A bit cheesy geeks

The whole week im attending a course on Introduction to Stata. It's about three hours a day and today was quite good. At some point I was thinking of this cheesy song...



(well, ok, i have been watching elizabethtown and that song is in it. and it's a fleetwood mac song originally. blurb.) naw, seriously ive been thinking of it in that class too. big smile there. i should do such course more often. anyhow. so im learning to handle stata now. so far i have only been working with spss. both are softwares for statistics. sounds boring. is boring. stays boring. spss is pretty much like windows, it does what i tell it when it works. the majority is menu driven (only twice i had to enter things in the syntax which couldnt be done over menus). but quite annoying in the long run because it doesnt work all the time. it often happens to crash. or everything, be it little or not, must be done manually. no extras please. and it's the most common used program. like windows. stata on the other side is the linux in statistical software packages. considered as geeks' tool as it is mainly done over syntax only. and free/open software (apart from a nice little licensing fee...). geeks around the world write files and procedures which everyone can use. i never bothered to get into stata as it looked just too complicated with all that syntax. but now it seems as if it is actually much easier to handle. and it does thing much faster than spss, which would have taken ages for. less hassle from now on. and maybe im really a geek than. blurb. i will see how it goes.



Later that day i started to sing "this ni-i-ight belongs to u-us, come on now to have a wa-alk" but i was immediately corrected that it is "because the night belongs to lovers..." (cheers vuokko) It was a very nice night (and still is). Quite warm outside, thats the way i like it. and i would have gone for a long night walk. this should explain my free interpretation of the lyrics... the song is from 10,000 Maniacs; what i thought. actually, as i found out, it has been written by bruce springsteen and patti smith. here's the boss in his glory days...

Found in Translation...

Today, finally after weeks of not knowing what the right translations are e.g. for short-term sells, i finished the English-German translation of an article of mine. i ve written enough about this here already so there is no need to repeat myself. it was the first academic piece i had to write in german for the past three years and i hope it comes across as such (even if nobody except me cares). it's off to proofreading now and will go straight to the review then. i ll keep you updated how it goes (for my part, i'm excited).



everyone, who managed to read until this point, yep everything is fine (apart from some minor issues). Just imagine, others think you dont know while you know nevertheless everything. Sweet little lies...

Maybe...

... I should say that all music clips (ok, lets say 97.529 percent) serve a purpose here. It's not just a clip for entertainment. If some would listen more carefully to the clips things would be clearer.

fuck it

Die Hard

I was dancing the other day in ASDA to Under the Boardwalk (and I embarrassed successfully my companion) and remembered that Bruce Willis sang the song time ago. Here's another one he did.



Nobody can say that dying is easy... But at least he's one of the few actors who really can sing. Yet remaining questionable.

I'm fucking bleeding

Ok, this wasnt planned but apparently my blood is too thin at the moment and whenever i scratch myself or hit myself i get bruises or just start to bleed ridiculously. It wont stop for quite a time. I'm a bit worried that i will bleed while im sleeping. there is one point at my neck now which starts to bleed just by starring at it... i just had it right now. one of my t-shirts got bloody bloody... hm, i guess i should see a doctor soon.

Don't count your chickens before the end of the week...

This week I went back to Germany to start working for this research project on elites’ networks. My first day was on Tuesday and I dove in immediately into work. I didn’t know what I would do before so I was quite excited. I like network analysis because it is more or less simple and interesting to see who is connected and how this happens. There is a theory that it will only take up to six people to have a connection from anyone to anyone. Be it from John Smith to George Bush or me to a boat driver in Bangkok. Well, I didn’t do exactly this kind of analysis. I am involved in examining the relations of political elites in 6 German areas. And to be honest, the job was tiring and boring at times. The first three days I had to enter numbers, control numbers and enter numbers again. 10 hours each day starring at a computer screen which isn’t really a good things for one’s eyes. The last day finally brought me some analysis which of the networks is more reliable for analysis. The people I’m working with are friendly (not all of them are nice, one had already forgotten my name the next day although i've only 5 letters in mine; it's not very nice...) and I enjoyed it overall. I will return to Germany at the end of July or so and continue work.

Time in Germany is always busy as I like to see friends there. So besides work I met up with people in the evening for chatting and have some drinks. It is quite strange being in Germany. It now always feels as if it is just vacation and during the first days I just wanted to go back to England. I felt like a displaced person. I didn’t understand the jokes people were laughing about, the stories which were important and going around at the moment. One day I had dinner with my family and my brother’s girlfriend. It was nice to see them but I felt a bit like a third person. I was just the son visiting from England. Well, theoretically and practically I am. But it wasnt really the feeling of what I would consider family. (it felt like a lack intimacy, whatever that means, i dont know to be honest; Keine Sorge, es war schoen!! Nur bin ich nun halt erwachsen und stecke meine Fuesse nur noch sporadisch unter den Tisch...) However, I think I’m just too whiny there. People’s lives go on as mine does as well. So, on one side I wanted to go back immediately; on the other, I wanted to be there because of seeing friends. And, thus, I had the feeling that the week will be hard.
Anyhow, it started slowly to become a bit better. I had one drink with my brother and we talked about his music and how it goes at the moment. I had dinner with a friend and whiskey and beer afterwards, while sitting outside and covering our legs with blankets like old people do… This was really nice and she told me about her new project which is a round trip with boats and seeing art alongside the river. I would like to do this one day. I met another friend before her, who I know from school. While he was repairing a coffee machine (with comments by his girlfriend… I spare my own comment there) we had a beer. We discussed our project (what we have done for the past 10 years already), a synchronic dancing group. Neither of us can really dance but this shouldn’t be a barrier to our success…One day we will be on a all music channels (I guess this will also be the day when a ban on dancing in any places will come into effect…). Then I met another friend. We got some beers from a local shop and sat at a view point facing a part of the city. We spoke about everything and even got a bit nostalgic, remembering old times. Around 11 or so we run out of beer and went to a pub to have another one. This was really good but it was getting even better. We went to another one just around the corner. The owner was called pea and he offered pea soup. I don’t want to know what was inside that soup… here is one picture:

His name was Wolke (Cloud) and he has had more than one beer...

Everyone who likes can pick the guitar and play a song and sing or whatever he or she wants to perform. To be honest these musicians there weren’t living from their music but rather from beer. They were playing some blues there with mouth harps. It was great. Ihana. The perfect ending for a long day. I had bit trouble working the next day, I must admit… however, after two painkillers I felt better.
Yesterday, it was night of the sciences. All departments of the university and other academic institutions in my hometown open their doors. There are lectures, music, discussions, court sessions… I saw lots of known faces there and had quite a lot chats. Additionally, there was opera on the marketplace, Italian music. And a lightshow. They are putting pictures on a house and play music and tell stories to them. Here are a few pictures (I had more but I wont bother you too much).













Later we went to a pub (of course, what else…) for drinks. And then something strange/amazing/surprising happened. I trained a habit that I more or less walk home when I’m drunk (I admit that this happens only in my home town in most cases). Because the way is quite long I always try to take a beer with me. This partially explains why I had some beer glasses (I would have had more but sometimes the glass didn’t survive my walking…). Or I took a beer bottle, whatever is available. My friends started to reserve me a walking home beer. Well, and yesterday I had a same way home like my friend and after a while she asked me if I want to come to hers and get a beer, because I like walking with a beer, don’t I? She remembered and conjured a smile on my face. Thank you very much! My way home was much nicer then.

So, at the end of the week when I started to count my chickens, I think the week wasn’t so bad. I still wanted to go back to England as early as possible, but I enjoyed the time in Germany as well. It’s nice to go back and have some vacation. But it’s nothing else really anymore. My home is here. I don’t belong to Germany anymore. This is weird feeling but I guess I will overcome this pretty soon, if I haven’t already.