Because I had some proxy-problems with Firefox on my laptop (the new one) I decided to install Google’s Chrome (I had it on my old laptop). To my surprise Chrome now has extensions, like the add-ons in FireFox. So I immediately installed adblock-plus, a gesture extension, and some other usefull stuff. Chrome ROCKS! I love it.

When I stopped being a freelancer, my salary dropped dramatically (to about 25%). We (back then I was part of a “we”) coped, but we needed to cut back some expenses. One of the things were my contacts. I bought them at a very good, but expensive specialist, so I switched to the so called LTP (Lens Totaal Plan) from Hans Anders. You save some money each month and after six months this money is enough for 6 pairs of contacts. And so it goes on and on. It was said, that whenever you would stop the program, the money you had save up until then, would be refunded.
Last week I sent in the form to stop the LTP. Today I got the confirmation letter. Along with a coupon for the money saved so far. To find that this money can only be spend on……contacts in a Hans Anders shop. Not even glasses, or sunglasses, no…just contacts.

What a big ugly fuck-up company Hans Anders is!

Period.

Completely forgot about this occassion to party: RaRe IT Services became 10 this year!

You know that you really left a company when you try to log in to the system and you get an “auth_fail_exception”. Buh-bye Transfer. Hello Merkator!

My new boss called me today, saying he has a job for me. Start: a.s.a.p., but only when I have my own hardware. So he “ordered” me to buy a laptop. One could get worse instructions from upperhand. So I bought a HP Pavilion dv7-3030ed. It’s not the Elitebook I got from my current employer, but the Pavilion is about 1000 euros cheaper.
It’s a great machine, with Win7 x64 on it, very nice wide 17″ LED-screen, 4 GByte of memory and a 640500GByte harddisk. Notefully, the keyboard is better than on the Elitebook, the mousepad is not. Definitely not. So I’ll buy a lasermouse to go with the laptop.

The new phone is not going to be the Nexus One, but the Motorola Milestone (Droid in other countries).

Open Source benefits the customers. Google recognizes this, as you can read in their press release of the new Google Android (2.1) phone. Let’s see when I can import one, or whether I’ll have to wait for the Dutch (read: expensive) release.

Update: no, it’s not gonna be cheap, $530 + $150 = $680 ~ €475.

In 2009 I wrote “As 2008 was a year of pain and suffering for me, I’m already beginning to suspect that 2009 will not be so great as I hoped it would be. For starters, I did not win the 25M euro in the lottery. I started 2009 with the flu. And I didn’t get as drunk as last year (there’s no hole in my memory). Fortunately I didn’t make any resolutions, so I can do whatever I want this year.”

Well, for starters the lottery didn’t win me the 27.5M euro nor the 10M Jackpot, and I didn’t even drink as much as last year (I even drove home by myself this time, no cab). But I didn’t start this year with the flu. That counts for something. I did some overdue backing up of my pictures to DVD, I backupped my MySQL databases, and I upgraded WordPress and Gallery to the latest (stable) versions.

I have no real new years resolutions, but my intention is to have a little more exercise again. Some running or some in-line skating, not sure yet.

A new year, a new WordPress version and a new theme. The upgrade to WordPress 2.9 went without a glitch, and I upgraded to a simpler theme as well. Please tell me if you like it. WPG2 is gone. It keeps nagging me about mod_rewrite, whereas mod_rewrite is active in Apache, but the stupid WPG2-plugin seems to think it’s not, so it disables the plugin in Gallery2 as well, leaving me with a less functional Gallery. That sucks, so WPG2 will not return.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is not supported in WP 2.3+, so tags are gone for old posts. Unfortunately! Sorry ’bout that.

I can’t seem to get the Gallery integration to work properly. Either I get lots of 404’s in my Apache’s logfile,or the popup image is bigger than the screen or something else is wrong. I’m not sure what to do, but this sucks. I know, I should upgrade to the latest Wordpress, perhaps that helps.