Personal

I finally managed to take a week off and I declare the following week as the week where I will do things which I love (thank you, Mr Roosevelt for the following quote):

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Another link which emphasizes the above quote comes from one of the Github founders, Chris Wanstrath, who gave a keynote at Ruby Hoedown. Time to look at my github account again and devote some hours to some projects (anyone in need of a OpenStreetMap -> Shape-File converter?).

Zach Klein wrote a few days ago a story about his flaws. He said that when he was asked about them in college, he couldn’t name them.

I can’t name them either.

But I’m working on it, even if I actually don’t want to. Today I discovered one of them.

I’m impatient. I guess I’ve always been. When I was still a kid, not too young anymore, I knew where my mum hid my christmas presents. I did have a look at some of them, not all, but some. That didn’t annul the joy when I actually got them, because I know what was lying under the christmas tree (again, not all of them, I didn’t unpack them or so).

I was also one of the guys who where quite unhappy when it came to the mid of summer because I knew school was still not going to start for a long time. And I guess I’m a doer. I was never one of those guys who was passive at school, who waited for other students to say something or to act. I wanted to show what I can do and I did.

Now I’m no longer a student, but an employee. And it makes me quite nervous to see what our competition did while we were talking about what we might can do. I wanna build things, I wanna do something, I wanna make progress, actively.

I guess that’s also one of my flaws in my personal life (well, no, I do know that it is a flaw). I can’t wait for things to happen, I need them to happen, I want to influence them and just can’t wait for it). Why do I write all that? Well, because I guess things are changing here. And I can only wait and see. Which makes me uncomfortable and pretty much puzzled.

I just wanted to register an .at domain and couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price: €72.00 for the first year. That would make about 10 (!!!) .com domains registered with Dreamhost.com. Can anybody tell me what justifies the price on nic.at?

My iPod mini’s battery is running quite low on power, just holds for a day or two. In addition, its disk is clicking and it takes me two or three tries to get it to play the song I wanna listen to.

So yesterday I purchased a replacement, a silver iPod nano, 4gb. It has the perfect size for me and enough space to hold the most recent music. Perfect. And even better are the new headphones, which are smaller than the ones I had until now (Sennheiser and original Apple headphones) which makes them much more comfortable.

I’m currently implementing a pure JavaScript time-series/line graph. I’ve got the idea from the book I’m currently reading (Visualizing Data by Ben Fry).

It works great, still have to do some improvements here and there but my main goal is to get it running with IE, which doesn’t support the <canvas> tag (which is really a pity).

Do you know any alternatives? It’s enough if I could draw basic shapes like rectangles and lines, nothing fancy.

• Take more photos
• Launch at least the two projects I’m working on
• Spend a few days at the seaside with my girlfriend
• Get my degree
• Spend a weekend in at least one European capital
• Move to Vienna
• Go to the theatre, at least once twice
• Go running, two times a week minimum
• Find a cool internship for August
• Get a job (in the web industry)
• Plant herbs
• Do a painting together with my girlfriend
• Contribute to some Open Source projects
• Learn another programming language
• Learn Cocoa
• Find a flat without a pre-installed kitchen
• Learn Swedish again
• Spend more time cooking and baking
• Watch ARTE more often (or quit my subscription)

[to be continued]

I will start my internship at Frequentis tomorrow and I have to say that I’m pretty excited (it’s not so that it would be something completely new, I did a one-month internship there in August and did some project work in spring). But still, it’s something which I’m looking forward to.

It’s also nearly the end of my studies at my university, I will write my second bachelor thesis, do the exam and then I am finally done. Plans for the future? Definitely, but I won’t tell - yet.

• LaTeX can be quite picky about umlauts, even if you set inputenc to utf8. Labels don’t treat umlauts correctly and so pdflatex will give you some strange error message.
• LaTeX again. Underscores within your text are also a bit of a problem, but there’s a package you can use (underscore)
• You cannot save transparent gif images with .NET easily (meaning: Bitmap.Save(someStream, ImageFormat.bmp)).
• GDI+ will give you strange error messages wherever it can. Saving a png image to an output stream is such a thing. You need to save it to a memory stream first and then save the memory stream to the output stream. That’s because the png must be seek-able, which is not the case for the bitmap class.
• TextMate is awesome. For real.
• Transparent pngs work surprisingly well in IE7.
• SVG support in Firefox is great, but sucks for Internet Explorer (you need a plugin from Adobe which you cannot install without administrator privileges).

Seems like I had a busy day.

It’s finally here, my shiny new MacBook has arrived on Friday. Overally I can say that Leopard is awesome, as is the hardware. Programs are really snappy, Spaces, Spotlight, Safari (I love the search feature and the resizable textfields) are all awesome.

The only problem I have at the moment is the keyboard. I’ve chosen the german version, which does not have labels for all characters on a key. So finding some strange shortcuts can be quite tricky sometimes.

Pictures and further insights will follow.

Yep, I’ve ordered a brand new MacBook (the one with the Santa Rosa chipset) last Thursday. The Apple website says that it will ship on Friday, unfortunately I have no clue where my MacBook is at the moment (Apple tracking doesn’t seem to work for now). But I will happily wait, read all those fancy Apple blogs which are floating around the web, collecting hints and tips and will be a happy Mac user on Friday (please!).

Update: Seems to have arrived in the Netherlands.
Update #2: On it’s way to Vienna.