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In a quest to work more efficiently and being fed up with carrying my Powerbook with me all the time, I went back to using my office Linux computer again today. The time I need to bump into something undesirable in Linux is less than a minute each time. Today, even before having to deal with the shortcoming that is KDE, I was confronted with the fact that my screen was at a wrong resolution and – joy! - mind-boggling 60 Hertz. As we're running clever net booted terminals, they must have updated things somewhere and of course being only a simple user means I can't do something as sophisticated as switching the screen to a sane resolution.
Luckily there's still Control-Alt-F2 or something that lets me run pine in a text base console window at 70 Hertz or so...
More and more people are writing about Obesity (too bad Feedster doesn't offer date-anchored sorting and graphing of the number of search results on a time axis). There were a couple of reports on the topic in die tageszeitung last weekend and I keep seeing them pop up everywhere. Obesity isn't only a problem for lazy rich people these days, but even more for poor people who can't afford reasonable food anymore or whose traditionally healthy eating habits are being globalised for bad.
Die Zeit has an interesting feature on the fact that in Germany you don't speak about money, even within the family: Über Geld spricht man nicht, Geld hat man.
It's very odd. Germans consider it rude to be asked how much they earn / how much rent they pay &c. And, as is stated in the text, I don't know how much money my parents earn or have. All I know that it has always been enough while not being obscenely much. So I never really cared for it.
And while – as a déformation professionelle if you wish – I am well capable of double-checking the offers banks make rather than having to rely on their 'advice' – I still find money quite a boring subject. Apparently I always used to. My parents still enjoy pointing out that I used to fail to claim long overdue raises in pocket-money when I was little.