A while ago, I asked my German readership if they would mind me merging my German and English blog together. For time reasons, my blog output wasn’t as high as would be reasonable to fill two blogs with, and furthermore, I often had trouble deciding if I wanted to blog something in my English or rather my German blog.

Fact is, most of my German readers can read English (and don’t mind doing so either), while the opposite does not apply.

The German readers (and the English-speaking ones who also understand German) said they wouldn’t mind, and encouraged me to do so.

Yet, until now, I didn’t find the time to actually do it. Today, I finally merged my two blogs into one, (of course not entirely without problems, I’ll blog that in a little while too), and to cut a long story short: Here are the changes that count for you, dear readers:

1. fredericiana.de is now part of fredericiana.com — all requests to .de get automatically redirected to the appropriate .com site.
2. If you have subscribed to the German feed, please update your feed reader (even if the redirect works fine for now, I can’t guarantee that fredericiana.de will always stay a straight redirect to the .com site).
3. If you have subscribed to a specific category only, please adjust your feed URL also.
4. If you cannot or do not want to read one of the two languages, I suggest you filter by the German or English category on the right hand side, respectively (especially when using a feed reader!). Then you should not see the stories anymore in the language you don’t want.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any comments, or if you notice any unexpected behavior, or whatever else you may have for me, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. Thanks!

Let me tell you a little story I learned about from a tour guide when I went to Munich on vacation in August.

This is the Sternecker Brewery (or brew pub, rather) in downtown Munich the way it looked like in 1919:

Every week, a tiny little political party of the Weimar Republic met here to complain about life in general and in particular, and as a rule of thumb ended up every time blaming it on “the jews”. Now a young corporal in the German army was sent there to spy on the group and find out if they are any danger. Instead, he liked their ideas and ended up joining the party.
Read on »

Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.

Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn’t like my name, Frédéric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

-Frédéric

I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my “é”s by regular “e”s but of course they are only half as nice

Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though “who the heck is that?” when receiving my email.

(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)

Wie es aussieht, gehören Chemie und Physik in diesen Tagen zu den “deutschen Tugenden”, während man das Dichten mehr den Briten überlassen sollte.

Auch vor dem Hintergrund des “Fachkräftemangels” scheint Ingenieur werden also in Deutschland Zukunft zu haben.

Oder Papst, natürlich.

(Da mir das aber kaum offen stand, muss ich wohl oder übel Ingenieur werden.)