… cannot be escaped in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Only the “Kiek in de Kök” comes from Low German – in the Middle Ages the name for “high tower”. From there you could look into your neighbours‘ kitchens!
The charm of double vowels…
When harlequins go on holiday…
they have their say on Fridays as usual, but with very short contributions! We’re on holiday – at home or elsewhere – and looking for inspiration for new topics.
We wish you all a wonderful summer!
Your Harlequin Team
When harlequins go on holiday…
… they can be lazy – and delegate the yoga lesson to the frogs in the garden. Then they let their foreheads go all soft!
Anarchist summer delights with charcoal
My barbecuing experiences in the Netherlands
In previous posts I have dealt several times with the culinary differences between Germany and the Netherlands – and they also exist in the case of the greatest of all summer pleasures, barbecuing. However, the differences are not so much culinary, but rather ideological. The Dutch are a people of flat hierarchies, they can’t stand it when one person has a greater say than anyone else. This is true in politics as well as in daily life, and I suspect that the royal family is also so popular because their representatives de facto have quite little to say.
Continue reading “Anarchist summer delights with charcoal”Leadership? – How can I help you?
A young man walks purposefully towards a shop. The shop is hardly recognisable as such because there is no shop window. A simple sign hangs above the entrance door. It says “Pharmacy” and in slightly smaller letters underneath it “for Leadership”. The man enters and opening the door triggers a shrill ringing. He barely has time to look around the small salesroom before an older gentleman with white hair and a dishevelled full beard appears from behind the counter.
Continue reading “Leadership? – How can I help you?”Scenes of an forced partnership
She was already there when I occupied my allocated hospital bed. She had already been there for some time, for five days. And she was in a bad way. She quickly found in me a compliant victim for her protracted medical history. I was a good listener after all.
Continue reading “Scenes of an forced partnership”Rowling’s got it wrong!
I have already dealt with the topic of “decisions” once before, in September 2020. Two reasons motivate me to take up this topic again: Firstly, the new book by Daniel Kahnemann et al., which deals with this very topic and secondly, a quote from Joanne K. Rowling, who may be a good writer but apparently has not read anything by Kahnemann and – what is much worse – not even our blog.
Continue reading “Rowling’s got it wrong!”Even more lost for words
Living in a multilingual environment
Harlequin Beate wrote a while ago of her trials and tribulations with language attrition. I am sure many of our readers will recognize the struggle we have maintaining our command of our first language when spending long periods abroad. And the longer we stay, the Wurst it gets!
Continue reading “Even more lost for words”Magic Numbers…
Actually, I had reserved this particular Friday especially for an OpenShift4 Bare-Metal installation, but you know Murphy: Firstly, anything that can go wrong will go wrong and secondly, Murphy was an optimist. So I will report on my experiences with RedHat another time.
On the morning of the Friday in question, a colleague called with the usual phrase that technicians have learned to dread: “Please take a look.” The dreaded “5 minutes”. But unfortunately, it was important, because a critical application on the production system was at a standstill and nothing worked. So I went looking for the problem and tried to find the cause. Since the error occurred from one day to the next without any changes to the program, I suspected a data constellation that was problematic for the program as the reason for the crash.
Continue reading “Magic Numbers…”Project management in internal Projects – a Survival Guide
I was pleased a while ago when I read Oliver F. Lehmann’s proposed project typology. He included a number of characteristics of internal projects that I recognised. As an external consultant I regularly experience that companies behave quite differently when their own employees are allocated to internal projects, particularly in business departments. “Just do it,“ seems to describe it nicely.
Continue reading “Project management in internal Projects – a Survival Guide”Election campaign in children’s news
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as a little boy
A while ago, elections were held in the Netherlands – and as in Germany, this fact had a great impact on all the news programmes and political talk shows in the weeks beforehand, where viewers were confronted with rather contrived and tiring battles of words. The situation in the Netherlands is somewhat confusing simply because it takes four or five parties to form a government (out of a total of 18 (!) parties represented in parliament) rather than two or three as in Germany.
A breath of fresh air came from the Dutch “Jeugdjournaal” – the daily children’s news programme I became a fan of when I started learning Dutch years ago. The top candidates of the six largest parties were guests there three days before election day, along with children, of course (this time only a dozen, due to Corona).
Continue reading “Election campaign in children’s news”