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According to my time sheet, I've had 26 consecutive work days. Those include Saturdays and Sundays, which I call "almost a day off" because they're only 4 and 2 hours, respectively. Anyway, since it's been a month since I took my wallet out of the vest I wear at work, I of course entirely forgot to take it with me for grocery shopping today. I only noticed when I tried to pay. Oops, I guess. Anyway, other than visiting the store twice today, I had breakfast, and then cleaned my place and washed some clothes. That's what I usually do on weekends. I'm mostly done now, so I guess the remainder of the day will be spent listening to music, watching some TV, and playing Fallout 3 which I re-installed a few days ago. I've started using twitter btw. Does that mean I'm twitting, or twittering, now? Anyway, I'm @ http://twitter.com/inanedirk so please make me feel important and add me d; Tags: internet, money, random, work Current Location: Husum, Germany Current Music: The Aurora Project - Within The Realms | Powered by Last.fm
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I bought some gadgets for my phone on May 31st via eBay. That's a docking station and a holder thingy to use in a car. Now, on the 21st of June I got a note in my mail that I could come pick it up from the local post office. Once there I was told that no, it wasn't here, the delivery guy had made a mistake in notifying me because he was supposed to deliver to the customs office instead of directly to me. So I had to wait another few days for a note from the customs office that I could come pick it up. I got that one today and went there right away. Now I still don't have those items I'd ordered because there's "a bit of a problem" with them. First, the officers can't confirm whether the items are actually genuine. Since they've got "Google", "Nexus One" and possibly "HTC" written all over them they need to get confirmation from some lawyers that they're not actually fakes that need to be destroyed. The officer made some pictures and e-Mailed them somewhere for confirmation, but they even might have to send them somewhere else to get checked. Secondly, they need yet another confirmation that Google is actually okay with the items being sent to Germany. Or some such thing. I don't quite see why this is neccessary. *shurgs*The customs officer promised to call me once she knows for sure. Possibly tomorrow, or Monday. She also said that "Made in Taiwan" suggests they might be fakes. Yeah right. Because the manufacturer, HTC, is totally a taiwanese company ... Tags: internet Current Location: Husum, Germany
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A few days ago I encountered an error when trying to install Windows Updates. Since none of the solutions I found via google worked for me, I contacted Microsoft Support. Since then I was walked through those solutions I'd found via google again. None of them worked of course. I also tried system restore but it "restored" to a black desktop with only the mouse cursor visible. Yesterday I tried the latest suggestion by Microsoft Support. Do an upgrade install, thus replacing most of the system while leaving programs, settings, and personal files intact. So I started that yesterday, then went to bed. This morning it wasn't done. I took a picture of the screen and when I returned from work this evening found that it had done absolutely nothing in these past 11 hours. So, no luck there I guess, but I couldn't cancel the upgrade installation either because it might leave my system "in an unusable state". Thinking it sure can't get any more unusable than it is now, I cut the power anyway, then booted a Knoppix DVD to grab some more files off the ssd, and intending to do a fresh install. Turns out I could still "rollback" to the previous install. That worked for the most part (except that my Windows now thinks it's not genuine) so I'm now back to being unable to doing any updates. I guess I'll just have to do a fresh install, probably will do that this weekend. I don't really know what else might be not working properly at the moment, so I'm going to make sure. For now I can watch the soccer though. Oh, I also need a backup solution since Microsoft's isn't very good. Any recommendations? I'll need something that backups an entire system volume and individual folders to an hdd. Should be easy to schedule to running once a week. Tags: computers Current Location: Husum, Germany
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I have to admit I have yet to sit down and watch the DVD in its entirety. I've seen most of it, occasionally only listening instead of watching because I was busy washing the dishes or something. Anyway, since we're talking about a concert DVD the music is the most important thing anyway, isn't it? And there's absolutely nothing to complain about here. Every band member, plus John Wesley, are brilliant musicians. The setlist is interesting: The first half is all of the Fear of a Blank Planet album, followed by a short intermission and then not a "best of" part. A bold decision in my opinion, they could've played it save and just performed the usual fan favourites, such as The Sound of Muzak, Trains, or The Start of Something Beautiful. But we've already seen those on their previous DVD release, so we get some less well-known but fantastic songs instead. Thank you for that, Porcupine Tree. Now, what's the significance of Halo being the only song that appears on both DVDs? Now let's take a quick look at the video. I've been watching the Blue-Ray mostly (I'd bought a Blue-Ray drive for just this occasion), and only put in the DVD to compare the image quality of the two. The most notable difference between this release and the previous Arriving Somewhere ... one is that this one lacks those post-recording graphic effects that had infested the first DVD. To be quite honest, I believe those were only to cover up the less than ideal quality of the source material. With this release we get images captured by HD cameras, and the only visual effects we have is the cameramen playing with focus and zoom. One reviewer on amazon pointed out that he'd wished for more long shots to better catch the entire band plus the video projections that run during the songs. He's right, that would've been nice, but then again, there's people out there who prefer to watch each individual musician play their instrument. Maybe some multi-angles could've been introduced here? (Seriously, among my collection of maybe 200 DVDs there's one that I know of that makes use of this feature). If you're the kind of person who's only really satisfied after finding something to complain about, you'll be happy to find that one camera (front center) vibrated from the resonance of bass and drums and therefore gave off a slightly wiggly picture. Anyway. The only complaint from me is that this release is a year overdue! This show was recorded in late 2008. Since then we've had a new album, and an entire tour dedicated to that new album. Now we all know Steven Wilson is both a perfectionist and a workaholic, but I feel his priorities were a little off when deciding to get other things done before this one. Tags: dvds, music Current Location: Husum, Germany Current Music: Porcupine Tree - My Ashes (live)
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