Martin Geisler Online

Today I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle that is my schedule. Originally when I was still in Denmark I looked at the available courses for the summer semester 2004, and from that I decided which courses I would like to follow.

Now that I’m here I’ve been going through the list, and have found that many of the courses overlap! It’s rather annoying not to be able to follow interesting courses just because they have been scheduled on top of other interesting courses.

At DAIMI things are done differently than at ETH — we pick our courses and they are then scheduled so as to minimize the number of overlaps. I don’t know how much hard work the administration has to put into it at DAIMI, but for us students it’s really great.

In the end I turned things upside-down and started to look at which courses I could fit into each weekday. That worked fairly well — I have a full schedule — but I still had to decide between a couple of courses which I would have liked to follow.

While looking at the statistics for my little site, I noticed something strange in the section about referers. This month I’ve got a large number of hits from German ensurance comparison websites?! We’re talking around 15.000 hits from more than 25 different websites.

Visiting a random set of them reveals that they all look the same and only contain some Google adds. So I guess they are part of a scheme where a lot of phony websites try to increase their Google PageRank?

Today I bought my GA which means that I’m now almost a real Swiss :-) I only have a temporary paper card now, but in ten days time I’ll get the credit card size one.

I also looked a little more at Aarau — the center of the city is a lovely area with old houses maintained in their old style. I was looking for a cross-over cable so that I can connect my computer to Stéphanie’s laptop. I’ve tried to connect the Netopia 3342 USB ADSL modem to my machine, but I couldn’t get it working using Linux.

So now I was thinking about getting online through the Internet Connection Sharing feature of Windows XP — I don’t know how well it works, but if it’s just going to implement standard router functionality, then I guess it will do just fine. But I didn’t find a long enough cable, so I haven’t gone further with this plan.

Having a wireless ADSL router would of course be the coolest solution, but that appears to cost at least 150 € or more, so if I can get a cross-over cable for 10 € instead, then I think I’ll go for that option instead. But I’m open for suggestions, please comment on the ICS thing if you have any experience with it.

(It just occured to me that I ought to call this site “Geisler Offline” until I get this Internet problem sorted out :-)

Last week was spend trying to understand more about the German language. I’ve been attending the so-called intensive German course offered to all exchange students. The course is seven hours a day, starting at 9:15. As I’m not at all used to speak and hear German all day long, I’ve been really tired when I got home in the evening.

The course is a mixed experience… We start each day with an hour where we talk about grammatical problems. This usually means that our teacher gives us some exercises, and asks us to do a number of them. After 10 minutes he will interrupt us, expecting us to be finished. But I need much more than 10 minutes to go through these exercises, and so do many of the other in our class! He will then be talking about “interesting” parts of the German grammar, but that’s all theory — we don’t get to train it.

I find this a great waste of time, for I don’t learn anything when he just talks about the structure of “Nebensätze” or what not — I need exercises afterwards. And here’s the crucial point, which some might call naïve: I don’t want to do the exercises by myself when I get home. First of all I don’t have any energy for German grammar exercises when I get home, and second, when doing an intensive full-day course, then I expected us to be doing the work at the course. I don’t want to spend seven hours a day just to get pointers about what I could do when I get home.

In the other six hours each day we have mostly been fooling around. Each day brings a new theme, such as “Education”, “Emotional Intelligence”, “Ethic and the Society”, and so on. We then read a short text about the subject, and discuss it with each other at our tables. That’s all very fine if it weren’t for all the acting and presentations that we’ve made.

We have several times had to do small presentations about the subjects, and today we even had to pretend that we were guests in a TV show. I think these things draw the focus away from the subject of the course: learning German. We spend our energy thinking if sport or physics are a necessary part of a general education, we spend time thinking about our role as a wealthy manager for the TV show, etc.

I understand that we speak German while doing these things, and that we train with the language as we do so. But I really do feel that there must be a better way than this indirect way. And when we just talk with each other, then I’m afraid that we wont learn about our mistakes — I make lots of mistakes when speaking, and so do the people I’m speaking with. Do we get any better at German by exchanging errors like that?

Oh well… I’ll be there next week too. Hopefully that will be better, also because I’m attending a workshop where I’ll have a chance of learning a little bit of Swiss-German. I can already understand some of it, but it would be cool to understand more!

Wow it’s hot down here! Last week I was in Denmark where it was cold and cloudy, and now I’m here in Switzerland where it’s full spring with summer-like temperatures today. Very nice!