Furthermore, unless you are incredibly wealthy, if you use your AT&T phone outside of the US like you would inside the US, you will be bankrupt quickly. This page allows you to check the per minute rate for roaming in practically all countries around the world. Roaming in all the European countries in the ads costs $1.29/minute, while Hong Kong costs $2.29/minute. That’s expensive! However, it’s still on the low end of things. If you happen to find yourself in Azerbaijan (we have neighbors from Azerbaijan), you’ll be paying $4.99/minute! So, while you may not have “no bars” while you’re traveling, at the end of your trip you will almost certainly have “no money”.

One thing that can be said in favor of AT&T is that it is a GSM carrier and, if you have a phone with a radio on the proper frequency, you could take your AT&T phone to Europe, buy a new SIM card there and easily use a relatively cheap pre-paid plan while you’re there. This avoids the costly international roaming charges but it means that you’ll have a different phone number while in Europe. If your US carrier is Verizon or Sprint (which use CDMA), for example, you would have no ability to simply buy a SIM card in Europe to avoid international roaming. Rather, you’d have to buy a whole new phone. However, while the ability to get a European SIM card is helpful, this is not what AT&T is advocating. They advocate they you simply use their service under international roaming.

In any case, the relative infrequency of Americans’ international travels coupled with the outrageous cost of international roaming makes this line of advertising very unconvincing to me, even though I have probably been to Europe much more than your average American.

Upon inspection, I discovered that the power supply fan had died.  The computer was still working but the fan in the power supply had given up the ghost.  It wasn’t too surprising, actually, since it had been chirping on and off for probably 2 years.  In fact, I had bought 2 replacement power supplies in July of 2006 just in case the existing power supply would fail – an occurrence that actually took a lot longer than I expected.  In any case, I discovered this problem about 15 minutes before the taxi was supposed to pick me up, so I had to just shut everything down.  After returning late on Monday night, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to get things fixed.  However, things weren’t quite as easy as I expected.

Replacing the power supply was easy since I had replacements on hand.  I also took the opportunity to clean the case out properly since it was full of dust.  I expected that after replacing the power supply and cleaning everything I would just power the machine on and everything would be back to normal.  Unfortunately, the network interface didn’t work.  I was getting some kind of IRQ conflict.  If I brought the interface up, I could ping it for awhile from a different machine and then it would stop responding.  I wasn’t able to figure it out yesterday so I just left it and worked on some other, more pressing things.  I took a look at the issue this morning again and this time, the network interface wasn’t showing up at all.  The IRQ conflicts were gone since the system was no longer seeing the network hardware.  So, I turned off the machine, opened it up, and put in an old ethernet card I had lying around.  This was recognized by the system as eth1 so I made a quick change to /etc/network/interfaces to move all of my previous settings from eth0 to eth1.  I restarted the machine and everything worked!

I think there are two lessons to be learned from this story.  One is that keeping spare computer components around pays off.  I fixed the problem with a spare power supply and ethernet card that I had on hand.  I didn’t need to go to any store or order anything online.  I probably saved myself a bunch of money and I definitely saved myself a bunch of time by hanging on to old stuff.  The second lesson is that this machine may go completely belly up before too long.  When motherboard components (like my ethernet port) start failing, the computer may not be too much longer for this world.  That said, as a 500MHz Pentium III from 1999, I’d say it’s had a good run.

1. “Zack!” (Interjection) This was used often by my coworkers as a sort of onomatopoeia when something happened quickly or unexpectedly, not unlike “Boom!” My German dictionary translates it as “just like that” or “before you knew it”, but “Zack!” is much succinct and expressive, so I like it much better.
2. “Ratzfatz” (Adverb) This word is used to denote that something is or should be done quickly. I like the fact that its two syllables rhyme.
3. “Schwuppdiwupp!” (also just “Schwupp”) (interjection) This is similar to “Zack!”, although it carries with it more of sense of the unexpected or out of control. So, while I could say “… and then I punched him in the face. Zack!”, “Schwuppdiwupp” would not be appropriate here. Instead, it could be used like this: “I stepped out the door and schwuppdiwupp, I was on the ground thanks to the ice on the step.”
4. “Dingsbums” (noun) This roughly means “thingamajiggy” or “doodad”. It’s a word you use when you can’t think of the correct name for something. This word is becoming less popular in polite society because of the “bums” part, which is reminiscent of the verb “bumsen” which literally means “to bump”, but which has become a vulgar slang word for sex. In order to get past this problem, people often use “Dingsda” instead.

Fellow German speakers, what are you favorite German words?

Upon moving to Pittsburgh, I became interested in the inclines, which are technically known as funiculars. These are basically railways that go up the side of a mountain at a steep angle. Not to be confused with cog railways, funiculars are drawn by cables and generally include two cars which counter-balance one another, one going up while the other goes down. There are two left in Pittsburgh: the Monongahela Incline and the Duquesne Incline, both of which are on the south shore of the Monongahela River and take passengers from river level up to the top of Mt. Washington, a bluff on the south side of the city. While there are only 2 left today, 19 inclines have called Pittsburgh home over the years. Furthermore, though my exposure to inclines has been limited to those in Pittsburgh, there are inclines all over the world, including all continents except Antarctica.

Another form of transportation that captured my imagination during a trip is the system of canals in England. Obviously, I had seen boats and rivers before, but I was fascinated by the man-made features of the canals that enabled them to negotiate difficult terrain. During our trip to England, I saw plenty of locks in person and read about other interesting parts of canals elsewhere, including canal tunnels, navigable aqueducts, boat lifts, canal inclined planes, and marine railways. A number of years later, during my year in Germany, I saw a boat lift in person: the Henrichenburg Boat Lift on the Dortmund-Ems Canal. Shortly thereafter, I decided that when I retired, I would build an elaborate model of the British countryside, including railroads and canals, with particular emphasis on including the interesting features listed above. I’m less committed to this plan now than I was at the time, so we’ll just have to see if this works out or not. I’ll let you know in 40 years or so.

A third form of transportation to which I was introduced during a trip is what might be called a cable car or aerial tramway. During a trip to Germany with my parents in 2000, we rode up to the top of the Zugspitze in a cable car. The Zugspitze is interesting because it’s right on the border between Germany and Austria and you can actually go back and forth between Germany and Austria on the observation deck at the top. Not only that, getting to the top involves taking a cable car or a cog railway, so it offers two unique transportation options. While the cable car was interesting, it didn’t really capture my imagination in the same way as the canals or even the inclines had. Perhaps this is due to it being more modern and not seeming to belong to a different era.

The last form of transportation to which I was exposed on a trip involves much shorter range transport than the others. The year I lived in Germany I got to take a tour of the WDR studios in Cologne. In their main building, they had a crazy elevator-type contraption called a paternoster. Basically, it’s like an elevator with no doors that never stops. There are two shafts side by side and a series of cars on a continuous loop travel up one shaft and then down the other. This means that you simply step in on one floor and step out when you reach your desired destination. If it’s not clear what I’m talking about, check here. These really fascinated me for a while because they’re unique, very efficient, belong to an earlier era and are disappearing. Right now, there aren’t many of these left in existence and those that survive seem to be getting phased out as buildings are renovated or demolished, since they’re more dangerous than normal elevators and they’re not handicapped-accessible.

The 4 modes of transportation mentioned above fall into two categories for me: those that I have used and those that I have not. I have been in inclines in Pittsburgh and I rode a cable car in Austria. However, I have never been on a canal boat, much less on a boat while it went through a lock or some other interesting canal feature. In addition, I have never been on a paternoster. I hope that I’ll get the chance to take both of these modes of transportation in the not-too-distant future.  If I do, I’ll let you know.