dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

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Websites and the art of maintenance

Websites are nice. They are interesting as they are an expression of your creativity, thoughts and/or skills. They contain loads of useful or useless information or only contain some pictures you took a while ago with your shiny new digicam. But maintaining them, keeping them up-to-date with new information …

Net addict

I find myself checking my e-mail after been to two parties while having made a kind of bet with a friend of mine to not use a pc for the weekend. Hmm, am I that addicted? I only wanted to send an e-mail and check up a small digicam I …

Skype

I've discovered Skype. I had it installed some time now, but never used it until a friend of mine told me he always holds group chats on it. Well, installed the latest version and made fun until 3AM. Quite cool to have a headset on your head, make jokes and …

Work work

Well, surely been busy this week. University eating my time as always, been offline [almost] the entire weekend [spending those days with my girlfriend made up for it bigtime ;) ], looking for a new chair and a chest for clothes. Eating pancakes on a restaurant ship, drinking way too much beer …

xfce4 v4.2 beta1 :)

Looking good as always, check the new and improved xfce4. There's a beta version of the compositor too; check the translucent panel at the bottom. Gotta get me x.org 6.8.x some day :/ Get it at xfce.org. I myself hope it hits Debian's repositories soonish.

Life's tricks

Life is fun. Even pessimists know life can be fun, if only for having a great girlfriend and being able to having good times with her. But life can play it's tricks upon us. Enter the younger brother of my gf and his own girlfriend. They are both 19 years …

How to add an hdd the cool way

Added a 120GiB hdd drive to my workstation Saturday. I had it lying around for a while, and when I came to build it into my trusty AMD Duron 750MHz workstation, I figured it wasn't going to fit. Well, not in the drive bracket that is. There are already 2 …

The tidbits of week 38

University and work really have me in a strong grip, so here are some tidbits I gathered last week. Our national technology proud - Philips - has a new slogan: "Sense and simplicity". Their previous one, "Let's make things better" lasted ten years, and now they where in for something new. They …

Party-induced comas considered healthy

Finished my breakfast at about 3PM today after about 12 hours of sleep. That twelve hours compensated for the about 2.5 hours of sleep I got the night before, at Alex' place, after a night of drinking beer, wandering around looking for a train [missing the last one home …

Not dead yet(tm)

For those wondering, the wonderful thing called University has opened it's gates again and is sucking up lots of my precious time. As I'm planning to actually get my bachelor this year [that's about two years late :/ ], I've dived headlong into it. So, I'm not dead, only a bit occupied …

US acting like China and paper documents suck

There have been quite a few protests against Bush in New York lately. The Axis of Eve Panty Flash Protest I like the best, but there are lots of others, like the bicycle rider protest. Lots of people where arrested, over 1500 as I heard. Now doesn't that seem a …


Bits of the last day of August

It still rains. Not continuously, but it's still wet outside. Damn, ye $WEATHERDEITY! Oh no, now the sun tries to shine. Heh, it just failed. August should have been the hottest month of the year. Instead it became the wettest August in 50 years [Dutch link]. And I am currently …

Good weather for hacking

Hacking as in merrily-programming-at-various-projects-while-not-minding-your-surroundings hacking. At the moment, rain is pouring from the skies and thunder and lightning make the scene even more enjoyable. The calendar says it's still August but Zeus doesn't give a damn.

How to make the perfect blog

OK, I know I'm flooding various aggregators and planet livecd, but I was wondering about various aspects of the design of my weblog site. I asked in my previous post if anyone used the feed in which I include the comments to posts I make alongside the posts themselves. I …

Random bits

First I want to ask the readers of my humble blog [yeah, you two] if anyone uses the feed with comments included. I'm asking, because noone gets a notification if someone posted a comment to a post or commented on a comment except for me. I know it's a tad …

About mages

As Alex pointed out, computer literates are not the most important mages. He's completely right, and I didn't intend to put it that way. I've far more respect for the modern day medical specialists and technical engineers. However, why only count a "real life" engineer a modern day mage? OK …

Modern day magic

Not so long ago I went fixing two computers. I generally don't want to fix other peoples windows computers anymore, but those where the pc's of the grandparents of my girlfriend, so I was glad to help them. While I was exploring the systems, installing things, updating stuff and nuking …

Caffeine, security and caffeine

Just finished my second espresso of this morning and pored myself a coke. Still not feeling even slighter awake. I hope I'm not growing resistant against caffeine, otherwise I'd be screwed :) Talking about screwed; I've a talk with my study advisor about my ongoing war with certain classes. Not only …

Gadgets and other freaky things

As you may know, I'm a gadget freak^Wlover. So, Engadget is one of the sites I've featured in my super1337 RSS aggregator. Todays harvest is a nice one; lets start with the first thing I would want to have for my [hypothetical] own house: a kitchen sink. Well, it's …