Are you sweaty?

Apparently, the so-called body scanners have been used in trials in Germany, more precisely in Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel. Having flown a number of times in and out of there I am surprised I have never seen one. It is well known that body scanners have downsides, including attacks of co-workers. But on the German side of things the main problem was that these machines triggered a substantial number of false alarms - due to underarm persiparation. As an embarrassing result the home secretary asked security companies to develop a more underarm persiparation proof software (see the news).
Also in Germany, I have been confronted with rather bizarre habits of the natives - more on this later, but first of all I was explained that the most standard-ish standard German is spoken in the city of Hanover. I wondered how come. In the quest, I found two potential reasons: a) the largest so-called Schützenfest (I don't know what it is yet. I guessed it involves a lot of people shooting at something, but picures suggest it's best translated as binge drinking.) in the world is held in Hanover, thus a number of German marksmen might have spread the word that this town would set the standard, or b) Hanover is the most noisy city of Germany and perhaps people have to speak very loud and clear?

Bündnerfleisch

Bündnerfleisch mit gepfefferter Nachfrage.
Gymkhanaprüfung. "Und ich bin überzeugt, Sie wollen das auch."
Im Gegensatz dazu ein deutscher Landtag mit Debatte über landwirtschaftliche Produkte - ein Beitrag der FDP von Heinrich Heidel, sowie im Bundestag Detlef Kleinert für die FDP. Letzterer übrigens Ehrenmitglied der Deutschen Parlamentarischen Gesellschaft.

Prince of Darkness

James Gosling the man who founded Java while he worked for Sun Microsystems famously called Larry Ellison "The Prince of Darkness" in his blog. Interestingly, Larry Ellison is CEO of Oracle. About a year ago, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for 7.4 billion US$. The deal included Java and OpenOffice. There were speculations out there whether Java would cease its existence in the freely available world and programmers using the language would have to pay for employing Java in their programmes. Also, Oracle was said to terminate the "Open" bit in OpenOffice. Others speculated Orcale could attack Google by transforming OpenOffice in an online based suite competing with Google Documents and Microsoft's Web Apps Office. Later in the process, Oracle sued Google for using Java technology in their Android OS. In particular, Google's Dalvik was said to be very similar to Java - though the case is still open. After Oracle made their stand, the programmers of OpenOffice decided to go and form LibreOffice. Now, and here comes the actual point of this: James Gosling was hired by Google. In his blog he said, he would not know what his job would really involve. This is in a row of hirings by Google. Tim Lindholm leading expert in the development of Java for mobile devices was also hired by Google. Wonder where this is going. Should one switch to something else that is compatible with almost everything? It's all changing.
Also in the change log: Cycling in a new area. See the map. At some point in the future, it might more scenic with photos as usual. Also, new language in the environment, an old language in here.