Too Far Afield

Saturday evening I had a conversation on a party. It was a special conversation, because it presented the fatality of language at its best. Language changes over time. Youth use other language than the elderly. On the party – well, acutally it was more like a get-together – one boy, only a few years younger than me, asked a question about his computer. When I explained the answer to his satisfaction, he said: Pornoes!*) Wait, what was that? Ah, actually it means something similar as cool or geil. I get the point. Am I really getting that old?

*) No German keybords at FBI means no umlauts, sorry!

This morning at our local post office I learned something new: An answer is always free. I had to mail back some papers to my building society and they provided me with a blue envelope. Above the address of the building society the letters Antwort saved me some money. Please frank adequately!, the place in the upper right corner said. At the post office the agent refused to take my money, though. Guess, what she said? Right. Antwort ist immer kostenlos. Well, if she demands it….

The few photos I made during our tour to the big chili meal Friday night are now on Pixel. Nothing special this time, just some shots of Maxime. Enjoy!

I’ve added two more photos to the home page. They were both made last Friday at the big chili meal in Eppendorf. One was taken by Konz and the other one by Maxime. I’d like to thank both of them for providing high resolution copies.

The photos I made on a tour through Klövensteen with T. on Saturday are now online. The Klövensteen is a forest at the western end of Hamburg. The moor you can see on some of the photos is the nature reserve Schnakenmoor. Although it was quite cold, the weather was good and the landscape was very interesting. Enjoy!

Thunderbird 1.5 has been released. Have a look at the fixed bugs and new features summary. This is largely for T., because he complained, that no one had told him after the last Firefox release.

In related news: WordPress 2.0 was released some time ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to upgrade, yet.

Note to myself: If you ever need a cover address in London: Use 23/24 Leinster Gardens, Paddington, London W2 [via London Leben].

If you read between the lines of this blog, you already know of my recent switch to Ubuntu.

About a month ago, when I still used Debian, the WLAN functionality of my Centrino notebook did not work out of the box. In fact, one of the reasons for the switch was, that Network Manager did not compile on my Debian system. During my day to day work, I often need to connect to different networks – wireless and hardwired – and it always is a pain to configure everything correctly by hand. So Network Manager would have been both very useful and productive. On Ubuntu, I didn’t even need to compile Network Manager, it was availlable as a preconfigured package.

About a month ago, when I still used Debian, I was in need of a testbed. Today I used the WLAN network of my sailing club. And it works. I just switched on my notebook and it really was like Network Manager promised: It really was painfree networking. Just after bootup, I switched on my WLAN antenna and Network Manager immediately found our WLAN network and asked me if I wanted to connect to it, because I had not connected to the network before. After I accepted, Network Manager configured the network options automatically and connected me to the network. On the next bootup, it didn’t even ask, if I wanted to connect. It just found out, that I still had no hardwired connection and used my clubs network automatically. In short: I got the configuration-comfort of Windows (and it is easier than a default Debian installation in regard of wireless network management) together with the stability of Linux.