Everything is packed

Stéphanie and I have finally finished packing… at about 2 o’clock in the morning. We’re kind of tired right now :-)

We more tomorrow, ehh, I mean later today. Bye for now, I’ll let you guys know when we have Internet out there and when things start to settle.

Sir, can I see your card and registration?

I just found out that the people we’re renting our new apartment from, Vesterbo, insist that we apply to be allowed to install our new combined washing/drying machine and the dish washer. We’re not allowed to connect them until the permit arrives, and of course they couldn’t tell us when that would be. How stupid is that?!

I tried asking them for a reason why we couldn’t just connect the machines right away, considering that the woman who lived there until now had all the same machines as we with to connect. But no reason was given. The woman I argued with could only offer an analogy, she said it’s like when you have a driving license: you’re also not allowed to drive without carrying it with you. But that’s not a reason! That is just side-stepping the question…

Arghh, I have such rules that make no sense to me and where I cannot get a reasonable answer!

All in all I must say that I’m rather unimpressed by these organizations that administrate the apartments in this town. We’re currently with Fagbo, and there we’ve been waiting over a week to have the light replaced in our bathroom (it blinks like mad, so you either have to shower with the light off, or suffer a headache when you get out…). It’s been like this every time we have asked the janitor for something — the round-trip time is at least a week.

At least the packing is going forward — Stéphanie and I packed most of our books and all our DVDs and CDs yesterday.

Live from TCC07

The last coffee break of the day has just finished and the talks are about to resume with a special event about the assumptions for cryptography. I’m in Amsterdam at the Theory of Cryptography Conference 2007 and have been listening to talks all day. Some were interesting and some were boring, but I guess that was to be expected.

What was not to be expected was the food: We got buns with different kinds of fillings (cheese, ham, raisins, etc.) and a glass of milk. There were also some deep-fried cheese.

In the coffee breaks they server, well…, coffee and tea with biscuits — I had a glass of water with my two biscuits :-/ Not so exciting, I hope the food will be better tomorrow.

Bye for now, I might write more tomorrow!

New hardware :-)

Yesterday Stéphanie and I went shopping for some new hardware — the kind of hardware you have in the kitchen and bathroom, that is :-)

We went to Elgiganten and Electric City, two big malls with all sorts of electric equipment. The nice thing about the two shops is that they lie beside each other, so we could walk back and forth and compare prices and specs. And we ended up going back and forth a lot…

We started in Electric City where we picked a washing machine, a condenser tumble dryer, a refrigerator, and a dish washer that we liked. We then walked to Elgiganten and compared prices, and came to the conclusion that Electric City was slightly cheaper. So we went back there and looked some more at the stuff, now with the things from Elgiganten in the back of our minds. There we managed to agree on the four machines we need (after I almost drove Stéphanie crazy by spending 15 minutes on picking a refrigerator) and went to talk with the clerk about how it should be delivered.

But the clerk told us that we could not have the stuff delivered on March 1st since Electric City had been sold to Elgiganten, and the shop would close on February 24th! At that point their remaining stock would be taken over by Elgiganten, but there was no way for us to pay for the things now and then have Elgiganten deliver them later… Aargh! All that walking back and forth had been for nothing…

So back to Elgiganten to look some more. The salesman recognized us from the first visit and now that we sort of knew what we wanted we figured that we might as well let him find the stuff for us. Since we were buying so many things we wanted them to be cheap, but the salesman was sort of hesitant to recommend the cheap labels. He would rather sell us a Whirlpool, Siemens, AEG, or Bosh machine than one from Candy or Indicit.

When he realized that we really didn’t want to pay (much) more to get the good brands, he started offering us discounts! So we could get a refrigerator from Whirlpool together with a dish washer from Siemens with a 10% discount! That was in addition to the discount that had already been given to those things. This way we got a refrigerator and dish washer that makes much less noise than the cheaper ones.

As for the washing machine and dryer the salesman wanted to put together a set, but we ended up buying a combined model and saved some money again. Of course the salesman was a bit worried about us buying such a cheap model, so he offered a five year insurance for 500 DKK (instead of 650 DKK). We bought the insurance and so he could reclaim some of the earlier discount :-) But on the other hand — if something breaks in the little machine, then it would cost at least 500 DKK just to have a repairman to show up.

So now Stéphanie and I have all the appliances for our new home. I’m really looking forward to start using them!

Planet updates

The DAIMI Planet has been updated once again! Changes/fixes include

  • Some of the timestamps were not formatted in the GMT+1 timezone. This should have been fixed now.

  • Several of the faces have been color corrected by my super fiancée! Compare this row of before and after images:

    Fitzi Gabi Martin Rune Mirka Peter

    Fitzi Gabi Martin Rune Mirka Peter

  • The faces (new and old) have now been moved to a box in the right margin. The faces are sorted by the last modification date of the feed. If you can come up with a good algorithm for sorting and/or resizing the faces, then please let me know. I’ll then tell you how to checkout the source from Subversion :-)

  • The error handling has been vastly improved: if a parse error is found deep within the HTML, then the output will be aborted and all open tags will be closed correctly. Before a single stray <i> tag could turn half the Planet into italic…

  • Caching works again. This should speed up the execution of planet.py and will hopefully make the Planet display all comments for the posts instead of just the 10 most recent comments.

As always, please tell me if you find any problems with the Planet or if you have suggestions for improvements!