Closing of the Blog

It is a long time since I wrote anything in this blog and I think it is time to close it. It was created originally to let friends and family follow my move to Berlin. Now that I am in Berlin permanently, it seems unnecessary.

I have two new blogs that are more active:

• Digital+Research=Blog which is primarily about research.
• Photo.Gallery.M which is primarily about photos and photographic compositions.

I hope you enjoy them.

Christmas 2011

"Was work ever fun?" asks Elif Batuman in a recent New Yorker article [1]. For me the answer is certainly yes, it is fun, which probably only shows what a privileged life I lead. Fun does not mean stress free, and I would not like that in any case. When I was doing professional computing work, I looked forward to things breaking or to people coming to me with impossible problems because solving them was fun. I deal with different kinds of problems now, but I still enjoy them and enjoy learning from them. Usually the holiday message has to do with travel and non-work events. I already have a blog post about the summer vacation, so this year I am going to write about the fun things that have filled the rest of my time.

Probably the biggest event in the life of the university this year has been the Excellence Initiative, which involves seriously large sums of money. Somewhat to our surprise the pre-proposal was accepted and the final version had to be done. This came at an awkward time between the terms of the outgoing and incoming presidents. I had nothing to do with the writing, but became fairly involved with parts of the presentation, as were other deans. The proposal could not, of course, answer all the questions that might come up and it had some gaps where implementation was not clear. This was an opportunity and one of the enjoyable parts of the process was working with the other deans to decide what we could reasonably say when the evaluators asked awkward questions. My sense, and I think that of others, was that we discovered how well we could work together.

At a more local level the stresses at the Berlin School for LIS have been fun too. For years the students had been asking for a ring-lecture that included all of the professors. I opposed this for a long time on the basis of past experience, but agreed to go ahead with an experiment this year just to see. So far it has met all of my expectations for being a disaster, especially for the students, whose eyes seemed glazed even during the last two sessions when some of our best teachers were talking. What we have gained, though, is more of a common sense of what skills our students need to write research-quality masters theses, and statistics is a significant part of that.

Yes, statistics. Not how to do a t-test or an ANOVA, but how to understand some of the basics like what a population is, why sampling needs to be done with care, and how to think about values that are outliers. Before the students can do statistics, they need to be able to read them, ask questions about the data, and know what the results mean. In the last several sessions of the semester we are going to shift the focus, and it it works, we will do more next year.

Our students are actually fairly impressive. Even as masters students a number of them publish in peer-reviewed journals. We face a re-accreditation visit in the summer, and one of our students has taken the lead in writing the description that we must  turn in. The students don't just sit on committees as representatives, they help run the place. We could not manage without them and I see that as something to be proud of.

Of course I wish that I had more time to go to concerts, which are abundant in Berlin, or to theater or museums. I can even imagine reading and sleeping more. But looking back at the year, I can't say that I regret my choices. I had fun and I hope others did too.
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[1] Batuman, Elif, 19 Dec 2011, "The Sanctuary: the world's oldest temple and the dawn of civilization", p. 82.

Lüneburg-Lübeck-Flensburg

Joan and I planned our holiday this year in three small German cities that she had never visited. The first was Lüneburg, where I had stayed one night on my way somewhere (I no longer remember where) in the early 1970s. The town is on the river Ilmenau with sailing boats and open-air restaurants along the embankment. Our hotel was in the older part of the city near the Rathaus, a tourist attraction that was mostly closed for repairs. We walked through a park that (we think) was part of the old fortifications and visited a church that had a complete second nave and altar in the basement. In talking with one of the staff, we also learned that a “Vikar” in the Evangelische Kirche is not a substitute Rector, but a person who has completed theology training at the university and needs a period of practical training before becoming a Pastor. In the US Episcopal church the equivalent would be a transitional deacon.

On the second day we rented bicycles and rode out to the Rote Schleusen, where we ate at a restaurant that came from an older world. The menu was offered verbally -- full dinners only. After some negotiation, the waitress allowed us to eat only soup and salad (cost 9€ per person). Every new guest greeted other diners, us included.. Below is a photo of Joan along the bike path.

The train to Lübeck was unexpectedly crowded. Some people ended up standing after the final stops. Our hotel was in an old mansion that had been completely renovated. The ground floor had an Argentine restaurant. from which the smell of steak wafted into the upper floor every evening -- attractive for meat eaters, less so for us. Happily the smell did not penetrate our room. The hotel (photo below) also had a pleasant outdoor bar on the city mill pond. A city beach and swimming area for children was on the other side of the water.

Lübeck has two art museums, one in the old St. Annen Cloister, which mainly had medieval works, and the other in the Dräger and Behnhaus museum (the two houses have been joined), which had 19^th and early 20^th century works, including Lovis Corinth portraits of his wife and of his 15 year old daughter and wood-block prints by Edvard Munch (Dr. Linde, an eye-doctor who lived in Lübeck, was one of Munch's patrons). Below is a photo of the Grönaur Altar (Flandern about 1430) from St. Annen Cloister.

On Sunday evening we heard an organ concert by a young Japanese performer, who played a set of older works on an historic portable organ, and then a 19^th century piece on a very new looking organ with shiny silver (or steel) pipes, a group of which projected toward the listeners like a choir of angels.

The restaurant options in Lübeck were broad. Our favorite was an Italian restaurant near the Cathedral, where on our last night I delighted in a Spaghetti Aglio e Olio with flecks of hot pepper. We had drinks several times at a “jazz” cafe, which had particularly good wine (less good food), and at a Viennese Cafe, whose Austrian wine selection was perhaps genuine but not much to my taste. We ate our breakfasts and most of our lunches at a bakery called Stadtbäckerei Junge, which not only had excellent Brötchen (including Danish Brötchen that were flaky like croissants -- not something I had ever seen in Denmark) and sandwiches with pesto, arugula, and hard cheese.

Flensburg was our last stop. Our hotel was convenient, pleasant, and modern, but located at the entrance to a large parking garage that made it less than picturesque. We intended to cycle along the coast, but could not find a bike that Joan could easily get on and off of without major athletic endeavors (I find the stretch to get on a standard man's bike increasingly hard too), so we decided to have a walking tour instead. This was probably a good idea, since the area is fairly hilly. Our plan originally was to walk up to the little sailing ship harbor at the point where the inlet turns east, but a security guard would not let us take the path marked as public on our map, so we turned back just short of our goal.  Below is a photo of Joan with the city and harbor in the background.

Maps of Flensburg show a pedestrian-only street and it is long, but about a third of what is marked seems open to cars. That part was also significantly less prosperous than the walking area. Perhaps the map shows what is planned, not what is.

We could not get seats on the ICE (Inter City Express train) back from Flensburg to Berlin, so we took the IC instead, which was only a little slower, but less comfortable. We had the good luck that we had a compartment to ourselves most of the time and could spread out. Otherwise the space was cramped. The train car looked as if it must have been in service during my student days and smelled of decades of strong cleaning fluid. The train did arrive on time, which is not always the case in Germany today.

New Year 2011

A new year and a new decade (the "twenty teens"?) has begun and with it the temptation to make new resolutions about keeping up this blog. Since new year resolutions almost always merely become an embarrassment, I will refrain. The original purpose of this blog was to give friends in the US a way to follow the adventure of my move to Berlin. Berlin is still delightful, but hardly qualifies as an adventure after four years. Certainly there are adventures I could tell about my work life and social life, but too much of what would be really interesting is or should be confidential and in the relatively small world of the university, even pseudonyms would be easy to decode.

I have thought about shifting the topic to research. Presentations of the pre-publication version of my latest Library Hi Tech column on "Archiving in the Networked World" has generated a pleasing amount of interest. The abstract is below:

Purpose: The purpose is to investigate: 1) how many journal titles are both in LOCKSS and in Portico? 2) what is the relationship of small publishers to LOCKSS/CLOCKSS and Portico? 2) what is the relationship of large publishers to LOCKSS/CLOCKSS and Portico?
Methodology: The article describes describes how data from Portico, LOCKSS, and CLOCKSS was cleaned and analyzed using Perl programs to discover duplications.
Findings: The findings show a significant overlap among the archiving systems. It also shows that Portico has no bias against small publishers and that large publishers are as willing to choose the LOCKSS software as to choose Portico. LOCKSS does, however, archive many more small and arguably endangered publishers and may be the only economically viable choice for them.
Implications: The push for greater transparency has made more and more data available. Both LOCKSS and Portico deserve commendation for providing the detailed lists of titles and publishers on which this article was based. Such data gives the library community an opportunity to build decisions about the long term digital future on firm and verifiable ground.

To be fair to Emerald (the publisher), blog readers with an interest in this topic will have to wait a few months for the official publication.

I have also thought about emphasizing the only hobby that I really actively pursue these days, which is cooking. A while ago I took this photo of some English scones that I had baked.

Scones for breakfast.

The recipe for scones is simple:

• 50 grams sugar
• 150 grams whole wheat flour
• 200 grams white flour
• 1 packet baking powder
• 1 egg
• about 250 grams milk
• 1 large teaspoon honey
• some butter cut into the flour (as few as 10 grams is ok)
• nuts and dried fruit to taste (about 50 grams is what I use)
• 40 grams of sesame seeds
  

Heat the oven to 200 C (for a convection oven) and butter a baking sheet.

Mix all ingredients except the sesame seeds. The mix will seem to dry until the last minute when all the pockets of moisture in the mix are evenly spread. (It may be possible to use some tool for this, but I prefer to work the mix with my hands.) Scone batter that is too wet will result in scones that are soggy on the inside.

Work the batter into a ball of dough and then roll it in the sesame seeds until they have coated the outside. Then pat (or roll) the dough into a wheel about 2 - 2.5 cm thick and cut it with broad-blade knife. Mostly I cut it into half, then each half into thirds, and each third in half again. The slices will look small, but they grow and scones are dense.

Bake for 15 - 17 minutes (depending on the oven). They can be served immediately, or cooled, frozen, and reheated later. They are fairly robust.

I eat scones mainly with butter and honey. They are especially good with honey and creme fraiche. Joan likes them with preserves.

Another possibility for the blog is to show pictures from walks that we take in Berlin. This would be true to the original theme, but mostly I take interesting walks only on holidays. Below are photos from yesterday's walk to the Lietzensee. The tall building was one that Joan looked at online when we were thinking about possible apartments.

Apartment building on the Lietzensee.

The Lietzensee covered in snow.

This seems like enough blogging for now. With luck there will be more later in the year.

Unripe mango

I have been traveling a lot this last week or so, mainly on trains between Berlin and Frankfurt (twice) and Frankfurt and Weimar. The Siedel family met in Weimar: cousins from all parts of the Federal Republic and from Canada. We stayed together in a hotel, with a cultural excursion to Goethe's house and the Anna Amalia library. And of course we ate together.

In Weimar at lunch I had a Thüringer Bratwurst, potato salad, and a vegetable salad. This is the German equivalent of a hamburger and fries in the US. Something quintessentially safe in almost any restaurant. The cooks were very generous with the sausage and it filled my meat quota several times over. I should not have eaten it all, but eating is sometimes hard to stop. For supper I wanted only vegetables and chose the “fitness salad”, in no small part because it included mango.

Is there anyone who does not love mango? It is smooth, sweet, juicy, and has an aroma that takes one to exotic places. I learned how to extract the fruit from a mango when watching a Hercule Parroit episode on the PBS (BBC) Mystery series decades ago. The trick is to cut the fruit with a sharp knife along the flat side of the stone, and then to scoop the soft fruit out with a large spoon. The spoon is hard enough to cut the fruit's flesh but soft enough not to cut the rubbery skin. The flesh comes off in large chunks and I expected soft, fresh, sweet mango in the salad. Instead the salad had small bits of apple. I like apple, but was disappointed. I ate it anyway and soon realized that the bits of apple were really very unripe mango slices. What were the cooks thinking? Perhaps they have no clue about mango, or perhaps they reasoned that mango was on the menu and they had a mango in the kitchen, so they put it in regardless of its condition. I suspect the latter.

I am writing the text of this blog on the train from Frankfurt and have just had supper in the dining car. Often I have the Nürnberger Würste for the same reason that I had the Thüringer Bratwurst in Weimar (it is safe), but sausage again was more than I could contemplate. I tried the chili con carne instead – with some trepidation, since it is not a German dish. The sauce was rich with tomato taste and even a modest (very modest) hit of some form of chili spice. Still, chili without the carne would have been better. People eat too much meat, and growing animals for meat has environmental consequences.

At lunch today I had mango lassi at an Indian restaurant. It is a mango yogurt drink. Elke orders it regularly. I should more often.I have a mango ripening in the window. Perhaps I will make some when the mango is truly ready.

Airplane dining

After rereading Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte, I decided to follow her example and to take my own food on the plane rather than submit to a standard transatlantic airline meal. She recommended, among other things, a high-quality sandwich, which transports easily and requires no extra tools to eat. A good sandwich requires good, fresh bread, which was available in East Lansing (my starting point) only if I drove to Goodrich's, which I had no time for.

Instead I decided on a rice salad. A rice salad is a wonderful way to use up leftover rice. Almost anything can go in it. I used half an avocado, part of a red pepper (cut small), cherry tomatoes (halved so as not to spurt), a scallion (chopped), green olives (with pimento, though really I prefer them stuffed with garlic) and some sharp cheddar cheese (the kind that is aged and crumbles, rather than the rubbery US store variety). Normally I use my own vinaigrette for rice salad, but this time I tried it with a hot salsa. To eat it on the plane, I brought a spoon, which I hoped security would not reject as a dangerous weapon.

The rice salad was good -- as it must be if one likes all the ingredients -- but would have been better with something to accompany it: a crisp bread, perhaps, in order to give a contrasting texture. The main problem came in the eating. The salsa made it sloppy, enhanced probably by juices from the tomatoes. I had to be very careful when eating not to let it drip onto my new suit jacket (or on the people sitting next to me in those very very closely packed seats).

Since I only had time to prepare one meal and my trip involved several, I had to eat the food Continental provided on the flight to Berlin. For years I have complained that Continental consistently has the worst food on any airline that I use regularly. I was therefore pleased to discover that the pasta and meatballs they served on my flight were (by industry standards) quite acceptable even boarding on good. The salad was the usual mass of iceberg lettuce with a slice of tomato and a slice or two of cucumber, but the Caesar dressing was significantly better than the usual oily mix that is supposedly Italian. Getting the Caesar dressing out nearly involved spraying it all over me (and the young man next to me), because the container suddenly collapsed and dressing came spurting out. Flying may be relatively safe now, but it still has hazards.

Stratford Festival 2010

Joan and I have visited the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford Ontario for the last 17 years and we have never grown tired of it. It is also an ideal blog topic that combines theater, food, and friends. This year it also includes a car story.

Probably everyone reading this knows how actively I dislike cars, even though we own one. It is almost impossible not to in Michigan and still be able to get groceries or visit a restaurant. Our car is officially a 1997 Geo Prizm, which means that it is essentially a Toyota Corolla since it came out of the experimental factory in Freemont, Ca., which GM and Toyota operated jointly. The car has Toyota reliability with a GM nameplate -- useful in Michigan. In 13 years we have only had to replace tires and a battery, and occasionally feed it gas and oil. Otherwise it is perfect. Or was, until we came onto the highway to Canada.

A sickening scraping sound started to come from the underside. Joan, who was driving, pulled over and I investigated. A plastic housing next to the front wheel had come loose from its bolt. I had no tools to deal with the bolt, but tucked the plastic under a convenient metal part and hoped the highway would not shake it loose. Once safely across the border in Sarnia, we looked for that miracle repair substance, duct tape (electrical tape, if you rather) and found it in a Dollar Store. I taped the car together and so far it has been trouble free. Just in case, the duct tape is still in the car.

We stayed at the Queens Inn in Stratford (linked from the photo below). For years I had wanted to stay there, but never tried because we imagined that it was enormously expensive.

In fact it is quite reasonable for Stratford (which is a relatively expensive town) and the location is ideal, because we can walk to everything while the car sits happily in its parking lot. The Queens Inn is also near Balzacs, Joan's favorite place for breakfast because of the excellent coffee. They had good tea at one time too, but have sunken to teabag level and imagine that a single small bag suffices for a whole pot of water.

We saw three Shakespeare plays this time, perhaps to compensate for seeing no Shakespeare last year: Winters Tale, Two Gentlemen from Verona, and Tempest. All were good. Two Gentlemen is a weak early play that was performed with admirable energy and 1920s staging. Winters Tale has its implausible moments (such as the famous seacost of Bohemia), but is a strong later play. I loved the bear, and the understudy who played Perdita is one of my favorite Stratford actresses. The performance was Joan's favorite in this set. Tempest was not among my favorite Shakespeare plays until I saw this version, which made the Prospero-Ariel relationship more affectionate and made Prospero less pretentious than in past versions. ... My father tells me that grandfather used to play the comic roles on the German stage.

Food is always a memorable part of the Stratford visit. I especially liked the vichyssoise at Bijou. It was both light and creamy, and the slices of very lightly braised tuna balanced the wonderfully against the starchiness of the leek and potato.

This has now become a very long post and I should stop here. Recently a dear friend in East Lansing hinted that I more than a bit behind on maintaining my blog. More than once I have resolved to write more regularly and failed to follow through. A blog needs a theme. The move to Berlin provided one for a year or so. Berlin is still wonderful, but it no longer seems like news. Recently I have been re-reading Amanda Hesser's book "Cooking for Mr. Latte", which grew out of a food diary. And of course Julie Powell's "Julie/Julia Project" began as a blog. I like to cook, so perhaps I should try a food-based theme. Anyone want to predict if this resolution will fare any better than the others?