The end of an era: CompuServe closes down in Germany

I just read a news article (in German) saying that CompuServe will be closing down services in Germany.

As the article notes, if you were online in Germany in the mid-90's, chances are you were either at a university or you used one of three ISPs: T-Online, AOL, or CompuServe.

Even our company's Internet connectivity at the time was via a dial-up CompuServe connection and our email via CompuServe's MHS service. (I was—IIRC—MHS:PNE@DATREV at the time, or INTERNET:PNE@DATREV.MHS.COMPUSERVE.COM.)

As of 31 July, people won't be able to connect to the Internet via CompuServe Germany (a service of AOL Europe Services SARL in Luxembourg) any more—and their @compuserve.de addresses will stop working, too.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Sure, there were people who cursed at Compu$erve (as some called it), but it was an important way to access lots of content (including the Internet, though they also had a lot of content in their own little walled garden back then, too) back in this days.

So it's kind of significant when one of those oldbies closes their doors, even if they were probably only a minority ISP in the last years.

The things you learn: Cornish pasties

I'd always been pronouncing them "pace-teas" in my head, like the pasties you stick over a nipple (or, more to the point, with the same vowel I have in "pastries"), but apparently, they're pronounced with a "short a" (as in "cat") in the first syllable. (I'd have written "pass-teas", but that would imply a "broad A" in my 'lect, as in "palm".)

Also relatedly, I'd pronounced pâté "PAT-ay", but apparently it's supposed to be "pa-TAY" or "pah-TAY". Ooh, all French and dignified.

New Opera and Firefox

OK, so I got rid of my greatest annoyances with Opera 9.51 and Firefox 3:

After installing the "Opera 9 Classic" skin, I can now tell unread tabs from read ones again, and I figured out how to make Firefox scale only the text (but not the images) when I zoom in and out.

So I thought I'd install the two on my PC at home, too.

I was kind of expecting a weird font on my LiveJournal friends page. Only here it's the font for the "Greek Extended" range that's being used, not the one for "Latin Extended-B". *sigh*

I wonder in which universe that makes sense.

Ah well. Now I have DejaVu Serif for my friends page (and Heise Newsticker, and—presumably—lots of other pages) rather than my "default" Georgia. *sigh* I'll survive, but still.

---

OK, this is getting ridiculous. My friends page was in MS Gothic or something like that now (a Japanese font). I've really no idea how Opera decides to pick fonts. Most of my page is in Latin letters, dagnabbit! Edit: It was GulimChe, a Korean font. Possibly caused by the presence of about half-a-dozen Hangul syllables on the page. That's still no excuse to render the entire page in that font, though, IMO.