Tuesday I was in the hospital for my final checkup. So I hoped. The neurosurgeon thinks my pain is not coming from another hernia but from a nerve. He thinks one of my nerves has been damaged, which basically means I will have to learn to live with this amount of pain every day. That sucks big time, since without painkillers I can’t even normally walk or sleep or do anything for that matter.

It can also be an inflamated nerve, since that can be tricky to heal and with some people it takes quite some time to be painfree again. Hopefully that’s what’s causing my pain. A couple of more weeks in pain is doable, I’m not sure about the “for the rest of my life” option.

One of the add-ons still not modified to work with Firefox3 is Zombiekeys. But I found that this inconvenience can easily be fixed. Download the xpi, and open it in your favorite archive manager. Extract the file install.rdf and find the line in the Firefox section that reads:

2.0.0.*

Change the 2 into a 3 and save the file. Now update the xpi with your archivemanager by putting the modified install.rdf back into it. In Firefox open the xpi-file (File->Open File, or CTRL-O). Restart Firefox to enable the add-on.

Tomorrow I’ll be having an interview to get back to work. Finally, after almost a year. It’s nearby, it’s a job I can handle and they don’t mind if I can’t show up on occassion when I’m experiencing too much pain, so the conditions look promising. I’ll keep you posted.

My Windows machine (which else!) seems to be infected with Srizbi. The machine is protected by Trend Micro OfficeScan, by AVG Free, it runs SpyBot and I manually run Ad-Aware. They all say the machine is clean (now). Still, both SpamHaus (CBL) and SpamCop put me on their blacklist as soon as the Windows machine has been online for a couple of hours. Shutting the machine down (or disconnecting the network cable) and waiting a couple of hours up to a day, and things are fine again.

Dear lazyweb, please tell me how to get rid of this ugly bastard? I’ve googled around, read all information about Srizbi, but it does not seem to be on my system, so it must be something that just looks like it. Please help.

Thank you.

Firefox 3 has been released and finally I can use the Del.icio.us buttons and more importantly the Google toolbar again. Why these people didn’t release a beta/RC-compatible version of their add-ons I can’t understand. Like they think nobody uses beta/RC versions?

My sister has a Jura espressomachine. It does everything automatically, so you only have to put in coffee beans and water, and then select the amount (30-240ml) of coffee and how strong (normal, strong, extra strong) you like it. That’s it. She and her partner tried a lot of different coffee beans and now have a couple of favorites. I regularly go there. Not to see her, but to drink her delicious coffee ;-)

Today I bought a Jura of my own. Not a new one, since I don’t have the money for such an expensive machine, but a refurbished one. It’s the older version of the model my sister has, but it works like a charm and the coffee is almost as nice. Almost, since my sister is not always there to enjoy a cup with me…

For the record, I now own a Jura Impressa E75.

I have a good camera (a Canon 350D) with a decent set of lenses and a good flashlight. When I go on vacation, I take it all with me. But I also do that when visiting a restaurant, or when doing some other trip or going to an event. It’s a heavy backpack to carry around, and most of the time, it is a pain in the ass. So I decided to buy a compact-camera on the side, and this afternoon I bought the Canon Powershot G9. It’s very sturdy (all metal body), it has all features an SLR has, it creates very good (IQ-wise) images. But a lot of compacts do that. I decided to buy the G9 mainly because it can use my Canon Speedlite, and because it uses the same batteries as the 350D.

Since I bought it, I already shot over a 100 pictures and some movies. The movie quality is very good, but if you really want to make movies, nothing compares to a real videocamera. The pictures are impressive, but it takes some getting used to the slower reaction time of the camera when pressing the shutterrelease. That’s the main reason I sold my first digital camera and bought a DSLR (my previous camera, a Fuji S2 Pro). But compacts have come a long way, and with this camera its not annoying, it’s just that I need to remember it’s not an SLR when using it, mainly because of the focussing speed. There is some time between point and shoot.

Also, I bought a 50mm (f/1.8) lens for the 350D. To weighten the backpack even further…

Yesterday I went to the neuro-surgeon because my after-surgery-resting-period was over and he needed to check me out. I already knew things were not what they should be, since I’m in pain all day again since about 1.5-2 weeks now. He prescribed the original medication again, and another 7 weeks of resting. Not 7 weeks of taking-it-easy, but 7 weeks of resting. Now where is that online shop that sells “patience”?

A couple of days ago I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, also known as Hardy Heron. I not sure if I like it all. There is no Firefox 2 anymore, only the beta of Firefox 3, which basically means 90% of the plugins don’t work. No Google toolbar. Can you imagine?
Also, xmms is gone. I don’t want a media-organizer or streaming audio, I want a mediaplayer, and xmms is damn good at that. So I had to compile it from source, something I didn’t want to do anymore since I made the switch to Ubuntu.
My mouse (a Microsoft Trackball Explorer) worked perfectly in Gutsy via xmodmap, but something has changed in the X-server, and now everything must be done via xorg.conf. Not sure why, but it took me some time to figure it out.

But it’s not all bad. Compiz works perfectly now with the standard ATI drivers in the kernel. No more starting the computer, changing the loaded fglrx kernel module to the manually compiled one, and restarting X. It just works now.

And of course, the whole upgrade process was a breeze. Compare that to upgrading your Windows…

Can you imagine what that is like? Two (2) whole weeks without an internet connection at your fingertips? Just Opera Mini on my cellular, but that’s about it. Don’t think too long about that question, because I already know the answer. It’s what some people would refer to as “hell”. Since today, I’m in heavenback online. Hi crowd!