Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Clever¶

711 words

My apologies for the high link-to-content ratio here in the past days... I've been a bit busy with term having started again, a talk to give yesterday and still more trouble with the moving aftermath.

In addition to that, our e-mail hasn't been working all ove the easter holidays. Apparently it is too much to ask someone to fix these things during the weekend or public holidays. They just have a couple of thousand users... Rumors are circulating that instead of simply having no e-mail service during that period, the system actually accepted the messages and simply didn't store them. Apart from feeling that mail systems shouldn't be able to do that at all in the first place, I strongly feel that the people who misconfigure their mail systems in this way deserve very bad things happening to them. Related note: If you sent a message between Thursday and Tuesday, please send it again.

Here are my bullets for today:

Regarding our recent DIY activities, I thought about writing something as 'clever' as as far as mounting things is concerned, mathematics will not help you as there are no parallel lines, right angle or even regular shapes, but physics will let you get away with cheating and things are likely to stay up. That was before my blinds came down...
Today we came an important step closer to finishing our kitchen. We mounted the aluminium angles, that we had carefully shaped on Saturday, between our work surface and the wall. Doing that involved unmounting the whole work surface again as we couldn't drill the holes we needed otherwise. The aluminium looks cool but neither our work nor the wall is terribly straight or precise. We made sure to fill all the gaps with silicone as to prevent dirt from creeping behind our construction.
We also tried out our new wireless equipment. Unfortunately the guy in the shop was overly optimistic when claiming that things should work without an extra antenna. Will have to get that tomorrow. Also, note that the web based configuration software of the Linksys wireless to ethernet bridge is utter crap. It fails to load properly in some instances, easily hangs and we had to reset the device around ten times in the course of our experiments. This is supposed to be plug and play!. For some problems the FAQ actually recommends to quickly unplug the device.
Nobody seems to be able to tell you to which extent the signal strength you receive will have an impact on the connection speed you enjoy. The most detailed answer I got so far was Um, yes – but not really. Haha, helpful. With the bridge's built-in antenna we could see the network but not connect to it. The signal strength displayed in that situation was around 5%. My Powerbook sitting right next to the antenna was displayed as about 70% Do these numbers mean anything?
My amused brother points me to ready.gov — so our friends in the U.S. are prepared for such likely events as biological threats or nuclear blasts. It seems to be pitched at families only, though.
More bad iPod engineering: The hold slider is hard to unlock if the headphones are plugged in. The connector cable is hard to remove from the dock if there is a cable in the line-out connector. Definitely not form follows function.
In my e-mail for the n-th time today: I thought it prudent to contact you again since I have not received a response to my previous emails. I would like to hear your thoughts on the eSellerate eCommerce system [...] Prudent?
Dignity is a handicap. Don't let anybody embarrass you out of having fun. Do not feel guilty about your pleasures.
... and 36 other attempts at a morality of joy at TWAS.
I didn't watch the news yesterday, but according to the papers Dubya's press conference yesterday failed to impress – even with the usual low expectations.
Seeing that our new server doesn't do mod_rewrite, some of my old links broke. Yesterday I failed to write a RedirectMatch rule that redirects URLs à la 2004/04/12/postname to 2004/04/postname. If you know how to do that off the top of your head, please leave a note.