Category: Work

On spam…

I usually receive spam to enhance my manhood, or make her moan in bed, or buy a gorgeous replica watch. However today, I received one that stands out. Really.

They call me Sir, but they all do, informing me they are putting up the following for immediate transaction:

  • 1 Unit of BRAND NEW 7,000dwt Oil Tanker (Built Nov, 2008 in China)
  • 1 Unit of BRAND NEW 6740dwt Chemical Tanker (Built Nov, 2008 in China)
  • 1 Unit of 1002dwt Chemical Tanker (Built 1988 in Japan)

Out of interest I searched what these look like. Who on earth would contact them for more information?? One of these boats is almost 120 meters long, weighs tons and costs 0.58 MIL$.

“c’est quoi un datespace ?”, expliqué par Dom

Dom nous fournit une excellente explication du concept de datespace, sur IRC, suite à la question d’un de nos stagiaires:

2008-04-10T07:55:05Z <seb> c'est quoi un datespace ?
2008-04-10T07:56:27Z <dom> c'est un logement qui, au lieu 
d'avoir une cuisine, un salon, une salle de bain, a plein de 
petits placards au milieu desquels tu tombe par hasard sur un 
pommeau de douche, une cuisinière, un coussin, etc
2008-04-10T07:56:41Z <dom> l'avantage, c'est que tu n'as 
jamais de problème pour ranger quelque chose de nouveau
2008-04-10T07:56:55Z <dom> l'inconvénient, c'est que 
tu ne sais jamais où est ton lit quand tu en as besoin
2008-04-10T07:56:59Z <dom> mais bon, on peut pas tout avoir
2008-04-10T08:00:00Z <seb> hum ok
2008-04-10T08:01:17Z <dom> (moins métaphoriquement, c'est une 
méthode d'organisation d'un site web utilisée sur le 
site du W3C où les ressources sont organisées dans des 
répertoires du type /2008/04/ )
2008-04-10T08:03:54Z <seb> aaaaaaaaaaah

Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder

I swear I knew what I was going to blog about, mere moments ago. I was only missing the title. I knew I had several things to list. /me scratches head, looks confused. Damn, I should make a better use of twitter.

I could blog about ADD, mind you. Note the absence of H; “Hyperactivity” seems preposterous as far as I’m concerned.

Now, where was I?…

I wanted to share the irony of this Temperature Monitor program that I use and that seems to simply stop when the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (in this case, it was 83C/181F for the CPU A Temperature Diode). How dumb is that?
Also, I note that I have yet to hear the fans of my MacBook Pro.

There was something else…

Oh well, it probably wasn’t that important. My minibreak time is up anyway.

Where are you travelling, m’ darling?

I was in London, headed to Los Angeles to hop on a flight to San Jose, California. It was a 19 hour trip, with 15 more to go. I stayed in California less than two days. I walked a bit (as a rule, I walk to the meeting venue), I scribed 1.5 day of meeting (a little less than 1200 lines in the IRC logs, a little more than 13000 words), I happily met with a friend and his wife that I hadn’t seen in a while.

The next batch of flights didn’t go so uneventfully. The flight from San Jose to Las Vegas was delayed by almost an hour. A shame since I had a shortish connection to make it to the Boston flight. So we landed mere minutes after the Las Vegas – Boston flight had left. The good thing was that I was were my suitcase was. I spent an hour in the America West customer assistance line, wondering where my legendary luck was and reflecting on how worse it could have been without the said luck. A very helpful lady booked me on a Delta flight to Boston. I had 5 hours to wait.

I walked from the airport to Las Vegas, at dusk, camera in hand. It was interesting. There aren’t a lot of people on their own in Las Vegas. (How mundane is that, for a comment?) I purchased a few gifts that I ended up misplacing on the next day, unfortunately. I took a few photos that turned out blurry; somehow the selector of my camera was on Manual Focus… I had a gourmet dinner at Wendy’s. And I walked back to the airport. It took 45 minutes. Only to find out that the 10:10 pm flight was delayed… “Est. 12:45 am”. Oh well…

I walked through security at 12:15 am. I was selected for further screening. They patted me down (and didn’t find the lighter in my left back pocket). They opened my bags, my computer, ran their sample pads on my jacket, on my shoes, detected explosives, ran some more sample pads on my shoes, x-rayed them again and eventually let me go. I was late by that time. I took the monorail to the gates, ran to gate D41 and boarded at the last minute. It would have been pretty ironic to miss that one. I arrived in Boston 9 hours after schedule. And my suitcase had made it.

I’m back in Boston for 3 months. Yay!