Speaking English considered harmful

One of my bottom two front teeth is pushed a little behind the other one, and the edge of the tooth is a bit sharp. Every now and then, my tongue will get irritated from that sharp edge and will hurt; fortunately, that usually goes away after a day or two.

This morning, it's happened again, and I noticed that speaking English will make my tongue hurt, because the way I make the two "th" sounds causes my tongue to flick against the sharp edge, irritating it. That's not a problem when I speak German, for obvious reasons :)

I briefly considered speaking only German, but didn't want to, for Amy's sake (to avoid confusion). I also considered using [f] and [v] instead but didn't think I would be able to keep doing that; I'd slip up often and so I wouldn't have gained much.

Amy Finn's languages

I asked Amy Finn (who's from Ghana) yesterday which languages she speaks, and she answered, English, German, and French. She said that French was her second language, which she learned at school, and English her first language.

I was a little surprised that she spoke no local languages; Stella, too, apparently, since she asked about tribal languages. Amy said that there were many tribes in Ghana and many languages. Apparently, her tribe (collection of tribes?) speaks twelve languages, of which she speaks three: [Something which I didn't catch but which seemed to end in [wi:] - Twi, perhaps? Though the first sound sounded like [s] or [ts] or something like that to me], Fante, and Ga.

I'm a bit curious why she didn't mention those languages when I asked her which languages she spoke. Did she think I wouldn't have heard of them, or that I wouldn't count them as "languages", or that I was only asking about "trade languages"?

When I asked her what she spoke at home with her parents, she said Fanti, so I presume that's more likely to be what I'd call a "first language".

New network at work

Our computers were migrated from one network to another over the weekend.

It took a little while to get my computer working (mostly) as usual again.

( boring details )

Edit: Hm, my Cygwin environment is still a bit messed up. I shall have to try to import the new domain accounts and stuff into its config.

What does Mcshield.exe do, besides chew up CPU time?

Whoo, Mcshield.exe keeps chewing up 40-50 percent of my CPU (i.e. one HyperThread?). Yay McAfee!

Edit: OK, it's now at a much more reasonable 0-3 percent. Perhaps it was doing some kind of initial scan or something.