chattius

Tennis was totally unknown in my area before Boris Becker and Michael Westphal, even today there are no tennis courts. There is too much wind on our hills and too few people to make tennis halls economic. The first tennis match I watched was Wimpledon 1985 when Boris Becker won. Was a month before I had to join army and I was doing a sort of goodbye drinking with friends at a pub. Suddenly someone switched the TV on and there was a tennis match... The second was Westphal-Smid in Davis-cup semifinals octobre 1985. I just finished the stupid 3month general drill at army and we came back from a 30 kilometre running with backpacks when we noticed that most of garnison were watching TV in the cantina. Becker had won the first match when we were away and the total underdog Westphal was fighting like a lion. Match took till well over midnight and our sergeant did no pardon, wake up at 4am same morning. I think Westphal-Smid is still the Davis-cup match with the most games played. Sad that Westphal died with just 25 years because of Aids. A girl in his class was drug addicted and had Aids, but the disease was not known in the time he was at school: 1970ties. Wonder how he would have performed if he wasn't ill. With 5 kids and only 1 TV (no cable TV, and our satellite dish is a single receiver 200 metres away, terrestial digital broadcasting is promised for 2013 in our area): with some luck we parents can watch TV after 10-11pm. For Australian Open: I think there was a german girl in the last 16. But I don't even know her name.

Never watched a superbowl game. But the swiss championship in hornussen was a great show

Cross species grafting isn't working. I do grafting with apples, quinches, Speierling, Mispel , pears,... but they are all rose plants more or less. I read that there are wild variants with smaller fruits but they don't tolerate frost too. So I have to stick to my normal fruits trees. The oak on the above picture is so big because in my state people did wood pasture. Some trees weren't coppiced by people but rather by cattle eating them. In decades 'tree' grew more and more in diametre but not in height. Then at a certain diametre the animals were not longer able to eat all the coppice. The ones in the mid survived and grew to trees. With further growing the coppices melted in one tree trunk with extreme diametres. It needs 600 year for a tree to become so big. Germany never had a big wooden navy, and the tree being a mix of several grown together coppices, noone wanted this wood. So the main use of these trees was wind/sun shelter for cattle or to hang people. The tree is in my state's first national park Sababurg. But to have tree's of this shape in future: it needs centuries of cattle eating coppices, so just doing a national park is not enough. Old traditional wood pasture cattle farming has to be protected too. The national park is at the Sababurg: Many people in germany believe that this is the place where the sleeping beauty faerytale took place., one of the other faerytale names is the princess in the woods.

How big are oak trees at your place? Doubt that avocados will survive in my weather. Can you use grafting? Attach twigs to more robust trunks of another tree sort? I did this with my mirabelle plums which are grafted on wild plums. 10-15 years: Yes that's the problem with trees. If you want a nice tree house you have to plan it for your grand children, not your children. When I read the diaries of my grand grand father: "planted oak tree's, north western part of Salzlecke (would be a place where animals lick salt from stony ground). Will be good ship wood in 150 years." Former generations did their planing for upcoming generations. Now we are used to see companies who do not plan for even 5 years because managers want a high win before dividends are sold out. So outsourcing or selling buildings and renting them back are common.

I am lucky. My most extreme was just -17C with a mild wind at 121km/h while being in the army. We did an army maneuvre in the surrounding of the Brocken, german harz area. The Brocken is known from Goethe's Faust. Also it featured the worlds first TV tower and live broadcasting in 1935. Being in former eastern germany it was used till 1994 by russians to spy radio transfers. We were informed that 3 families of tourists with kids ignored an evacuation warning. The shape of the Brocken often causes heavy storms on top hill, while near bottom it is only a strong wind. Record wind speed at Brocken is 263km/h and this not because of a tornado or hurricane. We were able to recover them all alive. 2 families were smart enough to hide in an old basement near top hill. The third tried to walk down and was surprised by the storm. Once localized we called for a Unimog to drive them down. Happened before cellular phones came in broad usage. Many tourists have fun to walk in storm at the Brocken. But evacuation warnings normally have a meaning.

Car killers Steinmarder = stone martens caused a car crash this morning. My volunteer firefighter alarm went off 4am this morning. A car with a 19 year old girl working in a bakery crashed. She managed a sort of emergency braking by carefully hitting the side rails in a narrow angle and sliding along them to slow down. She said she was unable to brake. A quick search made it obvious that a stone marten used its teeth on most cables and pipes it could reach. But the brake hose pipe didn't seemed to be damaged (they are armoured nowadays). But the electronic was damaged a lot. In central europe with areas having stone marders people do a lot of defense strategies against them: 100db ultra sonic noise in engine room electro shock plates in engine room (my preferred method, because our ancient diesel has a very big battery) smelly stuff ... You have to know that it is always the second marten which does the damage. The first is marking its territory, then the car is moved into a territory of another marten. Then the second marten hunts for the first, finds nothing and does a wild biting in engine room. So washing the engine too while doing a car wash reduce the risc. Also they seem to dislike diesel. Biting is done way less in cars with diesel engines. I cleaned up the engine room of our cars, no loose cables or hoses, all attached close to the frame or engine, so the marten can not bite around them. Where the cables leave the cover of the car frame electro shock is installed. So I only had to protect 2 possible riscs at our ancient diesel van and 3 at the Ente (german for duck, nickname for Citroen 2CV4). Are there other animals known to destroy cars in rest of the world? I know of Kea-parrots in New Zealand, are there more?

I am used to mix mustard, chilli, pepper, horseradish only when preparing food. 'Löwensenf Extra' (Löwe= lion, senf = mustard) is among the most spicy mustard's in europe which gets its spice just from mustard. No chilli, pepper or horseradish added. I lack a bit the words: Hot is chilli - it directly affect the nerves in the tongue which are used for heat. Mustard, horseradish is 'detected' in the nose and uses different sensors/nerves. So is 'hot mustard' decribed spicy or hot, if it is just mustard? And then there are different mustard plants: white, brown ,black, ... Black mustard is a cabbage while others are not. Black mustard oil is forbidden in european community for food purposes. There is a trick to heat black mustard seed to crack the 'poisonous' molecules, .... So when I want it strong spicy but no hotness, I use Löwensenf. Mainly if I need my tongue 'unburned' to get the taste of all the herbs in a food. Most people get their first experience with Löwensenf when eating Bockwurst which is normally served with Löwensenf.

Hmmm, was working for me on windows and linix, strange. Will try tomorrow on my work machine. Edit: I can look videos on my work machine too and this machine has a very strange operating system, strange.

Avocado/Sauerkraut Sandwich You do not want to know what barbaric stuff I mainly do with avocados: cutting the avocado flesh in small cubes: 5*5*5 millimetres or so. 2 slices of our selfmade spelt/millet bread (see inglenook thread at darkmatters)- perhaps you can buy Pumpernickel as replacement 1 slice is smeared with mustard (Löwensenf, very spicy mustard) 1 slice is smeared with horseradish paste the slice with mustard is covered with avocado cubes the slice with horseradish with Sauerkraut -- did you really exspect I would give a recipe without it The slices are put dry sides down in a pan with a bit olive oil for 4-5 minutes and then formed as a sandwich With 5 kids, 1 au pair girl and 2 parents; doing them in my big pan is fastest for me. To estimate how hot it is -from german cuisine, wikipedia: Mustard ("Senf") is a very common accompaniment to sausages and can vary in strength, the most common version being "Mittelscharf" (lit. middle-hot), which is somewhere between traditional English and French mustards in strength. Düsseldorf and the surrounding area is known for its particularly spicy mustard, which is used both as a table condiment and in local dishes such as Senfrostbraten (roasted steak with mustard). In the southern parts of the country, a sweet variety of mustard is made which is almost exclusively served with the Bavarian speciality Weißwurst. German mustard is usually considerably less acidic than American varieties. Horseradish is commonly used as a condiment either on its own served as a paste, enriched with cream ("Sahnemeerettich"), or combined with mustard. In some regions of Germany it is used with meats and sausages where mustard would otherwise be used. For the younger kids we use Sahnemeerettich and middle-hot mustard. Edit1: it proved best to have the Sauerkraut part down to prevent the avocado cubes from falling out. Edit2: @wolfie: yes I normally do seasonal cooking since 90% of our food is from garden or local farmer. Currently we do a lot of Rutabaga. I do not know for other countries, but I found 50 recipes from my grand-grand-mother. During the first world war germany was blockaded and a misharvest in nearly everything was in 1916. But it was an exceptional good year for rutabagas. And the winter 1916/17 is named Kohlrawwewinter (rutabaga winter) in my area. Rutabaga in bread, as coffee and meat replacement, ... So the housewives had to be creative with rutabaga recipes. In towns people started to hate the word Steckrübe or Kohlrabi. For my grandfather who was a small kid it became his favourtite food for life time and so my father grew up with it too.

My oldest searched in internet for some videos: First video is very close how a baking day in our villages's baking house looks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_R2-1f8hY Second is how to make a single Bauernbrot (farmers bread) Sadly I am a dinosaur and I still do analog videos Beaulieu 4008 bought at a garage sales 20 years back, The analog video format is hard to get nowadays but the 50000 people town where my parents live is germanies optical industry: Leica, Zeiss, Minox, ... And I know people working at Minox. Minox still produces 8 millimetre cameras. I have a 30 year old minox myself. So I have source for the black and white material which I can fix with chemicals at home.

1 avacado= 89 europan cents. So more than 4 times in price. But I get Spelt of only a quarter of your price.

3-4 people work synchronous on the bread mix. Lift it, fold it,.. It is a village baking day so you are not allone. In is done in a Brottrog, I lack the english words. Brot = bread, Trog a container to give water or food to cows, pigs. often a holed out trunk, or sandstone.

A more known millet/spelt mix is bible bread. Hesekiel gave a recipe in the bible which has several types of flour, two of them are millet and spelt. Spelt is replaced by wheat knowadays because spelt became rare outside central europe. http://www.sunshinerecipes.com/biblebread.shtml Back to our bread A old women told me that they did the bread different in her youth, Adding some lentil puree to the millet/spelt mix. But fresh lentils are hard to get and the dried ones from shops wouldn't be the right ones, closest would be dried red ones, boiled and made to puree.

I am wondering if I should start a thread: traditional recipes/food from your area which area healthy If you are a tourist than you are a guest, and guests get not the same as normal people. So many recipes you think as typical german, typical british,... are most often ones which only nobles could afford in old times. Somehow I got the feeling that mainly exotic food is considered healthy. Exotic here is as different to normal food than possible. But if you look at health books: in ancient times it didn't matter much in which part of the world you lived. If you got enough food, didn't get diseases or die at birth of kids: you had nearly equal chances to become old. So traditional food can't have been that bad. The changes came like 250 years ago in europe: an army needed easy to transport food, many calories, not easily rotten, ... So in germany the emporor asked people to breed beets with more sugar, potatoes with more energy, wheat with more energy, .... So the same farms could now feed more than double the people, less farmers needed is more soldiers which could be sold to england, ... industrial revolution, ..., artificial fertilizer (my old university is named after the inventor and one of its former professors: Liebig), .... So my theory is: if we go back enough and look for old recipes (more than 250 years old) we should still find a lot of healthy ones. The area I live was researched a lot: it had a century old economy which feeded around 150 people the square mile in an area covered to 90% with forest on bad ground (basalt). It was like nothing is wasted, and each farm or forest plant has several purposes fitting into each other. Warning: Corn has different usage in different parts of the world. If I use the word corn , then it stands for the type of cereals which are the main product of the area. So it may be rice in asia, maize in america, barley in german beer brewing areas, ... If you ask a farmer with a long family tradition anywhere in the world what is corn(or german Korn): he answers probably with the cereal which is most common at his place. Spelt: So take for example wheat: while prussian had big farmlands in plains to feed its soldiers, here it are hills and corn is sewed between tree trunks. The old horse driven or early motorized harvesting machines demanded that each corn plant was same height, not too high because wind on plains may break the plants, .... So within few decades nearly all wheat/rye was small plants with big corns. In my area wheat/rye/buckwheat was sewed between tree siblings and harvested with a sickle. The plants had to be bigger than the siblings, and the straw was used to build roofs of houses. So farmers here never really stopped to farm spelt (an ancient type of wheat). And now spelt is considered health food. Sauerbraten: Farmers had to give the best beef to the local earl. The beef which was left was low fat and poor quality, so they found ways to marinate it for days to make it eatible. Nowadays low fat is considered health food and you find the once poor people food in fine restaurants as health food. Handkäse (hand cheese)- local sour cream chesse While most cheese needs rennet hand cheese needs bacteria and can be done at lower temperatures. Cows in my area were used instead horses for farmwork in summer so most milk was in winter. Rennet based cheese need 40C, so you would have to heat a room to 40 degree celcius. So instead overheating a room Milk was left allone for 3 days, the fat on top was removed for other purposes and the rest was made into hand cheese. So this cheese is around 1% fat only- considered pure people food once, health food nowadays. Sauerkraut, Bear garlic, .... lot of the old stuff seems to get a revival. If you are a tourist than you are a guest, and guests get not the same as normal people. So many recipes you think as typical german, typical british,... are most often ones which only nobles could afford in old times. But what about the traditional food most people of a country had to eat, ... So what I need: A good name for a topic which collects old recipes for healthy food from all over the world.

Yes that is the problem with international forums, internet access depends on where you live. Even I live in germany I live in countryside where DSL isn't installed yet. Costs for my radio/satellite mix of internet access is traffic dependant. At work we are directly linked to the ultrafast research networks, but company pays for this on a traffic depending rate. Back to editing settings: Prefetching does also other stuff: The site counter of a site may raise even if you didn't click on the link, because the prefetching did it for you. At work you may get in troubles because the administrator thinks you would be the one who did all the clicks on x-rated sites found on banners, ... So if you switch prefetching on (even blank firefox can do this with a setting) you need good filters what stuff you want prefetched. Firefox's standard setting is so that it runs on a 80486 machine with 64MB RAM and a telephone modem. You can switch a lot of settings on: pipelining, more requests same moment, give RAM to cache, ... From Fasterfox page: You see the settings where done for Firefox1. So probably you can manually set every machine to the settings listed under optimized or turbo for modern machines. Made a big difference for me.

As far as I know Fasterfox is mainly a macro using the inbuild firebox setting variables (which you can edit manually). So it is for people who do not want to know the inside of firefox and just want stuff to run fast. But if you use a machine at work or if you have a provider who is paid by amount of data transfer: link prefetching (the biggst feature of Fasterfox) and all these nice extras make your browser faster but also add data volume. So I prefer to do the settings on my own and comment why I did them. If I would use Fasterfox then for its inbuild page load timer while trying to fine tune settings. Change a setting, write down time for page setup, increase pipeline number or number of erquests, write down new time,... Probably it even has good starting values depending on a link, cpu and ram test so not much need to fine tune. But once I am done with this I would disable it again, out of the above reasons. Call me a dinosaur, but I grew up with cars I could repair and understand, with computers I build from buying chips, ... Somehow I like to know what I am doing and have as much control as possible. Now you buy a car and bring it to service to be told: "Sorry I am just the mechanic, you need the mechatronic guy." Hope my old Mercedes Van withs its diesel and rapeseed oil engine and with no electronics except a radio (kids wanted USB player in it) will do it for another 40 years. So if you use your own machine and have a flatrate for data traffic costs, I think you can use it. But at work at a realtime OS, no thanks. The computer is needed to control explosives and I want to know which programs are installed; as few as possible

For me it made a lot of difference. Mainly if a page contains a lot of items. Have you read into all the listed tweaks? Pipelining Max-Requests Page delay RAM for page cache Name server cache ... Instead 12 seconds some pages were done in 2. You can create missing entries by right clicking into the list of settings. At home I use 3.6.13 of Firefox.

It is autobalancing: The brussel sprouts had to be collected in the garden: with a torch at 10:14pm after the evening walk with the dogs no cleaning automat for cups, knives and spoons --- so half an hour walking around in kitchen - normally cleaning involves all kids and is used to discuss the schedule for the next day. Who had to be driven to town, sport training, music school, birthday of friends, ... from 11 nests I fried I was eating a smsll one in the size of half my hand, also 1 brussel sprout and 3 chickpeas to test if they were ready So a neutral, perhaps even a negative energy bilance. So the trick is not to eat all yourself With daughters 15, 12, 8 , 3 and a son aged 3: The 12 and 8 year old can eat as much they want, they are grewing, do a lot of sports and keep their weight. The twins have to be controlled while feeding them if I don't want to have the kitchen look like a battlefield. So the 15 year old and myself automatically don't eat that much. I am keeping my weight for 20 years now with only 3 pounds more or less. And more is normally muscles I get in winter at wood work and which I don't need in summer at bureau work. Perhaps it is just this: around x-mas when you eat most I have the most bodily work to do. Cooking for yourself alone is way harder: most tins you buy (if you don't have a garden) are for 2+ people, so the food you do is normally too much. So you either eat too much or have to throw uneaten food away and many people hate this idea and eat too much.

No the pictures of the above link: Left is always the german voice actor for the movie actor which is center. it doesn't say that the movie actors did voice acting themself for sacred2. It is just that we germans know from where we know the voice. So if Jodie Foster would have spoken the dryad not many in germany would have noticed it. But her german voice is way better known here. I found only a single link which mentions an english voice actor involved in sacred2. See my last post. But since I don't have english version I can't say which role he was speaking. Some german voice actors are very good in improvising. The length of german and english often doesn't fit. So there were cases where the german voice actors made a movie/series to a success while it failed in original version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!

A link to the german speakers with pictures and speech examples: http://www.sacred-legends.de/?go=synchronsprecher This page lists this voice actor as booked for english (?) sacred2. http://www.voiceoveruniverse.com/profile/JudeCorbett Can anyone confirm?

The gold is needed to attach the jewelry to your armours

Did first experiments (late night and just the nests): Living on country side and born into a family with generations of carpenters and wood workers we have some strange names for some of our food. My wife has late shift at hospital and so I did an evening meal for the kids: "Lehm und Stroh", which would translate as clay and stray. Yellow pea puree is the clay while the Sauerkraut is the stray. "Lehm und Stroh mit Balken" would haved added Eisbein as Balken which translates as girder, so stray and clay with girders. But Eisbein would be a bit too much for an evening meal. So the recipe descripes what is needed to build a wooden patchwork house: girders and the space between filled with a mix of clay and stray (well my special mix for our house includes horseapples too, but that is another story). So back to the nest: After the younger kids were at bed and while cleaning the kitchen I noticed that some Sauerkraut was left. It was to few to do a pea soup the next day (we allways put sauerkraut in pea soup) so I decided to do some experiments. Fried Sauerkraut using the Nestbacklöffel (start to love this word): If it is crispy it breaks to easily. 11(!) small nests later I was at olive oil at 140 celcius for 80 seconds for best results. I used the best 2 nests and prepared a welcome snack for my wife: filled them with boiled chickpeas and a tiny variant of brussel sprouts. At weekend I will try the normal use of Nestbacklöffel: potatoe or rutabaga.

Did a search for an english page instead translating a whole german forum: http://www.webgapps.org/firefox/preferences-tweaks I got a big speed up when switching pipelining on, allow more silmultanous connections, cache DNS queries (some domain name servers respond really slow),... Pipelining, quote from link above: Warning: I do not use Windows or Linux. I run Firefox at work on a Realtime OS (variant of QNX- QNX will be the operating system of the to come Blackberry PlayBook), so my slow original settings for firefox may be caused by the need for real time reaction to interrupts from control elements. But it is worth a check, perhaps the standard firefox settings for Linux and Windos are way to conservative for modern links and multicore CPU's.

Our company does special metal works, mainly connecting different metals by special welding. One of the companies which gets metal from us gave some late x-mas gifts to us: kitchen tools. At the lottery I got 6 Nestbacklöffel(nest baking spoon?). First I thought it would be sieves but I was told that they are used to do potatoe nests. For people like me who never heard of a Nestbacklöffel before, they look like: My practical brain protests and says that 2 sieves of different sizes would do the trick too if tied together with silicon rope. But probably it is a set of 6 to do quicker 'mass production' for a party. So what I think a typical recipe would start with: Cut potatoes or rutabaga into small stripes. Place them between the 2 parts of the Nestbacklöffel. Put the Nestbacklöffel (I slowly get used to this word) into a pot with hot oil to fry the nest. Let the oil drop away, add spices and fill it with some salade snacks. So far the theory, but has anyone ever tried this tool, has recipes for it, .... Found a recipe with scallops in potatoe nests, but the tools I got seems to be smaller that the one on this thread. scallops-in-potato-nests-recipe I fear if I show these tools to my kids they want me to do some cooking with them. So I will hide them for some days.

Quote from the german 0.90 patch log Light sabres now have a typical sound profile, naming and are now based on willpower. Random unique light sabres can now be found at bosses. Redoing all Swords and sabres. Ones with less than 3 square in inventory are now all dexterity based. Bigger ones are all strength. Katana's are now all dexterity based and named as Katana, Yuudai and Kitari. Fist weapons with long blades are now dexterity based, others strength. I read this that higher willpower will be more damage with light sabres starting with the 0.90 version of CM-patch.