Alex's Journal

The past couple of days have been rather productive. I’ve managed to write two new songs in relatively short order which means the new album now has nine completed songs. There are still a couple more on the way, but I just haven’t quite gotten around to finishing them yet. I will do that soon though I hope.

Another piece of exciting news in my life is that I’ve started preparations for a grant application and proposal to teach English to German middle school and high school students in Germany beginning next year. If I get it, I should be able to work on a Masters degree at the same time. I’m really rather excited about it, although it is a real pain to get everything together for a grant. I will definitely get through it though because it is absolutely worth it.

The BBC is reporting that Germany is exiting the recession that has affected the entire world for the past couple of years. Germany, along with France, is one of the first countries to emerge from this economic downturn and yet the German government did next to nothing to try to pull the country out of the recession.

An article in the Wall Street Journal states the German stance on it:

“Germany has the most capacity in Europe to increase spending, but Berlin has argued against running up big deficits…”

“Last year, according to the IMF, the U.S. pumped an extra 1.1% of GDP into the economy. Germany did next to nothing.”

I think the American government needs to take a page out of Germany’s book. For being a socialist country, Germany seems to have less government intervention in the economy than we do.

I’ve posted a new wallpaper. It’s a wallpaper made in light of the German Empire before the first World War.

German Empire

Well, I am back in the US, which means I am no longer studying abroad in Germany. I’m going to miss it though as I really enjoyed my time there and really liked Europe. I think I will go back soon.

I’ve been living in Germany for almost a year now and with the exception of the internet at the university library, not once have I encountered fast internet here. The speed of the internet in the place where I live is dreadfully slow. It is supposed to be broadband, but behaves as though it was trying to be dial-up. And that’s when it works!

The way they’ve got their system setup is such that everyone is routed through a proxy server. While this may be common and isn’t that big of a deal, the fact that the proxy server is constantly refusing connections is a big deal. During this time I can access secure sites that bypass the proxy server, but the rest of the internet is unaccessible. That means that not only is the internet slow, but half the time browsing the internet is impossible which is extremely annoying.

I suppose it’s not really fair to say that every connection in Germany is this horrible, but as of yet I have to see a connection that isn’t horrible — broadband or otherwise.