Theo\’s Blog

Sylvia and me made some changes to our interior, to give our books a better and more prominent place in the house. We used to have two big bookcases packed to gather in a little cabinet of our living room. This looked like this:

That arrangement was allright, but we could do better. Check this out! Using the space in the living room to place our bookcases next to each other really makes a much more powerfull impression. I had to put some pressure on Sylvia to get this done, but I really think it’s much better.

And at the same time we bettered the cabinet to. Monday Daan Roosegaarde came and delivered us a custom made variant, or a ‘drunken bookcase‘ as one of my friends calls it. I love the variant. [Disclosure: I work for Daan and might say nice thing to flatter him, but really I love this variant.] I spend the entire first day staring agape with wonder at it every half hour. You do not yet see it on this picture, but we now filled the variant with the kind of books that you can easily read when you have a little time. Some comics and some short story books. All this cabinet now needs is a Fat Boy to relax in it, a better lamp and something on the walls.

Okay about that something on the wall. I was thinking about this; I want to paint a giant copy of this Calvin and Hobbes cover;

And this is really ambitious because I never really painted anything. But I like this picture so much. In my giant replica of it (2m x 1m) I would make the most of the picture plain white, I would place a few small bare trees in upper left and Calvin and Hobbes happily moving through the snow in lower right. (I might put in the words “It’s a magical world” as well, but I’m not sure yet.) A magical image if you ask me.

So where do I start? What materials should I use? I will start by asking Sylvia, she’s the creative type, she has experiences with this sort of stuff, but at least she knows who to ask. I will keep you update on this project. Share your thoughts with me, if you have suggestions on how to tackle this.

Isn’t Office Assistant your friendliest best friend.

My university had an unexpected, not so welcome suprise. Here is an excerpt from a mailing I received, explaining the situation.

Over the last few days, some employees and students at TU Delft have had regular problems sending e-mail correspondence to external relations. This is because the central e-mail servers at TU Delft have been regularly included on the Spamcop blacklist in recent weeks. Spamcop is a system used by a large number of organisations to combat ‘spam’ or unsolicited e-mail. Spamcop checks the source of an e-mail message and if it is included on a blacklist, all e-mails from that source are blocked by the receiving party. After a thorough investigation, the ICT department has discovered the cause of this problem.

We mark unsolicited e-mail as ‘*****Spam*****’ before sending it on to the addressee. In cases where the person in question has activated his or her Office Assistant, an e-mail is sent back. Over the holiday period, so many of these ‘spam’ emails were sent back and forth that we ended up being registered on the Spamcop blacklist.

LOL

A week ago me and my girlfriend cleaned up our laptops. Backed up the things we wanted to keep and reformatted the hard-drives for a new clean install of our Microsoft Windows XP OSes. In my case everything went fine, but Sylvia’s OS refused to activate with the message that the number of installations for her license was exceeded. We kept the OS in the unactivated state, but installed security updates and service packs by downloading it via my laptop and then installing it on Sylvia’s system (Windows Update does not work in a unactivated Windows), hoping that the problem would solve itself in time. We where guessing that Microsoft erroneous was still counting Sylvia’s previous installation as a still existing install. After a few days, we lost hope that the problem would solve itself, but I was reluctant to contact Microsoft. So I Googled for the problem, but found no cure for the problem. I did found however a advise to prevent this problem, which I will follow up the next time I reinstall a Windows OS on a machine. You can backup the following two files:

C:\windows\system32\wpa.bak and C:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl

After reinstalling Windows, you only have to replace these two files with your backup and reboot to activate your copy again. This trick only works when re-installing the OS on the same system. The activation files contain hardware information about your PC. Different mainboard’s and video-cards will probably not work.

Unable to find a ‘dirty’ way to activate Sylvia’s windows. I turned to the Microsoft customer service. I was amazed about this really nice experience that I had with them. I found the phone number in the Windows activation Wizard, the phone number was free (I’m a greedy Dutch) and I was helped right away. The nice lady, believed me on my word, that we had not used the same Product Key on an other machine and provided me with a special key to activate.The whole phone call took less then 2 minutes!

Two weeks ago I was with Sylvia at the “5 Days Off” festival in Amsterdam. On this pictures here we are exploring “Liquid Space 2.0″, a interactive cocon designed and realised by artist Daan Roosegaarde. Daan took this pictures. Thanks Daan!

Hello world.