I recently got an email with a brilliant little fairytale about how to trick people into happily giving you all their money. I wanted to share with you, but it was in Dutch, and the origin was cleary not the original author.
Today I was rummaging around the internet to see if I could find the original author, and I did. I found out that the Dutch story was freely translated from an English source. Here’s the original story from that English source, unaltered (and with reference):
We’ve probably all had it. Just when you thought you found the right number of Palindromic Square Sums, you receive a mail from somewhere up the chain of command with a cry for help. The rather lengthy mail contains 3 paragraphs on why this mail was so important, why it was sent to you and why you need to reply “immediately”. At the end of the mail, there is a fairly trivial question like “How many pounds is in one kilogram”?
So you search Google and find out that 1 kilogram is 2.20462262 pounds. Depending on your irritation, you mail the information, or a link to the google results (because it is a top hit). For people not taking the hint of your Google url, there’s now another nice option, called “Let Me Google That For You”.
It’s a bit more obvious to the hard hearing, and less blunt than a similar service I used a few years ago. Here’s the empty link so you can roll your own: letmegooglethatforyou.com
Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote.
Last sunday, I was at the Zoom Experience 2008 in Utrecht. The organization has learned a lot since last year’s debute of the Zoom Experience. There was plenty of room to walk, lots of places to sit down and talk, and the talks were in seperate areas with less noise.
This is what the Zoom Experience looked like on Sunday morning:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8mXREd7Lo]
At work, we’ve got two Oracle databases and a Java web application. One of the tasks of the web application is to copy tables over from one database to the other. Last week we ran into a funny problem which turns out to be an Oracle bug.
I’ve posted a question about this last week on stackoverflow.com but it seems that not many people are affected by this particular problem, or at least not many people know the answer to this particular little problem. We set out to tackle this and we did.
I recently tried to purchase a Logitech LS1 mouse from Logitech. After not hearing from them for 3 weeks, I ordered the same mouse at Dynabyte and got it within 5 days. Suddenly Logitech woke up and sent me another LS1 mouse. Because they don’t react to mails or calls, I had a spare LS1 to play around with.
I decided to replace the long, rigid cable with a short supple one. Here’s how you can do that, too.
After just missing the title last year, it looked like you were going to just miss it this year, too. The race in Brazil was very thrilling to watch, and in the last few corners of the very last lap were very exiting to watch, especially just getting Glock in the last corner. Nice race, good show. Find somebody to sell the movierights to 😉 . I’m looking forward to seeing you race again next year.
Cheers,
Rolf
As you’ve noticed, I bought an iPhone. When you’re living in the Netherlands, you’ve got two options to get an iPhone. The first one is walk to an Apple reseller, buy an iPhone and sell your soul to T-Mobile. The second option is to drive to Belgium, convince a reseller to sell you a simlock-free iPhone, and get a Vodafone iPhone “Super Sim Only” contract. I went for the first option, and to be honest I kind of regret it. The iPhone is brilliant, but the T-Mobile network in the Netherlands sucks. Bigtime.
If your life depends on somebodies availabilty, please make sure to check they’re not using the T-Mobile or Orange network (the companies merged). Don’t let T-Mobile fool you with the “iPhone has bad reception hype”. I can make screenshots like you see here each day. I have “No service” but I can see the Vodafone and KPN networks just fine.
A lot of great ideas start in the heads of creative minds. Unbound by budgets, planning, and customers, these ideas are passed around, and some of them turn into projects.
As soon as companies and managers get involved in realizing great ideas which are not really theirs, things can go very wrong. The least that can happen is that something isn’t built. Tomtom on an iPhone? A brilliant idea and technically possible, but non-technical people get in the way.
