Hey, It's Christmas.

 

Cool but (just) not freezing (+0C). The sky is overcast all day and we have a bit of rain and even a few flakes of snow. Very few, after about 10 I lost count being distracted between the flakes. It does prove that the weather forecast was correct setting the chance on snow at marginal but not impossible.
So no white Christmas. But then we are used to it, white Christmases here are about as rare as white Christmases at Sturm's or Mike's place.
Current (23:00) temp is 12.6C in, -1.6C out.

I try to sleep in but I am not used to doing that on Mondays so by 7:00 I am up. So I do some easy and definitively un-deep cleaning.

Then I burn my Christmas cake. I tried a few weeks ago and all went well then, the only problem was that my sheet of cake was a bit too thick to roll up nicely. So now I used a different plate to cast the dough in a thinner layer. I had the same amount of dough so I didn't adjust the baking time. Mistake of course. A thinner layer bakes faster than a thick layer. And the plate was different too (steel iso aluminium). The result was a nice hard bake, with a solid crust on the bottom, totally useless for rolling up.
I make a second batch of dough and bake that perfectly. Well I didn't burn the cake, just my fingers. Of course I did that on purpose to have a good reason for licking my fingers <g>
All's well that ends well and butter-cream is good to end swell-ings.
The cake? Just about perfect.

 

Later I struggle to get Oswal going again. To be able to work on Aria and the new box I needed to (finally) install the ps/2 KVM switch. I tried that last week but then Oswal refused to work with the mouse trough the box. That was probably a cable problem because after un- and re-plugging cables a few times things worked out all right yesterday. Only today Oswal booted into straight VGA. That is 640x480x16. Not nice. Then the Butterfly card (S3 Trio 3D/2X 4 MB SDRAM) didn't want to go higher. It took 5 reboots before I convinced that piece of silly silicon to behave itself.
So now I have Linux running on the attic. Still without the SCSI card, the Lizard simply hung on it, and I don't see the other two boxes on the network yet. Oh and the second CD drive is nowhere to be found.
Guess I have got some learning to do.

Nicely freezing but not enough to make the 2 mm of icy snow stick to the car. The roads in Belgium are quite use able because the read services start spraying salt early. In the Netherlands they wait much longer so that there the highway is open but the accesses are un cleared and extremely slippery. During the day the original first centimetre thaws but later gets rebuild to about 5 cm by another snow shower.
At home no extra snow fell so it is all gone by evening.
Current (23:00) temp is 8.5C in, -1.6C out.

Today is a full, official holiday in the Netherlands so the roads are almost empty. As is the office. Only 6 Belgians are in, holding the fort as it were. With me being BOFH.. Not a big chore because the AS/400 is running as smooth and unperturbed as ever.
I fiddle a bit with the price-calculation programs to find out how and where they are used. I did restructure the documentation menu and now I am struggling to work the findings about that calculation into it.
I took the old skeleton and realigned the bones, now I am hanging the meat back.

The copy protection being prepared on hard disks is under discussion at Thompson's message board. (It started with an article in The Register.)
Now I wonder why people are pointing to the record and film industry over the proposed 'copy protection' in ATA hardware. Sure they are prime candidates and pushers. It would also be a clincher for the ex-Clipper lobby in government. The net around freedom is tightening seriously.

Cold rain, on frozen ground. Yep, makes the commute just a bit less boring. Later on it thaws and keeps raining with intervals. We even get some fresh, half melted and refrozen snow (icy stuff).
Current (23:00) temp is 10.1C in, -0.4C out.

Traffic picked up only slightly and the office is occupied marginally better. Productivity doesn't soar however.
I get almost trough the calculation program. Just a few programs must be checked. I see one problem coming up though. Koen has to be able to come up with the price for an item (without conditions) for building an interactive price-list. Yep, we don't have that yet, you can come in and ask the price for an item and we cannot give that directly. To be able to produce such a list in advance it must be possible to pass a date (future) to the calculation. Currently the calculation gets a date but it is never filled (if empty the system date is used). The program does handle the date correctly if it is passed up to the point where a price is picked from a price list. At that point no date is passed.
So I have to check if a date is used in these programs.
When that is ready I still have to cast my notes into some reasonable form of HTML, fleshing out the skeleton.

I adapted my mirror slightly and I started preparing the year-end roll over. I did also put my DSL search on hold. I want a fixed IP address and I can get that but it costs five times more than the base option without fixed IP. OK, I can live with that. The problem is that the ISP's assume you are a business when you get a fixed IP and they also cost more, about ten times. Combined that clocks up to almost 10000BEF/month ($250), a bit more than I had counted on. There will almost never be more than one person using the ISP services at any one time so I want the single-user base option, which would cut the cost in half (or less).
I want a fixed address for two reasons. One is that I then can host my own web and mail servers. The other is that I can then connect to the office and work from home, skipping the daily 3.5 hour commuting. I can work from home now but that is over the phone via a call-back procedure. That means that my modem must be set to receive calls, which I don't like, and it means we cannot use the phone while I am connected. Adding a second phone line would solve that second problem but it does nothing for the first and it keeps the speed down.
So I am going to try some negotiating. And I'll be looking at the cable company again as well.

The frozen snow that fell last evening/night did not freeze on (just -1C) and the roads (in Belgium) were clear. The day itself was mostly grey with a bit of rain but also with two outbreaks of sunlight. No damage was done however. The evening is clear
Current (23:00) temp is 10.9C in, -2.8C out.

In stead of working on the validations or the calculation (or the V8-to-NX conversion) I spent the whole morning playing with JavaScript. The aim was to open a window without menu or tool bars of a defined size in a defined spot on the screen and closing the parent window. Not too difficult though there are some hidden traps. About two hours after finding a working solution I actually understood the whole thing (and I had found a few other possibilities on the way).

Of course JavaScript is not what I should do. So in the afternoon I work on the calculation problem. I got everything documented down well enough to start coding. Though that may not be necessary even. All the programs involved handle the date correctly. If Koen doesn't need the conditions included in the item price he can get it by just changing the call.

 

I spent all my evening time fighting with a Lexmark printer. And I lost to that stupid, stubborn piece of plastic.
Some time last wee my father had had a paper jam. Well, not he himself but the printer. He got the paper out but a small part got stuck. I got it out with my old surgical tweezers and he printed normal afterwards. This evening I wanted to print a (next) year calendar for Suzan. That would be 52 pages black and white so I didn't do that on my DeskJet 840 but borrowed the Lexmark for it. After the first page the 'paper jam' light came on. After searching and taking the thing apart (toner and drum) I found a tiny 2x2 mm chip of paper which I removed. Printing resumed normal but just for 2 pages. The paper jam light came on again. And I couldn't find anything jamming anything else.
It got delivered on 1997/12/24 with 3 years guarantee. Of course.
I will take it apart with my screwdriver this weekend and see what I can do. I am afraid that if something broke it will be a small 0.05c plastic sensor pin. Of course sending it in for repairs will cost a wee bit more than 0.05c.

Freezing less hard than late at night. My car is frosted over never the less. It turns out to be a nice sunny day. Until I hit the road in the evening cause then it starts to snow. Heavily. The only advantage is that the left lane on the highway is all but free of traffic so I can zip past the others.
Current (23:00) temp is 10.0C in, -2.1C out.

I finish off the V8-to-NX conversion of the TeleSales management module in the morning. The afternoon is mostly spent socialising in the office over a bottle of wine (one glass each). Not very productive but then, it's the last day of the year.

All the time I gain by recklessly driving trough the snow is lost on the border. There have been customs actions all the week but today there is much more traffic, lots of Germans on their way to France for skiing, causing a long pileup. Normally you can pass the border at 120 km/h (or more, breaking the law) on the two lane highway. Now everybody has to pass, single-lane, over the parking lot at the back of the customs building.

Snow and rain in the evening and night followed by some freezing (just -2C). I don't need my car today but Suzan does and she spent quite some time getting it ice free. There is some more snow and rain during the day but it isn't freezing so it melts away as fast as it falls.
Current (23:00) temp is 11.0C in, -0.4C out.

Shopping. The wireless adapter hasn't arrived yet so nothing computerish. I did get apples (and a pineapple), wine, some clothes. And a couple of casseroles.

It's rest day and miserable (wet) weather so I keep myself well rested. I don't bake anything this week but as an alternative I prepare the pineapple with a pile (no ball because the ice-spoon is broken) of soft ice cream and whipped cream. The cream had just passed it's sell by date and the ice had been languishing in the deep freezer far too long, I simply had to get rid of them and of course, being good 'green' people we can't throw it away, now can we?
Of course I eat too much of it :)

Cool and lightly freezing in the morning with the sun coming out spectacularly. To disappear just before noon turning the day grey. Typical will-it-rain will-it-not-rain weather.
Current (24:00) temp is 11.9C in, -1.8C out.

Running was sort of fun. Tiring too. The mist coming up last evening froze down. In some places that caused the ground to frosted over with tiny white ice crystals. In other places the mist settled down wet and froze later, causing black ice. In places I didn't have any grip while running, slipping with every stride out.

I wrapped my new years presents for tomorrow. We don't do Christmas presents. Years back Christmas was not the same commercial type of day over here. It was more a religious feast. The commercialisation came over from the States (US) after the war and the presents became more important. As far as I remember we never had presents at Christmas (maybe the adults had them). Of course we do (and did) have Saint Nicholas on the 5th of December giving presents to kids which may account for the lack of presents at Christmas.
On new years day we have always had a special lunch, often lasting hours, comprising various courses. I made the habit of presenting some presents then.

And I notice that people start dismantling their Christmas trees and display while it is still a week early. We set up our tree in the last week leading to Christmas and dismantle it on the 5th of January. At Epiphany.

Happy new year