Just prolongated my KPN subscription and ordered the Samsung Galaxy S5. Samsung offers a free S-View cover and 32GB memory card until the end of the month, so if any of you (local) S5 owners is interested in the S-View cover, let me know.
Aug 222014
Jul 062014
Got my first tattoo yesterday. Lines and shading done, colouring will be done in four weeks.
Koi and lotus on my left arm
Jan 232014
It’s been just over a week (9 days to be exact) that I started playing Ingress, and I became level 5 yesterday. It’s not as fast as some people level up (level 6 can be done in a couple of days or so), but I mostly play alone and did the first days only on foot. Now I use the car more.
Levelled up to L5
Jan 042014
My receiver broke down. Well, not all of it. Everything worked, except sound. Pretty basic for a receiver if you ask me. I inquired what a repair would cost, but all I was quoted were the costs of taking the device in for investigation. I decided to give it some rest, and asked my friends for advice. Their most sane conclusion was just to do the repair, since replacing the receiver would be way more costly.
This evening I started watching a tv series, and switched from sound via the receiver to stereo sound via the tv. It’s an flatpanel tv, so I guess you know what difference that made. Yuck. But…better than no sound at all.
During watching, I started to notice an echo. Because I was too busy watching, too pulled in to what I was watching, I didn’t pay much attention to it. After I watched my series, I switched to digital radio, and -as a creature of habit- I turned up the volume by using the Logitech remote, not the remote from the tv. The volume did increase. It took a second for me to realize that…..I just turned up the volume of the receiver. The echo I had been hearing was coming from …. my receiver.
As by magic, it now works again. All channels have sound, all inputs work, all I now have to do is put the right “label” into each source again since I did a factory reset to make sure the receiver wasn’t stuck in some software loop or something.
So……until some scientific rational reason comes up, I am going to believe that it was magic that made my receiver work again. Isn’t that something?
Jan 022014
In October my NAS disk broke down after the powerfailure. So I bought new disks. Last month (not even a week ago) my Windows system disk (SSD) died (unrecoverable). So I bought a new disk. Today my receiver gave in. No more sound. Everything works, except there is no sound. Factory reset (my receiver has that) didn’t work. So I’m guessing the pre-amp inside died, since it has 7 discrete amplifiers for each channel, so the problem must lie before it reaches these amplifiers.
WHY?
FML!
Dec 292013
Had a lovely -belated- Christmas dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. I fell ill at the end of the first Christmas day, so I had to postpone my dinner that was planned for the 26th. My sister fell ill as well. I was recovered enough today, and she decided she would not be a party-pooper and decided to come visit me. I stripped the starters from the menu at her request, and after all we had a lovely evening.
After cleaning up, I went upstairs to play some games. To my surprise, my PC had two black screens with only a cursor in the top left corner. Okay, let’s reboot. Same result. BIOS setup revealed that everything was seemingly in working order. But…..what’s that, only one harddisk. The normal HDD, not the SSD bootdisk. Unplugged the power, unplugged the normal HDD, boot and……
REBOOT AND SELECT PROPER BOOT DEVICE
Meaning the BIOS can’t find ANY boot device while only the SSD is connected. Let’s see what my server thinks of this disk. It’s linux, and it has hot-swap on the SATA ports enabled, so that should be a piece of cake.
And of course it was: to linux the disk was dead as well. On two different ports. After connecting via hot-swap, or after hard reboot.
Meaning: my desktop PC is out of order for now. The SSD has 36 months of warranty, and only 18 have passed. So yes, an OCZ Vertex4 128GB died after only 18 months of (not very intense) use. How fucked up is that?
Dec 152013
I’ve created a page with Maps Marker to show my employers. The address of the main office as a marker. You can hover to see the name of the company, or click on the marker to see the full address and the period I worked there. Click on the My Employers tab on the top of the screen to view it.
For now only the latest three employers, but I will add the rest a.s.a.p.
Nov 302013
As a sidetrack for a work related project, I recently looked at GeoDjango. GeoDjango is the geospatially enabled version of Django, the socalled webframework for perfectionists with deadlines.
Doing the GeoDjango tutorial for the umpth time, Python caught me again. The way the language works, it seems to flawlessly connect with the way I think when I’m programming.
I needed to do some manual upgrading, can’t remember what exactly, but that had to do with the Ubuntu registries not having the latest version or so. Nothing special.
Thinking about two projects to create now. One is an idea I already have for a long time, so maybe it will see daylight some time.
Nov 282013
Yes, that’s right! The deal was made earlier this week, but I wanted to go public with it after talking to my boss. Which I did this afternoon. He took it very well, I guess.
For the first time in a long time, I will be leaving consultancy behind me. Unfortunately that also means no more company car, so I’ll need to buy one myself in time. My new title is Senior Developer, and I guess the senior refers to the amount of grey hair I have, or the lack of hair for that matter 😉
I will be starting my new job February 1st, since I have a 2 months notice on my current contract. Plenty of time to finish my current project(s), and to transfer the knowledge I have of previous projects to some of my colleagues.
Exiting times!
Oct 242013
On Friday the 13th we had a power outage. Of course. It lasted an hour. After that my whole house came to life again, except….the TV-signal, my landphone and my internet. Correct, same provider. They had problems after the power got back on, and their problems lasted several hours.
I didn’t think I had any problems, everything in the house seemed to work. Except when I tried to get some files of my NAS disk for work. It died. Connected the disk to a Windows machine, my Linux server, tried repairing the disk with a controller of the same type of disk, but none of that worked. The disk was dead. It contained my photos, my music, my documents, all my downloads and some backups. Great. Because of money issues, the disk was not mirrored. And I found that my latest backup of my pictures was….from July 2011.
🙁
I bought 4 new disks.
Two 3TB disks to be installed as RAID1 (mirrored disks) in my server, to be my main storage for pictures, documents and the like. And the NAS gets two brand new 1TB disks, also to be used in RAID1. To make things more expensive, I bought NAS-grade disks, which basically can stand being “on” 24/7.
The NAS disks are now installed and I am gradually restoring my pictures onto it.
The period the missing pictures span was certainly not the best period of my life. But there were some good moments I captured. Guess I have to make up for that in the years to come. Let’s charge the Canon, and start shooting.