April 2004

Beach Reading

26 April 2004

Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle is an excellent book, but it is poor reading for the beach. It’s also not a good book for babies.

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Mama’s Sunset

17 April 2004
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Balcony View

13 April 2004
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Baggage Service

11 April 2004

Vacation update: 3 pm, 6 phone calls to Delta, all day waiting for courier to call, and still no missing suitcase. First day of vacation ruined. So far our story matches this complaint about Delta Baggage Service, so things may not get better. Update We have it. Mama decided it was useless to deal with [...]

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Happy Easter

11 April 2004

We made it, as did 2 of our 3 suitcases. We a full Gulf view from the balcony and even a poor to medium WiFi signal (although our neighbor Mr. ‘linksys’ should really change his default settings and password).

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HAM-FRA-ATL-TPA

9 April 2004

Tomorrow at 5am (ugh) we’ll be on our way. By sunset tomorrow evening we’ll be on the Gulf coast.

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Jodeldiplom

8 April 2004

German readers will recognize the title as a reference to Loriot, the German comic, and his classic sketch on the ‘Yodel Diploma’. A reporter is interviewing a German housewife who, with the permission of her husband, has learned yodeling at night school, including the conjugation of yodel verbs (“Di dudl di?” “Nein, di dudl dö!”), [...]

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Vacation. Starts. Now.

8 April 2004

Next. Work. Day. 3. May.

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Good News for the Chancellor

8 April 2004

Via H-BLOG: For Gerhard Schröder’s 60th birthday, the Bild Zeitung created a front page with only good news for the Chancellor. All lies. “Germany Debt-Free: Finance Minister had miscalculated for years!” “Oskar Lafontaine emigrates to France!” “Sorry, Gerd: Bush begs for forgiveness!”

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Crossroads

8 April 2004

We’ve been looking into Kindergarten the past couple of weeks, which we want Christopher to start this fall. We have a full-day slot reserved in the regular group, but given his speech development it has been strongly recommended that he attend a so-called ‘integration’ group, where the group is smaller and there are regular speech [...]

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Samba 3… yes!

7 April 2004

It worked! At least 95% worked, and the few problems could be easily fixed. Two notes: We decided to skip domain mapping, since we don’t have a group for all Samba users, and Samba 3 only maps one-to-one. To convert the SIDs, I exported the smbpasswd to XML, added line breaks, ran this perl script, [...]

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Smarty Templates and Movable Type

6 April 2004

Brad Choate: Smart templating with Movable Type

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Betrayal of trust

5 April 2004

newsrack cites a New York Times article on companies systematically altering employee time cards, a practice I’m sure is not confined to the US. Here in Germany, for example, the union Ver.di is campaigning against labor practices at the Aldi and Lidl chains. Shaving pay is theft of the worst kind, from those who can [...]

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Last of his Kind

5 April 2004

This evening we decided to end the suffering of the first, smallest, smartest and now last of our three American cats, Mausi. Even though we’ve been owned by several cats the past two decades, this is first time we’ve made such a decision. We probably waited too long.

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Samba 3… maybe?

4 April 2004

Sometimes when you don’t know what you’re doing, you have to ask for help. So now I think I know what went wrong with our first attempt. Samba calculates the SID for each user dynamically, and samba-tng uses a different formula than samba 3. For users to continue to work after switching to samba 3, [...]

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Wet memories

4 April 2004

Just so you know, a USB memory stick can survive 40°C in the washing machine, although I hope the condensation inside will eventually evaporate.

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Marketing is everything

4 April 2004

Christopher has always refused to wear jeans or canvas pants, preferring either overalls or (now that he can go to the toilet by himself) sweat pants. The average life expectancy of sweat pants for a 4 year old is about one week…. the weakest link is in the knees. Then yesterday Mama started calling his [...]

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Googlerank

4 April 2004

Why would anyone would want to increase his Googlerank for Weber?

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blogg and blogosfear

4 April 2004

If ‘blog’ has 2 g’s in German, why does blogosfear have only one?

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Better off without us?

3 April 2004

Spiegel Online: Secret government commission declares rebuilding of eastern Germany a failure “Immense unemployment, an overaged population: a secret circle of advisors to the German government has declared the rebuilding of eastern Germany in its present form for a failure. The paper accuses the goverment of lack of concept and inaction in the east.” 1.2 [...]

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The cat that rules Estonia

3 April 2004

Sofia Sideshow: The cat that rules Estonia

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Living in Europe

3 April 2004

They took down the beta sign so now it must now be official. Living in Europe “is a new community blogzine produced by a cooperative of bloggers and writers with a focus on … Living in Europe.” The concept (see Eammon’s 4 part interview, in 5 parts) started last year with Living in China, and [...]

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The end of Schengen?

3 April 2004

John Robb: “Reuters Visitors from visa-waiver countries (UK, Germany, etc.) will all be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the US.[...] There is clearly foot dragging by visa-waiver countries on the new US requirement for vistors to have passports with biometric data (something the US doesn’t have) for unimpeded entry.” If this is the trend, [...]

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Help Wanted, Anyone?

1 April 2004

The layoff reaper strikes again at my employer. Despite short time and a slight profit last year, our workforce will be 10% less as of June 30. Let me ask here on behalf of 2 soon-to-be ex-coworkers that if anyone needs a Lotus Notes Admin (willing to relocate) or a Win/Citrix/Linux Workstation Admin (in Hamburg), [...]

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April Fool’s Day

1 April 2004

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but an annoying thing about Germany is that Germans take April Fool’s Day very seriously.

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Subsidized Day Care

1 April 2004

Over the weekend when doing income taxes, I was surprised to learn that the German government is now paying 25% of our day care costs. As of 2003, child care costs are generally tax deductable, and since we pay our Tagesmutter 600 Euros per month, that’s not a small amount added to our tax refund. [...]

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