Wed, 28 Feb 2007
Deutsche Post - when fact beats fiction
Sometimes it happens, that items that are handeled by the German Mail (Deutsche Post) get damaged by their technical installations. When this happens, the item is put into a transparent plastic bag, together with a letter excusing the accident and telling the recipient how to file a request for investigation. So far so good. Unfortunately the envelope that got ripped in that case included two pendants that fell out and got lost.
I didn't expect this to be much of a problem, but when I tried to file my request at the mail office it turned out, that there is no form for that kind of incident. The regular form used for requests for investigation assumes that the whole shipment got lost. There is no way to indicate, that it is not an envelope that is missing but merely its content. Trying to exlpain that to the lady there also wasn't successful. Except for repeatedly telling me that I had no right to claim compensation when posting things via regular mail (I know!!) she wasn't of much help. In the end I filled out the form as good as possiblei, gave comments where necessary and the lady promised me I would at least get a confirmation from the service centre.
So today, after waiting for more then two weeks I finally got a letter
from the service centre. Guess what it said: "Dear Mister(!)
Reichle.
And now,
guess how I got it. Ripped, in a transparent plastic bag.
The investigation can not be carried out at the moment, since
the information you provided is not complete. Please complete and correct
the information according the missing item ..."
Posted at: 00:47 in /english/misc
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Tue, 20 Feb 2007
Bilingual
I've decided to split my blog into an English and a German section. This is mostly because I've now also started blogging about some local events that are probably not of much interest to readers from other countries, so I'll blog these in German, but the rest will still be in English. All English posts will still be syndicated on Planet Debian, the German ones will only be readable via my blog or the respective feed.
Talking about feeds, I spent some time trying out different feed formats for this blog, since I had some trouble with Planet. The current one (rss2.0) doesn't validate because there is html in the description element but apart from that it seems to be fine, so I'll keep it for the moment.
Posted at: 15:19 in /english/meta
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Wed, 07 Feb 2007
Planet weirdness or Dear Lazyweb
Should you be reading this blog via planet.debian.org, you may have noticed, that since a few days my posts stay on top of the page much longer than they should, usually for a few hours, and then start wandering down with the rest. The problem is: I am not editing my posts. Checking my rss feed shows a pubDate, e.g. Tue, 06 Feb 2007 20:26:00 CEST for my last post, and that pubDate doesn't change.
Could it be a problem, that the pubDate is in CEST rather than, say, UTC? Or that it doesn't give the offset? I am using blosxom and this began happening when I removed the until then unconfigured timezone plugin from /etc/blosxom/plugins/ because I wanted the date of my posts to be at my local time and that (actually) works without having the timezone plugin, so I thought I wouldn't need it. I've now replaced it and set the timezone to CEST. This didn't affect the pubDate of my rss, but maybe it will fix my planet problem. If not, any other ideas how to fix this would be most welcome.
UpdateAs I've been made aware by several people, we currently have CET, not CEST. Thanks for mentioning :) I am still trying to find the reason for all this. In the meantime, please excuse my planet b0rking.
Posted at: 13:38 in /english/meta
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Tue, 06 Feb 2007
Second and third day in Luxembourg
Right, back from Luxembourg and here's how the other two days went:
I woke up pretty early on Friday. Damn sportsmen, seems they all jump
out of bed at 6 am, to happily (and noisily) engage in their
respective sports. Horrible. I've never heard so many people be in such
a good mood at such an early hour.
Breakfast was great though!
I spent the rest of the day at the LinuxDays site. It was situated in the ground floor of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor and consisted of two rooms for talks and workshops and a tiny exhibition area with tables from Lilux, CAcert and a book shop. (Oooh, the temptation!!) It was also possible, to sit in the nearby cafe, which was right next to the exhibition area. Unfortunately LinuxDays.lu don't provide any kind of hacking centre (read: chair + table + power plugs), but the friendly people from CAcert offered me a seat at their booth/table so I could do some work.
My talk went quite good. I didn't feel as comfortable giving it as I usually do, since it weren't my slides. But I still think it went quite well and there were some interesting questions afterwards. There aren't any recordings of the talk, but the slides can as usually be found in the talks section of my homepage.
The third day started as the second one, but this time I stayed in bed and watched the Sendung mit der Maus instead of getting up at such an inappropriately early hour. I had actually planned to travel back to Hildesheim by train, but the very nice guys from quintessenz.at offered me a ride to Mannheim, which made my journey back home a lot more pleasant and also much more comfortable, since I could then take a direct train from Mannheim to Hildesheim.
Concluding, I'd like to thank the organisers of LinuxDays.lu for the really good service! (I've never before been at a Linux Day where speakers were provided with such a lot of stuff. (Free hotel, travel reimbursement, free food AND a book from the book shop! Yay!) It's been really fun, speaking at this event and I can recommend it to anyone. LinuxDays.lu may not be the biggest or most popular Linux Day, but it's a really nice local event and very professionally organised!
PS: So, where are the pictures I promised?
They are in a
directory on my home machine, and this will remain the only place
they're at until I've found a simple script to generate web galleries
(such as album, galrey, jigl, shalbum ...) that manages to generate a
gallery that doesn't use tables but CSS or I found the time to rewrite
or produce an according template for any of these scripts. Grrr.
Posted at: 20:26 in /english/travel
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Fri, 02 Feb 2007
First day in Luxembourg
- The train to Frankfurt is agreeably empty but, as usually, terribly cold! My fingernails are blueish!!
- Yay, Chinese food from a paper box. (I love those. They're classic!)
- Book recommendation of the day: English as a Second F*cking Language (Eek! Bookzilla is down!)
- The next train was an IC. I even got a seat with a power plug.
- The power plug was broken though.
- I noticed when my laptop suddenly went down without warning
- Mental note: Fix acpi!
- The train ride to Koblenz is really beautiful! The steep Rhine banks, the castles, the barges ...
- Mental note: Go there for holidays!
- I took pictures, but don't get them off my camera. Forgot the cable. Damn.
- There are pictures of the event at the event's site though. Also Sven is here, so I trust everything will be documented most exhaustively ;)
- The last train did an "unscheduled stop". Engine trouble. They fixed it rather quickly though.
- Using public transportation in a foreign country is a real challenge. Extra points for doing it in the country's capital, at rush hour, in the dark.
- ... and in French of course.
- WLAN at the Centre Henri Tudor works! only http and ssh though.
- Thank god for tunneling
- Favourite question of the day: "Are you a punk or a hacker?" Answer: "That goes together."
- I met some people and went for a pizza afterwards. Pizza Rucola. Hmm!
- F***ing HUGE hotel.
- It's a sport hotel. It has rubber floors and looks very much like a gym in some places.
- Some of my worst and most humiliating childhood/youth memories feature gyms. Urgh!
- WLAN costs 5 Eu for 24 hrs. Ts!
- The wall is decorated with a reprint of the poster for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Tasteful. Apparently every room has an Olympics poster. Maybe they should've left this one out.
- There's a sign saying you shouldn't smoke, and another one saying you shouldn't smoke in bed. Heh.
- Good night.
Posted at: 12:16 in /english/travel
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