This is just great. A Hamburg court has just ruled that fading pop star Dieter Bohlen (of Modern Talking fame) may use the informal „Du‟ when addressing german police officers. Ordinary citizens would be fined up to €500 for such an offence.
(Via stern.de)
Today I took a CBT (that’s the Commission’s acronym for computer-based test) to become a contract agent for the EU Commission. I think I did OK, but I wish I was quicker at math.
The test was made up of 3 sections: one called ‘verbal reasoning’ which meant a short text and a set of statements where I had to pick the correct one. The difficulty is to keep any previous knowledge about the subject of the text out of your thinking.
The math section is made up of excercises of what is called “Dreisatz” in German.
The last section, EU knowledge, ranged from trivial to hard (but not impossible). Apparently, I’m not allowed to tell you more.
Update
I got an email the other day from a hungarian lady asking me wheter you are allowed to use a sheet of paper during the Computer-Based Testing and the numerical reasoning in particular.
In my case, there was no paper, but a little piece of whiteboard (like an A5 sheet of paper) and an eraseable marker. Not quite as good as paper but better that nothing.
Also, I told her that I found the CBT harder than the paper-based test, because some of the reasoning tasks where so long that I had to scroll up and down a lot. As a result, I didn’t even manage to work on all the tasks, which I did manage in the paper-based test a few months later.
I got to Hamburg yesterday night. I like Hamburg.
People say I speak German with a Scandinavian melody.
I tried the multilingual plugin today, but it didn’t work out too well. First, I would have to manually convert the language of all existing posts, and then the plugin ate the post titles in the RSS feed. Also, I wonder if I would still have been able to edit posts in MarsEdit.
I might give the other contestant, polyglot, a whirl also.
Update
It seems polyglot is more of what I was looking for. I want the main interface in English at all times, and just the ability to make (parts of) posts in other languages. And I will let this be decided by the readers browser preferences. If you prefer German over English, the fist sentence in the Hamburg post should appear in German.
The European network for student newspapers, SPINE - Student press in Europe, has launched a new web site. Actually, it’s sort of a blog where the member papers post the main stories from their respective papers.
Very cool. And this is even more cool: there’s an RSS feed for the stories. Now if they’d put some more effort into the members’ page (profiles of the members, and why not RSS aggregation) and more of the members would supply their headlines, that’d be wonderful!
(Via Lundagård)
Det kan ju verka lite pretentiöst att skriva på flera språk i en och samma blogg. Samtidigt är det ganska naturligt för mig, framför allt när jag skriver om saker som har väldig mycket med ett land (och därmed språk) att göra - och väldigt lite med andra. Men jag skall se om jag inte kanske skall göra bloggen ännu mer flerspråkig, och skriva de inläggen där det är relevant på flera språk. Så får jag se hur det hela kommer ut hos läsaren. Inte helt tirivialt; jag hoppas att det i alla fall finns någon enstaka läsare som tycker att inläggen är interessanta oavsett språk.
Hur som helst får jag testköra några plugins till detta magiska bloggverktyg. Stay tuned…
Donc, hier j’ai finalement envoyé ma demande de validation des acquis de l’experience à l’université de la Bourgogne à Dijon. Je n’étais pas encore tout a fait content avec mon dossier, mais je me susi dit que si je ne le fais pas maintenant, ça durerait encore un mois ou deux. Donc mieux valait le faire d’un coup.
Je me servirai de ce blogue pour en parler plus, ca m’interesse vraiment de voir ce processus «de l’interieur».
Oh, this is just typical. Maybe I should have created a really multilingual blog. But I will just carry on writing in the language most relevant to what I’m writing about. So this is about my applying for an APEL (accreditation of prior experiential learing) degree in France. Their legislation is the most advanced in Europe in this field.
By ways of Nils’ blog (at least I believe it’s the Nils I know) I found this. Nästa: Bandhagen: om att bryta på två språk. Good to see (hear? read? is there sort of a passive word for blogging? X is to blog as read is to write? Oh, that’s another issue, for another day).
Anyway, it’s not just me that’s getting all messed up with different languages. I thought I was doing so well. But since I moved to Norway, my Swedish has become all Norwegian (even my dad laughs at me. And he calls a printer a tryckare - guess who’s lived in Germany for a while). And my Norwegian is still way too Swedish for my own liking. On top of that, my German’s gone all funky, especially in writing.
I sortof regret I didn’t buy this book back when I was in Bologna in the end of august…
Ich bin eine Wurst. An absolutely hilarious, must-see movie.