Haha, this make so little sense:

Yes, this is a pear with a mouth. Once more proof that Internet memes can be quite random.

(thanks to Wil who pointed this out)

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We all know that President Obama's internet team is undoubtedly the most advanced a US government ever had (and one could argue, even in the world). Now, we can't exactly say the same for his VP Joe Biden:

Hat tip to Joe for a fun new addition to our treasure chest of internet memes: We'll give it an honorable spot, right next to the series of tubes and the internets!

[via]

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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

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There's been a nice little meme going on in the Mozilla blogosphere during this last week: Running your blog through the wordle "word cloud" generator, then posting it. Here is mine:

Comes to no surprise that "German" and "Germany" are two of the most-used words here -- I sure hope I am not boring my readership to death by giving them intercultural lessons here :)

Anyway, if you post yours, feel free to send a ping to this article, or leave a comment with the link to your blog. I am looking forward to seeing how others' word clouds look!

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So I stumbled across this "How Many Countries Can You Name?" Quiz where you need to name as many (sovereign) country names as you can in 5 minutes.

I got a 59 at my first try, while the average is 57 (even though some people take it many times, as the result screen notes).

I do admit it's hard to think of so many countries in very limited time -- and sometimes I pathetically failed at guessing the English spelling of a country's name as well, such as Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and others...

How many can you come up with?

(via Violent Acres, who got, uhm, slightly less)

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This is a meme I borrowed from Freya. It's a Google image search meme. Search for your answer for each one, and pick your favorite from the first 3 pages.

Feel free to pick it up if you like, and don't forget to trackback!

While Freya got a bunch of "naked chicks" in her search results (and neglected to include them, much to the dismay of her male readership), I got a bunch of muscular models that share my first name--who I conveniently chose not to display here either (sorry female readership :) ). Here we go:

Your first name:

Your middle name:

Your last name:

Your age:

A place you would like to visit:

Your favorite place to be:

The name of a past love:

Your college degree or concentration:

Your grandmother's first name:

Where you grew up:

Your childhood pet's name:

Your best friend's nickname:

Your first job:

Your favorite food:

Your favorite color:

What you're doing right now:

One of your bad habits:

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