My mother's father – or
„mein Großvater“ – wasn't German, technically. He was born in 1902, on a farm in northeast Ohio, to first-generation Americans whose parents came to this country from the Alsace region of France. This was always a little confusing to me, when Grandpa used to tell us that his grandparents came from France but spoke German, not French. Once I got involved with my family's genealogy research, I learned that the Alsatians indeed spoke a dialect of German.
*At some point while Turtle's parents were visiting, the women were playing games and listening to Christmas CDs. “Silent Night” came on, and I was thinking of Grandpa and how we kids used to beg him to sing
„Stille Nacht“ to us in his broken German.
The base image is a small photo Grandpa took of himself sometime in the 1970s at one of those automated photo booths you see at the mall. The pocket watch is one that he bought used around 1930 and passed down to me when I was in college (it still runs and keeps perfect time). The smaller blended image is Grandpa on his wedding day, in 1936.
* I admit to taking a certain amount of pleasure in telling people that even my French ancestors were German.
2 comments:
ok foofoofachoo.....how the heck did you get that symbol in his name? and that is quite cool the way you did that picture.
Hi Doozie. Good to see you're still around, despite your trials and defibrillations.
Here's the deal with the special characters (and please forgive the necessary but shallow descent into geek speak). Without getting into a lot of unnecessary discussion about character sets and code points, I'll just say that the ß character (as well as the fancy double quote characters) are part of the Latin-1 character set. That's just a tech way of saying, “They're not on your American keyboard, but they're there if you know how to get to them.”
So how does one get to them? One way – and the one that most HTML-challenged people will use – is to either use the Windows Character Map utility to select the desired character and copy it to the clipboard, or (if one knows the decimal value of its code point) enter it from the keyboard by holding down the ALT key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad.
Unfortunately, I don't know how Macs accomplish this sort of thing, but I suspect someone in the know would tell us that it's much easier.
For me (a geek for whom formatting a blog post in raw HTML is actually easier than using the WYSIWYG editor) the answer is to go into HTML edit mode and type “ß” (in the case of the “ß” character). This is what is known as an “HTML entity”. When the browser sees something like this, it knows to automagically display it as the character it represents.
How do you know what entity represents which character? Please refer to my earlier posting about a very handy reference tool created for just such occasions.
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