Gmail - language specific features

Google has recently added a new FAQ item detailing features missing from Gmail when the language setting is set to something other than English:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=19933&topic=12900

(If you are from google, I would appreciate it if you didn't sue me.)

The Swedish

Intermediate (2) Limited Working Proficiency
Able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. Can handle routine work-related interactions that are limited in scope. In more complex and sophisticated work-related tasks, language usage generally disturbs the native speaker. Can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations, including extensive but casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family and autobiographical information. The individual can get the gist of most everyday conversations but has some difficulty understanding native speakers in situations that require specialized or sophisticated knowledge. The individual's utterances are minimally cohesive. Linguistic structure is usually not very elaborate and not thoroughly controlled; errors are frequent. Vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances but unusual or imprecise elsewhere.

I think the above is a pretty much where I'm at with my swedish. Note:

language usage generally disturbs the native speaker
I say weird things a lot, in particular when I want to use a grammatical construction that I just learned. We learned something called the s-passive a few weeks ago, and later when I was at a store being offered a receipt, I said something retarded like "det behoves inte av mig" ("it is not needed by me"), instead of just the normal "nej, tack" ("no thanks")

can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations
Very descriptive of me. I'm pretty confident about using my Swedish, even though I sound like a retarded 7 year old. I'm prone to leaving two minute, completely incomprehensible messages on peoples answering machines, or going up to girls and asking them what they think about ice-cream :-)

vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances but unusual or imprecise elsewhere
Also quite true. Whenever it gets to things I've never talked about, I always rely quite heavily on one of my favorite words in swedish, "sak", meaning "thing". Useful sometimes, but not when you say: "den där goda saken som stör i den där kalla saken." "that tasty thing that's in that cold thing" (icecream in a freezer). Actually, I managed to successfully communicate my desires when I added "som bestående av mjölk" ("that is composed of milk")

Världens bästa Rasmus (bastu = sauna)

I said:



And so replied rasmus:



But soon afterwards:

Figures from History I, with Casey Rodarmor

And so I present to you Gil Schuller:

A man obsessed with those things that once assembled, could not be taken apart.

A window into my life on the internet

People/groups that are mostly retards

According to google:
people in Monahans
u ppl
retribution paladins
this NU generation of "metalheads"
Poeple (sic)
My fellow airmen
Celebs
their target audience
Americans
politicians
Jay's fans
the French
rest of them
those that call themselves metalheads
the ones you like
the people who contribute to the internet
other women
the armmy
these guys
climate skeptics
druids
people on youtube
the viewers
people who play on legends
cnet reviewers
the alliances doing BG in the 70 brackets
paladin
the people of Air America
both
the kind of people that persistently question lesbian orientation as questionable
libertarians
scotish people
kids these days
all of you
my friends

The Epicness that is LTH

The engineering college at Lund University, LTH, is a very special place. I always get the feeling that the students are the ones who own it, and not the professors or administrators. Each department has a student group called a 'sektion', that takes care of student life in that department.

D-Sektion (dator = computer) has a pub on campus called Idéet:


The feeling towards alcohol is much more relaxed here. The drinking age is 18, so *everyone* can drink, and it's pretty much a normal part of everyday life. I recently took part in the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (my team beat out all of Iceland, BTW), and after the contest they gave us beer and sandwiches.

One side effect is that students often throw parties on campus. It's a great feeling to actually go out to a party that's in the same building where you take classes.

I'm sure this was on campus somewhere:


Tidbits

I have a pink jumpsuit. Each section has their own color, and students have jumpsuits of that color. D-Sektion (dator = computer) used to have brown jumpsuits, but that didn't work out, for obvious reasons. We eventually asked for another color, and got pink. We wear our jumpsuits to most of the student parties and events. D-Sektion's mascot is the Pink Panther.

They are good for dancing:

(Joel is in orange for fysik)

I know a bunch of songs, all in Swedish. Most of them are about how great D-Sektion is. For example: "Dator, dator, vi är LTHs elite, alla andra lukta skit, a ha ha ha ha!" which translates as "CS, CS, we are LTH's elite, all the others smell like shit, a ha ha ha ha!" Oh, the poetry.

LTH's elite:


I have swum in The Lake The Lake (sjön sjön), the filthy pond in the middle of LTH. This was part of Nollning.

There's a tiny island in the middle, The Island The Island (ön ön--trust me, i works better in Swedish):


Nollning

The first 6 weeks of the year are called Nollning, which is basically the freshman integration period. The best translation of nollning would probably be hazing, except that it's all extremely friendly, enormously fun, and the upperclassmen go to great lengths to help the new students integrate and feel at home.

Even though I'm not a real nolla, I took part anyways. The first thing that happened was the upperclassmen thew silly pink baseball caps at us. We were then instructed to wear these hats at all times.

Then they taught us to count to 4 in binary, (which has been a long time coming for me, let me tell you):


and showed us the punkt formation and associated song, which we had to perform many times over the coming weeks:


My favorite part of nollning was probably the Regattan. Basically, every section builds these floating things, often confusingly referred to as 'boats', and floats them out onto Lake Lake. Eventually a cannon goes off, and they do their best to destroy each other's boats.

Last year's Regattan:


This year's was *unbelievable*. The PhD students built a huge styrofoam replica of Lund Cathedral, complete with towers that they could move up and down. Huge is an understatement, I think it was easily the size of the a school bus. It was obliterated almost instantly when the cannon went off, but it was an amazing sight, even as it was being gleefully torn apart by some civil engineers.

Nollagasque

The culmination of Nollning is the Nollagasque, a big dinner party where the nolla finally get to ditch their retarded pink caps for proper Swedish student hats (mossor). A student's history is told by the rings (spegat) hanging from the tassel of his mossa. Mine has one pink spegat, signifying a year studing computer science. Nollagasque was epic beyond measure!

Here's one of the last pictures of me in my nolla keps, before becoming a real Swedish student:


A fancy dinner in Kårhuset, replete with comically slow service:


And here I am, not only a nolla no longer, but also enjoying delicious meat with farsan:


You're supposed to burn your pink keps when you get your real mossa, but I saved mine...



Don't tell anybody :-)