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Week 28, 2000 ,Svenson

Sjon



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Kelshon Saga. The logs. (book37.7 p192)

10-07 to 17-07

 

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MM-clxxxxii     Monday

 

2000-07-10

 


Dry yes but grey and cool (13°C) with wind picking up and slacking off and coming from all direction. Bah.

Koen reported ill last week. Now I hear from our manager that he was not really ill. He did however get involved in a brawl somehow during the weekend. His opponent used a boxing iron. He is expected back by the end of the week but no guaranties.

A job which he should tackle did come up last week. As he will not be able to do it and time is pressing I have to pick it up. Well Promises were made to France and about ten minutes later Sef, our department manager, came by pressing me not to do anything that was not urgent. I wasn't and I won't. Of the tree points presented one is a bug and I will solve that. The rest can wait till Koen is back later this week or next.

I got one change request for TeleSales from Jan. He seemed to be surprised that Ronny was on holiday even though that was known months before. This is a low priority change request so it will have to wait till Ronny is back (the 31st). The screen where measurements for nonstandard goods must be filled doesn't test for min/max boundaries even though they are displayed. It looks like an easy to solve bug and maybe, if I find time (ahum) I may try to solve it, without touching any ship able code. I don't know Progress nor the structure of the TeleSales application so I am only going to do anything real in an emergency.

 

I did some surfing yesterday, all without problems until evening, when I wanted to post. I guess I fell out off the web.


Can a One Man Show have more than one spectator?

 

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MM-clxxxxiii     Tuesday

 

2000-07-11

 


The temperature drops somewhat (11°C), and the clouds drop somewhat as well. Yep, rain today, all day. And the prediction is more of the same this week, into the next.
That is a "Belgian Summer".

My car has 260 000 Km so has to come in for maintenance. Which means I have a day off. This time it doesn't fit well because Theo and Ronny are on holiday and Koen is home, recovering. So there is nobody present to handle problems. I did leave my phone no and e-mail address but that is not the same as being there.

I make pizzas, one tuna, warm for lunch and one choridzo, cold for dinner. And they are a success. (better than my food pages anyway, I pulled them off-site for rebuilding)

Hey, no mail or phone from the office. Does that mean that nothing happened? Or that I am not irreplaceable?

I have been dabbling a bit with Javascript (ex see my copyright below). I don't have a book about it (yet) so I am really dabbling. One fairly good way to learn Javascript is to view the sources on porno sites cause they use automated pages a lot. Of course it is a dirty way of learning and with a slow modem it can be very time consuming. I usually browse these sites with images disabled, mainly for speed. I guess however it is about time I get myself a good reference book on Javascript. Advise is welcome.


 

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MM-clxxxxiv     Wednesday

 

2000-07-12

 


It is dry but rather because the clouds haven't decided where to unload. With 6C, low grey clouds and some brisk wind in the morning. By evening we get a few (exactly 2) break overhead revealing a week sun. Summer is nothing but some wistful memory.

; return trueoen is back. Without visible outside damage. His lip has been stitched though so he cannot shave (which is why nothing is visible). He couldn't eat for the better part of last week and for drinking he had to use a straw. (Ever tried drinking coffee with a straw?)

Anyway, he is back so he joins in on the discussion about the problem that was being pushed my way on Monday. After discussing it for about half the day we conclude that ... a bug has to be solved and one link has to be added to an existing program. Do I love these discussions ;-(

And then Francis comes around with a problem (different but related to the address problem) that must be solved. One can select/use an address that is not an invoice address for the module in use. Should be blocked and seems not to be. Hmm ...

 

The daynotes.com is still out of service. Enough mirrors exist (for example at Brian's site or check the one at Dan Bowman). The back-chanel mailing list is not working either, mail doesn't bounce off but nothing gets passed on either. I have got a list of mail addresses strung toghether on my mirror but a list of mails is something different from a mailing list.

I had a problem with Red Corp . they list prices in Belgian franks (BEF) but have a button to transform those into Euro (EUR). They also have two links to select prices with or without VAT. That seemed not to work at all. Either I got BEF with VAT or EUR without VAT or BEF without VAT. Whenever I then went to another page I would end up in BEF without VAT. I mailed their webmaster. In stead of the usual, automatic "we will look at" confirmation I got a reasonable but not entirely helpful reply. At least some living person was at work there.
Sensing that someone there was willing to help I did some testing in Netscape and then some in MS IE and in Opera. All of them doing strange things wrong, all different. So it's not, as I first feared, just an 'optimised for MS IE' site. And replied with my results. About ten minutes later they asked if I had cookies enabled.
Of course I hadn't so I enabled them and presto. Works like a charm. This type of service is worth rewarding with some business I think.
To put a crown on their performance they mentioned they had been able to eliminate a bug on their site thanks to my information. They offer me a 30Guilders voucher for the help. Now how can I not love them?
I am not sure that ordering from Red Corp is interesting if you don't live in Belgium or the Netherlands but if you live in this corner of the world its worth giving them a visit.


Why did God make the world round?
If it were square men would go and pee in the corners.

 

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MM-clxxxxv     Thursday

 

2000-07-13

 


Grey, cool (12°C) with a few showers; Clearly late autumn, but why are the leaves not falling?

I finally got an almost undisturbed day and finished the VAL-archiving correction program. It runs without hiccups, swallowing and correcting all the errors I can throw at it. I just have to make a bit of documentation and pass it out to Jan for acceptance and execution.

 

Yesterday I mentioned the daynote mirrors maintained by Brian and "Dan Bowman". I meant Dan Seto of course. The link was right, the name was not. Now I am waiting my execution. I just don't know who is going to shoot first, Dan or Dan.
And maybe that is why Brian's server is "refusing to perform the request" when I want to go there.

And something in the style of the "GUI interface" from The Regiter :.

Attention, Microsoft press office. We've noted with some dismay your [recent] tendency to refer to Microsoft's products as "raising the bar." This time you say IE 5.5 "further raises the bar for enabling developers..." Now, in puissance, when you raise the bar, you make the fence higher, so you can sort out which horse can jump best. Making the obstacles bigger for your users and developers is surely not what you mean?
But then what do you expect in an indutry that requires special cooling to achieve hot perfromance?


Like "rock solid performance" coupled with "extremely stable" environments.

 

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MM-clxxxxvi     Friday

 

2000-07-14

 


Like most of the week the morning starts of at 12°C the temperature never rises above 16°C. Between the sometimes torrential showers we have low grey clouds with one or two sunny breaks. The Maas has reached over its normal winter levels while normally, in summer the water level is a few meter lower.

I cleanup and profile the correction program, finish off the documentation and pass it on to Jan.
And I start on the next problem.

 

The first night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall is broadcast on the BBC so I sit close to the tele. About the first time in months that I watch more than the weather foercast. But then, for good classical music I would even leave off posting a daynote. And no, I am not a connoisseur of classical music, I don't know many composers nor a lot of tunes and I definitively cant play or sing. I just enjoy the melodic lines.
The problem I have with most (not all) modern music is that it is all ritm, it is more about pushing decibels trough the walls than about melody and composition.


 

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MM-clxxxxvii     Saturday

 

2000-07-15

 


We have had a day of "five minutes weather". That is you get five minutes of rain, followed by five minutes of sun. After which there is five minutes of greyness preceding five minutes of drizzle. Which is replaced by five minutes of driving clouds. After which the cycle repeats itself.

Shopping but I don't need much so I am back soon.
And on to the garage. Last Tuesday I brought in my car for maintenance and they placed new brake shoes. No problem there as I do wear my brakes. The problem now is that the brake warning light on my dashboard blinks whenever I brake.
After searching for ten minutes we find one of the wires touched the wheel and had its insulation scraped off. After applying some duct tape I am back on the road.

I found the problem with my copyright link. I had   "   history.back() "   in the javascript code and all the while I was checking the link statement. If it works everywhere I will have to build it in into all my pages. This is where not using a web design package hurts, I have to change all the pages by hand. Sure its just copy and paste but still, it's a lot of pages.

 


July calls a friend and breaks down in tears : "My husband has left me !"
The friend consoles her : "Don't worry too much, he'll come back."
"No, not this time," sighs July, "he has taken his computer with him."


No comment

 

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MM-clxxxxviii     Sunday

 

2000-07-16

 


The same temperature as yesterday (12°C) and the same "five minutes weather" but with periods of around half an hour iso five minutes.

Although my toenail still is blue-black but not tender anymore so I go running, full distance with water-cooling. After missing last week I already feel a lack in speed.

I lazy away the morning, catching up on the week. And the afternoon gets invested on making jam from berries.

I couldn't reach my sites at Masset yesterday and this morning. Probably the sites are being transferred from the servers in America to a new set of servers in the Netherlands. I am posting to my backup site, on the extra dot domain sjon.svenson.com so I am still alive and available


tic tac toe, you are the new foe
tic tac toe, time for us to go
 
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Swijsen © 2000

A day you don't learn something new is a wasted day.