tijs.org

This rules!

Today i got a letter from Eneco, our energy provider (gas & power), that they noticed no supplier was registered as delivering service to our home address so they would have to stop the gas & power coming to our house within 10 days. Slightly weird since i’ve switched suppliers to Greenchoice in october of last year. I called Eneco, only reachable on working days, i then called Greenchoice (on a saturday morning) and got someone on the line after two rings. This apparently is a known problem as he had my request id’s at hand which i could then pass on to Eneco so they would be able to find the Greenchoice request (from october last year) and mark our account as “ok”. Eneco corporate had not been able to get a transfer request to filter down their systems into the computers of their office that manages the actual network, in 6 months time. So now i had to help them by phoning in the actual id’s of the database sets with my account information in them.

Eneco is not alone in being big and lumpy, i have similar experiences with UPC (big & scary), KPN (big & clueless) and companies like Accenture are not known as Accidenture in the IT world for nothing. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size and customer service that is apparent for every big company i ever had dealings with, professional or otherwise.

In a perfect world i would never have to deal with any company with more than 50 employees. Luckily networked companies can build and sell anything from cars to power networks to food stuffs using networks of small motivated companies instead of single big lumpy ones. Pick those and it will improve your quality of life

oh… and that means i will have to find alternatives to Yahoo and Google’s collection of services too i guess if i want to ‘eat my own medicine/poison’. Any ideas on that?

Je kent het wel, je leeft een beetje luxe, rijdt af en toe een auto, of heel vaak, maakt een pleziervluchtje naar hier & daar, misschien op kosten van je baas, gaat op vakantie naar ver weg, of naar dichtbij, reist met de bus of je hebt je eigen auto gebouwd want je leeft een beetje luxe.
…

Brave Hendrik spreekt

Gizmodo have took it upon themselves to start a boycot of RIAA music: Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March - Gizmodo. Although the effect is questionable the intention is a good one. Beyond just stopping to buy RIAA albums there is something else you could do though; help make RIAA free music easier to find. The RIAA radar is doing a great job at building a database of RIAA free music. Why not use that database and tag all music on Last.fm that is RIAA free with the appropriate tag (i.e. riaafree). If enough people help in this effort we’ll soon have a nice and clean Last.fm radio channel for everyone to check out. At first you will be the only one who can see the riaafree tagged music but after enough people tag artists with this tag everybody will be able to easily enjoy it.

(via Boris)

I never really understood why people believed in Bio fuels like ethanol so much. The current wall street hype is understandable but the the european mandate to have 5,75% of all fuel be bio fuel? Where is it going to be harvested from? To have enough biofuel to make all of the united states de able to drive on it you would have to fill the entire US with corn fields. About twice. Furthermore, as it now turns out, prices for food are rising across the board due to the risen demand for the stuff. Beer, meat, milk, most food stuffs have the same basic resource needs as ethanol.

So i guess the question becomes; drive or eat?

This about as silly an eco solution as they get in my humble view. Hybrid cars are a good solution, charge them with electricity gained from solar power and you halve your fuel use and your co2 fumes. That at least makes sense. Am i missing some material information to get this whole biofuel hype?

update:
this seems to partly solve the problem; using grasses and wood pulp instead of grain. cheaper and 50% more effective.

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

A quote from Bill Gates

Not sure why i’m so excited about a damn router…. but it’s here!

Geachte Apple Store-klant,

We zijn vandaag begonnen met de verzending van het nieuwe Apple AirPort Extreme-basisstation (802.11n). Het doet ons genoegen u te kunnen meedelen dat we uw AirPort Extreme-basisstation (802.11n) één week eerder dan verwacht zullen verzenden. De verzending zal nu uiterlijk op woensdag 21 februari plaatsvinden. U hoeft verder geen actie te ondernemen.

in english: were glad to inform you we are shipping a week earlier than expected.

The Apple iPhone has only just been announced but the, also very anticipated, spanning sync software will run on it too as announced today. So not only will you be able to seamlessly sync your Google and iCal calendars, you’ll be able to sync them to your phone too. Sweet!

Spanning Sync Blog: Spanning Sync v1.0 to Support Apple iPhone

Consumenten die producten kopen die inbreuk maken op intellectuele eigendomsrechten (IE) moeten vervolgd kunnen worden voor heling. Dit blijkt uit een amendement dat Europarlementariër Toine Manders (VVD) indiend heeft op de Richtlijn strafrechtlijke handhaving IE-rechten. Vrijschrift / FFII wijst er op dat de formulering zo breed is dat het niet alleen gaat om de spreekwoordelijke nep Rolex op de zwarte markt voor 5 euro. Vrijschrift secretaris Ante Wessels: “Het gaat om alle producten, alle inbreuken, alle elf IE-rechten. Een pot huismerk pindakaas kan al inbreuk maken op een pot Calvé pindakaas. Hier hebben consumenten helemaal geen zicht meer op.”

[persbericht] Europarlementariër Manders wil consumenten criminaliseren