Category: Journal

I recently said to a friend that I felt I needed to learn more about databases.  That’s kind of an odd thing maybe, since I don’t really have much direct involvement with databases, but I like to learn.  He suggested I take an free online course from Stanford and sent me the link to Stanford’s Introduction to Databases.  The course opened up for me a whole new concept, OpenCourseWare.  Oh I’d heard of it before in the context of Wikiversity and MIT’s recordings of their live courses, but this was different, an instructor led course with homework and quizes and exams and deadlines.  53,000 people were signed up by the first week of class, around 16,000 took the first quiz on schedule.

The course is awesome.  The first week we got an overview of relational databases and then dove into XML, DTD’s, XML Schema and JSON (which, BTW, are not relational databases), then we went heavy into Relational Algebra, which reminded me why I liked set theory in elementary school so much and made me wonder why set theory wasn’t really even talked about in high school (something I’ve wondered many times, actually, sets rock).  Next we slid into SQL, which is specialized programming language used for managing data in Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) and originally based on relational algebra.  I had a bit of trouble with some of the SQL modifications and I haven’t done much of the challenge level exercises yet but I am having a lot of fun. Lastly we covered Relational Design Theory, including multi-valued dependencies.  This past weekend we had the midterm exam and I did well.

I have thought for years that we need more distributed models of education and this is a step in the right direction, several steps really because, among other things, it’s free! Many of the students were not in the US and were not native English speakers. Yet they were able to participate. We collaborated through a combination of piazza and IRC (both had their places but I much preferred the latter). This is moving us towards a true democratization of ideas. And it seems that the teachers find it rewarding to, even more so than their normal teaching in some respects. Professor Widom, the chair of CS at Stanford, heads this course and she blogged a year ago that this was “one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life.” ¹

Some of the courses are eligible for credit – at other institutions.  Others are a reasonable prep for credit by exam at a university or for a CLEP or DANTES testing.  Of course, the course may not mirror the exam and that could be a problem. What we need now is to establish an institution that distributes education this way entirely and finds some meaningful way to authenticate student identities and validate their scores, thereby obviating the need for a separate examination.  We could even group source the faculty.

At the same time, we need professional organizations to recognize this form of training for continuing professional education, such as is required in law, medicine, accounting, etc. Such continuing education is often costly, especially for those not actively practicing.  These programs should count for continuing professional education wherever other college course do (and even without accreditation they would likely already qualify in many jurisdictions, albeit with lengthy paperwork requirements).

Most importantly though, these have immediate value for personal/professional development.  You can learn about almost anything, asynchronously (i.e. without fixed class times) and free, in a semi-structured environment designed to not require expensive texts.  And, there is so much relevant knowledge to learn.

I’m compiling a list of OpenCourseWare materials on my wiki.

Some friends recommended a few places to go while I’m here, unfortunately, they were all 6 hours away. On Monday (Labor Day) afternoon I finally decided to get out of the hotel and drive to Timpanogos National Monument and see what was there. I had read online that it would be impossible to get a cave tour without ordering a ticket in advance, especially on a holiday and I didn’t really bring good cave clothes, so I didn’t even bother to try. I paid the six dollar entrance fee and told the Ranger that I just wanted to walk around. She gave me a cheesy trail map. After driving a bit I left the monument and entered Uinta National Forest, then things on the map started to appear. I oriented myself and decided the Tibble Fork trail looked promising. The area was crowded, there is a small reservoir there where people were boating and fishing and an “OHV Parking Area” (I had to look it up, OHV stands for “Off Highway Vehicle”). Four wheelers and dirt bikes abounded. I crossed the dam and quickly located the trail, it was two miles to the ridge though it seemed further. I wasn’t used to either the hiking or the elevation. Mostly it was lightly forested and brushy and there weren’t a lot of good views until towards the ridge. I took pictures with my iPhone 4 and I haven’t really sorted them yet. I took multiples trying to get the light right, so what follows is really an unsorted gallery of all the pics I took. I may come back and sort through them and throw out a few but if I do that now this post won’t be out before I go back to Maryland. Here are some from a few of the meadows on the way up:

At the ridge the views became substantially more impressive, though I was dismayed that there was no Biergarten, the top of every good mountain should have a Biergarten. I proceeded Easterly along the ridge trail, the first few are looking Easterly and Northerly, then follow some looking Southeasterly.

I wore my Tevas, they held up well and are normally good for such things, if you leave out the fact that hiking in shorts and sandals in the Rockies is not exactly in accordance with snake awareness. Unfortunately, maybe the pads on the straps were old and my feet were not used to it, I got nasty blisters. They started to appear as I approached the ridge and got progressively worse, not much for them at that point but to walk thru to the end.

Then some pics of the way down the Mud Spring trail toward Tibble Fork Reservoir, even with blisters I decided it was better to take another way back:

I saw a deer, a Muley, I think, though you can barely make him out in this picture:

Finally, back at the base there were a few rather good shots, though the sun was behind the mountain in question, so the light isn’t the best:

I thought this sign was interesting as I was surprised shooting was allowed in a National Forest:

But maybe I’ve just been in Europe too long.

Some of the photos of peaks make the mountain tops look like they have snow, this is just overexposure required to get any detail of the landscape below.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. I only met 13 people on the trail in the 5-6 miles and probably 3-4 hours that I hiked, which was a relief as the reservoir below was pretty crowded as were the parking areas and there were many OHVs as mentioned above. Unfortunately, of those 13, three were on dirt bikes and they nearly ruined it. The sound and the smell were so horribly inconsistent with everything else on the trail. The others were either walking, riding bikes, or on horseback. The trail was missing something though – besides the Biergarten at the top – a group of 20 or 30 friends, neighbors, and acquaintances and a cabin at the bottom with food and beer; but that’s for another post.

Last night we had some friends over for dinner. We had der Rehsbraten (roast roe deer), das Blaukraut (red cabbage), and die Klöße (potato dumplings; the word is related to the English “clod” and is pronounced somewhat like clues, only not so much, and with an “eh” sound on the end). Of course we had das Bier and also das Wein (we’re on the border between a famous wine region of Unterfranken and the beer capital of the world, Oberfranken. I commented on my beer glass, a very nice traditional Krug from the local Fußballverein, not one of those gaudy Oktoberfest ones that you buy in the airport, and one of the guests asked what it would be called in English.

Now, I’ve known since my first day or two here that beer glasses are called die Krüge (singular der Krug) and that der Stein means “the stone”; but I still thought maybe some of their beer glasses, such as the ceramic ones, might sometimes be called steins. First, I said that the style I had would just be a mug, but he said “I think a mug is for coffee”, so I told him yes, we’d call any large beer glass (other than an English pint glass), but especially a German style mug, a “beer stein”, but the generic name is mug. He was quite puzzled by “beer stein” as that would mean a “beer stone”. He explained that all German beer glasses are called Krüge, but that the ceramic ones are more precisely Steinkrüge (stone glasses). No one would ever think to call a Steinkrug a “Stein”, though.

Although we didn’t get into this last night, to confuse things a little further, a glass of beer can also be called ein Seidel (which refers to the quantity, today it is translated as a half-liter). In Franconia, where we live, this is known as a Seidla, the “la” ending being roughly equivalent to the English “ette” – smallish and not exactly manly. Although the half-liter is the most common volume of beer these days, ein Maß (or very locally in this part of Franconia: a Moß), a liter krug, is the traditional volume, primarily reserved for festivals now.

Wednesday the 15th of September was the first day of school for William and Sam. Sam is in the first grade and the first day of first grade is a big deal in Germany. We had to get him a schultude, which is a cardboard cone filled with candy and other cool stuff. We bought him what we thought was a mid-sized one but when we got the school we found that most of the kids had ones made for them in Kindergarten that were much larger than the largest ones for sale at the store! Oh, well, if we’re here long enough, Lloyd will get one of those since he starts Kindergarten in a couple weeks.

First we went to Sam’s classroom and met his teacher and the kids did a few things to get organized. William was pretty much on his own at this point, which isn’t easy for him I’m sure. He’s been homeschooled until now, and entirely in English. Now he’s in the third grade in a rural German public school, quite a shock.

After Sam was more or less organized, we all went to the local church for a special first day of school service, around here almost everyone is römisch-katholisch (pronounced cutOlish – English is one of the only language with either of the th sounds we have). There is freedom of religion but they understand that to include certain religious rights. They educate all children in religion and all Catholic holy days are official state holidays in Bavaria, which is predominantly Catholic (Bamberg is a former seat of the Holy Roman Empire and the resting place of the only Pope buried north of the Alps and they are serious around here about the Catholic church it is part of everything). When I enrolled the boys in school, the school asked what religion the boys were on a form. I asked what that was for and the principal said, “oh, because we have to know what religion to teach them” (!) I was pretty sure that even if the UCC exists in Europe, the name wouldn’t translate well, so I asked what the choices were. I think they might have been worried I’d say Jewish, because then they’d probably be required to find someone to teach it and if they thought finding a German tutor for the boys was hard! I can’t imagine looking for a Jew around here, let alone a Rabbi (there are Jewish monuments in the city and you can tell that the stars on them were added back at some point – in a European city the size of Portland, Maine I have yet to see a man wearing a skullcap – if I did I’d guess he was the Archbishop sooner than a Jew). Anyway, I said I was Protestant and they didn’t understand at first and then they said ahh protestantisch! (which although it looks the same is pronounced with emphasis on ”ant” so it’s understandable that they couldn’t tell) and so they wrote down evangelisch. I asked what it meant for fear that it was a bit more conservative than we and maybe I’d better choose katholisch after all, and they shrugged and didn’t really know what to say. I asked if it was Lutheran and they said “ja, ja, Lutheran” but I wasn’t very confident in this answer. I later learned that evangelisch actually does mean Lutheran.

Returning to the service, the priest wasn’t around, a woman led the service – maybe a deacon. William’s class was there too but Sam’s class had to go up the alter and do something special, I think she marked crosses on their heads with water. I couldn’t really see. We were able to sing along a little as there was a handout and singing in German is not really that hard if you have the words. We also recognized the Lord’s Prayer/Our Father but otherwise we had no idea what was going on. There was apparently some discussion of caterpillars turning into butterflies because the lady had a stuffed toy caterpillar that she could turn inside out and it became a butterfly. Unlike almost everything else in Bavaria, there was no beer involved.

Then we walked back to the school but we went to the gym (which they call something entirely different which I have forgotten – ein Gymnasium is a high school). There the principal talked for a bit and then the second and third graders (I guess – William was with them anyway and they were divided into two groups) sang songs and read showed off the ability of the second graders to read a highly alliterative children’s book.

After this we went back to Sam’s room and the teacher told us to say “Tschüss” (the German equivalent of “Bye”). We did and then she closed the door. On the way out we saw that William’s class was at recess so we went to see if William was OK, he was on a raised area above us and he walked to the rail to speak to us, a half-dozen kids or more followed him. I thought they were just curious and wanted to hear him speaking with us in English. A little while later we saw him walking by himself in a different part of the schoolyard so I asked him why he wasn’t with them trying to make friends. He pointed out that they were all girls. Not having been followed around by girls since Montessori School, I really couldn’t relate.

We left and came back at 1120, the first day of school got out early. We then went out to eat with all the families from our village who had children in the first grade and I ate too much Schweinshaxe and nearly got ill.

The next day (Wednesday) the boys rode the bus to school and in the afternoon they had their first Fußball practice. Saturday they have there first game! They don’t mess around with Fußball around here, it’s serious business.

(I expect to revise and add to this over the next few days or weeks so check back)

Shortly after I got here I took the USAREUR (US Army Europe) Hunting Course. It lasted six weeks and cost $150. That may sound like a bit but for Germans to get a hunting license they have to generally study for about a year sometimes longer and spend well over €1,000. Once I got my certificate that I’d completed the course, I had to by a minimum of €1,000,000 insurance and then go to my Landratsamt in Haßurt and get my license. The license cost me €150 for three years. Then I had the right to go and purchase rifles and pistols and to get prior approval to buy up to two handguns. I have purchased a nice Rottweil Dopplebockflinte (over-under shotgun). Bowhunting is not allowed in Germany as it is considered cruel (but then they require you to club your fish over the head before you pull out the hooks, but that’s another story).

Hunting in Germany is a bit different than in the States. First of all, as you would expect by so much training, you have to learn a lot more about the animals. It’s as if at the end of the hunter’s safety course they gave you not just a written test but a shooting test and a oral exam in which imagine you were presented with a mounted young female grouse and asked, “is it a ruffed grouse or a pine grouse?” Or asked to describe the differences between the male whitetail and the female assuming that they are out of antler and you can’t see what they’ve got between their legs. We had to be able to tell the difference between Steinmarder (Stone Martens) and Baummarder (Pine or, literally, Tree Martens) for example and the rehwild (roe deer) stands about 3 feet tall on a good day and you hunt the males from the first of May to the end of January! Schwarzwild (wild boar) are hunted at varying times of year depending on the age and gender and woe to you if you shoot a female out of season. Of course, you probably won’t lose your weapon and get a hefty fine because there aren’t really any game wardens, not as we know them, but you might lose respect with other hunters which here might mean that you’d never hunt again!

That brings us to the most striking difference in hunting here. The hunting rights are leased over a period of many years and you don’t hunt on land unless the owner of the lease invites you to. You can buy a piece of land and not lease the rights (known as a Jagdrevier) but you’ll have to buy several hundred hectares in a country where most people’s houses actually touch (but land use planning is for another day). Every three years the owner (lessor really) of the Jagdrevier must negotiate with the farmers or foresters that work the land, sometimes they own the actual underlying land and sometimes they lease it as well (think feudalism). The negotiations center around how many rehwild (and rotwild (red deer) if the Revier has them) the Jäger will kill. Here’s the part that usually blows American’s minds: the Jäger wants this number to be low, the farmers would prefer the Jäger kill everything that moves. They don’t bother to negotiate over pigs because 1) they don’t have a territory, and 2) they are so destructive that the Jäger is expected not only to kill all he or she (in which case she’s a Jägerin) sees but to call all of his or her friends who have hunting licenses as well.

So, say you have an area of about 250 hectares of mostly fields. You may be required to kill, say, six rehbok (bucks) and five rehgeiss (does). You will actually have a three year plan and you can carry forward or backward if necessary. In other words, the plan would be for 18 rehbok over 3 years and you would be expected to divide it up roughly evenly but if you shot 7 the first year you could get away with only shooting 5 the next. At the end of the three years you would settle up with the farmers and if you hadn’t shot enough you’d owe them money for the damage to their crops and if you were lousy enough they could ask a county official to cancel the whole lease and lease the Revier to someone who could hunt. At the same time you’d negotiate the next three years and the farmers would argue that there was lots of damage to their crops and you’d bring all your vast knowledge of wildlife to bear and explain how it was really the häse (hares) that were doing the damage and you couldn’t possibly be expected to kill as many deer as before because you’d just about cleaned them out.

Then there’s the meat. Hmm, how do I explain this? Well, if you own a Revier, you have the right to all the meat from all the wild animals that die within your Revier and that includes the right to sell it; actually you’d better sell it to raise money to pay for the Revier (they ain’t cheap) and to pay for any damage you have to pay for. So, if you don’t own a Revier, and you go hunting on someone’s land, you have the right to keep the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys – that’s about it, those are known as the Jagdrecht (Hunter’s right) and you don’t pay for them. All the rest you pay for if you want it or you put it in the Revier owner’s meat cooler so he or she can sell it. On a Rehbok you generally get the trophy which means you get the head but nobody does full head mounts – instead you skin the head and clean the meat off then cut the top off and boil it and mount this top of the skull with antlers. Every year you are required to bring all of these from the past year to town to show them off at an annual festival. If you hunt boar you will be expected to buy the meat if you take the trophy. If you shoot a red deer you better be prepared to pay thousands of Euro for the trophy because you are going to pay for it. If you don’t want to do that either shoot a female or don’t hunt red deer (which are like Elk by the way).

There’s a lot of history to this stuff going back a thousand years or more, though it basically was all made up by Herman Göring in the 30s.

The Easter Bunny is alive and well in Franconia.   It is known as die Osterhäse (the Easter hare) or das Osterhäsla (the little Easter hare).  That second word is a peculiar Franconian word not standard German, but that’s another story.  He brings eggs, lots of eggs.  Eggs are painted and hung from trees around here in preparation.  They also have the town fountain or spring known as die Brunnen which at this time of year are decorated with evergreen bows an in gigantic and complex wreathes and adorned with eggs (sometimes plastic ones but sometimes with hundreds of real eggs, blown and painted by school children) and are then known as die Osterbrunnen, I will include pictures here.  The stores sell the usual fair but here there are Konditorei which sell schokoladehäse (chocolate hares) weighing over 700 grams (nearly 2 pounds) and standing about 2 feet tall! (and costing €40).

The connection between springs, bringing life giving water, and eggs and rabbits/hares both being symbols of fertility, being celebrated in the springtime is obvious.  It even seems reasonable, at least over a few beers, within the context of an ancient myth that the hares would conflate with the eggs and would be delivering them.  When this gets mixed with Christian symbology too though, it gets a bit too confusing.  Some of the wreath like structures on the Osterbrunnen are designed like crowns or crosses and on Palmsamstag (yes, that would be Palm Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday) the Osterbrunnen in Trabelsdorf had branches of fir on the ground in a path.  I saw no palm leaves anywhere.

I went to Schlenkerla on Thursday evening, as I do nearly every Thursday evening, and sat with a group of German friends.  I tried to describe the branches on the ground, which were either Fichte (Spruce) or Tannen (Fir), most likely the former as the latter is rare in this area.  Unfortunately I pronounced the former “fikte” when it should have been nearer to but not quite “fishte”, they were quite confused how there could be pieces of this all over the ground in a path as the word as I pronounced it sounded to them much more like the verb ficke, which means “to have sex” – but not quite so genteel.  Of course, that has more to do with springs, eggs, rabbits, and other fertility symbols than it does with palm branches on a road in Jerusalem, but who knows, maybe this too really hearkens back to an ancient religion. 😉

Yesterday the restaurants, what were open, served no meat, though you certainly could still get beer.  The church bells did not sound but at somewhere around 0530 yesterday and today some little girls walked around making noise on some very loud wooden things known as die Ratsche (ratchets) and chanting something.  Whoever thought up this idea was not very bright and ought to be flogged.  To have children running around in the streets making very loud noises, even having machines to make them, before 6 in the morning on a Saturday is insane.

About 2 months since my last substantive post, I have a lot to catch up on.  We have only had internet at home for about a week now.  Jessica and the boys got here on the 9th of February after a very long journey.  They got a ride to Portland from David then took a bus to Boston, then Aer Lingus to Dublin changed planes and flew to Frankfurt, then they took the train to Würzburg and on to Bamberg.  Their my friend Gary helped me pick them up as I don’t have enough seats in my little 325i.  We’re still working on the seating problem.  Jessica should write her own entry on how the trip went.  Everyone is settling in well; Lloyd prefers it here and wants to stay, Sam wants to know when we’re going home.  William has already helped me understand what Germans are saying.  Our neighbors invited us over the other evening and we visited late into the night then they took William to see Monsters vs. Aliens (in German of course) on Saturday.  We have four bedrooms in this house and we don’t use them all, so people are welcome to come visit!

(removed personal contact info, e-mail me if you want it)

I’ll post more, with pics, soon!

Since I moved from a hotel to a house, I no longer have internet access outside of the office.  I can’t access Facebook at all (the Army blocks “social networking” sites) and I can’t get to my blog except before and after duty or maybe during lunch (well, I can, but I shan’t).  If anyone is trying to reach me, e-mail me.  I do see posts to Facebook as I get an e-mail telling me about them, but I can’t reply unless I have your e-mail address on this computer, which is pretty unlikely unless you’ve already heard from me.  I do have a phone at my house with a plan that includes free calling to the States (it actually costs 19 Euro cent per minute for Jessica to call my cell phone so it’s infinitely cheaper for her to call you).  Jessica has no access to e-mail at all.  We will be getting internet in a few weeks hopefully.

12.4.2009 Update: We’ve had internet at home for a week or two now and Jessica now has access to her e-mail (when she has time to check it, which isn’t that often).