Time flies! Believe it or not, yesterday ended our Munich “era”. We moved out of our apartment and are getting ready to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in just a few days.

Thank you, Munich, for having us. It’s been a blast.

I am two days late for this year’s anniversary, but this is just too impressive: Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

Make sure to click on the picture to see bigger versions.

(via Justin, thanks! Source: US or Canadian National Archives, via Wikipedia. Public Domain.)

On occasion, people claim I blog about too much geekery, so here you go with some dog content:

Yup, that’s Lizzy, playing with her brand-new rubber chicken. She picked it herself at the store and oh-so-appropriately, it is a Bavarian chicken sporting Lederhosen.

Given her usual aversion to having photos taken of her, I was impressed that I got a set of four pictures before she bailed.

Just in time for the recent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, boston.com’s Big Picture has a great collection of photos — both contemporary and recent — that show what the Wall once looked like, and how it looks now. This is great!

In a New York Times article about the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, they add a schema of a typical section of the German-German border, showing that the “Wall” was not really only a wall, but rather an elaborate combination of measures to keep people from fleeing their own country. Pretty impressive and sad at the same time.

In response to the birthdays I mentioned in my last post, Google has two topical logos today.

The American site, google.com, honors Sesame Street:

… while google.de remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Quite the contrast.

This week is a good week: We’ve got lots of reasons to celebrate, that couldn’t be more different in nature. Which ones, you ask?

Let’s start with the oldest one: On November 10, Sesame Street turns 40. The show is still going strong, and I have fond memories of it when I was a child. My favorite characters were always Samson, as well as Ernie and Bert. Only much later I found out to my astonishment that Samson, the big, brown bear, is only present in the German version of the show, and not in its American counterpart. (In turn, Big Bird is missing from the German Sesamstraße). Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

Number two on the list of this weeks “birthdays” is the reunited Federal Republic of Germany. While reunification wasn’t completed until late 1990, the 9th of November, 1989, marks perhaps the most important step in the process. After several weeks of civil protests, the East German government announced that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. In a slip of tongue, the announcing politician declared the unprecedented travel permit to be valid “immediately”, resulting in an exodus of East Germans to the West.

Witnesses would later describe how the customs officials tried to check passports at first, and after awhile just opened the borders to let people pass, realizing it was futile to try any further checks. Due to this historic significance, the 9th of November was considered for the national holiday of Germany, but it was dropped in favor of the 3rd of October due to its unfortunate coincidence with at least two dark spots in German history. Happy birthday, reunited Germany!

Last, but certainly not least, Mozilla Firefox turns 5 on the 9th of November as well. Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004, and since then, the Web has been changing faster than ever. It has developed into an exciting platform for innovation and collaboration. That the web browser space is now a competitive environment with a number of excellent players in the market, is something Firefox had an essential influence on and it is something the Mozilla community can be proud of. Make sure to watch the video “The Story of Firefox” on the Five Years of Firefox website. Happy birthday, Firefox!

Photograph of West Germans welcoming East Germans, CC by-sa licensed by Bundesarchiv on Wikipedia.

On September 27, 2009, the Federal Republic of Germany will vote for their 17th “Bundestag”, i.e., its federal parliament. Due to my absence on the actual election day, I went to the ballot today already for early voting. Here is proof:

The staff were very helpful and interestingly, there were actually a lot of people asking for absentee ballots.

Another observation struck me as odd while reading the ballot: Of all people, the direct candidate of one of the nationalist parties^*) is a “Fremdsprachensekretärin”, or certified multi-lingual secretary. Yup, a foreign-language secretary by day, moonlighting as a xenophobe. Life’s ironic.

^*) whom I didn’t vote for, just in case that was unobvious.