Inspired by "Da Workshop"

The other day I was on the phone with my friend Lasse, and we entered into a discussion about powertools (e.g. Binford2000.. ) which we both are absolutely fascinated about, but know little about how to use in practice.. Anywho, I bragged about our fine "Tech Workshop" anno 2005 - which, for some strange reason, inspired him to and do some real work himself..

The project - wall-mount a switch under his desk.

First - get the powerdrill:
Well.. Lasse is living in London - and have been for a number of years now - the avid reader will notice that the drill do not have a UK powerplug - probably because Lasse acquired this fine tool whilst living in Denmark.. Goes to show you how often Lasse is using his powerdrill......

Fixed:


Here's the wall with the four (more or less aligned) freshly drilled holes:


The final product (not too shabby, eh..) :


The aftermath - cleaning:


As always, Lasse is available - together with the rest of the team of handymen on 1-800-MORONS-AT-WORK

Squeezebox

Squeezebox
Originally uploaded by mich_bsd.

and here's a nice picture...

SMOKIN'!!

Jesus-holy-mom-of-a-goat it is scorching hot over here right now... Check out my Forecastfox...


Needless to say mich and I are sweating like newborn baboons right now...


cheerio!!

Squeezebox arrived

My squeezebox just arrived a couple of hours ago - oh boy, this is a super nice little gadget..

I installed audio/slimserver from the ports collection, and turned the squeezebox on.. I took me about 30 seconds to get the little sucker connected to the network, and recognized by the slimserver (running off my laptop) - everything works like a beaut.. Now I'm discovering all the cool functions and features..

I also installed the last.fm plugin that soft of works.. seems the squeezebox reboots every time I initialize a last.fm stream.. I looked briefly on the slim devices forum, and it seems that I not the only one experiencing this problem.. hmm...
Haven't tried out the scrobbler plugin yet, but it is installed - so it should work.

I've just finished setting up the squeezenetwork account, and I'm just now discovering pandora - holy crap - this thing just ROCKS !

Looking forward to listening to Danish broadcast streams tonight on my stereo... Also, I will have to connect the squeezebox to my WLAN at home.. That should be interesting..

Enough for now, I will play some more..

PS. UPS Express rocks - I put in my order Monday afternoon, and the package arrived at 11am today !

Squeezebox - en route !

Weeee.. after Stig's excellent post about his squeezebox - I got kinda hooked on the idea, so I just ordered one. I got the one with both Ethernet and wifi connectivity.. It's actually quite affordable, something like $340 (with shipping) - I'll probably have to pay local tax on it, but even then it's still cheaper to buy it directly from Slim Devices than a France-based webshop - where it would be well over $450 (what the hell is wrong with those guys... don't buy your shit from softline.fr !)

So what can it do ?
Well.. pretty much anything - stream a shitload of online radio stations - I will finally be able to listen to danish broadcasts from my stereo.. also, I will be able to stream my own music. In addition, squeezebox can function as a wifi bridge for my WLAN - pretty neat !

Go read the Slim Devices : Squeezebox : Overview here !

No shit, Sherlock

Snippet from Danish newspaper Politiken:
"Foreign Ministry: Nobody should travel to Lebanon"

Geeee, you think ?

----
Udenrigsministeriet: Ingen bør rejse til Libanon

Forholdene i Libanon er nu så alvorlige, at Udenrigsministeriet fraråder alle at rejse til landet.

Shit is hitting the fan

It is not looking good in the middle-east...

Israel calls Hizbollah capture of soldiers act of war

MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (Reuters) - Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed up to seven Israelis in violence on either side of the Lebanese border on Wednesday, further inflaming Middle East tensions.

Racism & Soccer

Just got this postcard the other day.. and in light of Materazzi's poor behavior during the Italy vs. France worldcup final, I thought it would be worth posting.


It says: "Do not let racism invade the stadiums"

- nuff' said !

France Italy

GODDAMNIT! Damn lenguini-eaters!

Well, at least we still royally kick their asses at rugby

See you for the World Cup in 2007, slackers!

Au moins on a battu le Portugal..

Rendez-vous dans 2 ans pour la coupe d'Europe !

Ahhhhhh...

I'll do anything to kill that thirst !

France:1 Portugal: 0

Ils sont ou, ils sont ou, ils sont ou les portugais!

I am SOOOO happy those losers are out of the competition, especially that Cristiano Ronaldo, what a little jackass that one is...

Cry your heart out, you pansy.

France 3: Spain 1

I think this pretty much says it all...

Australia vs Italy

I feel sorry for the Australians... 
Italy did *so* not deserve to continue in the world cup.

 

via http://users.on.net/~billt/italianjob.gif

Tom Cruise's M:I:III promo at la Défense

I learned from a "20 minutes" article yesterday that Tom Cruise would be at La Défense on his European promo tour for M:I:III to inaugurate the "Dôme" cinema, so I trudged over there after work and waited around, to see what would happen.

Well, our favorite scientologist came down in a big ass helicopter, and people (especially chicks, but a lot of 'guys' too) went APESHIT! I mean, these people were moshing, just to get a pic of jerry mcguire!

First impression of Brian Flanagan - man is he short - I mean I knew he wasn't 6ft, but he is literally 5ft tall. Seems like a nice guy though, as it took his time signing autographs with pretty much everyone there (around 2000 people) I managed to get the following snap.

Apart from Ethan Hunt, Jamie Foxx was there too, didn't see him though, as I got the hell out of there, I needed a beer.

Navigo Integral - A bunch of retards!

I am in the process of changing my bank, cause BNP sucks ass... for multiple reasons, don't get me started..
Anywho, part of the process is to move all your services that is automatically charged from your account.. One of them, is for me, Navigo Integral. This the "new" public transportation division of RATP. It's actually quite neat, too bad the employees are like all other French public employees, retards.

Knowing that I'm dealing with retards, I called in advance and asked them how I should proceed with the change.. I was told, send the following (per snail-mail obviously):

- Bank identification paper
- auto-charge authorization (signed)

Ok, great.. My new bank had provided me with templates for these letters, so I simply have to add my contract# and my signature. Filled in the stuff, and sent it.

Yesterday I received a letter from "the retards" - well in fact they need the information (the exact information I already sent) filled into a special form.. *sigh* Not any additional information, no no, just a stupid form that differs very little from my original letter.. except I have to fill all numbers, address etc etc manually..

Called them up today, and sure enough, they insist on me resending the form.. fucking hell.. I've made the same change with countless of other companies, and obviously the only ones creating trouble are publicly held organizations.. such as the tax office, and RATP.
Actually my ISP even allowed me to change the thing online, without any hassle...

I can't wait for the day they will be privatized, all these companies, I swear to god, heads will roll ! They do not know the first thing about company care..

I hate them all..

Quote of the day

If you wanna feel funky, feel free - but please don't spread that funk on me.

Chris Rock's demented uncle

Just like the picture

Hey,

It's too early for chitchat. I just like the picture.


Oh yeah, I figured mich has been putting up jackass pictures of me, so basically - "right back atcha"

Ciao!

Da Nikon D70S - yeah baby!

Ahh, after a month or so of craving a new digital camera, it's here!

We opted for the Nikon D70s kit with a 18-70mm lenses, and were right - it's a pretty sweet beast ;)

What is there to say - Boys and toys...


Now I have to learn how to use it!

ciao!

Post a picture (or two) day

The phrase "useless slacker" springs to mind ;)

Bike !

Went yesterday to pick up a bike in Decathlon - it's amazing how cheap it is to get a bike these days.. It's a sweet ride, and as of now I'll be riding it to and from work every day.

Here's how I've shortened my daily commute, so far:

With car: 25-30 minutes
With bus: 20 minutes
On bike: 9 minutes
I'm expecting that to go slightly down once I get into the routine (and shape).

Here's a couple of pictures of the beast






Obviously I also picked up a bicycle "computer" - with loads of nice functions..

Pimpin' Ride .... and Pimp My Ride

Yo! A buddy of mine just gave me a car (yes, gave)! Ok ok, it's not the most recent thing, but it rolls, and gets from point A to point B (I think).

It's a Renault 25 GTX from 1986 - totally an 80s car, but it's got some cool specs (rofl) - 2.2 liter engine, electric windows and sunroof (yes! a fucking sunroof!), and basically everything is working. I have to change a couple tires, and fix the radiator (well, someone has to fix the radiator, I don't know anything about damn cars), but apart from that it's in relatively good shape - Oh yeah, we need to clean it too, it hasn't driven for 2 years, and has been sitting in a garage, so there's 'a bit' of dust.. check out the pics!






We're thinking about getting in touch with MTV's Pimp My Ride Europe, because this is totally the kind of car in need of a Pimpin'.

Anyways, I'll get this thing out of the garage, fixed and cleaned up, and post some 'After' pictures soon. Ciao!

Dimbo

What the hell ?!

I was just reviewing my fine post earlier, when I notcied the Google ad in the right pane :



Feminine blogs ?!? What in the living crap is that about ?

Easter is coming..

Enough said.

Picture of the Day

I think this picture says it all.... at least for today...


ciao!

4000W AC Power Supply!

Hello!

I just loved the look of this little beast!


This is a Cisco Catalyst 6000 chassis 4000 watt power supply. I would just loooove to plug this baby in.

(rest assured, there is absolutely nothing, I mean NOTHING sexual about me liking this thing... nothing I tell you..)

Anyways, tata, laddies!

Sunday at the Sorbonne

We were walking around yesterday in our neighborhood, and decided to go over to the Sorbonne University to check out the damage the recent anti-CPE riots have bestowed up it, and of course we took a couple pics.

Here you can see they have severely barricaded the university:


Suddenly I noticed this dude dressed in orange in front of the barricades. I decided to get closer...


Look at this DUFUS! This "Syndicalist" from FO (Force Ouvrière - a workers union) was standing there, on a SUNDAY, dressed in ORANGE, with a GREEN FLAG, and you know what, he was happy about it (look at him smile)!


This is a snap I took over the barricades, at the CRS trucks in front of the university:


This is Rue St. Jacques, which is usually a really busy street...:

Tomorrow the anti-CPE riots are pretty much taking france as hostage, as all the workers unions are going to block up ALL PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, which mean I'm going to have a hell of a time going to and from work, and mich is going to have a HELL of a time getting back from Denmark.

I hate them all...

Münich re-visited

So I'm back in Münich as part of my upgrading corporate firewalls world-tour. The weather is pretty shitty, I could swear I saw snow falling down this morning. It's cold, grey and boring.

On the upside, had a couple of brewskies last night, I have got to give it to the Germans, they do know how to serve a tasty beer:



Spend a considerable amount of time on the phone with Deutsche Telekom... my god, what an ordeal. Apparently very few employees with T-Kom are able/willing to speak English - and, unfortunately, the ones that say they do, are complety incomprehensible.
We are converting our Office-Connect line, to a T-DSL business line - not a big deal, right ? Wrong !
They are obviously removing the Office-Connect router, and setting up some DSL equipment. Only they installed a DSL-modem (without router functionality) - so in order to get it working, we would have to install a Windows XP box directly on the modem... *sigh*..

Had to find a T-Kom store, and go fetch a DSL-Router... Sinus 154 DSL Basic SE.. With integrated WiFi and configurable by a "nice" web interface.. that basically only works with IE... *sigh* *sigh*

Obviously this beautiful web interface is only in German, and completely illogical. Anyway, managed to disable WiFi, NAT, and the builtin firewall - and in addition, point the fixed IP that we've purchased , directly on our own firewall (running FreeBSD naturally).

Today, tidying up - cleaning out the old firewall, and helping the sales staff here, with their small tech issues...

Back tonight, and leaving for Denmark on Sunday...

Attention to detail...

Hello!

I was watching a concert on tv, and realised that some jackass working at W9 had misspelled the artist's name...

The dude's name is Gérald de PALmas, not PLAMAS, you jackass!

The mistake was up for most of the concert, then the whole line disappeared. Obviously it left me enough time to take a picture...


BTW I played some rugby this morning... and scored a try!

It doesn't happen often, so I had to mention it...

plus I didn't get hurt, which is pretty exceptional as well...

ciao!

Snippets for vim(1)

For a week or so, I've started to look into Ruby on Rails for web application development - it's very nifty and has a lot of potential !
Watching the online tutorial videos, I'm becoming increasingly jealous of the OS X users and their super cool TextMate editor ! Being a vim(1) man myself, I set out trying to reproduce some of the textmate behavior - specifically the snippets functionality. After searching a bit around on google, I found the snippetmagic project, which does exactly that ! It add snippets not only for rails projects, but also:

• actionscript
• asp
• c
• css
• django
• f-script
• gri
• haskell
• html
• java
• javascript
• latex
• logo
• markdown
• mips
• movable type
• objective c
• ocaml
• odcompletion
• perl
• php
• phpdoc
• propel
• python
• rails
• ruby
• setext
• slate
• smarty
• source
• symfony
• tcl
• template toolkit
• text
• unixshell
• xhtml
• xml

Pretty friggin' awesome !

Cool 7940 phone.. and real cool ringtone

Hello!

Mich is currently checking out a VoIP solution using the world renowned Asterisk, an Open Source PBX.

Well he got Asterisk installed on a "server" (aka - spare parts sitting around the office thrown into an old Compaq Deskpro chassis), and in order to test this fab solution, we got ourselves a couple Cisco 7940 IP phones:

Now these babies are hot - real hot! I don't know if you've recognized them, but they're practically the same suckers they use on "24" - and guess what? We have the unofficial "24" ringtone! Yes sir!

We are such geeks...

ciao!

Danish Muslims

So the aftermath of the whole drawing the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, is resulting in an Imam in Denmark trying to organize all Danish Muslims to burn their Danish passports on the central square in Copenhagen.

Well, go ahead... a new passport costs 500,- DKK (roughly 70,- EUR)

I think there are more intelligent ways of showing discontent with the publications..

Charlie Birdy - Revisited

Back in the 90s when I first arrived in Paris, my usual hang out would be Chesterfield Cafe on rue Boetie, in the 8th. It was a pimpin' place, with lots of cool people and taking the party to the max until the early morning. There was actually a rumor going around, saying that at that time - Chesterfield Cafe was the busiest bar in Europe. I do not know if it is true, but there sure used to be a lot of folks.
At some point in 2000 or so, Chesterfield got sued for the Chesterfield trademark - probably by Philip-Morris or some other lame-ass tobacco company. So they changed the name to "House of Live" - I do not know if management changed as well, but the place just wasn't the same. I've only been there a few times since then.
Yesterday, I found out that they had changed their name (once again) to Charlie Birdy - and a friend of mine got a job as bartender there - so we went their last night for a drink and some food.

The place has been cleaned up, and do put it a lot of nice deco - and I'm happy to see that they kept that huge cool-ass mahogany bar. They are definitely going with a more upscale look, than their predecessors.
The food was ok, and the drinks too (has some Mojitos) - but the waitress was slow as hell, and the hostess was not too friendly. Also, I did not have a chance to visit the restrooms, but both Chesterfield and House of Live were notorious for their absolutely disgusting restrooms..

Go check it out:
Charlie Birdy

Today is post a picture day

Dimitri, on the whole "work" thing:

Agilent N2X

The other day, my esteemed colleague and myself went out to the Agilent Technologies HQ in Massy, France - for a demonstration of their N2X product, and I must say - it kicks ass !



Only downside is the price... it is priiiiiiiicy...

Selling my car

I'm selling my wheels..

It's a Peugeot 307 XSi 2.0 - it's in excellent condition.. well, more or less.

Drop me a mail if you are interested.

La Defense

Took this picture on my way home from the "Solutions Linux" expo at the CNIT.


It's a nice building, huh?

Nike Airmax 360 - Running on Slaves?

I was coming back from the FNAC on Friday evening after a nice cold beer at the 'Relais Odeon', when I noticed an ad for the new Nike Air Max 360.

This is how the situaiton went through my head.

- Nike, huh, cool
- shoe kinda looks nice, although i don't really like Nike
- Airmax 360 - alright.
- Nike Airmax 360 - Running on Slaves - that's a bit of a bizarre ad.
- Running on Slaves? huh, what the...!

Well apparently some anarchist losers had been there before me, taken apart the lit billboard, added a bit of their own to the ad, and put it back together. This is what it looked like:


As you can imagine, this ad really got a crowd quick.

I wonder how long that was up before someone was notified and it was 'cleaned up'?

In any case, I got the pic!

ciao for now,

dim

Useless parking

In my building (where I live) I have a parking, so I can basically just take the lift down to the basement, and I'll be by my car..

The other morning when I went to work, a couple of cars looked like this:

click for a larger picture

Apparently, during the night a bunch of thieving bastards had gained access to the parking, and managed to run off with 12 tires. In addition, they broke a couple of windows to get inside to steal gps equipment etc..
Amazingly, they did not touch my car, though they broke windows on the cars in front and behind mine - I guess it's because mine has a nasty alarm.

In light of my previous blogpost, about the price of tires and whatnot, I'd like to stress the point - that I did not, I repeat, *not* have anything to do with this little operation.. really....

Tired of tires

Evidently I have to change the two front tires on my car.. (being that they skid every time I accelerate, and don't even get me started on the breaking.. or lack thereof)

This is where I get screwed for driving with 17" rims..

So the other day I went to my local Midas for an estimate. It was a most unpleasant surprise.. with the cheapest tires, it would cost me around 550 EUR for both tires ! Sweet mother of all that holy !!! For crying out loud, it's rubber we're talking about - not plutonium.

Spent some time yesterday, calling around to find a cheaper solution. Here's my findings:

All places are 15 minutes or less away from my home. Classed from cheapest to most expensive.

Tire reference: 205/50 ZR 17 89W

1. Jumbo Pneus (Genevilliers)
Cheapest tire: 150 EUR / tire
Medium tire: 170 EUR / tire
Michelin/Pirelli: 210 EUR / tire

So a couple of average tires (including "montage"): 340 EUR TTC

2. Euromaster (Levallois-Perret)
Very nice service - on the phone, anyways.
Cheapest solution (including "montage") : 388 EUR TTC

3. Speedy (La Garenne)
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 463 EUR TTC

4. Midas (La Garenne)
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 550 EUR TTC

5. Peugeot (La Defense)
This is where I purchased the piece of shit car I have.
First off, the service was absolute crap - I was transferred 3 times, and had to call back
another number, because he didn't want to transfer the call.
Montage: 60 EUR HT
Tires: (263 EUR HT/ tire): 526 EUR HT
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 700 EUR TTC


Perhaps I'll just find another 307, and "walk off" with a couple of tires in the late night hours..

New digital camera

I had the misfortune to turn 29 a week ago or so.. We "celebrated" the occasion with lots of booze and whatnot - once I get a scanner working (cough, cough Dimitri) I'll scan and post the ticket from the police for "Tapage Nocturne" (Nightly commotion) as proof for the festiva.

Anywho, people gave me a bunch of money so I could finally get one of them modern digital cameras. So last weekend I went to Fnac to pick one out.
I settled for the Fuji Finepix F11 (holy crap there's a lot to choose from). It's a nice little beast.

6.7M pixels (whatever the hell that means) and best of all - it came with battery, charger, XD memory card and a carrying case.

Pretty sweet..

Meet the colleagues

Say hello to Pietr and Carlos:

Hard hitting journalism

Roughly translated it goes :
"26 year old survives death-jump"
"A 28 year old man from Odense survived.... bla bla"

So is he 26 or 28 - or are they talking about two different people ?

Real smooth Bt

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone.. Let's hope 06 won't suck ass like 05 did.

I'm just about getting over my new years hangover..