Slowly the “time between the years” is passing by and soon the year 2006 will be gone. Everybody will celebrate the turn of the year in a personal manner, with or without New Year’s pledges, with or without fireworks, with or without looking back  at the old year, with friends, with family or alone, with masses of people in Trafalgar or Times Square, in their own appartment or somewhere completely different, maybe even abroad.

To all people, however they will celebrate, we pass our best wishes for a good start and a successful 2007. And maybe you will pass around to read this blog from time to time in the new year as well.

Over new year our good friend from London, Michael, is visiting again having arrived with Ryanair on Friday evening. So yesterday we had the whole day to do something as we did not want just to hang around. What do you do with visitors around? You look for exhibitions and museums. Michael had been in Berlin for a few times, especially with Derek in the period when I had no contact with them. Then you start thinking what he might not know already.

Then I remembered the GDR Museum, which had opened here in Berlin on 15 July 2006. It is a relatively small museum, giving a good overview however of the every day culture in the German Democratic Republic. The concept is quite interesting as well, one may touch many exhibits or even leaf through notes or test GDR games. A visit costs you about an hour if you do it thoroughly and it is well worth a visit in any case.
Just an additional personal thought: I as a total West German I hardly have any GDR experience at all, and therefore I visited without personal remembrances. And honestly, for me the museum could as well exist in the West with a title like “Petit bourgeois in the 60s and 70s”. Apart from the political specialities of course, but then these were an expression of peziz bourgeoisie as well.

Even without a detailed statistical survey I think that I may state that most peoples’ relstionship to Christmas is coined by childhood and family. Remembrances of course are manifold, quite a few miss the security of their family, others like me remember the stress connected with the occasion, meals that had to be even if you hated them as a child (in my case it was the inevitable boiled carp my grandparents insisted upon). But, even that I dare to state, the base feeling towards Christmas is quite positive, at least everybody regards this celebration of winter solistice as something very special.

Many people try to preserve this childhood experience as long as they can. When I look around here in our young quarter, Freidrichshain, then I can see that most flats are dark on Christmas Eve and all those young people have returned home to their childhood memories, into the family, also back into all they were quite happy to have got away from. At Christmas they want to be back, in their positive and negative remembrances.
But then one day this world is gone. Parents die, young people build their own families and suddenly develop different priorities. But not everybody has own children which may be taught negative or positive feelings for Christmas. So, what to do when the “old Christmas” suddenly is gone? When parents are not there any longer or, as it is usual today, the old Christmas family has dissolved by divorce, estrangement or death, or if it has broken into a patchwork family? In a German blog I read something these days, which has hit a note: One should develop own rituals. And we are on our way to do this.

Just as last year we had an “Open House” on Christmas Eve. Whoever of our friends wants to come, is invited, we had a fondue (certainly not written in cast iron to have one each year for the future. People from 20 to more than 60 years met, and everybody had fun or they would not have stayed long past 2 a.m.

Everybody helped themselves to dinner, we sang to the guitar (no, no Christmas carols) and we played games,  old-fashioned Charades.

And we have the first declarations to come next year as well.

Those two like each other, even if they met only at the age of nearly two.

Well, during all year I commute between Hamburg and Berlin and during the weekends I am not too keen on maintaining Hanna’s laptop (she agrees that there are better things to do then). These days we wanted to play our favourite game (Patricians 3) and, well, it did not work.

Therefore I had to begin maintenance, and worked at it for about 5 hours. To start with, defragmentation was busy for 2 hours, her disk was extremely fragmented. Patricians of course did not work after that, I did not really expect it to. But it was a start. Next was repairing the registry. Downloaded shareware, which immediately found more than 250 errors, which it was able to repair. Why does Windows not have an integrated repair programme, if this is such a well known problem? How should a “normal” user know to watch the registry?

Patricians still did not work however. Well, next step to remove malware with Ad-Aware. It did find stuff, but did not help with the original problem. Then I tried to reconstruct what Hanna had done during the last days. And voilà, she had ceded to the urgent requests of MS-Updater and installed Internet Explorer 7. Well, I deinstalled it just in case and, o wonder: Patricians worked again. Installed IE7 again, and it did no longer work.

Now she has an Internet-Explorer-free system and everything works quite well (except that the updater is offering updates for IE no longer in the system). But we are lucky, there is something like Firefox. But why MS is expecting its users to undergo such an occupational therapy, I still do not understand.

It is quite something to have cold. Your body simply chooses when he thinks it is the right time to have one. Hanna’s caught a real cold an at a time when her body knew that I am available to care for her. Then you are allowed to have it.

Linus on the other hand tries to avoid it. Hanna has created a “warming place” for him by placing a blanket on the heating. He loves to stay there. Just to avoid a cold?

For me the Xmas period is less of a celebrating time but a time of vacations. At the end of the year I think of having commuted enough, from Berlin to Hamburg on Mondays and back on Fridays. In spite of the fast connection this is a kind of burden. Well, to have a job is worth something. And the value for money is better with Berlin accommodation than in Hamburg, well known it is. So there is no alternative to commuting.

But slowly the working year is nearing its end, and since Friday I will stay with Hanna for three weeks. Whatever an Xmas and New Year is used for.

You could feel a general excitement. Everything should work, a good talk was set to go and further steps should be agreed upon. Two presidents of universities, two high-ranking R&D managers from industry, a representative of our local government and two manging directors of (semi-) public institutions were listening with our small project team to a talk from Oxford University and then discussed how the relations between universities  and industry could be improved.

In the beginning everybody was quite reserved and slightly exhausted at the end of the working day, but then everybody got relaxed and we had a fruitful discussion. The final special dinner with Knieper (a Helgoland dish of crab pincers) contributed to lively informal talks and successful networking. So in the end the conclusions were positive.

The general public does not know much about research fundin of the European Union. It is organised in so-called framework programmes (in the past one would have said five-year-plans) and until now they followed just this rhythm, money and goals were  valid for this period. Now it has turned into a seven-years-period.

This is the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development, the European Parliament has approved it on 27 November and the Council will do it just these days. And all researchers are getting ready and long for the latest news on the conditions.

It is not a tiny programme, every year the Union provides some 7 billion €, last year about 16,000 applications were submitted, which were evaluated by nearly 5,000 experts. And therefore it is no surprise that more than 500 participants had registered for a local information conference (just for the greater Hamburg area) to get the latest information. And it is about time: the calls for proposals are planned to be published on 22 December and the deadline for proposals will be mid to end of April. Further information is available on Cordis or on the Commission’s site.