German level 3 is much harder than German level 2 I had taken last term. The class is much smaller, and we had to speak in German for practice. The teacher also speaks a lot more German this time, even though she is speaking slow, I could only understand about 50%. There was one grandma in the class started German level 1 with me back then, and two woman from my German level 2 class. There are also two new guys join us this time. Out of the six people in the group, four has a German boyfriend / girlfriend. Oddly enough, the grandma is one of them. And no, my girlfriend is not a German. I guess love is a major factor pushing someone to learn a new language. For the remaining two, which is me and another guy, the motivation of learning is to visit German in near future. With this much more in depth training, I hope I’ll at least able to carry out basic conversation during the World Youth Day in August.
All posts by hevangel
ISIC
International Student Identity Card (ISIC) is a necessity to travel in Europe. This green little card let you purchase flight and rail tickets in the discounted student fare. The problem is only full time students are qualified to apply this card. This term I am only taking the M.Eng. project course, so technically I’m a part time student. Fortunately, the student society of SFU handles the issuing of the ISIC card and the checks of full-time status is very lax. It’s just a glimpse of the unofficial transcript by the student volunteer at the encounter to verify the applicant is taking full time course load. Thanks to the computerized of the school records, the unofficial transcript is simply a print out from the website. Therefore I can easily change my status to full-time with a minor fix in the HTML file. Mind that I don’t think it is an act of forging document, since the unofficial transcript is not a legal document after all. Moreover, I strongly believe that it is plain wrong to have price discrimination against part-time student. By getting the ISIC card thru the loop hole, I’m merely exercising my right to the discount benefits. Today, I feel good that I had beat the system once again.
After break up
The relationship between ex boyfriends and girlfriends always has to handle with care, especially when both of the couple are your friends. Extra precaution have to taken into account to make sure both parties will not showing at the same time to your events. Otherwise, it may bring embarrassing moment to the whole group. Sometimes I wonder why it is so hard to step back from a relationship to friends. Although I had similar experience with my ex, cut all the contact after broke up, yet I still don’t understand. I guess only time can heal the feeling of being hurt in order to be friends once again. I wish at some time in the future, my usual gang will be united and hang out like in the old days.
Quote of the day: Stone age did not end for the lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil. – from an article on energy crisis in the Economist.
auto audio system
Today during lunch, we had talked about the trouble of burning CD to play in car. The topic naturally extended to the iPod adapter come with the latest BMW models. Somehow Ray Woo pointed out why can’t we simply have a audio system takes compact flash of SD cards? There are already audio players with mp3 decoder that can read data CDs. It shouldn’t be too hard to add a memory card reader, which only cost $15 for PC used version. Downloading songs to memory card is much more convenient than burning CD, and a 1GB memory card is big enough for any trip. I feel about disappointed about myself that I didn’t think of this idea early. Anyways, now after I had gave it a second thought, I can figure out why no one made such device yet. It’s purely economical reason, a 1GB memory card will cost as much as the audio system. Unless the price of memory cards drop significantly, using them in car is still not very feasible.
rapture
Tonight’s Simpsons episode is really hilarious by making fun of the concept of rapture commonly believed among evangelist Christians. In the episode, Homer walked into a theater and saw one of those left below (mocking the left behind series) movie. He got scared by the apocalypse and some coincident (yet funny) signs of the end is near. Homer then derived the end time using some weird calculation and convinced everyone in town with yet another coincident. However, the end of world didn’t come as he predicted, so the crowd ditched him. It turned out that he forgot to count Jesus himself in the number of people in the last supper, thus his previous calculation is wrong. This time no one believes in him, and it turn out he is the only one raised to heaven. In heaven, Homer found himself not happy because he missed his family very much. He bring out one of philosophical dilemma of salvation in mild way. How can a person have eternal happiness in heaven if he see his family and friends are suffering in hell? In the end, Homer made God turn back in time and cancel the apocalypse. This episode has many in-jokes of many common mis-concepts in Christianity. The conversation between Homer and God about Jesus never be the same after he came back from Earth has a really nice touch humor. I don’t like the idea of rapture personally, and always think that it is the work of the devil to mislead innocent souls. However, I couldn’t realize the idea rapture is so ridiculous until it is portrayed by the Simpsons. This episode is highly recommended to the evangelist christian as a mind opener.