84000 liedjes

Ik gebruik ook last.fm en ik heb sinds juli 2007 al meer dan 84000 liedjes gespeeld op mijn PC waarbij de titel en uitvoerder (automatisch) doorgestuurd worden naar last.fm.

Da's een dubbele heleboel.

Als je last.fm zoveel data geeft dan krijg je een heleboel suggesties en grafiekjes terug die je blijkbaar moeilijk in een iets oudere browser te zien krijgt (zelfs als Flash geïnstalleerd is). Respectievelijk mooi en minder mooi.

Uiteraard zijn die cijfers voor interpretatie vatbaar:

• Ik speel vooral klassieke muziek waarbij een enkel klassiek stuk meestal uit verschillende bewegingen bestaat. Het onderscheid wordt gemaakt door een tempo-aanduiding, bv 'allegro' or 'adagio'. Veel klassieke stukken hebben echter meer dan een 'allegro', deze worden bijgevolg dubbel geteld. Een alternatief zou zijn om de bewegingen te nummeren, maar ik heb geen zin om ettelijke honderden liedjes te retaggen.
• Uit de lijst met 'Top Artists' blijkt eerder de grootte van mijn CD collectie en het tijdstip van rippen, dan een absolute voorkeur voor een zekere componist. Na even rekenen: Door mijn collectie Haydn (150 CDs) en Bach (155 CDs) (op hetzelfde moment gekocht, maar van Bach heb ik nog maar een derde geript) ben ik ongeveer 9x gegaan; Mozart (40 CDs) en Vivaldi (40 CDs) elk ongeveer 20x; Verdi (25 CDs) en Beethoven (40 CDs) respectievelijk 13x en 15x. Andere componisten komen uit verzamel-CDs of kleinere CD boxen.
• Uit de 'Top Tracks' van de laatste 7 dagen kan je steeds zien of ik een tijdelijke bevlieging heb gehad met een voorkeur voor specifieke werken, dan wel achtergrondmuziekgewijs door mijn playlist ben gelopen.

Kalender afvalophalingen Nijlen 2010

Ik heb mij ook eens bezig gehouden met het ingeven van de Nijlense afvalophalingskalender in Google Calendar: raadplegen, toevoegen

Bikers are voters

Vanavond ben ik naar een MAG info-avond gegaan over de plannen van de politiek in verband met de toekomst van het motorrijden, en lichtjes geschokt terug thuisgekomen. Als het van sommige beleidsmakers afhangt moet motorrijden blijkbaar zo snel mogelijk illegaal gemaakt worden. En in afwachting tot het zover is gekomen, moeten we bij voorkeur als melkkoe dienstdoen en ons het geld uit onze zakken laten kloppen.

Je kan het zo gek niet bedenken of iemand heeft het voorstel al wel eens op tafel gelegd:

• Fluo vestjes verplichten, ter bevordering van de zichtbaarheid
• Daytime Running Lights voor auto's, om de zichtbaarheid van motorrijders te verminderen (erm, wacht eens even ...)
• Beschermende kledij verplichten
• Technische keuring invoeren (en wij onnozele Belgen willen weer heiliger zijn dan de paus en dus moet die keuring strenger dan de Duitse TÜV)
• Invoeren van technologische snufjes (ITS) zodat we toch maar niet te snel zouden rijden (en bijgevolg in elke bocht onderuit gaan en een hoop voetgangers neermaaien omdat onze gashendel automatisch wordt dichtgedraaid)
  
• Opleiding in zoveel stappen en met zoveel minimumleeftijden dat mensen gewoon niet meer beginnen aan motorrijden (in Australië is er sprake van minimum 4 jaar een autorijbewijs hebben en minimum 28 jaar zijn vooraleer met een lichte motor mag gereden worden)
• ...
  

Toch niet al die maatregelen zijn slecht? Inderdaad, maar het grote gevaar bestaat dat ze op zijn Belgisch worden ingevoerd: zonder na te denken over de details.

Het zijn ook niet enkel de pestregels die specifiek voor motorrijders worden uitgedacht. Vlaanderen's hebzucht naar meer bevoegdheden (en dat in een Europa dat hoe langer hoe meer verenigd en eenvormig wil zijn) zou er voor kunnen zorgen dat wanneer (een deel van) de verkeerswetgeving wordt overgeheveld naar de gewesten, elke Belg die zich ook al eens buiten zijn eigen gewest wil wagen, drie verschillende verkeersreglementen moet kennen. Om nog maar te zwijgen van al die buitenlanders die plots om door één land te rijden, drie sets van regels moeten kennen.

Gelukkig bestaan er nog organistaies zoals MAG en FEMA om onze vrienden politiekers af en toe terug met beide voeten op de grond te zetten. En dat terwijl hun werkingsmiddelen jaar na jaar afnemen; immers, er zijn hoe langer hoe meer motorrijders (een 300000-tal nu) en ze denken allemaal dat er genoeg anderen zijn om actie te ondernemen zodat zij zelf in hun luie zetel kunnen blijven zitten.

Om een idee te krijgen hoe de politiek zich bij de volgende (gewestelijke en Europese) verkiezingen in juni wil voordoen naar motorrijders toe, vindt er een debat plaats op 14 maart in het Antwerp Docks hotel (Noorderlaan 100, Antwerpen). Iedereen is welkom, maar kan de organisatie best op de hoogte brengen van zijn komst, zodat er voldoende plaats en drank aanwezig is.

Devoxx

On wednesday, I went to Devoxx (formerly JavaPolis).

First, breakfast as usual; then the keynotes session about JavaFX and the on-site RFID experiment.
It was the first time I heard about JavaFX. It seems to be the next Flash and it looks cool. I especially liked the fact that it runs in a JVM process separate to that of the browser so that one doesn't slow down or blocks the other. This also makes it possible to drag JFX applications out of the browser and run them standalone.
The RFID presentation was done by an ill-prepared IBM suit who, having seen the venue, seemed to have managed to remove his tie and loosen his top shirt button only barely in time. At the venue, three (sponsor) companies worked together to provide RFID-containing badges, equip all rooms with scanning portals and supply hardware and software for tracking badges and creating statistics about the attendance of various talks.
Instead of telling about anything Java-related on this Java venue, they went on about hardware, antennas, limitations of RFID, etc. Also, instead of doing one comprehensive talk, the three companies each did their own presentation and together they went 15 minutes over their alotted time.
What I missed in this keynote: the Java aspect and a real-time view of people moving about at the venue (especially those leaving the RFID talk; there were plenty).

Next, I went to the Hippo talk. Hippo is a JSR-170 compatible ECM and CMS, using Apache Jackrabbit somewhere inside. From the presentation it looked nice and user-friendly, but when I asked whether Hippo could be deployed on top of an existing Jackrabbit repository, they couldn't give me a satisfying answer. I guess I'll have to check out that for myself.

Lunch was a disaster: after queueing for ten minutes, they were out of bacon sandwiches (I don't eat cheese and I don't like fish on a sandwich), so I moved to another queue. After standing in line for another ten minutes I finally had my sandwich, but they were out of soup. And by that time they were out of soup everywere.
The organisation was very proud to announce the venue was sold out for the second time in a row: 3200 people attending. Is it that hard to multiply, say 250ml of soup by 3200 people and end up with enough for everyone?

After lunch, I went to the High Performance Java talk, which proved not to be a good start of the afternoon. The (overacting fake-jovial) presenter (Iran Hutchinson) started with a five-minute joke about his first name before going on about OSGi and how it should be used and what some of its pitfalls are (managing multiple threads in a single bundle, apparently). He also briefly mentioned Caché, some kind of high performance database that is accessed like a multi-dimensional array. This should have been the core of his talk, but I went away with the knowledge that the Knopflerfish OSGi implementation offers a GUI (something that I would have liked to have seen in the OSGi-specific talk I attended last year).

Next up, Scala. Having a functional programming and language design background, I was a bit interested in how functional programming could be implemented in Java. Simple: by breaking source compatibility: Scala is a standalone language that is compiled to Java bytecode.
They didn't go into implementation details, they just showed some basic constructs and how they are translated to Java.
Since Scala converts infix operators to method calls from left to right, operator precendence looked a bit fishy. Unfortunately, they only showed simple operators that didn't require precedence and there wasn't time for questions.

One of the few things I understood from the next talk was that Scala has a bit of a problem with mathematical expressions; well, isn't that a coincidence?
The core subject of this next talk was about cross-language development: using different languages in a single project: Java, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, ... The two guys presenting were very enthousiastic, but the whole sounded like the dialogue was provided by a Russian-to-English translator tool and I'm afraid my brain just shut down in horror at some point. All I know is that if I ever need multiple languages in a single project, I have to take a look at IntelliJ IDEA.
My brain did wake up on the intruductions of new terms such as 'camel humps names' (CamelCase identifiers) and the Elvis operator: '?:' ('when your head is turned ninety degree').

The last talk of the day was interesting again: "RESTful design - Patterns and Anti-Patterns."
REST is an architectural style (Roy Fielding's orignal definition) or "the web used correctly." "XML without SOAP" is one of the worst and most innacurate popular definitions of REST.
There are five requirements for REST:

1. Every 'thing' gets an ID (eg a URI).
2. Link together as much 'things' as possible.
3. Use standard methods (eg GET, PUT, POST, DELETE).
4. Allow for multiple representations of the same 'thing' (eg human-readable HTML, machine-readable XML, or both together in the form of XHTML). The representation could eg be chosen by an Accept header in an HTTP call.
5. Communicate statelessly

Some anti-patterns:

• Tunneling through GET by using the same base URI with different methods specified in a query part.
• Tunneling through POST ('the SOAP way') by using the same base URI with different methods specified in an XML body.
• Ignoring caching; the server should use cache control headers and ETags.
• Ignoring response codes.
• Misusing cookies: using them to identify state is wrong.
• Forgetting hypermedia by not connecting resources and representations together.
• Ignoring mime types; use the correct mime type for every resource; use the vendor namespace if necessary (application/vnd.XXXX).
• Breaking self-descriptiveness (when the manual of how to use your service becomes bigger than the service itself).

Some REST patterns:

• Use collection resources where you provide links to individual resources (eg a GET on '/products' produces '/products/apple' and '/products/pear').
• Page your collections when the list of links become too long (eg with a query in the URI).
• Don't worry about URI design or hierarchy, opaque URIs are fine; linking stuff together is more important than the way links look like.
• Create resources by POSTing to a collection.
• Polling to generate notifications for changes is not bad as long as caches are used properly.
• Externalize server cache by putting the cache operation in a proxy that handles the cache and ETag headers.

He did go a bit fast from time to time, but this presentation was a good introduction to REST and a starting point to get to know more about it.

Dinner was even more disastrous than lunch: they ran out of french fries when only about two thirds of the attendees got their tiny helping. Hearing it would take at least half an hour for a new supply to arrive, I went home hungry.

Drie maanden Diftar

Op 1 juli 2008 is in Nijlen het Diftar-systeem van start gegaan. De theorie is dat de vervuiler betaalt door voor de afhaling van restafval en GFT per kg te laten betalen. Na drie maanden kreeg elk adres een overzicht van de hoeveelheid geproduceerde afval.
Bij de start van het systeem moest iedereen een provisie betalen van 60 euro. Hiervan zou de kost van de afvalophaling afgetrokken worden. Bij een te lage provisie moet worden bijgestort.

Mijn overzicht ziet er zo uit:
Saldo op 1 juli: 0.00
Betaling van 1/8/2008: 60.00 (De laatst mogelijke betalingsdatum, uiteraard).
Vaste kost van juli tem oktober: -12.00
Saldo: 48.00

Zelfs als je geen afval produceert betaal je nog altijd 3 euro per maand aan vaste kosten! Met een provisie van 60 euro en mijn afvalproductie ziet het er naar uit dat ik ongeveer één keer per jaar een container zal moeten voorzetten en elke 1 à 1.5 jaar 60 euro zal moeten bijbetalen.

Bij het persoonlijk afvaloverzicht zat ook een brochure met veelbelovende resultaten: de gemiddelde restafvalproductie tijdens juli, augustus en september is gedaald van 20kg per inwoner in 2007 naar 12kg per inwoner in 2008.
Zou dit er iets mee te maken hebben?


Misschien moeten we eens met Scriptura langs IOK gaan, dan kan ik onrechtstreeks mijn voor niets betaalde vaste kost terugkrijgen en gaan hun afvaloverzichtjes er misschien wat beter uitzien.

Vals plafond

Vandaag een vals plafond gestoken in het kader van mijn opleiding houtbewerking (lees goedkoop werkvolk gespeeld). In dit geval ging het om het plaatsen van een houten roostering, met daartegen PVC schrootjes. En dat ging zo in zijn werk:

1. Kies een hoogte voor het plafond, tel er de dikte van het plafondmateriaal bij, en tel er de dikte van de bevestigingslatten (22mm) bij. Dat wordt de onderkant van de roostering.
2. Van de onderkant van de roostering, meet een afstand naar beneden, tot op ooghoogte (bv 160cm). Dit is het referentiepunt voor de paslijn.
3. Loop met een pasdarm de hele ruimte rond en zet in alle hoeken de referentiehoogte over.
4. Meet van elk referentiepunt 160 cm naar boven en verbind deze punten met een lijn (smetkoord gebruiken).
5. Langs de lange muren, planken tegen de muur bevestigen; de onderkant van de planken komt gelijk met de smetlijn.
6. De kortste overspanning vullen met evenwijdige planken, ongeveer 40cm uit elkaar; hiervoor worden korte plankjes van 38cm gebruikt (bij planken van 22mm). De eerste plank zit vast tegen de muur, daartegen wordt haaks een kort plankje genageld (schuin genageld). Tegen dit korte plankje komt weer een lange plank (recht genageld), enz.
7. Op het einde opnieuw een plank tegen de muur vastzetten en een plankje op maat zagen van de overschot plus ongeveer 0.5cm. Dit plankje wordt met een zware hamer tussen de laatste plank en de plank tegen de muur geslagen om het geheel op te spannen.
8. Bevestigingslatten (ongeveer 40x22 mm) in de lengterichting tegen de roostering schroeven, ongeveer 40cm uit elkaar. De uiteinden van deze latten mogen niet op een plank uitkomen, maar moeten zweven en met kort latje aaneengezet worden (anders kunnen deze uiteindes niet behoorlijk vastgezet worden op de roosteringplank).
9. PVC aflijsting (voor de schrootjes) rondom rond tegen de bevestingenslatten nagelen.
10. De PVC schrootjes in de aflijsting schuiven en vastnagelen (met roestvrije inox nagels).

In ons geval waren er nog wat moeilijkheden met elektriciteitsleidingen en aansluitpunten die wat verlegd moesten worden, de plaatsing van nieuwe verlichting, en een paar moeilijke hoeken veroozaakt door inspringende steunberen. We hebben ons ook beperkt tot slechts één pasplank tegen de lange muur omdat we de roosteringplanken in putrails konden leggen.

Phrase from nearest book meme

Apparently, some meme is doing the rounds again.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

"The general secretary smiled to show he knew the Owl was not sleeping."
- The Altman Code, Robert Ludlum

Correction 2

The second graph was, of course, also wrong, for the same reason as the first.


Now the yellow graph somewhat approaches horizontality, but only due to the fact that Maes is cheaper than Antol used to be and due to the economic crisis pushing petrol prices down.

Correction

As Nick kindly pointed out, I made an error in the inflation-adjustment in my first graph: I did my calculations in the wrong direction. Below is the corrected graph.


As a result my earlier conclusion was also wrong: current petrol prices are at their lowest value of the past 2.5 years.
This joyous situation will be short-tempered, however, as the federal government has annouced it will re-introduce the cliquet system of fuel taxation. When prices decrease, tax will only be decreased for half the amount of the price decrease. As an example: when an amount of petrol costs 100 euros today, increases with 10 euros and later decreases again with 10, the cliquet system will ensure that you're paying 105 euros instead of 100.

Financial analysis

After working for three years and one month, driving a bike for two years and six months, and living in my own house for nine months, it's time for a small analysis of my financial situation and general economic trends. I'm not an economist, so please forgive the flagrant mistakes and errors I make in my assumptions and calculations.

First of all, the government calculates and publishes a monthly consumer price index, a measure of inflation with respect to a certain reference year (the most recent one being 2004). The general index includes various products typical households consume, each with a certain weight according to their importance. Next to the general index, there is also a so-called 'health index,' which excludes items such as tobacco, alcohol and ... vehicle fuels. The reasoning behind the latter is that these are already represented in the cost of all other products in the index as they need to be transported, which consumes fuel.
Without starting an argument about any unfairness in the fact that salaries are inflation-adjusted using the health index, let's accept the facts as they are and reverse the line of thought: since all products require fuels in their harvesting, manufacturing and transport, let's take fuel cost as the base for cost of living. It's also the only product of which I have more-or-less accurate data.

In this graph, the blue line represents the absolute petrol price I have paid, starting from the day I bought my bike. The first months I usually went to Antol, as they were the cheapest petrol station in Lier at the time. Later on, Dats opened a station that was marginally cheaper, and by May 2007 I went to Maes (which had taken over Antol and dropped prices to be the cheapest in each station's region).
The period of missing data was when I crashed my bike and had to wait a few months until it was repaired. The serious dip you see is an outlier related to me siphoning petrol from my mother's car after she accidentally filled up completely some days before buying a new car.

As you can see, at my last petrol purchase I paid the third lowest price ever (in the past 2.5 years). The third lowest absolute price, that is. The magenta line depicts the inflation-adjusted petrol price, using the general consumer index (which includes petrol). You can see we're still a long way off from paying a low value for our petrol.

Speaking of petrol value, let's see what the value of my income is with which I have to pay these exorbitant petrol prices (and, by extension, everything else I have to buy to live).


Again, the blue line is my absolute gross (before taxes) monthly income. It does not take holiday money, bonuses or tax deductions into account. Taxes, even after deductions, are at about 30% on average at my current salary (but I'm in the highest tax scale, so every increase in salary is taxed at 50%).
The graph, like the previous one, starts at the day I bought my bike. At that time the salary at which I started (marked by the red line) had already been inflation-adjusted for 2005. As you can see from the magenta line (inflation adjustment based on the health index), in November 2006 the value of my salary had dropped below the value of my salary at the start of my employment. Another conclusion based on the numbers is that, over the past three years, I have received an increase in salary value of 50 euros (calculated now, in October, by December it will be less). Moreover, those 50 euros are September-2005-euros; in October-2005-euros they would value at 47.

Now, let's compare the value of my salary to the value of petrol. That's where the yellow line comes into play: it's the ratio of (general) inflation-adjusted petrol price to (health) inflation-adjusted income. In an ideal world, this would be a straight horizontal line. In a perfect world, it would be a line that goes down. In the real world, however, it's a line which general direction is slightly upwards. Luckily for me, the inclination of that ratio is slightly less than the inclination of my income.
Luckily again (in the context of petrol prices at least), the economic crisis and pending recession has caused petrol prices to drop back to their level of two years ago during the last few weeks.

The green line, in case you're wondering is what I could be earning if I had dome some jobhopping. Although I have expressly removed absolute values from the last chart, I can say that the difference between red and green is 550 euros.

My conclusions? None specifically, I just threw some facts and calculations into the world, feel free to draw your own conclusions. I'll just repeat the well-known facts that employer loyalty is never rewarded and that petrol prices are just way too high.

Facebook

A while ago, I suddenly received a friend request from Klaas on Facebook. My first reaction was something along the lines of 'WTF?' Then I clicked on and discovered my Facebook account: apparently I had created one in early August. Probably to check out what all the fuss was about.

After searching around a bit, it seems that most of the people I have connected with on LinkedIn are also present on Facebook. And more: I found a number of school friends that aren't on LinkedIn.
I guess I'll be maintaining two networks in parallel now.

Screening

I did another MAG screening again today. I'm getting better and better at it: all eights, except for one seven for driving over a plank of timber and two sevens for the break test. The two tries for slow driving were 14 and 18 seconds.

Quotation is as follows: you start out with seven; for every fault one point gets subtracted (but they don't go negative); for doing something extra you get one point extra (which can be lost in case of a fault).
Nine is for doing the exercise better than the instructor and 10 is reserved for some guy named God.
For slow driving you have to drive 10m and taking at least 12 seconds to do it, without placing a foot on the ground or driving outside a set boundary.

Some photos I took today. I miss my 10x optical zoom; 6x doesn't even come close.

I rest my case

After a few mails back and forth between me and the Canon repair centre it's all clear now.
They told me it was an "exceptional service" of them to replace my four-year-old, out-of warranty camera with a brand new one. Apparently they usually send irrepairable cameras back unrepaired without replacement.
This BS means one of two things: either they are lying to me and they always send a new camera if and older one is deemed irrepairable or would cost too much to repair, in which case they could easily have informed me about this policy before I sent them my camera in the first place. Or they damaged my camera beyond repair themselves and now silently try to make up for it.

Another hint that the latter suspicion may be true is that the official communiqué by Canon for Belgium in which they state that cameras showing the problem I had would be repaired free of charge is dated 22 July 2008. If they were still able to repaire CCDs then, it must mean that spare parts are still available and that they allocated a budget for repairs.

All of this is moot, however, as the repair people stated that my camera had already been sent to Canon for environmentally-friendly destruction and there was no possibility to get it back.


Accepting my defeat, I went to take a look at the CHDK library to check if it was available for my camera (Canon PowerShot G9 firmware version 1.00G). Unfortunately, it wasn't, but searching a bit further, it became apparent that there was some active development going on. Yesterday, I ended up installing the first nearly completely working version of CHDK on my camera (which was out since the day before).
I also installed a script for time-lapse photography, so now I have the most important functionality of my old camera back.

Furious

Yes, that's what I am!
Today I received a package from the Canon repair centre; me happy at first, until I opened it. Inside was a brand new (at least, it looks brand new) Canon PowerShot G9!
The ETB ASS assholes downgraded me without asking, or even notifying me!
- I can't reuse my AA batteries; I'm stuck with some proprietory lithium thing that costs a fortune if you want a second pack and another fortune if you want an external charger (at least it would all cost more than a set of 4 rechareable AA batteries).
- I can't reuse my CF cards; the G9 uses MMC+ crap, which not only requires me buying new memory cards, but also a new cardreader for my PC
- The LCD screen is fixed, not tiltable; so no photographing under odd angles; something I do when photographing plants or technical stuff (PC innards, bike, etc)
- Downgraded from 10x to 6x optical zoom (from 38-380mm to 35-210mm equivalent)
- The S1 supports time lapse photography, I don't know whether the G9 does
- The viewfinder on the S1 was a mini LCD panel, the G9 has an optical, parallax-prone viewfinder that probably doesn't zoom with the lens
- And last but not least, the S1 has a decent grip while the G9 is flat; of course it fits in an inside pocket, but that's not a concern of mine since I keep as little as possible in my pockets as it only causes extra rib damage in case of a fall.

They haven't seen the end of me, that's for certain!

Distorted

A while back, my digital camera (a Canon PowerShot S1 IS) started to show some quirks. From time to time, the viewfinder display showed some purplish flashes. At first I thought there was something wrong with the display, but afterwards it became clear the the recorded photos were equally affected:

Since I bought the camera second-hand a few years back, the warranty period was long over. Besides, the problem only happened occasionally, so I was just hoping it wouldn't crop up too frequently.
Until a friend (the guy in the photo, incidentally) told me it was a known problem that affected some Canon devices equipped with a certain CCD made by Sony. The adhesive used for bonding the glass cover plate on the CCD causes corrosion of some parts of the CCD internals with the result illustrated above. The whole process is accelerated in warm and/or humid environments (it was indeed a very warm day the day that photo was taken).
Apparently, Canon has stated that they would repair affected cameras free of charge (including shipping to a service center). My guess is that they in return will claim their money back from Sony.

Anyway, equipped with this information, I finally reserved a day for a telephone fight with customer services. I first called Canon's Universal International Free Number: +800 22666 767. Either the number is out of commission, or it's not available through my Telenet Mobile subscription. Then I called the number of their Belgian helpdesk: 02 6200 197. After the obligatory language chooser and waiting until the phone support guy got out of his settee, this went very quick (4 min 12 sec): they don't do repairs in Belgium. But they did give me the number for the repair center in the Netherlands (+31 165 850 500).
Then I called the repair center, a phone call that also went very quick (3 min 28 sec). They said I had to start up the repair process through their website (they spelled it, as the name is somewhat unfortunate). I would have to send or bring in the device after which they would give me a quote for the cost and ask whether I would want to have it repaired. To my reply that this was an issue where both repair and shipping was supposed to be free of charge, regardless of warranty status they immediately responded "it's about a faulty CCD then?"
Honestly, I was impressed. I had thought it would be a lot more difficult to get something done for free.

Anyway, I registered on their site, requested pickup and sat back and waited. Next day UPS hostaged me the entire morning until about 1300 (I had to stay home until they picked up the package with my camera).
According to UPS tracking, my package arrived (was signed for) the next day. According to the repair center's status tracking, they received it a week later and sent it immediately to a 'repair location' where they started the repair and ordered parts.

That's the story so far. I've spent €2.76 on phone calls and half a day waiting for UPS. Hopefully, Canon keeps their promise and I won't have any further expenses.

To be continued...

De vakantie is voorbij...

...weeral.

Op de planning voor dit jaar staan: één verplichte houtverbinding (eigenlijk drie, maar onze leerkracht dit jaar houdt niet zo van regeltjes), iets kast-achtigs (waarschijnlijk ook weer iets verplichts waar een draai aan gegeven wordt), een dag op verplaatsing werken (waarschijnlijk een roostering voor een plafond of plat dak), misschien nog een uitstapje of twee en de rest van de tijd is voor werk naar eigen keuze (eigenlijk theorielessen, maar dat is ook weer een regeltje).

Zonsondergang

Wolken in het oosten, bijna open hemel in het westen, en dat in combinatie met zonsondergang geeft enkele minuutjes lang onderstaand beeld. De kwaliteit is niet schitterend; waarschijnlijk veel te veel transformaties toegepast om alle foto's min of meer naadloos aaneen te rijgen.

Zweefvliegerij

Ik ben daarstraks eens een kijkje gaan nemen op het militair vliegveld in Brasschaat waar een collega gaat zweefvliegen. Wel knap om eens te zien, maar meegevlogen heb ik niet; enerzijds omdat in een kleine cabine kruipen nogal onhandig is met een kilo of tien aan leer en anderzijds omdat ik vergeten was mijn portefeuille uit mijn andere jas te nemen.

Zweefvliegtuigen maken toch meer lawaai dan ik had gedacht. Het opstijgen is vrij luidruchtig, vermoedelijk omdat de steile hellingshoek nogal wat turbulentie veroorzaakt. Maar ook bij het landen hoor je ze duidelijk langszoeven.
Hieronder een kort filmpje van een opstijgend vliegtuig. Ik heb het geluid weggelaten omdat de microfoon van mijn fototoestel naar achter gericht is, er was dus enkel achtergrondlawaai te horen, niet het gesuis van een opstijgend zweefvliegtuig.

First harvest

I finally tasted my strawberries. The first ones were eaten by birds, but after I placed a net to keep them away, the rest are getting a chance to ripen properly.
Today I cut the two ripest and had a taste: they were perfect. Firm flesh and slightly sweet; infinitely better than the tasteless hydroculture you get sometimes.


It also looks like I will be overwhelmed by strawberries next year, considering the production and growth rate of runners. I cut off most of them, though, to allow them to put more energy in producing fruit.
If the new plants on the existing runners are showing any inclination to bear fruit this year, I will have to get a larger net as well.

New chain

After 34000km of loyal and 3500km of erratic service, my bike's chain has finally been replaced. And not a moment too soon either. At the end, it was clearly well past it's best-before date: it was tightened at the maximum and still it rattled and even hit the center stand.

Not only was it too slack, a few thousand kilometeres ago I noticed some of the chain links were stuck at the angle they're in when running along a sprocket. This has the nasty effect of constantly tightening and slackening the chain. So my chain was effectively pulled at many times per second when driving, which of course increases the rate of wear even further.

A chain is always replaced together with both sprockets. You can see why from the picures below: the teeth on the old front sprocket are eaten away almost by half.



On the rear sprocket, the difference is less pronounced, but it's still noticeable. That's because the rear sprocket is larger and does less revolutions than the front one.



Interesting note: according to my garage, some people only get about 15000km out of their chain, which underlines the importance of a good driving style. A chain and sprocket set is quite expensive.