#English

Ok, for a few years I’m irritated by the following:

See.

When you have multiple ovens in your kitchen, it is impossible to set them to the exact same time. So, once in a while (every minute ;)), there is a period where there is discrepancy. And that irritates me.

First of all you can question whether it is useful to have two clocks above each other, but that is a different story. But how hard could it be to synchronize them somehow? That shouldn’t be extremely hard, and considering that the combined cost of two mid-tier ovens is around 2000 euro, the few cents / euro to get this done shouldn’t be an issue.

After a few years, my box of sugar cubes started to become a bit empty. So, it was time to buy a new box. And this obviously means some research. It didn’t take long (hey, there are not that many options…) till I stumbled upon this claim:

The smallest sugar cubes in The Netherlands (500/160 = 3.1 grams per cube). That is certainly a claim.

Especially when on the same page, you can find this:

At Jibes I was in the fortunate situation that I was provided with a top-of-the-line laptop with full rights that I could also use privately. And at Quinity I still used a regular PC at home. So, until recently, I never had to buy a private laptop (I did bought some private laptops in the past, but those were always as an ’extra’).

So, this time, I needed to buy a primary laptop for private use.

Some time ago, we needed some new containers to store food leftovers. And we we’re at Ikea to buy - I don’t know anymore, but I’m sure it was something else :)

Anyway, we bought some Ikea 365 containers. In the shop we also saw an interesting way to hang them under a kitchen shelf. Didn’t really gave to much attention, but at home, we thought: he, that might be something for us, on the shelf where we store those containers, we don’t use all the space.

After using the same hosting provider for the weblog for 16 years, I finally switched to a new one. 16 years ago I registered the domain and got a hosting package at freerider.nl. After a few renamed and takeovers, the company is now called oxilion.nl.

In the beginning everything the things they provided was exactly what I was looking for:

• Cheap :)
• Webhosting
• PHP + MySQL support
• Email
• A few Megabytes of storage, and 1-2 Gigabytes of traffic
• FTP access

But, nowadays, my needs are a bit different:

So, that migration to Medium didn’t really worked out in the end. Never got the custom domain working, and I really didn’t like the password-less-login (every time you login, you have to request a mail…)

So, next attempt ;): migrating to Hugo, a static site generator.

For this, I enabled Wordpress again, to install a plugin, to export all content to Markdown files that can be used with Hugo. After that, it was finding a good theme, changing a few things, fixing some encoding problems. And removing all fixed url’s, so I could use (the same) permalinks.

After a 5-year hiatus, I ‘rebooted’ my blog… so, welcome back ;)

Back in 2011, I suddenly received an invoice from my webhoster for excess data usage. Looking at the statistics, it was clear that my domain/weblog-URL was included in a list used by botnet to mass-spam. So, I received thousands and thousands of visitors (bots) that would download a complete page and try to comment on that page. This generated more than a gigabyte of traffic per day… So, quickly made the decision to take down the complete blog.

As a Winamp user since 1998, today I replaced it with Songbird. Winamp has all the features I need (basically FLAC support and last.fm scrobbling :)), but it lacks an important feature I need in the near future: MacOS support.

Today I briefly looked at some Winamp alternatives (thanks Guido!). Some lacked the multi-platform feature, others were just plain hideous (ok, I’m not going to make friends with this statement, but players in this category always had a Linux background…).

Recently, I stumbled upon “Rework” by 37signals in my local bookshop. As an avid reader of Signal vs. Noise, buying it was a non-decision.

The book adheres to their mantra less is more: it is only 273 pages, and about one third of them don’t contain text. The chapters are short and easy to read. You could read the whole book in an evening if you’d want (and then re-read it the evening after it).

Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Joshua Bloch:

Teaching to the test at M.I.T. http://tinyurl.com/cb4799 . But do they teach ethics?

I’ve only read Handout 1, but I am puzzled by two thoughts:

• Do MIT students really need this? I consider MIT as one of the most prestigious universities in the world, with only super-smart students. I would expect that anyone with a MIT degree would be able to get into any company (solely based on capacity).
• Are the interview questions at Google that simple? I was always under the impression that the interview process at Google was very hard, and that they would only hire very, very smart people. But c’mon, these questions are that simple – I would almost say trivial – that anyone even considering applying for a development job should be able to answer these questions without any problem.

I still don’t know what to think of it… (I almost believe it is fake, but the URL really points to mit.edu…)