And the aptly named, Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Company

Not a whole lot has happened lately, largely in part due to the job. The job, by the way, has been the most uneventful part of all. I have literally nothing to do. My existence goes wholly unnoticed, and reality is totally uninfluenced by my actions. It's like The Sixth Sense. So, I spend my days taking advantage of the company's internet connection (must be a T1 or something, I got firefox at 128kB/sec, which is way better than what I get at home, which is 56k) and free coffee (Kondens Milch is great, it's 7.5% fat and makes coffee taste awesome). Originally I felt angry and guilty about being useless, and I wanted to quit and work for Armin instead, but I'm starting to get used to it. I mean, I learned a ton about phonetics today (on Wikipedia - did you know that English is the only language that has r-colored schwa in standard varieties?), read a bunch of news articles (I've got my Google News layout totally setup now), checked email aggressively.

On Saturday I went out to Hanover with Patrick, who stayed at our house back in 2001 with a friend, for a week or something. He bought me a bunch of preposterous drinks (a Piña Colada in Germany is about six euro, at least at the one American bar & grill we went to - only a minority of Germans have ever supported the euro, but they adopted it anyway), and we also went to an American diner and had awesome burgers. We'll probably go out again in the future (once his girlfriend is back in town) and see a movie or something.