What's 11 meters in feet?

I have a confession to make. Many of my 5,000 imaginary readers will probably not want to be friends with me anymore. Some may not even want to talk to me anymore, others will probably assure me they'll be there for me again once I've come to my senses...

It is not easy to admit it, but I am a soccer (Football - for you British English aficionados) fan. I am female, I have an advanced degree .... and I love soccer! Somewhat non-cliche. What's even worse: I suck at playing it myself. It is, admittedly, highly entertaining for others seeing me "play": Usually, what spectators will see is me starting to run after the ball, maybe getting it once, losing it while desperately looking for a teammate to pass the ball, then fainting from exhaustion halfway across the field. How can they RUN that far? It's nothing short of amazing to me.

Even if I weren't a soccer fan, I wouldn't stand a chance here at the moment. We have a couple of days to go before the World Cup 2006 starts. And it will be right here in Germany! That's the good part. Now for the annoying stuff:

They even have sausages shaped like soccer balls! Everybody is trying to make money in that big bad marketing machine. You should see our supermarkets! It's almost funny. Who buys all that stuff? Alright, so I bought the soccer-shaped Nutella jar. But it was because it's almost a Kilo Nutella! See, it's actually a GOOD thing!

Obviously not that good - from the legal aspect - were the vibrators named after popular soccer players. They had to be ... er ... pulled off the market after said players protested the use of their names. Probably a good idea; What if the German team suffers a premature ..... exit and is literally kicked out of the World Cup after the first round? Wouldn't be good advertising for a vibrator not to be able to finish it, eh?

Oh well, so here I am, dragging my friends and my soccerball to the park every weekend, desperately trying to manage running across the field ONCE without needing a respirator afterwards. The World Cup starts in 10 days and I'll need to be in shape by then. Or something....

I'll be watching the games on Big Screens allover town. That way, I can see the really important thing: all those nicely displayed soccerplayer butts ..... er.... ya know! Whatever, I'm off to eat Nutella.

About time, Google!

Can you survive another geek post? Suit yourself!

I hadn't really checked my blogroll for a couple of days. Catching up now that the withdrawal symptoms are getting far too severe. So now that I read all my favorite blogs, I find that Google seems to finally have managed Google Maps for Europe. I am impressed!

See, the thing about Google is that it seems to be releasing all those cool things one after the other. It's all geek stuff. Most people probably wouldn't be excited about it. I am, though. (I have the distinct feeling this abnormal behavior was caused by early exposure to a Commodore 64) I am, however, not impressed with Google's way of never doing stuff properly. Oh, they have chat in Googlemail now, they even finally decided that a delete button is actually a good thing to have even though your e-mail provider offers almost 3 Gigs of space. Buuuuut, chat only works when you have your account set to US-English. I love that! It doesn't even work in UK-English. I realize it must be very tough to translate it from US- to British English. Very difficult, indeed! Same thing with the "Delete" Button. How many months does one need to tranlate the word "delete" into a different language? How come the German Google Mail version just now got their own "delete" button?

My guess is that the American Google Geeks are just a bit too enthusiastic about creating new stuff while the translators probably even have a social life or something equally disgusting.

Talking about social life: I think I OD'ed on that over the weekend. I need sleep now....


(EDIT: Wow, Google Talk for Gmail was just made available for lots of "foreign" languages! ... "Foreign" meaning "not American English". That impressed me immensely again. Suddenly having the chat set to make sounds was rather inconvenient - having to scramble turning it off at work and all. ;) )