Catherine Conner
cat
American digital medievalist expat living in Germany
Homepage: http://www.floppysheep.com
Posts by cat
Ye Olde Keyboard Layout
Sep 14th
This link has everything I could want, all in one place: technology, history, and language. Tired of struggling to find the characters you need while you’re typing your Old English/Old Norse texts? Help is at hand:
http://megse.unm.edu/research/internal/keyboards.html
Or maybe I’m just jealous that there are people out there whose jobs require them to write large amounts of Old English 
Capital of Food Innovation
Sep 10th
Never have I been so proud to be Texan. I thought that deep-fried Coke was the limit. But no. Deep-fried butter. Just one of the many goodies premiered at the Texas state fair.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/09/fair_explores_new_frontier_in.html
Can’t help noticing the creator has a sense of irony as thick as his arteries:
“I mean, butter by itself does not taste good,” Gonzales said. “Nobody just grabs a stick of butter and eats it. That would be gross.”
Using Images from the Web Under the Creative Commons License
Sep 5th
Many images can be found on the internet that are published under the so called “Creative Commons” license. This means that as long as you credit the original image as specified by the image author, you can alter and use it without paying any royalties.
Wikipedia maintains a full collection of images published under this license, which is a great go-to place to find pictures of just about anything. And most of the pictures on any topic in wikipedia itself are covered under this license. So I’d recommend two methods for searching for these images:
Adventures in German Part 1: “Floppysheep”
Sep 1st
At the beginning of my relationship with my German husband, I was determined to learn his language. Not strictly necessary, of course, as he speaks perfect English. But the hard-working masochist in me said “hey, turnabout is fair play!”
One of my many failures in the language has to do with pronounciation of German vowel sounds. In addition to the problematic umlauted vowels (“ä”, “ö”, “ü”) — which every beginner in the German language knows are built only for mouths that have spoken German since birth — the German language includes subtler differences in long and short vowels. These are easy for English-speakers to pronounce, but dastardly hard to recognize and remember where and when they appear. More >
