What a month it’s been! The four weeks I just spent in a conversation class for Spanish have been even more intense than the crash course Hungarian I had back in 1997 for two weeks. The teacher’s even invited me to enroll for the third level of Spanish in the Fall and completely skip the second semester; just like when I went from German 102 straight into German 301.
My goal now: 15 minutes of Spanish every day to keep it up until the next class.
I came across this conference here in Vienna and became nostalgic. I was at the first one so many years ago and thought it was great. I was working as a volunteer and had the chance to meet Ted Nelson, whom I wouldn’t have been able to discern from Adam at the time but whom I subsequently learned was a pioneer in my field. Sorry Ted, I was just getting into the information profession (a.k.a. IA a.k.a. HCI a.k.a. User Centered Design a.k.a. UX.)
Anyway, I found Scope2 and was reminded about a scratch I’ve been itching for a while. Do you know what I’ve wanted for the longest time? A little handle (a.ka. link) that says “Add this to my calendar” and then *poof!* it’s in my electronic calendar. It’d be nice if that were for MS Outlook (’cause I’m such a geek when it comes to Oulook) but what about for Google Calendar? The API’s there. I mean, you can Digg a story, auto-add feeds to your news aggregator, and post a link to deli.cio.us, so why can’t you capture something in your calendar?
Now, I’ve checked out the Google Calendar interface and let me say, I’m not impressed from a GUI standpoint … yet. It has potential and probably will become the standard calendaring tool in the near future but the problem is making a browser act like a windows app, which all the JavaScript in the world won’t achieve. Well, maybe *ALL* the JavaScript in the world could massage a browser into an Outlook-like app but Google Calendar isn’t there yet and until it is, I’m sticking with Outlook.
This morning we went to the office which handles marriages for our district. We were up at 6:45 to make sure that we would make it by 8:00 in order to be the first in line. Visda had all of her papers, I had all of mine. Or so we thought.
We were called in (we were indeed the first in line!) and asked to present our papers. I handed over mine; Visda hers. The person handling us then asked Visda “Where’s your original birth certificate?” We didn’t have it with us but we did have the notarized (from both the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Iranian embassy) translation which was attached to a copy of her birth certificate.
Not enough.
They had to see the original document: the original birth certificate which is in Farsi, of course. Now, in this age of all sorts of digital authentication possibilities, you might wonder why they would need to actually see the original hardcopy birth certificate when they had a translated, notarized version right in front of them. You aren’t the only one because we sat there and lisented incredulously as they explained that we’d have to come back again and next time, we’d need to bring the original.
On a lighter note, the highlight of the morning came from a gentlemen who’s been there a while and knows how frustrated couples can get when dealing with the paperwork. I think that he could see the disappointment in both our faces and is to be commended for saying “yes, but don’t forget that you’re lucky to have found each other. Some people would love to have these kinds of problems if only they could find the right partner.” So true.
Today we learned how to conjugate verbs in the past perfect tense. OK, there are three groups of verbs (-ar, -ir, and -er) and with six different conjugations, that’s 18 new possibilities. To practice, we played a game where one person starts by saying something they did yesterday. The next person repeats that sentence and then adds another sentence and so it goes around the room. Oh yeah, and throw in a couple of reflexive verbs that I didn’t know how to deal with. I’m in a bit over my head but I’m loving it; it’s a great challenge.
