Cutting the Cord

We finally cut the cord. For a long time, TV program providers via cable or satellite were seen as the content gatekeepers. And boy, did they relish that role. Not only were prices astronomically high, but you also had to buy one of their infamous “bundles” – meaning that you paid for a slew of programs you were not interested in and never watched. It was impossible to...

Zero Emission

Photo Gallery Big week: I can celebrate 2,000 commuter miles on our new electric vehicle. Time for an interim report. Last November, we ordered the just-introduced Volkswagen e-Golf. We had been looking at electric cars for some time, but they were either too expensive (Tesla) or just too strange (i3). We wanted something that looked and felt like a car. With the e-Golf, Volkswagen was...

Jam

My longish stay in Germany has, of course, as main purpose the recharging of my language batteries. But I won’t lie: Food comes a close second. I have been eating my way through the specialties of the south-west, from Maultaschen to Hoorische, from Linsen mit Spätzle to Fleischsalat, from Saumagen to Gefillde. One development I noticed is the explosion in the number of people...

Countdown

Practicing for the countdown to the 10th anniversary of this blog. My first post went live on June 30, 2003. Looking back at over 720+ posts, some of them cringeworthy after all this time, some more resembling Tweets (except that there was no Twitter then), many still relevant. Thank you to the translation blog pioneers who inspired me a decade ago,...

Fifty-Six Thousand

I’m using Crashplan for my on-line backup. If you are not backing up your data regularly – you should. In more than one place, if possible, and not all in the cloud. So when I was sitting quietly in front of my computer the other day pondering a particularly ambivalent English sentence, I noticed that my hard drives were spinning like crazy, even though I had not been touching...

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles

One of the reasons that I put this blog on hold in June of 2012 was that the all-consuming task of purchasing a condominium in Los Angeles made it impossible to set aside the time necessary for blogging. When we started to visit properties up for sale in the city, we were still renting a house in Claremont on the easternmost edge of Los Angeles county. We had been trying for many years...