I've been studying languages again (human languages, not programming ones...) and having a good time with them. In a past life I was a linguist in the Army. I had taken German and Russian at the university and joined the Army so I could attend the Defense Language Institute. I studied Russian there for a year, but when I got to Germany in 1994 the Russians were pretty much gone. They took all the slavic linguists and put us in Serbo-Croatian courses because of the war that was going on in Bosnia at the time. I got out in 1998 and haven't spoken much except a little Russian to coworkers since then (can't believe it's been 12 years!). Now that I have two little boys, though, I figure it's time to dust off my language skills and teach them something at least. The last couple months I've been having fun setting Mac OS X to my different languages and learning the vocabulary you need for day to day computer activities. I've done it on my iPhone as well. I love how easy it is to switch keyboards on the iPhone in particular. Makes it so easy to look words up in online dictionaries! Particularly with Russian due to their Cyrillic alphabet. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on an iPad for this. I'm telling you, studying a language today isn't what it used to be! When I was in high school and college you'd sit there with a big old dictionary and flip through pages constantly. Reading one page of a book was a miserable affair if the author used a lot of vocabulary... To hear it I'd drive all over the Portland metropolitan area to video stores scouring them for German or Russian videos I hadn't seen yet. Slim pickings back then... Well, now that I'm getting back into studying them it's completely different. There are numerous apps on my iPhone that stream German, Russian or Serbo-Croatian programming any time I feel like hearing it. My Verizon FiOS now gets the Russian, German, Serbo-Croatian and French packages so I can watch German TV anytime (well, anytime my wife isn't in the room...). Just got a region free DVD player for the boys TV in the playroom and they're now watching German DVD's of Thomas the Train, Pinky Dinky Doo, Winnie the Pooh and a couple others that I ordered off of the German Amazon website. Our four year old is already building a nice little German vocabulary. It's amazing how much things have changed in such a short time! Well, getting myself back on topic, the other day I booted into Windows 7 and wanted to set it to German like my regular desktop was. Turns out that you can only do that with the "Ultimate" version. Needless to say I don't have Windows 7 Ultimate... That sucks. Just another item to add to the list of irritations when I periodically have to use Microsoft Windows. Hmmmm... Looks like my wife has gone to bed. Time to go see if anything good is on my new channels! :-)
About The Author
Ron Grove draws on over ten years of training, network administration and development experience. He loves to work with new technology and see how that technology can be best utilized by his clients. You can find him through his company Evanoah, LLC or through his LinkedIn profile.
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