Present Perfect

Sabbaticals are good, when work leaves you alone. After two days of being pulled in to work on problems, I had another productive day of working on "other" projects.

To ease me in gently, I did a new mach release to update for Fedora 8 and 9. I'm thinking of updating my personal repository again because I just do too much ad-hoc building on my various computers, and it just makes more sense to do it in an organized way. We'll see if I can keep it up!

Next on the list - a MOAP release, finally. Cross fingers.

Sabbaticals are good, when work leaves you alone. After two days of being pulled in to work on problems, I had another productive day of working on "other" projects. To...

Yesterday evening I made my first sale-through-the-web - An older man in a very nice suit came by to buy the Robin CD shelf for 10 euro. He didn't look like the kind of guy that collects CD's or needs to buy shelves second hand, but I didn't ask what he was going to do with it. And now I regret not asking - I seem to have a need to know what happens to stuff I stop using and give away.

Anyway, because Fons asked, my other items on Kapaza are:

• industrial vacuum cleaner(I just *know* we're going to need it as soon as it gets sold)
• my back-friendly chair(Painful to get rid of as it has served me so well, but it damages the parquet floor we have now)
• microwave(when you've had a few different places between you and your girlfriend you tend to accumulate microwaves - we already gave one away)
• My prized TV closet - our new TV's outgrown it.

Registered friends get a 20% discount on every item as long as they permanently give up the right to complain about the sale once made!

Yesterday evening I made my first sale-through-the-web - An older man in a very nice suit came by to buy the Robin CD shelf for 10 euro. He didn't look...

An excellent opportunity to write an angry email to a company that I feel wronged by. The company in question is a Belgian company called Artson NV, I bought two stereo volume dials for my speakers, and they invoiced me shipping costs *after* the first invoice and the shipping, and then sent me a 15% intrest invoice a month later.

For once, this post will be in Dutch.

Jullie zijn het eerste bedrijf waar ik ooit iets van gekocht heb die leveringskosten *apart* aanrekenen en *na de aankoop*. En daarna rekent u een maand later ook nog eens 15% intrest aan.

Ik heb vandaag betaald, maar het zal meteen ook de laatste keer zijn dat ik ooit nog iets betaal. En ik hoop dat ik niet de enige klant ben die omwille van die manier van doen andere winkels opzoekt.

Het gaat mij niet om het geld, het is maar 3,15 + 0,05 euro (die 0,05 euro dient waarschijnlijk om ervoor te zorgen dat mensen daar nog eens overkijken - het bedrag 18,15 euro staat wel VIJF keer op uw factuur, en het eigenlijke bedrag van 18,20 euro slechts EEN keer) - het gaat mij om het feit dat uw manier van werken onlogisch is en erom vraagt om slecht af te lopen voor de klant.

Ik durf wedden dat u veel aanmaningen moet sturen.

Zonder rancune en vriendelijke groeten
Thomas

An excellent opportunity to write an angry email to a company that I feel wronged by. The company in question is a Belgian company called Artson NV, I bought two...

I've been a late joiner of del.icio.us, but have not regretted it.

I originally joined because, with the travelling back and forth, I was getting annoyed at having 3 main computers to work on, each with a different set of bookmarks.

Then it became incredibly handy for getting to sites on my N800 and my phone - you just set up the delicious page once on them, and then tag on your desktop to access it on your devices without typing URL's. It was a lot easier to install software this way for the N800.

I've tried various times the Firefox extensions, but never felt they were very useful. It ends up being very cluttered and I was never able to through them organize the bookmarks I really used daily (which I put in folders on a bookmark toolbar) in a way that matched my toolbar. For example, I have a dropdown folder called "gst" which links to GStreamer's home page, buildbot page, bug list page, ...

This weekend, after upgrading to Fedora 9 with its Firefox 3 beta I spent some time thinking it over again. I never noticed the Bundled Tags feature before, and was hoping this would be a way of combining tags so that they could be shown on my toolbar. For example, tag the pages I want in my gst dropdown with 'gstreamer' and 'toolbar'. But apparently, the Bundled Tags feature is OR, not AND, so that didn't help. (I'm not sure why AND behaviour in this case is useful to begin with, but hey...)

In the end, I decided to keep it simple. I'm now tagging all the pages I want on my toolbar with a tag starting with @

So, I have @gst for some pages, and then I use the Favourite Tags del.icio.us toolbar feature, and add it as a favourite tag. This allows me to decide the order, and decide the contents, and thus perfectly replicate the setup I had before, but do the same across all my browsers.

Now I can go on being a happy organised productive person!

Feel free to comment on how you organize your bookmarks across various computers for more ideas.

NOTE: Fedora 9 ships with firefox 3 beta 5, which is not yet supported by the offiicial Firefox extension. Get an unreleased beta here (you'll probably have to join the yahoo group though)

I've been a late joiner of del.icio.us, but have not regretted it. I originally joined because, with the travelling back and forth, I was getting annoyed at having 3 main...

So, I took a week off to get my life cleaned up a little and enjoy my new apartrment back in Brussels.

I've set myself some specific goals and gave myself a todo list. I'm also hoping to enjoy being on holiday, go see some concerts, and play some GTA4 (surely a bane of any good sabbatical).

Friday evening we went to Motek's CD release party. Not bad, but the songs I had heard on the radio were probably the best they had, so it was slightly disappointing.

I spent saturday making lists of things to do, we cleaned up the garage a little bit, and I reorganized my browser bookmark system. More on that in a separate post.

Yesterday was spent overhauling the garage completely, dealing with the wet floor, reorganizing it so we can find stuff and put more stuff in it, and cleaning the doors. We also took pictures of things we wanted to sell, and they're now on Kapaza (If you know of other/better sites to advertise furniture on in Belgium, feel free to let me know).

And Friday I noticed by accident that our beloved ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead was visiting my new home town, so I mailed to reserve a ticket and got my wish yesterday. A rock hard performance - though short - by the boys, and a very energetic crowd. I almost got hit by a microphone stand, and a cymbal stand ended up being thrown in the audience as well.

I also enjoyed the second opening band a lot, every song was good, doesn't happen often for me. They're Bellavista from San Francisco.

7 days of sabbat left.

So, I took a week off to get my life cleaned up a little and enjoy my new apartrment back in Brussels. I've set myself some specific goals and gave...