Parlez-vous Francais?

Another day, another milestone. Today was the first day that I conducted over half of my conversations at work in French. Woohoo! Or make that le woohoo! Note that I didn't claim that it was good French. Of course, no Frenchman would claim that any of the French spoken on this side of Lac Leman is "good." C'est la vie!

Today I also started re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion as the beginning of a chronological read-through of Middle Earth. Next will be The Book of Lost Tales, The Hobbit, and then The Lord of the Rings. Thanks so much to Lee and Sam for lending me The Hobbit oh so long ago! Of course I should really be spec'ing out the new Poken Web UI, defining our forthcoming API, and putting together the PowerPoint slides for Wednesday's Google Tech Talk. I guess Tolkien will have to wait.

International Wisdom

On Monday we had a cultural values exchange--in ICA/E of all places! We were divided into groups by nationality (44 different groups!) and given a list of 12 virtues. Each group was then instructed to provide at least one proverb from its country about each virtue.

Although there were many great ones, my two favorites hands-down were:

Virtue: Fidelity
Nationality: French
Original Proverb: La fidélité en amour n'est que la paresse du désir.
English Translation: Fidelity in love is just the laziness of desire.

Virtue: Temperance
Nationality: Finnish
Original Proverb: Hosumalla ei tule kuin kusipäisiä lapsia.
English Translation: Rushing won't get you anything but stupid children.

Awesome.

Also awesome: today in Accounting we dissected Carlsberg, a huge beer conglomerate.