The robots think I'm multilingual.

Since moving, I've had to rely on Google Translate a lot. Everything from government websites to local news websites has to be translated. I'm slowly learning German, and I can occasionally make out simple articles without translation, but that little "This page is in German. Would you like to translate it?" notification gets a lot of use.

Somewhere along the way, the algorithms have noticed. I'm seeing a lot more German spam, the web page ads that sneak past my adblockers are increasingly in German, and Google Play has been playing a lot of Europop lately. Tonight, for a change of pace, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" song guesser decided that I wanted to listen to French pop. Ça joue.

Comments

Stinky cheese, man

I'm living in a place that's known for it's cheese. There are hundreds of kinds of cheese at my local grocery store. I try something different every time I go shopping, and I've still barely scratched the surface of what's available. There's one kind of cheese that deserves special mention: Raclette . Raclette is strange for a few different reasons. Most notably, it's almost always served cooked, and there's a bit of a ritual around cooking it. You will never be offered raw raclette. Why? Raw raclette is pungent stuff. It's hard to describe the smell, but I've heard it described as a cross between sweat socks, vomit, and curdled milk. To say that it stinks is a polite understatement. So, why on earth would anyone eat it? Because when you cook it, you somehow cook the stink out of it, and what's left is sublime. It's a sort of oily cheese, and you get something like the best pizza or nacho cheese you've ever had. I've hea...

Sometimes, things work as intended

A small computer success story: I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory. After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems. ...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that The troubled disk had finally failed. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it. When everything was finished, the system would let us k...

Actual Size

I get a lot of questions about Switzerland's size. So, I put together a spreadsheet showing Switzerland's size relative to each US State. You can view the full spreadsheet on Google Sheets , but here are some highlights: The two states that are closest in size to Switzerland are Maryland and West Virginia. Maryland is 61% (about 2/3x) of the size of Switzerland. West Virginia is 151% (about 1 and 1/2x) of the size of Switzerland. Pennsylvania is 281% (about 3x) of the size of Switzerland. One of the nice things about living in a small country is the short distance to the borders. I can be in Germany in an hour. France, Lichtenstein, or Austria in 2 hours, or Italy in 4 hours (less when full service through t he Gotthard Tunnel opens later this year). This weekend, we're going to visit... somewhere, and "do you want to go to Milan or Munich" is about as difficult as "Do you want to go to Columbus or Buffalo?"

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