Die ersten Balkonblumen ...

Weather afghan

There's a German group on Facebook I joined lately: Wetterdecke 2014 (weather afghan 2014). Actually 2014 has already started and 365 pieces is a weird number for a blanket - or it gets REALLY long if you make rows or it gets VERY huge if you make 10 cm squares. I suppose I will go a different way: I'll create very normal granny squares, starting with the weather of today, 18th February, just adding one a day until the blanket is done. In case one colour runs out it simply gets substituted by another .... so for now we are at -1°C and that will be the square of today. Pictures will follow when I have some time ... and yes, probably there will be more needlework around on this blog.

Fanny ... what, this is for me?

It's fairly cold outside, just a bit above zero ... Fanny, our family cat, went out this morning without even eating, because the air was fairly fine. Now, around noon, the postman brought a parcel for the neighbours and I went downstaris ... Fanny was already waiting and ran in as if the devil was behind her. I had already cut the remains of the noodles with cream sauce from yesterday which I wanted to mix with some meat for her and the bowl was near the kitchen sink. Well ... while I took over the parcel and got back upstairs, my dear cat already was over her food (which she probably supposed to be ours). As soon as she heard me coming in, she jumped down and looked at me with her big eyes as if she wanted to say "no, I did not touch your food, I am still wating for mine". Well done, dear Fanny ... and so I took only the noodles she already had eaten half and put them in her bowel on the floor ... Ooooo ... I got one of those glances like: "you mean I should really eat that stuff? That's not really food for real cats ... " ... LOLOL ... isn't it the same everywhere? Best is what is not yours :-D

Roses (by Luna)

Scrapbook Designs for Education ...

Well, my daughter is starting to help. I suppose we will see quite some of her pictures used for educational purposes. One day she would like to become a painter and every now and then, nowadays, she draws all sorts of black and white pictures, which are indeed easy to print, easy to handle etc. for students, no matter if in terms of photocopies or in terms of printing books: keeping all black and white is much easier and cheaper for all - and there is another plus: children can color the designs ... so yes, she may go ahead and she does already have her very own style.

Why do projects reach an end? Is this really necessary?

In Italy like in Germany ... and I suppose also in many other parts of the world ... it seems that starting something is always easy, but then maintaining an activity gets worse day by day for the simple fact that people around, that should help, think that others working for free for the community is a "given thing".
The ones who should care prefer to look at "new stuff", because what is there is there and of course those people investing their time, simply have to ... but nope, you are wrong, really wrong ... each time someone gives you his/her time this needs to be considered properly.
People working for free for the good of the community need to be helped as much as possible, you need to talk to them when they need it, keep them continuously updated, not just pretend them to do what they did for quite some time and pretend from them to hurry after whoever, because it is so much fun to work for free.
May it be a crèche to be created once a year or may it be a cinema kept alive, may it be a dictionary project to go ahead ... it's always the same: people who work there, do it because they love to do it.
The funny part is then: once those working stop doing what they did for so many years for free they are the "bad guys" ...
Those of you who would like to run projects, who would like to get ahead, who would like others to work for free on whatever ... think about how to keep things alive.
This year I saw two situations like these: in one I was directly involved. The responsible people for economical matters were asked for an appointment and there was no answer for three weeks - well a: "sorry, but we are down under right now, we can only talk in two months from now" would have been enough ... but it did not come. In particular one person receiving already old age pension, invested almost a full time job in that project and she did not even receive a "thank you" but was criticized for doing the work which nobody else wanted to do. She did it well, to her best.
Not good guys ... not really good ...
And as to the second one: an association that each year cares about the same event, that each year needs funds to be able to build things ... well they get the answer late, or better there is no definite answer yet, just a "we want to help you", but even this is already too late ...
Being it a yearly event and almost 20 years that that project was kept alive ... why was a timely response not possible?
Why do people then wonder when those who work say "stop, we don't see a way to go ahead"?
No, it's not only these two projects. There are many more I could cite. It's just a pity that such moments have to happen over and over again.
At this stage I would like to say: thank you to all volunteers in the world - you are great people, do great stuff. Without you many things around the world could not happen. Keep up the good work you do as much as possible and be aware that there are always people who see what you reach by just uniting forces and do. Thank you so much!

How my dictionary odyssee started and goes on …

Having to tell how I started my dictionary and language career, well I just use the occasion to do this publicly.

Many years back in time, when I was sixteen, I started to go to a school for foreign correspondents. There I studied English, French and Spanish. I took lessons in various other languages in the evening. When going to school I always had to carry 6 dictionaries with me: three monolingual ones and three bilingual ones, plus the “normal“ books. Back then no computers were around and I started to create tables on paper with the corresponding terminology. Then I thought “why isn’t there something easy to carry where all you need is in” … some years later I took a nonspecialist in computer sciences. This dates back to DOS 2.11, green font on black screen, software like dBase, Wordstar etc. The mouse was not there at the beginning, only after some time … and when we had our dBase lessons, I got back to my thought on a multilingual dictionary: I still had my tables and I started to create a first database with them, but still: it was only for my own use and it was hard to share data. Not many working with languages having the same ideas were around. I was too much ahead of time.

Around the year 2000 I had a first online dictionary created with LinksSQL, but still my colleagues were not ready for that step. I had a translation agency and shared glossaries that way, but it was too soon.

In 2004 I took over Adminship at the Italian Wiktionary, which was developing and needed some work to be done. At a certain stage someone added templates to it.wiktionary and there I started to talk with Gerard. All work was done more than once … it was done over and over again on so many open content Wiktionaries around. This was then the moment when the idea of an Ultimate Wiktionary, in a second moment called WiktionaryZ came up. But: no way to get this into the minds of people – probably again it was too soon. 

We talked days and nights and my thoughts from a translator's POV were very different from what non translators would expect. All these talks led to "we do need a database" and for those who cannot deal without it: we also need Wiki functionality. Gerard found funds and so a dictionary project, based on Mediawiki software, called OmegaWiki was programmed. Well much of the functionality of course was adapted to the sponsor's needs. 

For some very precise reason, which I am not going to explain, I left the project. At that time I already had many, many contacts in the field of less resourced languages and we went ahead making those dictionary plans even more detailed and perfect. Ambaradan started it's way. We tested a pre-alpha release during the KDE Multimedia Education Sprint in Randa 2010 with Agrovoc, which is really a lot of data and the engine went fine. It was taken offline again to add further functionality.
At the End of 2010 I went back to Germany and Bèrto, the programmer of Ambaradan went to the UK at the Beginning of 2011. Full time work slowed down development a lot and there is for now no chance to see the software live.
During the years from 2008 to 2010 we collected quite some data for two dictionaries, one of which is a Children's Dictionary. The data was collected in an offline excel table and loaded into a MySQL-Database. It was then released for vocabulary learning for Parley and other software.
Now, some weeks ago, I noted that OmegaWiki changed quite some into the direction I wished. Well: time to care about the project and add the data, try to create connections so that the data can be re-used ...
And at this point: there is more to come ...