Fellow German blogger ix got married in Las Vegas recently (congratulations) and faced the problem to have the marriage accepted by his local civil registry office in Hamburg—because only then they would be able to get all the rights and duties that marriage entails in Germany.

So far, so good: Along with a certified copy of the marriage certificate, he also needed to bring an “Apostille”—a standardized transcription of a legal document (in this case: the marriage certificate) to be accepted by another country (in this case: Germany). Of course, one cannot expect the government officials to be able to read the English language, not even when a marriage certificate consists of a quite simple set of information that does not differ significantly between the two countries. So he had to obtain an official translation of both documents from a certified translator, before they finally accepted his marriage as valid.

That the German government is very strict about “our official language is German” is no news to me: Once before I had to provide US documents to an agency and in spite of the relevant passages being very tiny, they demanded to have the whole document translated. Eventually, I managed to have them accept my (and therefore an uncertified) translation, which probably saved me what would have felt like a million dollars in translator fees.

Though all in all, it seems to be a quite tedious process, I now hope to know quite well what needs to be done to have a US marriage accepted in Germany. My fiancée and I will face the same process soon and this way we know what to expect. I’ll make sure to blog about it again when it’s time.

(pictured: “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563))

By the way: After some vacation in Florida (warm!) and Oregon (cold!) I am finally back in Germany. I got one of the last decent flights from Charlotte, NC before an ugly snow storm hit the American Northeast, so I guess I am lucky.

All the things I brought from the US made my suitcases a little heavy but it also came in handy that it is now legal to import 430 Euros worth of stuff to Germany without paying customs, which I didn’t even come close to.

Now I am busy unpacking, and also finishing up my master’s thesis which will be due to be handed in by the end of the month. And afterwards… but that’s another post entirely

Is it time to leave? Again? Yup. The final days of my stay in Pittsburgh have come: My master’s thesis is more or less complete (by the way, it has the nice name “Transaction Management Challenges for Cross-Organizational, Workflow-Based SOA Applications” and spans 104 pages total), so it is time for me to take it back to Germany and finally wrap up that “Diplom” of mine.

It was a fun time in the “Steel City”, I’ve learned a lot both professionally as well as personally and I have met great people who I will really miss. Thanks for making my time in Pittsburgh great, you know who you are!

But I am not quite flying home yet: Before diving back into the “frozen tundra” of Germany, I shall visit warmer parts of this country. I promise I’ll feel a little bad for you, snowed-in readers, while I sit by the pool sipping margaritas!

(Pittsburgh skyline photo CC by-sa licensed by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. on Wikimedia Commons.)

Today I looked at this blog’s usage statistics and as it turns out, a whopping 54 percent of my visitors use Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer, then Safari, Opera, Chrome.

It’s interesting to see how much difference the “clientele” of a page makes for its statistics. The overall market share of Firefox has topped 20% a few months ago, but since this blog has a lot of tech content, a higher number of Firefox users is probably not surprising.

By the way, almost 80% of my Firefox visitors surf with Firefox 3.0.5, followed by only 5% of 2.0.0.20 users and a long tail of various other, outdated, browser versions.

Recently, I got the following fortune cookie. How “nice”!

I find it highly ironic and amusing that a fortune cookie–of all things man-made, yes, the same kind of fortune cookie that has been “sticking its nose” in other people’s business ever since its inception–dumps its opinion about talking of things you don’t understand on me.

But I guess it’s better than this one of unknown origin (which has been floating around on the internet for about a million years and is most likely photoshopped):

(Yeah, I played with iPhoto there to give the photo up there the look it has now — a simple pic looked too boring.)

Germany has predicted that its economy will shrink by 2.25% in 2009, which would be its worst performance in the post-World War II era.

BBC: German economy faces gloomy 2009

“Great” timing for me to start my first full-time job ever *sigh* — on the upside, though, it can only get better from here

Oh, oh, I got hit by an Internet meme. Both Rey and Wladimir demand my participation, and by the laws of teh Internets™ I shall comply.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things:

1. I am slightly color blind (my uneducated guess would be “deuteranomaly”, or mild green weakness). It’s apparently the most common form of colorblindness, affecting about 6% of males, and I have no considerable problems because of it. Except it may make me not the ideal person to ask about the color combination of clothes (which may arguably be a blessing). I’ve known since the medical exam before elementary school, yet at the military exam, the woman testing my eyes thought she was making a great discovery and shouted out “you are colorbind!!!” — I yawned.
2. I learned to read well before attending elementary school while I was still in kindergarten. (Don’t know how others do it, but in Germany, at least at that time, it wasn’t taught before first grade). I picked it up out of curiosity from my brother who is two years older and went to school already.
3. I took Latin all the way from 5th through 13th grade. It was one of my two advanced courses for graduation (the other one was Math), and I am unsure how, but I got an A+ for both the written and oral exam. Needless to say it didn’t end up being particularly relevant in college, nonetheless it was fun and I’d do it again. And no, I cannot actually speak Latin.
4. I have been playing the trumpet since I was 14 years old. It’s one of my favorite things to do yet I got to do it way too little lately due to writing my master’s thesis. I’ve played in a number of groups: orchestral, big band, and in a trumpet quartet. Some of the most fun but also most exhausting gigs were at the yearly congresses of the Association of Catholic Fraternities in Germany, with hundreds of attendees.
5. I do not have a particular accent in German: While I have lived in south-western Germany all my life, my parents are not from there, and theirs isn’t very strong, so I didn’t pick up a particularly distinct accent. Nonetheless up until this day, I still get asked “you are not from here, are you?” at home sometimes, particularly by the elderly. The closest I have to a dialect however is indeed from south-west Germany, which I sometimes notice when I use apparent localisms too freely elsewhere in Germany and earn question marks in return (food items seem to differ the most!).
6. I have more than only remotely considered studying law. I ended up studying information engineering instead, as it looked like a great middle ground between law and my big hobby, computers (with some business thrown in, for good measure): It’s 40 % computer science, 40 % business and 20 % law. And in fact, I loved studying this, and the law classes were my favorites, hands down. What I didn’t realize until later is that as opposed to real future lawyers, we got the interesting topics only. Awesome!
7. I attended three universities: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Oregon State University and Carnegie Mellon University, all to finish this one degree. Curiously, the only one I paid tuition for was/is KIT, luckily also the cheapest.

Seven harassees:

1. JP, who needs to blog more, for his PageRank to recover
2. Freya, who I am secretly hoping will actually vlog this meme
3. Justin, who I always get confused about living in the same time zone with
4. morgamic, who I already got to work with in two places
5. clouserw, who we all want to know more about, don’t we?
6. Polvi, for being one of the most creative people I know
7. Brian King, for being an awesome add-on magician

Here’s an “award” the city of Pittsburgh would probably prefer not to have “won”. According to the 2008 American Lung Association’s State of the Air report, Pittsburgh is the number one U.S. city most polluted by short-term particle pollution.

1. Pittsburgh, Pa.
2. Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, Calif.
3. Fresno/Madera, Calif.
4. Bakersfield, Calif.
5. Birmingham, Ala.
6. Logan, Utah
7. Salt Lake City, Utah
8. Sacramento, Calif.
9. Detroit, Mich.
10. Baltimore, Md./Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia.

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s flyer “Particle Pollution and your Health” says about short-term pollution:

Short-term exposures to particles (hours or days) can aggravate lung disease, causing asthma attacks and acute bronchitis, and may also increase susceptibility to respiratory infections. In people with heart disease, short-term exposures have been linked to heart attacks and arrhythmias. Healthy children and adults have not been reported to suffer serious effects from short-term exposures, although they may experience temporary minor irritation when particle levels are elevated.

On the year-round pollution scale, the city ranks almost equally as bad: Trading spots with the “short term” number 2, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh was the second most polluted city in the country, year-round.

1. Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, Calif.
2. Pittsburgh, Pa.
3. Bakersfield, Calif.
4. Birmingham, Ala.
5. Visalia/Porterville, Calif.
6. Atlanta, Ga.
7. Cincinnati, Ohio
8. Fresno/Madera, Calif.
9. Hanford/Corcoran, Calif.
10. Detroit, Mich.

Only in the third discipline, Ozone pollution, Pittsburgh doesn’t rank among the top 10.

Link to the condensed lists, or look at the stateoftheair website for nice Google Maps overlays, and to find out how your city is doing.

(Thanks, Tara, for the link!) — (Photo “Pollution”, CC by-nc-sa licensed by Gilbert R. on flickr)