Hi. I moved this weblog away from Blogger to my own site. Please click

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Alright, this is it. I was working on a WordPress installation elsewhere, a different layout and lots of other stuff. Now, the new location is all setup, I'll start moving this blog away from Blogger. Don't misunderstand me, it's a great service, but far too limiting.
Keep your fingers crossed. ;-)

Goodbye Google, and thanks for the fish.

Hilary Rosen worked at the RIAA for 17 years, now she's been invited to blog for a week over at Lawrence Lessig's blog - a professor of law who serves on the board of the EFF.

Lawrence Lessig

I've turned 28 last friday. Happy birthday to me.
The Kyokushin Karate Summercamp in Warnemünde was great, I'm already looking forward to next year.

... 38 centimeters and growing...

The famine in Niger escalates: About 2-3.5 million people are affected by it, around 150,000-800,000 children already suffer from undernourishment and might die in the near future. The numbers vary a lot, but considering the situation it's not surprising. Milton Tetonidis of Medecins Sans Frontieres has been quoted that response has yet been very low - spread the word.

German:

Spiegel Online
Ärtzte ohne Grenzen
Care
Plan Deutschland

English:

United Nations - OCHA IRIN Africa News
Doctors without Borders
Unicef
Allafrica
Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN
USAID
Relief Web

I'm sorry I have to focus on other stuff until mid August, so there might not be much or any blogging at all during that time. Since I postponed things I have to take care of for weeks now, it leaves me little time to continue writing regularily. If you want to read something interesting during the break, try Hugo Dobson's Japan and United Nations Peacekeeping: New Pressures, New Responses. See you after the summer.

We're back. There would be lot to write about (in short: it was great, Belgium is a great country), but one mishap on Tuesday kept me busy until today. After my first post from our host's computer on Monday, I've been told that the computer has problems.

Several dozen viruses, beside Sobig, AntiSpyware Viruses, Trojans and as far as I could tell, keyloggers as well. Since I couldn't rule out that my passwords for Blogger and several Emailaccounts were compromised, I spent the day with changing all of them. It was time for reneval anyway, but it hits you when you least expect it.

Fighting against a French style, by IME Korean and English keyboard enabled computer, copy&pasting the commas because I can't find it and the "m" and the "@" symbol for email doesn't work right - this is my first post from our hosts computer. We'll spend the next three nights at Mrs Park's house, who offers mainly Koreans, but also other people a place to stay in Bruxelles.

Our trip started out a little bit problematic, since we couldn't buy a ticket for the regional express train to Cologne. Three ticket vending machines didn't accept my money or my card, so we didn't have a choice but to dodge the fair. The ride with the Thalys was great, for ten Euros per person I would even stand all the way, but we had comfortable seats and it went smooth all the way until ... well until "Brussel-Zuid". I blame the hot weather that I was looking out for "Bruxelles-Midi", as it was written on our tickets, so when the train stopped at Brussel-Zuid, we didn't get out. "Zuid" also sounds a little bit like "Sued" or "south" in German, but it was indeed Bruxelles-Midi. Just before the train was ready for departure to Paris, we jumped out.

Finding the hostel wasn't too difficult, although nobody knew the street we were looking for. The place is nice, actually a private apartment with a guest room with four beds. Tonight we share the room with two guys from Swissm using a mixture of German, French and English. After checking in, we went for a walk through a park to the Basilica d'Elizabeth nearby. Walking towards it, we realized its sheer size - and even better, it had an illuminated red cross on top! Perhaps it was sponsored by a South Korean (churches over there always have that kind of a cross), on the backside we saw that one of the windows had a Korean map and the flag. We'll check it out tomorrow again since it was already closed tonight.

I can't wait for the Korean breakfast tomorrow morning...

If you're interested about the German media landscape, Sign and Sight offers a great daily insight, focusing on cultural and intellectual life in Germany. Unlike other sites (see below), Sign and Sight strives for objectivity and gives overviews. I recommend the digests and articles about Merkel's new middle, What do the conservatives want? and Writers warn about Linkspartei.

If you'd rather read news yourself instead of digests, try one of the following sites:

• Deutsche Welle (in 39 languages)
• German Times
• Topix (news collections about Germany)
• Spiegel Online (English site)

My favorite newspaper, Die Zeit is unfortunately not available in English. Learn German. :-)

There's one popular site I have to advise against: David's Medienkritik regularily posts about events and news in Germany and focuses about German news about the U.S. It is some kind of self proclaimed watchdog that already disqualifies itself by its inaptitude to see a difference between the Spiegel and Stern, thus often only serving right-wing audience by focusing on Anti-Americanism (keeping its definition as vague as possible), failing to differentiate even the most basic interrelations and possibly even prone to censorship. In some cases, it happened to raise valid points, far too often it pushs its own agenda - but since it extremely focuses on a handful of topics it presents a grossly distorted perception.

Explain the Internet to a kid using simple terms and concepts... or just show them a video. Like this one. Depending on the age, die Maus is a good alternative (in German).

Warriors of the Net

Here's a great library about Japanese texts from Man'yôshû till the end of the Edo era. From 芭蕉 (Bashô) to 漱石 (Sōseki), 源氏物語 (Genji monogatari) and other stories, you'll find a broad selection of texts.

UVa Library Etext Center: Japanese Text Initiative

From the The London News Review

Just one day after London has been chosen to host the 2012 Olympics, a terrorist attack on the Underground network with an explosion and three blasts on busses left between two and a dozen people dead. The time of the first blast was this morning - the timing reminiscent of the September 11th attacks. A few minutes ago, the German intelligence service BND confirmed that a terrorist attack is very likely - also a claim of responsibility by a group called Secret Organization — al-Qaeda in Europe surfaced.

Spiegel Online published an article with 22 pictures of the attack.

The attackers aimed at the public transportation service for several reasons:

1. to hurt as many civilians as possible during rush hour
2. spread fear among the population
3. hurt a modern society there where it's most vulnerable: its openness

BBC: London rocked by terror attacks

The Marmot's Hole added to Blogroll. It's a group weblog centered around all things Korean, including news, events, culture and history. Writing since January 2003, the linklist to other Korean blogs is extensive - if you want to participate in the discussions though, you have to register (an extreme, but safest way to prevent spam in comments). You'll notice the absence of a design or any colors with the default theme, so nothing's going to distract you from the content.

update: Firefox with enabled adblock blocks their weblog's header image...