Archives for April 2008

Die Zuschlagmarke

Die Zuschlagmarke is a type of stamp that has two face values: one for the postage and another for a special cause, eg. 55+25

These sorts of stamps often appear before Christmas and include a small donation to a charity. In the above example 55 cents would be the postage for a letter and 25 cents would be the donation.

The donation is not allowed to be higher than half the value of the postage itself, although this has not always been the case and stamps used to be produced with values such as 12+38.

To hear a simple explanation and a short discussion in German, listen to the podcast:

(Press the “play” button to listen to the podcast)

Download a transcript

Download the MP3 file | Subscribe to the podcast

Happy Birthday, WWW!

The BBC reported today, that the World-Wide-Web is celebrating its 15th birthday. This is because the first web technology was released by CERN on 30th April, 1993.

It’s not an event that I remember experiencing, although I know that I was in my second year at university and getting ready to go to Germany for my placement year, so I dug out my diary from that year to have a look.

Apparently I didn’t have any lectures on that day and stayed at home to do homework and revision, which I guess is not very exciting compared to the birth of the web!

I remember at the time using an information system called Gopher and my first contact with a web browser was with NCSA Mosaic in September 1994 when I arrived back at university for my final year.

It was then that I started to design web pages. My final year project for my computer science course was to design the website for the Department of Languages and European Studies, which included looking at the different technologies and where it was all going.

The site was basic by today’s standards, but it used an interesting feature of colour-coded links to show which pages were public and which were only available on the campus, as well as a separate colour for external links.

There were experimental audio files in WAV format and video files in Quicktime, as well as a selection of photographs provided by other students – often displayed with only 256 colours.

Many of the pages stayed online after I had graduated and have only been replaced within the last year years. I still have the source code to those pages, but you are unlikely to find them anywhere online now. To get some idea of how the site looked, there is a page of the main department site on archive.org which shows how the links were colour-coded.

I would have liked to have compared what I wrote back then about the future of the web with what has actually happened since, but although I have the project work backed up and readily available, I have been struggling to open the file containing my summary. It is another example of digital obsolescence as even with the wide variety of software and operating systems available to me I have not managed it yet!

I guess I will have to dig out the printed version of the project or return to the original PC that I wrote it on, providing it still works after all this time (and I was pushing it to the limit back then!)

The web has revolutionised the way that we work with and think about information, and back in 1995 when I was finishing off my project work I am sure that I would have written something about the forthcoming changes in peoples’ attitudes to working with the web and the availability of information.

But after all that has changed over the past 15 years, sometimes it is still the printed word that is easiest to retrieve.

Was man so alles mitmacht bei einem Iberiaflug…

Normalerweise läuft ein Flug immer nach dem “gleichen” Schema ab.

Man hat eine Abflugzeit mitgeteilt bekommen und man weiß an welchem Terminal man abfliegt.

Dies muss nicht immer der Fall sein, meine Erfahrung war, dass im online Buchungsystem, auf der Iberia Website und am Flughafen verschiedene Abflugzeiten bekannt gegeben wurden. Ich war natürlich zum frühesten Zeitpunkt am Flughafen nur um festzustellen, dass der Schalter noch nicht geöffnet hatte.

Es ist auch so, dass der Fraport und Iberia verschiedene Regelungen zum Handgepäck haben. Beim Fraport darf man 8kg mitnehmen und Iberia erlaubt 10kg. Erstaunlich ist, der Arrecifer Flughafen erlaubt nur 6kg.

Aber eines ist überall gleich, Flüssigkeiten sind nur bis 100ml erlaubt. So konnte man sich nichts zu trinken ins Flugzeug mitnehmen, also war man auf die Angebote von Iberia angewiesen. Eine Dose von einem Softdrink kostete 2,50 € und wenn man Hunger hattte konnte man sich ein belegtes Baguette/Brötchen für 6-8 € genehmigen.

Man hat auch die Crew von Frankfurt nach Madrid nur schlecht verstanden, da sie überhaupt kein Deutsch sondern nur spanisch und ein wenig Englisch sprach. Wenn man das Spanische nicht verstand hatte man Pech.

In Madrid angekommen, musste man eine halbe Weltreise zum nächsten Terminal unternehmen, nämlich erstmal lange laufen bis man zu einer Art Untergrundbahn kam, die einen dann zum anderen Terminal fuhr. Auch dort musste man eine gute Strecke bis zum Gate laufen. Und zu guter letzt auch hier wieder verschiedene Abflugzeiten am Gate und Anzeigetafel.

Beim Rückflug war es dann so, dass andere Personen das Personal fragten, ob der Flug nach Frankfurt an diesem Gate abfliegen würde und bekamen die Anwort Nein. Am Ende flogen wir tatsächlich von diesem Gate ab.

Das war alles eine unnötige Belastung….

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