2007-10-14

Pickled in Brine

Ahhhh, lovely. Spent the day at the Spreewald Therme near Cottbus. Their ads use lots of grey-haired people, but there were a fair amount of younger ones there.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day, about 15 degrees C outside, and there is a salt-water pool outside there. The place has lots of different pickling solutions, each pool is marked with temperature and brine content. They had some cute stuff like two pickle barrels (the area is famous for pickles), one with a steam bath of brine and one with a brine fog - both just lovely for the airpipes.

The sauna area had heated tiles in a very comfortable, reclining position in the caldarium, I actually dozed off. The vitamin bar had an open fireplace crackling (a real one, not a gas flame) that made for a very cozy atmosphere.

Two friends gave me the day together for my birthday. We had a grand time, although I am sure people were rather disconcerted to hear these "old ladies" talking about agile programming and other computer stuff. We had a great discussion on the way home about the "Bundestrojaner", the intention of the government to secretly search private PCs to find "terrorists". Although we did not agree on whether it was okay for the government to do this or not, we did agree that we did not think it was technically possible at this time - I mean, come on, we don't even have browsers that work well on all possible platforms, how are they going to get a virus to do that?

Anyway, I am now quite pickled (and I do not mean drunk!) from all that salt. I shall sleep well tonight!

1 comment:

WiseWoman said...

Had a chat the other day with someone who actually understands this Bundestrojaner stuff.

She was very clear: it is not only technically possible, but is currently being used in individual cases, just not globally yet.

Someone needs to tell Microsoft about this - there seem to be some mighty bright people the Minister of the Interior has hired to program this. Microsoft needs them in their security department.