Present Perfect

Johan's last day yesterday. They say it's hard to get close to a Scandinavian and I'm inclined to believe that now. I know he will be in good hands at his next location so I'm happy for him. It is going to be weird though, he was the first to join us on our little escapade. Saying goodbye is strange when you know you'll see the other person again very soon though :)

I was a bit anxious to see what would happen now that I'd have to figure out stuff on my own, server-wise. I had started on some of the work I had asked him to design to try a different approach. At first I found some things that didn't work exactly as I thought they would, and it was frustrating to not be able to roll my chair to the right and ask about it. On the other hand, when going through the whole stack, it wasn't that incredibly hard to figure out where the bugs were and fix them in all the right places. The server is getting quite complicated, but still elegant in design, which is nice. And the bugs were all fairly easily localised and fixed, and just went to show that all parts of your code should be covered in testing.

So after some hours, I was connecting with my admin interface, which got its widget code from the manager, and which showed me the options to change some component on another machine at runtime, and I got notified back. I spent a good ten minutes switching between the snow and SMPTE patterns on the video test component ...

Last week

Some random bits from last week. Treated myself to an early Christmas present - a CD, "Mew" by Frengers (go pick it up), and the three big Knuth books. Lovely, a hundred page of mathematics as an introduction ... I've been Knuthing myself to sleep ever since.

Kristien and I are now going through Dawson's Creek from the top. I hope Michelle Williams plays in some decent movies soon.

I had finally gotten around to get a library card for the library with the big stack of CD's. I celebrated my inauguration by being a week late in bringing stuff back, but apparently that didn't work. I handed in my discs, and sort of lingered at the desk, and the woman seemed confused about what more I wanted. Drats, no punishment for me. The bad parts are that a) they don't have that much stuff, b) most of it is classical, c) you can only take 3 discs, d) you can only have them for a week. But anyway, better than nothing.

This weekend Kristien decided she needed to buy a printer. Remembered there was a discount sale for Epson laserprinters at one of the computer stores, but couldn't remember the model. Went to the store, called up Peter to look up the number and compatibility info, got the news that it should "sort-of-work". Tried to buy the thing. The woman at the counter said she couldn't accept credit card because we need either a passport or a residence permit to prove our identity. I told her that it was the sixth time I was in that store and that I had always paid showing my driver's license. She said that that was not possible. Uh, ok. "Well, that woman here standing next to you sold me a bunch of DVD's yesterday". No, that was still not possible. Spanish quixoticism.

Anyway, some discussion, printer bagged, went home, figured out it needed some extra package installed with some binaries as a driver (even though my FC3 install had the printer in the list), installed it, tried it, worked fine. The CUPS system really could have given a better error message, because there was a binary missing that it was executing, but hey, pretty good all in all.

Kristien's boss here just delivered a son to the world. As far as newborns go he was pretty cute and they were happy.

Three weeks of owning GTA San Andreas, only three game hours logged. Something's wrong.

Johan's last day yesterday. They say it's hard to get close to a Scandinavian and I'm inclined to believe that now. I know he will be in good hands at...