Alex's Journal

I found an interesting program for the iPod Touch and iPhone called Stanza. The program allows you to essentially use your iPod Touch or iPhone as an eBook reader. You can buy books directly from a browser within Stanza which connects to a large list of databases to find exactly the book you’re looking for. One of my favorite parts though is that I can download my favorite Mark Twain books for free from sites such as Project Gutenberg which have posted the full texts to books whose copyrights have expired.

Stanza on an iPhone

The program also comes in a desktop form for both Windows and Mac OS X which I have actually found to be an extremely nice alternative to just reading out of a web browser or reading PDFs.

You can download Stanza for free for the iPod Touch/iPhone, Windows or Mac OS X here: http://www.lexcycle.com/download.

I have decided that as part of my on going efforts of connecting with fans of my music, that I would open a blog. You can find the blog at http://www.alexseifert.com/blog. My plan is to keep it up to date with all of the latest happenings in my musical life, my thoughts about my music as I create it, etc.

This will be different than the News section of the website in that it will be less formal and more personal. The News section will be used for announcements and the sort, whereas this will be thoughts and opinions as I create my music.

Check back here often for more updates! Also, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date!

You can also subscribe by e-mail here:

So I broke down and decided to catalog my ever-growing personal library. I chose to use an online tool called LibraryThing because it seemed like a good way of keeping track of everything. There are other tools out there that I considered, many of which are offline, however most of the cost money and I didn’t want to spend money on something when I can get it for free. LibraryThing seems like a good tool. I haven’t cataloged my entire library yet, only what I happen to have on hand with me at the moment. All 38 books. I have a much larger collection of books that I still need to move to my apartment at some point.

If you are interested, you can view my library here. I will also be putting a link to my library catalog as a button on the right side of the blog so readers can view it at anytime.

If you have any books that you think I should add to my library or any comments, feel free to leave me a comment on this post or any other post.

Here is a widget with some of my books:

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” which date back tens of thousands of years. They also cite words such as “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as words that will go extinct. Here is a portion of the article:

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

“We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

“We fit a wide range, so there’s a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time.”

Yesterday, my new album, The Kitchen, was released! Visit http://www.alexseifert.com for more details about the album.

You can also listen to it and download it for free from Last.fm here:

Volume 1
Volume 2

The Kitchen

I found an ingenious solution for people who do not like End User License Agreements (EULAs).

For anyone who is going to be working with the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, do not use David Irving’s translation of it, entitled: The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. For a project I am working on, I have been dealing with both Irving’s translation as well as the original book in German written by Gehlen himself (Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971). I read the German version cover to cover for this project and have been attempting to use Irving’s translation as a quick reference to check for facts, however, as I have been using the translation, not only is information missing from the original in his translation (I’ve had to check the original multiple times to verify it was actually there), but there are actually pages and pages of accounts and “memories” that don’t exist anywhere in the original!

The accounts may be true for all I know, but they are presented as though Gehlen told them (though he did not in his memoirs) and there are no references cited. It has been most frustrating and I do intend to report this inaccuracy to the university. Perhaps they will dispose of the book as anyone who is unable to read the German version would have no idea otherwise, possibly leading to inaccuracy.

Today marks the second year of Und Es Regnet (previously Alex’s Thoughts). I have been in the blogging world for 2 years now although it hardly seems that long. This blog has gone through several different phases starting off as Alex’s Thoughts and hosted at Wordpress.com. Maintaining its name, it then moved over to a sub-domain of AlexSeifert.com. The third stage is its present form of Und Es Regnet taking over a stagnant domain which I own and refocusing the emphasis away from technology and more towards my experiences and studies with the German language.

Here’s to another two more years and hopefully more to come!

The past couple of days have been agony and torment for me to some degree with my head spinning around contradictions, frustrations and the overall irony of the present situation I find myself in. About a year ago when I was spending my year abroad in Germany, I met this Dutch girl whom I fell head over heals for. We had an amazing amount in common, she was bright and beautiful and we never tired of each other’s company. The biggest problem though is that she is insanely religious. I don’t mean to the point that she goes around praying all the time or trying to convert other people to her religion (to her religion is a deeply personal thing), but I mean it in the sense that she is vocal about it in private and that when we talk, she will occasionally go off on these religious tangents that drive me nuts.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis or has read a number of my previous posts can tell right away that I am a stark Atheist. I can’t buy into the belief in some sort of supreme being who has unlimited powers and controls us all through blackmail. I just can’t do it. Before I go on, however, I would like to make it clear that I am not so dense as to not understand or even respect other people’s beliefs. I am simply stating my view point on this situation.

To get back to the story, since I have been back in the US, we have consistently been talking on instant messenger — usually several times a week. A couple of days ago I was talking to her when she mentioned that she was watching a documentary on TV about the evolution of bears. I knew things were going to get bad from this point because whenever some who is religious brings up evolution, you’re bound for an argument. Well, we did have a pretty big discussion about it because she started going into this crazy creationist stupor condemning the theory of evolution as an unprovable dogma which people blindly buy into. Do you already see the irony in this argument?

I suppose it really wasn’t much of a discussion since, because I care for her quite a bit, I didn’t really say much. I did what I usually do and passively let her rant until she gets bored and drops it. Then I take the pent up frustration and spill it out here or to friends who have the same viewpoints as me. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll hate me for it — in fact, I don’t think she would mind the debate at all and might even enjoy it — it’s that I know how she strongly she feels about the whole thing and I want to respect that. Besides, that’s what blogs are for. I can take it out here without running the real risk of hurting anyone’s feelings personally since it’s written for a general audience.

Throughout the majority of Obama’s campaign for the presidency, he pledged to work with Republicans in a spirit of bipartisanship. In the three weeks he has been president, Obama has proved time and time again that his promise of bipartisanship was hollow. This is particularly true when we take a look at his obsessiveness with pushing his economic stimulus bill through Congress.

President Obama has spent most of his time as president trying to get an economic stimulus bill worth almost $1 trillion through Congress in tact. While the bill did pass the through the House of Representatives, not a single Republican representative voted for the bill. Republicans voiced their concerns about the bill to a mostly deaf president, who turned around and called them “irresponsible” and the delay “inexcusable” while completely avoiding the issues raised by the GOP.

Republican concerns were finally addressed by Obama’s fellow Democratic party members, but without the President’s involvement. On the contrary, the President said that he will not “return to the failed theories of the last eight years” and scolded the GOP even more for the delay. Addressing Republican concerns about the bill is not returning “to the failed theories of the last eight years,” but is, in reality, bipartisanship.

Why bipartisanship will never work

In the political world, bipartisanship is a practice rarely observed. American politics have two major parties: the Republicans and the Democrats, and countless smaller political parties, including the Libertarian Party. Despite reality, in which the borders of the two major political parties have become hopelessly slurred, each party is supposed to stand for its own values and its own views on the best way of governing the nation.

Contradictory ways of governance do not lend themselves well to working together. For the sake of argument, we will address each party for what it is intended to represent instead of what it actually represents nowadays. Generally speaking, the Republicans are for big, private business and small government, while the Democrats are for big government and the individual American. The contradiction lies between the way the two parties view the government’s role in the lives of Americans and American industry.

While the core beliefs of the parties are in practice skewed, the fact that there is a difference between the two already creates problems. Members of one party will vote one way while members of the other party will vote differently.

Obama’s promise of bipartisanship is completely in vein as he has already proved. Not only is he not willing to try, but it was in vein to begin with. By completely ignoring the Republican concerns with his stimulus bill, he has proven that he is not even willing to sit down and negotiate with the Republicans. That is not bipartisanship. That is a hollow promise.

The original article was written for Despotic Democracy and can be found here.