The clarification pseudo-meme

[pne]

(via fledchen)

How many times has someone on your friends list posted about something and you were really confused, but you didn't want to ask because you knew you SHOULD know? How many times have you felt 'guilty' asking a close LJ friend a question that should be 'obvious'?

Well, here's your chance. If you've missed a few things, missed an entry and are confused, ask me anything. Even something EXTREMELY basic, like where I live! I'm not allowed to get even slightly irritated at any of the questions - we've all missed things before. (I do reserve the right not to answer or to give partial answers, however.)

Comments

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

Where did you grow up? How did you meet Stella?

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

how does this occasion relate to my icon?

[volantwish]

Where do you work? What do you do there?

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

Oh! I second this question! :)

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

And this one :D

[pne.livejournal.com]

Er, no particular reason, really.

I was scrolling through my list of keywords, wondering whether any of them was particularly appropriate, and none of them struck my eye especially, so I went with this one.

Where I work

[pne.livejournal.com]

I work for a company called "gedas on site services GmbH", a subsidiary of gedas, which in turn was recently sold from Volkswagen to T-Systems (a subsidiary(?) of German Telecom).

I'm a software developer there. Basically, companies come to us and say, "we want a program that does $FOO," and we tell them, "sure, that'll be $500'000," and then a group of people sits down and develops the program for them, and I'm one of those people.

Development also includes maintenance (e.g. fixing bugs or implementing change requests or enhancements), testing, and documentation. There's also specification, but I haven't been involved with that much; for most of the projects I've been assigned to, the specification was already done and we "just" had to implement it.

So far, I've used C, C++, Fortran (maintenance only -- some small changes to an existing program, but no new code per se), Perl, and Java; an application development tool called JAM; MFC; HTML, Javascript, JavaServer Pages, servlets; SQL (with HP Allbase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server); and ETL tools including Business Objects Data Integrator.

My two current projects are a program for calculating costs for a transport from point A to point B (sounds simpler than it is); and work on our parent company's finance data warehouse (lots of boring numbers get sliced, diced, and turned into pretty reports for management).

[pne.livejournal.com]

Where did you grow up?

I've always lived near Hamburg, in the north of Germany (and the second-biggest city in Germany). I was born in Reinbek (east of Hamburg) and spent the first six-and-a-half years of my life in Neuschönningstedt, a small village a bit north of, and belonging to, Reinbek. In March 1981, we moved to Tornesch, a small "sleeper town" (i.e. people pretty much only sleep there but typically go elsewhere to work or for recreation) northwest of Hamburg, where my parents still live.

For all of my schooling, I've had a long trip into Hamburg -- first from one side of town, then the other. (And I've taken public transport to school by myself since about the middle of first grade, I think.)

During my apprenticeship (1992-1995), I also lived at home, and took the train to work and to vocational school; after I came back from my mission in 1997 and started work at the same company and started earning "serious money", I moved out after six months, partly in order to shorten the daily commute.

I've been living in Harburg (a suburb in the south of Hamburg, south of the Elbe river) since then -- November 1997. (When I married Stella, I moved into a bigger place, but just two bus stops away, still in Harburg -- or if you want to get technical, from Wilstorf to Langenbek.)

I like living in Hamburg; I appreciate the infrastructure provided by a large city (including, but not limited to, the quality of public transport). Also, Hamburg is a fairly green city; it doesn't take long to walk to a lake with trees around it or to a hill amidst some fields, still within the city limits.

Did that answer your question? I'm not quite sure what you wanted to hear.

How did you meet Stella?

For the answer to that, I'll refer you to this entry from November 2003 (http://pne.livejournal.com/169081.html), where I answered the question already.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I've answered both questions now.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

So how many languages do you speak, and where/how did you pick up such a brilliant command of English? I don't know why, but there was a time when I thought for some reason that you'd been born in England and only moved to Germany later in life. In retrospect, however, I now realise that I was thinking of someone else.

I also seem to remember that you're a Church of Latter-Day Saints adherent. Were you born into an LDS family, or did you convert later in life? And where did you do your mission? (If you're in fact not an LDS adherent, feel free to disregard, and consider a replacement proverb forthcoming.)

pne's languages

[pne.livejournal.com]

So how many languages do you speak

I tend to claim "four-and-a-half": English (native), German (native), French (four years at school), Greek (two years in Greece), and Japanese (four years of once-a-week public education). However, my Japanese is pretty rusty these days and not much is left.

My wife will claim more for me, since she says I'm being modest about my abilities in other languages. But while I know anything from a word or two to basic grammatical rules in all sorts of languages, I won't claim to "speak" them. (Especially since being able to say three sentences and impress a native speaker isn't "speaking" to me; it's more akin to showing off, if that's all the command of the language you have.)

I suppose I could try faking Spanish from the bits I do know along with inventing cognates from French and/or English, and I've been known to fake Dutch on occasion (mostly by mangling German into what I hope might be a cognate). But I don't claim to speak them.

So, depending on your standards: anywhere from four to n.

where/how did you pick up such a brilliant command of English?

Schooling, mostly.

My father is from England, and he spoke English with us children, but the main advantage I have over my sisters is that I went to an International School, where the language of instruction was English. Using that language daily for twelve years certainly made me fluent, and undoubtedly gave me a larger vocabulary than I would have had just from speaking with my father. (School also nearly buried my native accent with an Americanoid one, due to the fact that so many children were either from the States or spoke with some variety of a US accent. The Americanoid accent still shows up now when I speak to Americans, but my underlying British accent has resurfaced and is now my "default" accent in English again, if there are no accent cues from my conversation partner. I use British spelling and, to a large extent, vocabulary, though, even during the time when my accent was more American.)

Incidentally, German is my second language, I suppose, since both of my parents spoke only English to me when I was a baby. My mother (who was German) switched to German when I was three or so, and was starting to learn German from the children I was playing with. (She said that even quite a bit later, when something needed to come out quickly such as "Careful!", she'd still do it in English, sometimes even with neighbours' children who didn't speak English.)

there was a time when I thought for some reason that you'd been born in England and only moved to Germany later in life.

That was the case with my father, but not with me. (He had studied German and French at university, and his employer at one point offered to transfer him to their German branch so that he could put the language to use, an offer he accepted.)

I also seem to remember that you're a Church of Latter-Day Saints adherent.

That's correct. (Though the official name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Including the mid-sentence capital T at the beginning, which always strikes me as odd. And a lower-case d in day, though there are apparently also groups using the spelling Latter Day Saints, without the hyphen and with a capital D; see Wikipedia for more on the two spellings Latter-day Saint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter-day_Saint) and Latter Day Saint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint).)

Were you born into an LDS family, or did you convert later in life?

I was born into the faith. My father was originally Roman Catholic, but was converted after having been introduced to the LDS church by a friend whom he met in Germany. My mother was born LDS; the two met in church.

And where did you do your mission?

Greece (greater Athens area and Thessaloniki) and Cyprus (Limassol).

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

it usually relates somehow and I didn't see it so I was just wondering :)