New PC

The next-to-last time we were at ALDI, I was again tempted by the PC on offer there (which I had previously seen in their newsletter).

Several of its stats are better than those of my current machine, and more in line with what I'd like to upgrade mine to, for example the 3 Gb of RAM (which my current motherboard can't take -- it can only handle 2, at least according to Crucial's applet thingy) and the nVidia 8600 GT graphics card (I currently have an 8400 GS).

*sigh*

Anyone have seven hundred euros or so lying around they don't need?

(Translation: we could afford it in theory, but I can't justify that expense right now.)

Amy nearly in the papers

There was an article in the local newspaper about Amy's new kindergarten (with the headline "Now all that's missing is the children"!), with a picture of Vivien (the teacher), Stephi (the directrix), Till (the Zivi), and three children (Sana, Hussein, Kristin).

I imagine that if Amy were already going there every day, rather than once a week, she would have been on the picture, too.

It's also a little amusing that Stephi explicitly points out that "we've already got children from India, Poland, Sweden, and Arabia"; that accounts for four out of the six I know of so far :) So it's more of a coincidence that the first "batch" of children is so diverse. (And IIRC, Hussein's father is from Lebanon rather than "Arabia", though he travelled around a bit and I don't know where Hussein grew up.)

Fascinating bits about Chinese writing systems

Browsing around Wikipedia, I came across two fascinating bits related to writing Chinese.

The first is Xiao'erjing, a method of writing Chinese in Arabic script (that reminds me of how Dungan -- which can also, incidentally, be written in Xiao'erjing -- is usually written in Cyrillic).

The second is General Chinese, a method devised by Y. R. Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major Chinese dialects simultaneously, and from which one can also (usually) derive the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations. In effect, GC is a reconstruction of the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, except that distinctions that have been lost from all major dialects are not bothered with.

That seems pretty nifty, if a bit impractical to read and a nightmare to learn to write correctly (since you, by definition, have to make more distinctions than your native 'lect does -- even worse than the equivalent of General Chinese for English would be, I think, since I don't think the various varieties have diverged as much).

Dungan itself (Wikipedia, an article) is also pretty fascinating.