Lemony Snicket’s: A series of unfortunate events
It’s a nice movie. Nothing special, really. A bit over the top, now and again. Not as good as I expected it to be. But maybe we movie-watchers are spoiled, these days.
People and their dogs
Some people are worse than the average nerd in regards to communication. When I told my father today that Monique and me wanted to go walking with Dark, the puppy, he asked us not to stay too long, since he expected visitors this afternoon. One thing you need to do, ‘visitors’ with family Stoop in the weekends usually means ‘people who want to see the dogs’. So we made sure to get back early. That proved to be an easy task, since it started raining when we were walking in the fields.
The woman who came to visit, brought her own dog, Parel (pronounced PA-rule, with the A the same as in ‘Da’ from daddy, it means Pearl in Dutch). Parel is only two weeks older than our own Dark, but she looked about the same as our Aagje, in size and built! Quite amazing. Her owner obviously hadn’t been to puppy-school with Parel, since she just didn’t listen. People should go to puppy-school with their dogs, it just makes them behave better. And the earlier you start, the better. I’ve seen that with Aagje. But that’s another story.
Her owner was a bit… how can I say this politely? I mean no disrespect, but it was difficult to actually have a conversation with the woman. Afterwards my father told me she’d been here before, without a dog, and he had the same trouble with her, so he was glad that she took her dog in with her this time, so he could play a little with the dog while trying to hold a conversation with her. She kept combining all kind of things that have no consequence to each other.
I’ll give you one example, which struck me as very peculiar. At a certain time, Monique, who was here also, explained to the woman the theory behind deep pressure. Monique is an ergotherapist, she knows about everything there is to know about perception and treatments to improve perception. She primarily treats small children with perception disorders or i.e. AD/HD. She knows a lot about the way signals are processed by our body and brain. Now, the owner of Parel probably didn’t know that, but when Monique started to explain about deep pressure and the result on small children and, as we earlier noted, with the same effect on Aagje, her respons was very… peculiar:
“Ow, I don’t know about such things. I’m probably not someone to treat my dog with homeopathic stuff.”
I mean… huh? We never mentioned homeopathy or anything similar, what was she talking about? Strange woman indeed…
By the way, the effect of deep pressure on Aagje was that it calmed her down. Monique told us to apply deep pressure daily and Aagje would probably become a quieter dog. It worked.
Whatever. Tonight, Monique and I are going to see Lemony Snicket’s: A series of unfortunate events. I’ll tell you later if I liked it.
Oh and I did 32 crunches today. Pressured myself into that, since I did 30 again yesterday and Monique told me I should be able to do 50 at least at my age…
Interesting prospect
Yesterday we (Bart and me) went to a new prospect. Bart has done an internship there, so they already knew him. We talked and it was a nice conversation. A conclave between equals, so to say, with Bart’s and my opinion actually being valued. I can really appreciate such a talk. They took the time, too, to talk to us, about three hours. So I think we can call the meeting a succes. Next week we’ll be building an offering and before summer we hope to be able to implement everything.
And no, I cannot say which company or what we will be doing there.
Actually helping people
The last few days I’ve been thinking about going to Asia or Africa and actually help people there building up their lives again. No, I’m able to actually build houses and such, but maybe I can help build the knowledge or computer-networks in schools or some such? I don’t know. I think that when they would ask me for such a task, I’d instantly say yes. But maybe I’m not the right guy for such a job. Yes, I could teach and I’m quite proud in saying that at least that’s one of my virtues, being able to teach. When they’ve got Internet over there, I might even be able to setup some small ISP’s or something. An Internet café, I don’t know. Just giving money doesn’t feel good enough. But I can’t just pick up my belongings and go live there for a few months. I’d only be a burden, I’m sure. I wish I could really help.
Scanning for spam
For our colocated server, I’m working on integrating SpamAssassin with the MTA on the server, Postfix. The latest SpamAssassin has features I really like, but I seem unable to correctly implement it the way I want. The easy setup is site-wide, with common settings for every user. But the nice thing about the latest version is that one can use an SQL database (PostgreSQL in our case) with personal settings for each email address. I wish it was as simple as it sounds, I’m unable to make it work the way I want.
I’m trying to use SpamPD to act as a transparant smtp proxy between Postfix and Amavisd-new. I could use Amavis to invoke SpamAssassin, but Amavis doesn’t support all the options SpamAssassin has in a transparant way and I actually find it a bit of a sloppy implementation. I mean, it works kinda nice, but it doesn’t really use the Unix way-of-life, all kinds of small, independent programs with their own specialty. When SpamAssassin gets new features, Amavis can’t use them. So I never really worked with this setup. The trouble with spampd seems to be that it doesn’t use the SQL setup as I have told it to. The normal spamd, the one that doesn’t work as a smtp-proxy but is distributed with SpamAssassin, can use it, though, with special options that spampd doesn’t support. All mail scanned by spampd is processed as user ‘root’, which is not something I want…
Bart just suggested I should take a look at DSpam, which actually has all the features I want and acts like a transparant SMTP proxy, just the way I like it. It even includes a user interface for each seperate user. I think. I’ll take a better look at it tonight.
Last night was fun. We went to a Italian restaurant, where she had a Lasagna dish and I had a Pizza Alla Diavola, which pretended to be extra spicy, but was in fact just moderatly spicy. Although Monique disagrees with that, she thinks I’m so used to spicy food, my taste-buds have deteriorated. She could be right, though. Too bad I couldn’t stay for the night :-| Ah well, I’ll see her again tomorrow.
Just did 30 crunches again. Maybe I’ll so some more later. It’s hard getting past 30, I think I forget to breath when I do them :)
Tonight I’ll be in Venlo with my girlfriend. We’re going out for dinner together, just because we feel like it. Since I don’t have my student’s public transport pass anymore, I’ll have to actually pay for the trainride! ;-) I don’t mind, even though I don’t really have the money for it. Yesterday I requested the discount card from the Dutch Railways, so next time I’ll at least be able to go there with 40% discount.
I won’t be sleeping there, though. I snore and she’s got a rough week at work, since they’re introducing a new system there. She can need all the sleep she can get, I’d figure. So I’ll be returning late tonight.
Did two sets of crunches today, the first of 22 and the second of 25. So that’s a total of 47. Not sure if I can keep track of them this way, though ;-)
Commercializing “Good Deeds”
I’m horrified by some companies. The way they abuse the public’s sympathy for the people in Asia who were hit by the tsunami last Boxing Day is really bad taste. The one action I’m most horrified by, is Ilse‘s latest scam. They will donate €0.01 for each search with their search engine and they “hope to reach the €10,000 in three days”! It’s insulting and really, really bad taste, that a company would abuse such a disaster to get more hits.
If they really care for the victims, they should just donate the €10,000. Why try to misguide people to use their search engine in the guise of helping those people? They don’t earn €0.01 for each search, I tell you. It’s not a matter of “collecting the payment”, it’s a matter of “hey, if you help us get more popular, we’ll donate some pocket change to your favourite good cause at the moment!”.
Don’t get me wrong, there are enough commercial efforts to help the people in Asia, but not like this. When one sends an SMS to a certain number, €1.50 gets added to your phone bill and €1.50 will be added to giro 555 (the bank account from the Dutch Coöperating Aid Organisations). Next thursday three tv stations will colaborate in an effort to raise money for the same bank account and there will surely be lots of ads shown there, if just to pay for such an event. That’s commercial, but I don’t mind that (although I probably will not be watching, since more and more people are saying there’s already enough money collected and I payed my share).
I consider Ilse’s action absurd and a show of really really bad taste. We want to help the people in Asia because we feel connected to them, the world is getting smaller and smaller because of modern communication and transportation. There are reports of people abusing the disaster for their own gain, but those are individuals. But a legitimate company who does this? It’s just plain improper. I’m ashamed Ilse started from Interlink, a group of students whom I had the privilege with to be a part of for several years.
What are those people thinking? *shakes head sadly*
Puppytraining
Okay, it’s official, I’ll be doing the training for Angel, one of our dogs. Dad wanted her to go to a dogschool, the same one as Dark is going to with Kitty (my sister). Dad went to visit there yesterday, because he wanted to see how it was set up, but since it’s in a manège (horse riding school) he couldn’t stay long: my dad is very allergic for horses and when he left he was hardly able to breath. (He’s okay now, if you’re wondering.)
So I’ll be going. I’m really looking forward to it, since Angel is my favourite (although all four of them are great dogs). Training starts Januari the 24th, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Beerbelly
I hardly drink beer, actually. But my belly is the place where fat arrives first and decides to hang out. One gigantic LAN-party for fat. Nice. Had a fight about that with my girlfriend last weekend. She’s so sweet, she’s worried about my health. I’m not that fat, really. I could loose 10kgs, but I’m not flowing over my chair or something. But she wanted me to work on my belly…
So yesterday I did 28 crunches. Today I did 30. Let’s hope I can keep it up.
mkgallery patch
My dad uses a little bash-script with the name mkgallery for creating photoalbums of his dogs. I just reinstalled his pc (as you may have read in earlier posts) and therefor the script was removed. In the last years I made some additions to the script and today I had to re-apply those. Made a patch from it, so everyone can apply it easily. You can find the patch here.
It adds a -f switch, to surpress the printing of filenames of the pictures and a -e to change the extension for the created gallery. The extension defaults to html (the original behaviour), but now it’s possible to change it to php, so you can incorporate php-scripts in the album.
Strange companies
Some companies invent strange reasons to tell potential customers that they don’t have the time or inclination to actually do some work. For example, I asked the dutch branch of Bol.com if they have a z39.50 compliant search interface available for the public. Not a strange question, because although the standard is an ANSI (American) standard, it’s quite an Open way to search for books and the like. Programmes like Tellico can use it to search for certain books, something that’s very interesting for a bibliophile like myself.
Note, I asked if they had one available for the public… And what’s their answer? “I’m sorry, but we can’t disclose technical information about our site due to security constrictions.” I don’t get it. Why not just answer “No, we don’t have such an interface available for the public” or “No, but we’re thinking of implementing it” or something like that? Sounds like corporate babble again. *sigh*
Valid Email addresses
I’m a big fan of The Order of the Stick and today the author/artist, Rich Burlew, informed me that finally the first volume of the comic will be in print. I love web-comics, especially when they are a parody of Dungeons & Dragons or other Fantasy RPG’s. For example, I bought all three volumes of Bruno The Bandit. That’s really a lot of laughs. So I went on to buy the first book of The Order of the Stick and apparantly the e-commerce software used is something called CubeCart. Well, let me tell you, that stuff is real rubbish.
Most sites I know that deal with email addresses are rubbish, actually. Since they don’t allow for a “+”-sign in email addresses. I hate that. I really do. The “+”-sign in an email address is a really convenient way to track where spam comes from. My MTA, Postfix, allows for the “+”-sign to be used as a delimiter (and Postfix isn’t the only one that allows this). This way I can make different email addresses without any fuss, I just append a “+” and some string to my normal email address et voilà, a new email address that is automatically delivered to my normal Inbox. My email client, Novell’s Evolution (used to be Ximian’s Evolution, but Ximian was bought by Novell), can filter spam out and I can filter special email to other folders just by checking the address it was sent to. Very neat.
But alas, since those stupid programmers don’t follow Open Standards and RFC2822, they will not allow my address with a “+”-sign. Anders Jacobsen made the whole rant before, on his weblog. Be sure to read it.
I emailed Rich Burlow that since the app didn’t accept my valid email address, I was unable to buy a comic. Now, I feel sorry for the guy, he puts a lot of work into the comic and I’d like to support his work. Maybe I’ll try to donate some using PayPal… Assuming PayPal accepts “+”-signs in email addresses…
The First Day of the Year
I don’t really care for celebrating New Year. Some people consider it some kind of closure, a point in time to start anew, with a clean slate, so to say. Not for me. I don’t mind celebrating it, since it is a holiday and fireworks can be very nice to look at, but I don’t feel or act different the first day of the new year. I have no sudden urge to say to myself “Yes Tim, this is the year that you’re going to do things all different, from now on, there’s a new Tim, that will first of all loose 10 kgs of body weight.”
It is a special day for me, nonetheless, but for a whole different reason: Me and Monique, my girlfriend, became a couple on the newyears eve of 2003. And that’s a thing I like to remember and celebrate. But aside from that, my day was a normal saturday.
Since Monique went home around 4 o’clock in the morning, I slept late. I slept bad, too, since the dogs started barking early in the morning. I really woke up around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The first thing I do on a saturday is sms my Monique to ask her what we will be doing this day. She wanted to go take a stroll with one of the dogs. Since my dad has four dogs, there’s always one willing to jump in the car and drive to the park. So we went strolling through the park (‘Brunssumerheide’, for you dutchies) and didn’t return to the car until the sun was almost completely down, around half past five.
When we got back home, dad already prepared dinner. He asked us the day before if we’d like to fondue this day and of course, who can say no to fondue? We talked a lot during dinner, about all kinds of things, mostly the dogs, though. And then we went to see what was on the television. Sometimes we play a game, ‘Kolonisten van Catan’ in Dutch, ‘The Settlers of Catan’ in other places (see also GnoCatan), sometimes we watch television and tonight we watched the DVD of King Arthur (the director’s cut). My dad usually doesn’t understand the movie and goes to bed early and Monique and I have some of the privacy we sorely lack in our few days per week together.
So nothing special, just a normal day. I do need to loose those 10 kgs, though…
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Happy 2005!
I wish you all the best in this new year, may it be a better year than 2004. We need it.
