dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Articles


"More"

Oh shiny consumer society, with its broad streets lingered with deadly McFlurry cups, Britney Spears listening sheep with iPods and our fast-food consuming I'm-not-fat-I'm-big-boned fellow humans. Mrs Bsag has a piece about "More", triggered mainly by the advertisements marketing campaigns sling at us: excess masquerading as progress, and increase in …

*sigh* cars...

Yesterday we went to a very nice building of the University of Utrecht, located right at the sight of the Dom [nicer pics on the Dutch page]. Here, twenty-one students of my girlfriend's year -- including she herself -- where officially made pharmacists in a nice ceremony. Congratulations sweety! After a nice …

Corfu: A [not too] Lazy Tale

I finally came around to editing the notes I took while on vacation at Corfu, that nice green Greek island. I hope you'll enjoy this read ;) At least I can heartily recommend visiting this sweet little island. 20060805 - To Corfu! After my quick blurp a lot earlier today on a …

Rain

Hey, you damned $WEATHER_DEITY, it's the end of August, not October! Give us back our sunny free days!


Dictionary.com blurp

I kinda like the restyle they did, but the special chars in the pronounciation key of their "Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)" source don't turn up right here [Firefox shows the unicode char-not-found character, which doesn't look that well in their nice clean site ;)].

Wrapping things up

OK, my two readers are getting a tad tired about this subject I guess, but today I'm making a list of all things, projects, courses etc I've laying around and prioritising them, hoping to mod quite a lot down the level of "todo this year". That's really necessary as I …


Broke

BTW, did I mention we actually, positively, really spent way too much money on clothing today? Oh well, us poor students need to get some decent clothes once a year too ;) And then to think we want to buy a car this weekend too. Thank the Light for savings accounts …

How to stop being haunted

As I posted earlier on, being haunted by unfinished projects and uninteresting courses at University isn't great fun exactly. Now this is general knowledge, but how does this lazy procrastinating programming and randomly surfing geek do something about it? Of course, "getting a grip" on the situation and myself is …

Alegria!

OK, a while back I said we where going to Cirque du Soleil's show Alegria in Amsterdam. Well, we did the 2nd of August, and thoroughly enjoyed the show. They have a huge shiny white tent, which is cool to watch when approaching their site. Of course, they have …

Haunted

Am I cursed? I have the very annoying "habit" to have projects and unfinished courses haunting me. Cleaning my slate hasn't succeeded as yet. Maybe I should be a bit less overzealous on the project side and actually wrap up some of the exiting projects I embarked on and finishing …

Ideas for a personal network

Some ideas for a modularised set of gadgets that work together in a personal network [e.g., "on the body"]: PDA [provides touch sensitive screen, other input possibilities, wifi, some storage] Music player [provides hdd storage, has small screen and controls for standalone functioning] Cellphone [provides gsm/3G uplink, possibly …

Grumble

After finding my wallet in time, finding my old bike mysteriously locked and needing to put some air in the tires of my better bike, but still being in time for my train, I got booted out of it two stations down the track needing to buy a ticket because …

Back and online again

We just got back from Corfu, and I just got online again after a refreshing period of offlineness. The statistics: Number of digital photographs copied to my laptop from the image tank we had with us on vacation: about 2000 Number of megabytes these take: 6582 Number of pictures I …

To Greece!

We are currently sitting in a waiting area on Schiphol Airport with our plane leaving in about 2.5h. On to Corfu! Yay at a completely offline vacation on a great green island :) See you all in about eleven days!

On stupidity

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? [ Source ]

286 day today

OK, this is a real geek speaking, but the upcoming days present a nice numeric sequence other geeks will appreciate [except when you're not a fan of this platform ;)]: 2/8/6 today, 3/8/6, 4/8/6, 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 the following days, representing …


Fixing sound in Firefox on cheap audiochips in Linux

OK, so you're already using the nice ALSA sound system on your Linux install, but when you're playing music etc you can't hear the sound of those YouTube movies? Edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and add/edit the FIREFOX_DSP setting to read "FIREFOX_DSP="aoss". Of course, you will need ALSA's OSS …