archaelus

Now that I have a computer that doesn't die at the mere thought of watching a video, I've been checking out some stuff on YouTube, including some Module stuff.

Wherein there is a conclusion!

True to their word, they had the meters read before the end of the week and recalculated bills. The result is what I'm happy with - no change in any old bill, and they've prorated the last chunk I was there to the right percentage of the month.

While early experiences with the call centre was a bit rough, once someone got on to it properly the service was a whole lot better. So I'm happy with the outcome.

Phew! No unexpected super large bills. :)

Account Structure Update
Back by popular demand, Basic Accounts will be available to all users again by the end of the (northern hemisphere) summer. More information on the decision-making process and proposals relating to the future of Basic Accounts are in lj_2008.

New Themes
Two attractive and all-new Flexible Squares themes, "Circular" and "Circular Brown" are now available.


L to R: Circular and Brown

New V-Gifts
Give someone you care about the gift of enticement. With the new Chocolate Ice Cream, Vanilla Ice Cream, Tea, Coffee, Curry and Sushi v-gifts, all the significant people in your life will be able to share in the longing for the tasty edibles below. Plus, it reminds loved ones you think they're really sweet, really savory or just plain satisfying.


L to R: Chocolate Ice Cream, Vanilla Ice Cream, Tea, Coffee, Curry and Sushi

Ж-Men...but not the ones you might expect!
This week LJ Russia launched Ж-Men, a new comedy series about superheroes, inspired by the LJ communities dedicated to superheros, comics and cartoons. The title's "Ж" comes from ЖЖ, the nickname for LiveJournal in Russia.

Ж-Men's script is written by a group of LJ enthusiasts who also happen to be television professionals. Who knew? Following the premiere, five more episodes will be broadcast over the next two weeks. We hope you find the series fresh and enjoyable.

This is, of course, an experiment for LiveJournal. As always, we'd love to hear what you think!

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List 5 songs you like that start with that letter
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions

psychochicken gave me B:
1. Bigstick - Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom
2. Best For You - Age Pryor
3. Bathtime in Clerkenwell - The Real Tuesday Weld
4. Buttons and Zips - Elbow
5. Between You and I - Big Wreck

There are a LOT of great B songs that I feel guilty not listing others as I think of them. If I did, though, I'd be here all day.

When I was young and single, I used to buy DVDs all the time. "Only $18.99 each, I can hardly afford not to!" But my heavy DVD-watching days are behind me, so I was going through my collection and looking for stuff to sell online somehow, maybe on Amazon.

"Trois Couleurs used for $20, not bad...I, Claudius is going for $40, sweet...The Dekalog almost $50! Baraka....what the hell?"

Yes, apparently the DVD edition of Baraka I bought years ago is listing used on Amazon for $399.99. Do people really buy it at that price? Cause I'd gladly take $398.99 for mine.

A friend has asked if I know anyone interested in doing firewall admin work, for $SOMEWHERE. It's a Juniper/Cisco environment, with likely Solaris work as well.

Ping me by private message if you're interested and I can pass details on.

(To be clear, $SOMEWHERE is not my $EMPLOYER, but literally somewhere else.)

I have a new (to me) sewing machine again, finally! It's a refurbished antique (as old as me if not older), but it was inexpensive and seems to do the things that I need/know how to do for now. The instruction manual is in Dutch and French. I suspect those years of studying French in high school and university might pay off somewhat. Still, thank goodness for illustrations!

The shop I bought it at is on the same street where we go grocery shopping. Quite convenient, as I imagine I'll be in and out regularly stocking up on new threads and bobbins and such. I'm not sure that I brought many of the ones I already had with me. I guess now would be a good time to finally through through the boxes in the guest room and organize all of my fabric and various arts and crafts items. I don't know what I brought with me anymore!

I'll have to be careful Friday night and not drink too much so that I'm able to be bright-eyed and bushy tailed Saturday morning for the textile market over on Broodstraat (we almost bought a house on that street). I'm hoping to find some unbleached cotton among other things, as well as a good fabric to use for making the covers for the dining room chairs. I also need to make napkins and pillows!

linebyline
A writing prompt where members respond to single phrases and use them in their posts.

plants
A community for green thumbs, botany enthusiasts and lovers of plant life.

mst3k
The LiveJournal destination for Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans.

This time, it's .. more of the same actually :(

So I thought I'd better call the power company again since I hadn't heard from them in a few weeks. It turns out that despite assurances they would arrange a meter reading, apparently that never got recorded or something. *sigh*

We are sort of back to square one. Only this time, we know some additional facts:

- The new people who bought the place never signed up with anyone else
- They actually did have the final reading for the old tenants before me, so a starting point exists
- They're still sticking to the line that they want the end reading to start some estimation work on what my bills should have been.

As I posted before, the bills had what I expected anyway, about $180/mth. They will have an interesting time trying to claim more, and given they're in violation of the contact to read the meter on a regular basis, I suspect the two of us will somehow end up with an estimate roughly being $180/mth. I'm fine with this, no refund but nothing to pay is an acceptable compromise.

What happens to the people who moved in after me is more interesting. They might find it hard to defend on the basis of "it was part of the rental", I know the property was sold and I believe it was sold to the current occupiers. In either case, it could be a long slog ahead if everyone disputes what they owe.

Hooray, the Incredibly Strange Film Festival is back. See their homepage for all the details. I have just over a week to decide what I'm seeing and when :(

At the moment, my watch list looks like: Sukiyaki Western Django, Pop Skull, King of the Hill, The King of Kong, Timecrimes, I Think We're Alone Now .. which is a decent chunk.

Anyone else going to some of those movies? :)

I had a great time this afternoon at The Cross for bowdlerizer birthday drinks, along with many others.

That's all :)

Tasty Tom Selleck Cake, originally uploaded by the small cat club

most excellent creative use of chocolate hail.


mmmmm... chocolate hail.

new cellphone features, originally uploaded by Br3nda

I released new versions of Salza2 and ZPNG today.

The Salza2 updates are minor tweaks the defsystem to fix build problems on a few Lisps. Thanks to Chaitanya Gupta for bringing it to my attention. Get the new Salza2 here.

ZPNG changes are more extensive. I added COPY-PNG and PNG= functions from Tobias C. Rittweiler (thanks, tcr!). I also added a new class and protocol for writing out PNG files incrementally, row-by-row, so you don't have to create or convert all your image data to a big ZPNG array to write it out to a file. Doing it row-by-row will save memory. In theory you could create a PNG with overall image data much too big to fit in memory, as long as you can fit a single row. Get the new ZPNG here.

If you're into git, you can check out both projects from git.xach.com.

Enjoy!

Every now and then I want to use leading tildes in SBCL pathnames. That is, something like this:

(probe-file "~/.emacs") =>
   #P"/home/xach/.emacs" 
OR #P"/Users/xach/.emacs"
OR #P"/usr/u/xach/.emacs"

I know about user-homedir-pathname, but it's not quite convenient for interactive REPL use.

So I put together a short file that patches SBCL internals slightly so leading tildes in pathnames go through the POSIX getpw interface to look up home directories. It's not something I'll ever use in source files, but it's pretty convenient interactively.

To use it yourself, just download tilde.lisp and add this to your ~/.sbclrc:

(load "/path/to/tilde.lisp")
(tilde:install-tilde-expander)

After that, you can use "~/foo" and "~bob/foo" in SBCL pathnames.

update Here's a git repo for tilde.lisp, with an ASDF system file too.

I recently searched out the expatica.com website I'd seen before moving. At the time, it had freaked me out, because of all of the difficulties described in getting residency, etc. Now it's freaking me out because everyone sounds so miserable and they're making the Dutch out to be cold, distant and unwilling to be friends and they all stare too much. The food also sucks and tall women can't seem to find pants long enough.

Personally, I've found the Dutch to be incredibly friendly, even when I have to ask them if they speak English. People in shops have been surprisingly cheerful -- and I come from the land of Southern Hospitality where there's no such thing as a stranger. ;) The people we've met at the bar have been equally friendly and cheerful and ready to share a laugh. Perhaps it helped that we had the previous owners of the house to introduce us, but they themselves have been incredibly friendly and helpful and we all meet up at the bar most Fridays and have a convivial evening. I also haven't noticed any staring; quite the opposite, so who knows!

As for the food, I've had no complaints. Even the burger I had last week, although slightly different in flavor from the US burgers, was tasty. I'm already becoming addicted to the seasoned shoarma meat, although I've yet to have a proper shoarma. We've just been mixing it with veggies and potatoes, a dish inspired by a Dutch Flickr contact of mine. The ice cream here is certainly divine (particularly the three chocolate one), as are the apple tarts and sausage pasties and the veggie mixes ... A lack of good food has certainly not been an issue for me.

I haven't tried to buy pants since moving here, but considering the height of the average Dutch woman and the fact that I haven't noticed women wearing too-short pants makes me question the difficulty in finding long enough pants, too. Short-enough pants maybe, but long pants shouldn't be a problem! I did notice that a tank top in H&M in a size medium was about the same (if not bigger) than an XL tank top in the US. Not that women here are heavy (quite the opposite), just that sizing seems a bit more realistic. Perhaps because so many women are taller, they don't expect everyone to be a size 0.

Bah. Maybe I'm still too much in the honeymoon phase or maybe these people just need to complain. Either way, I'm still happy here.

In a discussion about how Americans think "Bluetooth" is a synonym for "headset", and you "tether" your laptop to your mobile to get data access:

10:04 <jsr> If it's wireless, it's  "Ghost ridin' the datawhip".

That is much awesome, and I will use it often. :)

(Nobody gets any points for working out we were discussing iPhone limitations)

genx_xslacker
For everyone born between 1965 and 1976, your commnunity is here.