We've rediscovered that Bomberman rocks! It works over a LAN, you'll just need to have IPX installed. As a network game, Counterstrike's got nothing on it.

If the link stops working after a while, leave me a note.

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The past few days I've been tuned in to the stream from InfoRadio RBB. I leave it on medium volume blathering at me while I work. I only understand one word out of every bunch, but my ears are getting used to the sound of well-pronounced Deutsch.

Does it happen that when you speak words in a foreign language you're not fluent in, you unconsciously affect a fake accent? Your (probably wrong) idea of the proper accent, I mean. I do that with Mandarin and German. I hear the students reviewing for the IELTS in the classroom down the hall not quite speaking like Brits. I've started to break the habit. Today, this morning, in the car.

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Taking a medium break from writing code. My freshly-upgraded server is running in the background, sending messages to what it believes to be another server on the net. I added scheduled sleep/wake times and am testing them. Server 1 should go to sleep in 45 minutes and server 2 should awaken. We'll see.

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Dave gave me a bunch of Jamey Aebersold playalong tracks to practice with. One of the tunes I'm working with is Airegin by Sonny Rollins. Made me realize something. Ever notice that there are certain tempos that are just so weird to play? The grey area between 'medium-fast' and 'fast', for example. Too fast for your medium-speed muscle movements to deal with, but not quite fast enough for your fast movements to really work. In my case, too fast for wrist and fingers only, but too slow for my forearm to just start throwing triplets down.

The version of Airegin on the CD is like that. It's somewhere between 210 and 230bpm, and I had no idea this was a tempo range I couldn't hack. I can play slower than that, and faster, but not easily inside. So strange. It's all in the head, of course. It'll get fixed.

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Another fun thing about learning German is discovering the technical jargon of one's trade. Recently had to implement something that translates a set of CSV files into a tree structure. Eine 'CSV-Dateien' zu einer 'Suchbaum'. Or maybe 'Baumstruktur'. Everything can sound more important than it actually is; useful if ever I turn copywriter.

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