null's journal

My Internet at home has been broken for some days now, which has led me to an interesting discovery: after the hands have stopped trembling and these really bad dreams are on the decay, I suddenly have... time. I've started doing things like cleaning/rearranging my living-room or kitchen (=sorting out the ancient stuff I've planned to get rid of for years), sitting on the balcony, spending more time with friends and neighbors (and less with online friends :-P )... and generally feeling less stressed.
A rough estimate suggests that a broken Internet increases my free time by 3-4 hours a day.
What am I doing so long?
Today my cable modem has come back to life, and I've spent the day with the most lovable women on earth and two real-life friends, only being online for about an hour.
Maybe there is still hope for me. :-) If I ever run out of time again, I now know that all I need to do is smash that modem.

Some of you might remember what Wonko did. Now giving people the ability to expose my bedroom to ABC's The Look of Love for 24 hours a day seems a little far-reaching, but the geek-value of having a realtime connection from your computer to your homepage is enormous. :-) That, and some massive fit of insomnia, made me create this page. The information is refreshed every 5 seconds as long as my computer is running (check the page's timestamp). More info will be added whenever something interesting comes to my mind.
Source code (Delphi 3) or other features on request. :-)

Well, today I received another pro-war / pro-Shrub mail. Somehow I seem to attract those people's attention :-P or maybe others get those mails at well. To be fair I must say that most people are polite... well, ofcourse there are others, but who cares about pre-school fanatics anyway.

Not much else happening. Yesterday I had to show a movie to some Spanish club (a Spanish movie of course) and improved my virtually non-existent Spanish by a handful of words.

Tomorrow we're going to Munich and visit Jaz and maybe Ettena. Yay!

This post was edited by null on Mar 28, 2003.

Today we found the answer to a computer problem we've been hunting down for more than two weeks. A certain Miss J., network administrator of our customer's ISP, had completely messed up the whole network settings because she didn't know what we meant by "configuring the firewall to allow incoming connections to port 3000". The connections were accepted by some machine, but none of the data ever reached the actual server. Don't ask me how (or better, why!) she did this. Since we didn't have physical access to the server, we had to ask her to check everything for us, which now turned out to be a pretty bad mistake.
Miss J. is, according to her signature, a Microsoft Certified Professional.

Mr. T., the one who developed some neural network thing for us, has a wife who is an MCP. Mr. T. himself has a lot to do with theoretical physics, and less with computers. Supposedly he had to help her hook up her computer to the Internet.

Now everybody knows that MCSE stands for "Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert" (in German "Meine Computerkenntnisse sind erbärmlich"), but what does MCP stand for? "My Company Paid" (a lot for these courses)? It's a real tragedy.

Wouldn't it be great if there was some Real Life Certified Professional, like RLCP? The certificate could exclusively be issued by long-known competent co-workers, and only to people who have proven their knowledge in a real-life environment. Education costs would drop to zero as the RLCP would learn everything there is to know by the trial-and-error method (this admittedly might take several years), and the costs for the actual test would be reduced from like 700 bucks per test to a couple o' beers for the certificate-issuing workmates.
Everybody would know that an RLCP actually is a person with proven knowledge, and so this certificate would soon gain worldwide respect. RLCP's would be among the best-earning professionals there are. Network and server downtime would be significantly reduced, and poor programmers (like me) would have more time to concentrate on the actual task, instead of fixing the stuff some pseudo-professional has messed up - people would remove "MCP" from their signatures and instead strive to get this much sought-after real-life certificate... and as a side effect, Microsoft would suffer some considerable financial losses because nobody wants their 'training' and certificates anymore.
As a bonus, there could be an RLCP certificate for almost anything - computers, cars, building trade, babysitting, ... - all one would ever need to be recognized as an expert is these four letters!

Let's start an RLCP initiative today!

This post was edited by null on Jan 28, 2003.

Well, when the news woke me up this morning, the first thing I got to hear is that a certain Mr. Rumsfeld considers Germany and France "problem cases" because they're reluctant to join the USA in another senseless war on an oil-exporting country (Iraq).

Who the f*ck does this goddamn moron think he is? It's bad enough that his idiot president's bosses want to wage yet another war just for personal profit! But no, Europe has to join the game as well because it might cost the USA too much to defend their government's economical interests without assistance.

Honestly, if I had a nuke I'd give it to Bin Laden at once if he only promised to drop it over Washington DC. (Apologies to anybody living there, I would of course warn you beforehand.) I so can't stand that hypocritical, lying, moronic crypto-fascistic government any longer! How can such damn mafiosi be given the power to decide over the lives of millions of people?

Will Germany and France be the next Axis of Evil™? Wait, no, they don't have any important oil resources... nor are they communists or Muslims.

To all Americans, this is not meant to offend you as individuals. But please please do something about that horrible government of yours! They let people die, they wage wars for personal profit, they destroy whatever respect your country may still have in the rest of the world, they lie thru their teeth about almost everything they do! Stand up and demonstrate to the world that you're not the idiots your government wants us to believe you are.

According to my co-worker, some American journalists are investigating the current and past government(s) and have found out that 3/4 of a Daddy Bush-government energy plan have been dictated by Enron, and they held back important economic information for personal profit. It's good to see that not everybody over there blindly believes the lies the so-called 'democratic' oil bosses government people spread!

This post was edited by null on Jan 23, 2003.

I'm not sure if this is of general interest, so I'm gonna put it in my journal. :-)

• For everybody stranded around Lindau, we still need a meeting point and time or something. In case we miss each other, this is what my car looks like.

• General info: My cellphone number is +41-76-3885430.

• Weather forecast: it's fscking cold. Maybe we'll have snow at our place (currently there's some falling from the sky). This is the place I'm gonna outrun Jaz on my super sleigh (which I have yet to find). Click the Livecam link for weather info.

• For anything I've forgotten please post a reply with an appropriate question.

See you around! :-)

Yeah the temperature outside is frightful
but the snow is so delightful
Only seven days to go,
so let it snow let it snow let it snow!