Last week I got to go to the States for an interview with Teach for America. Though the interview was only one day, the whole trip seems to have flashed by in a whirlwind blur of the insides of various airplanes, airports, cars, offices, houses of family and friends, and coffee and book shops. All with the requisite insane security precautions, of course. It was a little strange being back in a place where I could, without effort, understand everything that people around me talked about. And also strange spending a whole week without constant internet access.

The Iraq War was on everyone's mind, in all the places in all the countries that I visited. Among the people that I talked with, there seems to be no support for Bush and general apprehension about aggression in Iraq. I wonder where the supposed supporters of this war are keeping themselves. Maybe I'm electrically repelled from them.

My friend Jon observed that the Iraq situation shows that there can be times when everybody is just wrong : anti-war protesters, pro-war protesters, brutal Iraqi dictators, belligerent and ignorant American presidents, media purveyors, etc. ... nobody seems to have the right answer, whatever that might mean.

German

murrayc : I've found that my German, as bad as it is, generally follows your described pattern of random declensions. It's amazing to me that little children will learn this stuff—and even more complicated stuff—just by sitting around listening to it. Though I suppose if I were allowed to sit around and listen to somewhat-linguistically-helpful people talk to me for two years, with no other expectations of work or productivity, my German might improve too. :)

Coding

So I'm back at work, preparing for a first open source release of the project I've been working on. If you're interested in a code generator for CORBA components and test components, check out the ccmtools project. We'll have a release out this week, as soon as Confix supports multiple configuration files.

Might also get a chance the next couple of weeks to help out with GStreamer a bit. The editor needs some bug fixes, and the docs still need much love. So much typing to do ...

Reading

I picked up Trainspotting in London's Stansted airport. It's an excellent book, very well crafted out of a series of short stories. Next on the reading list are The Poisonwood Bible ; Guns, Germs, and Steel ; and Porno (the sequel to Trainspotting). Reading is so pleasant.