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Bring back "Be Right Back"!I'm all for simplicity. But, with all these kinds of adjustments, one can also overdo it. I feel this has been the case for the new Windows Live Messenger 9.0. In this new release the various statusses have been simplified to just four: Available, Away, Busy and Hidden. While this makes sense (after all, you're away when you're out to lunch and you're busy when you're making a phone call), I feel this is missing the be right back status.
To me, Away has always indicated being away for a longer period of time -- Say about an hour or so. Busy doesn't cover it (I mean, sure, you could be busy going to the toilet, but ...). So, now, whenever I'm away for only a few minutes I have to either edit my name ("Siebe - BRB"), change my status and make everyone think I'm going away for a longer period of time, or tell everyone I'm talking to that I'll only be away for a few minutes.
I want be right back back... and I know I'm not the only one. Second weekend here, eh?Hmm. The second weekend here is almost up. So far everything is going well. My manager and our lead test (I think?) came up to Richmond last Friday. Good fun. Got some good information on the stuff we're going to do over the next few months (which should be totally kick-ass, by the way). Afterwars we had dinner with the four of us (3 + another tester of our team up here in Richmond). Got an XBOX yesterday. *Awessommee*. In case you're wondering, it's the Elite version... which isn't even that much more expensive, and has the benefit of a bigger HDD which comes in handy when installing games to the HDD (to speed up loading and so on), and has the HDMI output. I was blown away by the graphics of Gears of War 2 on the flatscreen TV here in my apartment (so far I had only been playing on an oldish TV!). The XBOX itself came with Lego: Indiana Jones as well as Kung Fu Panda, and I got GoW2 along with it. I'll buy some more games from the Microsoft company store, where stuff is way cheaper. So far I've unlocked little over half of the KFP achievements, and a couple of LIJ ones. Good stuff. First day of workJust got home from the first day of "work". Mostly it was listening to presentations, listening to HR telling us all kinds of stuff, and setting up machines and installing software. I havent been able to log in to the network yet, though ... Turns out that my account is currently disabled, most likely because it is currently being renamed (because I was a vendor for the past few months I already had an account).
Oh, and in case you're wondering (I doubt you are :-P) I didn't have to take the bus or a Microsoft Connector, because another new employee came to pick me up. Turns out we both did a few internships in Redmond, and he arrived over the weekend. We met up yesterday for a few drinks, as well, which was pretty cool.
There's nothing much else to tell, really. The day was okay, a little bit boring at times, but I'm also excited to start with the new job. Tomorrow and the rest of the week should be more interesting, as soon I get access to the network and get everything set up. Details, details, detailsI like details. I like knowing details. In a few days I'll be making the move from the Netherlands to Canada. No small feat, if you ask me. It's a complete culture change, and (hopefully) for a short while I'll have to manage everything on my own. Language fortunately is no barrier -- I consider myself quite fluent in English.
The most stressful thing will be flying. I don't mind flying itself. Actually, I love flying. For some reason or another, my hands and feet always feel warm (I have been diagnosed with Raynaud's Disease), which I suspect is due to the slightly reduced pressure in the cabin and generally speaking a relatively high temperature. So far I've only been flying non-stop, and this will be the first time I have a stop-over... In Heathrow, of all places... and I tend to be one of the people who go "what about my baggage?"; "will I need to gather it, and then head to the next check-in?"; "do I have enough time to make it to the next boarding?"; "I don't know the layout of the airport, yikes!", and so on. I'm sure it will be alright, but right now I'm not content with it. Next time when I'm paying for the ticket, it's *so* going to be a direct flight.
At the moment I'm still waiting for the address of my temporary housing. Once I know that, I can start figuring out how I can get from my home to work the most effeciently (so far, Transit 101 from TransLink has been very helpful!). Seeing as I don't drive (no drivers license), I'll have to use public transport for now. My bike isn't coming until I find a permanent place to live (it is being shipped by the movers with my other goods). I'll go for a test drive on the bus the day after I arrive, so that there are no unexpected surprises when I try to get to work on monday.
Then I'll have to arrange a new bank account, and get a social security number (of whatever the equivalent is in Canada). I still haven't decided on which bank I want to go with though. I'm thinking about going with Royal Bank of Canada, but I'm not sure. Surprisingly enough, it's very hard to find good ratings of banks. I'm currently spoiled with an account with one of the two or three triple-A rated banks in the world (yes, even after the whole economic bloodshedding).
Once I'm settled in, I can start looking for houses/apartments. Microsoft takes care of a lot of things for me, though, which is good. One of them is helping me find a place to live. Hopefully I'll be able to get something near a shopping center/supermarket and still be able to get to work without too much of a hassle.
If you've got any tips, leave a comment :-) "Computers are like drugs"From http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000761.html:
I fear this warning came too late for me. Writing a bookFirst off, happy new year everyone.
For a while now I've been having the idea of writing a book. Being a bit of a book-lover myself (I think I averaged reading about 1 book per week in 2008), I've always wondered what it would be like to write a book myself. Although I like a wide range of subjects, it would most likely be a mix of action, mystery and mindgames. On the other hand, having a crack at writing a humorous book (ala Discworld series, Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, and so on) would be cool too.
The only problem I have is preliminary writers block. I have a general idea of the story of a book, but I doubt it would ever be able to get in enough pages to call it a book. I think it would be more like one or two chapters. Perhaps I should just start by writing short stories? Complicated"This is another example of how things can get extremely complicated even though the basic idea is very simple: Once you have the simple idea working, everybody finds random special cases that force you to take your simple idea and make it more and more complicated."
Unfortunately, this is way too common. Unicode class to UnicodeCategory cheat-sheetCheatsheet of Unicode classes to the .Net Framework System.Globalization.UnicodeCategory enum names:
Po = OtherPunctuation Pf = FinalQuotePunctuation Pi = InitialQuotePunctuation Pe = ClosePunctuation Ps = OpenPunctuation Pd = DashPunctuation Pc = ConnectorPunctuation Co = PrivateUse Lu = UppercaseLetter Ll = LowercaseLetter Lt = TitleCaseLetter Lm = ModifiedCharacter Lo = OtherLetther Mn = NonSpacingMark Mc = SpacingCombiningMark Me = EnclosingMark Nd = DecimalDigitNumber Nl = LetterNumber No = OtherNumber Zs = SpaceSeparator Zl = LineSeparator Zp = ParagraphSeparator Cc = Control Cf = Format Cs = Surrogate Sm = MathSymbol Sc = CurrencySymbol Sk = ModifierSymbol So = OtherSymbol Cn = OtherNotAssigned You're welcome. Curiosity killed the catJust for kicks I visited the new website of the DHS where all non-US citizens now need to apply in order to be permitted to fly to the US. Aside from it being one of the most ridiculous rules, "evar", it has another "What the F..." issue:
Please read it carefully. I especially like the end of the blob of text, where it says "By clicking OK below...", as if I have a choice! There is no cancel button which takes me the hell out of there (redirect to DHS.gov or whatever they think is best). So by visiting the site and being prompted with that dialog, you must agree to it, without being given a chance to back out. Nasty. Twitter & Number of followingI've been using Twitter for a while now and I've noticed that some active Twitter users are following more than a couple of hundred people. This makes no sense to me. On your Twitter homepage, you get all the various tweets from the people you follow. Let's say you are following 400 people and each of them tweets about once or twice a day. That's 400 to 800 tweets -- the homepage only shows about 20 or so. How can one actually believe they are keeping in touch by following that much people?
Not only that, but (recent) scientific studies have shown that our brain is hardwired to be able to interact with about 150 people. This may be a little less or a little more, but in general I agree with the principle of not being to able to interact with over a double of that number. If we try to keep in touch with much more than that, chances are you are neglecting some people completely, pay less attention to others, and eventually only focus on a select group of people. Not only that, certain companies are now coining terms like MySpace burn-out, social burn-out, etc. because a lot of users of social websites are experiencing tremendous stress trying to keep up with their friends.
How about yourself? Do you use any social "web 2.0" websites? Do you experience stress trying to keep up with them all? I finally caved, after months and months and months of nagging by embee. I signed up for Twitter. I must admit it is slightly addictive, but I hope not to end up being a Twitter Shitter. So, from now on, also check out my Twitter page. I'll be mostly dumping my various one-liner thoughts about technology, mostly because im usually to lazy to write a full blog post about it. That's not my nameThey call me Sieb,
They call me Sibe,
They call me Seibe,
They call me Sybe,
That's not my name,
That's not my name,
They call me Tolsman,
They call me Tolsa,
Questions about the Windows Live Messenger Web APIs?Check out http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wlmessengerapidev/threads/. They have, by far, one of the best question/answer ratios of the MSDN forums. There's perhaps only one or two questions which haven't been answered yet. Cool! CSS Extensions for Internet Explorer 8Anyone who is using IE CSS extensions, or CSS attributes which haven't been fully defined or accepted by W3C yet should cehck out the following blog post from the Internet Explorer team: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/08/microsoft-css-vendor-extensions.aspx. The page discusses the new IE8 CSS extensions, which will now be prefixed with "-ms-", similar to "-moz-" for Mozilla, and so forth.
Your page will still render fine in compatibility mode (which was heavily discussed a few months ago).
Also, kudos to the IE team for actively blogging about their new product this way! I wish other product teams, especially those in Windows Live, did the same. ZuneWhat can I say? I love my Zune. It's big music library has given me several very good recommendations, and I especially like the "similar artists", "similar albums", and so forth, features. What I like even more is the ability to look up other frequent listeners of a particular album or artist.. I found a lot of great new songs that way.
I think I'll switch to a newer Zune model sometime in the near future though -- I still have the "v1" (i.e. 30GB) one. Financial crisisDuring my highschool career I had five years of Economics class. One of the very first things we were taught was the following, very simply graph. It demonstrates very clearly the general way economy is going: we are getting more wealthy over time, but every now and then the economy has a (small) setback. However, during this time we are still more wealthy than we were, say, 10 years ago -- yet everyone complains. The economy eventually restores itself, until the next setback comes along.
Right now I am not (personally) worried about the financial crisis -- I think a lot of people were indeed too greedy, too stupid, and simply had a wrong vision of what was affordable. Especially the United States has become a culture of "if we can't afford it, we'll buy it on a credit card/loan". This is, in the long run as we're seeing now, stupid. Most people are no longer able to afford their basic cost of living. Too big of a car, too big of a house, the latest crazy tech stuff, and so forth, while they couldn't afford it. Simply speaking, if you can't afford it, do not buy it. This point should be hit home harder by any government out there who isn't already. Encouraging people to spend, spend, spend while they have barely any cash in their accounts is wrong.
Besides, my money is safe. The Dutch government (I am unsure whether this is a European thing or not) guarentees up to 20,000 euro -- That is, if a bank were to tumble over, you get up to 20,000 of your checkings/savings money back. Of the next 20,000 euro, 90% is guarenteed to get back into your hands. Above that, all bets are off. But seriously, which average citizen has over 20,000 euro (or 40,000 euro) in their savings account? Most people I know have maybe 10,000 or so euro in their savings accounts, and that's being generous.
Plus, moving your money to a different bank account will only cause more trouble due to the wonderful nature of human psychology. Updated: Trust scanner drivers on VistaA long time ago I wrote about installing drivers for the Compact Scan USB 19200 scanner from Trust. Since then I've had several comments about it not working anymore, even when running it in compatibility mode for XP SP2. I have no updated the blog entry in question, with an additional step to still make the drivers work. It sucks that there are no official Vista drivers (and probably never will be), but it will do for now.
And yes, I still use that scanner myself. It comes in handy every now and then. Import TariffsI was recently researching import tariffs when I found a somewhat funny entry in the manifesto of tariffs: nuclear reactors. Imagine ..
A UPS or FedEx truck stops outside your house. The delivery guy gets out.
DG: Ah, hello, sir, I've got a package here for you .. Says is a nuclear reactor!
You: Oh good! I've been waiting for it for a while now!
DG: Where do you want it?
You: Oh, em, just put it in the backyard, ill unbox it later
DG: Very well, please sign here, here and here |
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