Regina

The cold and rain have caught up with me, after a single day of relatively good weather. There will be very few photos taken during this holiday, I fear.

I had forgotten what clever, interesting people my sister and her family are: the speed of conversation, the balletic weave of jibe and retort, are like a Billy Wilder movie come to life. It's fascinating to observe, and dizzying to take part in, their conversations after such a long time away. I find myself to have slowed down, to have adopted the Germanic zeal for precision at the cost of the easy fluency that we once shared.

Their computer (one of those Windows things) died last week, so the first thing we discussed on my arrival was what kind of Mac they should buy. We phoned around yesterday morning, and after some difficulty found the only Mac Mini available in the city - which we promptly bought yesterday afternoon. I have been fine-tuning it and teaching them the basics of Macism since then. The question of salvaging their data from the wreckage of the Winbox is still open, of particular interest are the 4.5 gigabytes of music files that nobody remembers (or admits to) downloading.

Three days until the opera starts! I'm very excited. There have been some last-minute changes in the cast due to illness (and politics, it is whispered) but should still be quite good indeed.

In other news during my nearly three-hour stopover in Frankfurt on the way here, I signed up for a pilot project run by the German Bundesgrenzschutz (border police), testing automatic passport control by iris recognition. It was impressively simple and efficient: sign the release forms, present my computer-readable passport, stand in front of the camera, stand in front of a test system to confirm that it could recognize me. Finding the ofice where this was done took twice as long as the actual sign-up. It worked well, too: I walked from there to the passport control, ignored the three hundred people waiting to be checked by a human and laid my passport on the checking console. The first set of doors opened, I stood in front of the camera which flashed and beeped, and the second set of doors opened. Took about twenty seconds. What's not to like?

Mind you, I would not have been so willling to stand in front of an American version of this system. I am willing to trust the German = European security apparatus and its political masters; I have serious doubts about the CIA/FBI/NSA and actively distrust their political masters.