Been busy lately

.. and not much time to blog

Although, there are many many things to blog about I do not have the time to do just that. It's been a very busy time. So here is a very quick and short update.

So what happened?

• Had a very interesting time at Vicrea doing a conformity test for the Dutch ministry of Housing (VROM) and they, we, I passed! Three cheers for them, us, me!
• Also while being outsourced there I made the functional design that they are now building without me. Every now and then I sense the grunts coming from that building. Sorry, it wasn't me who designed the interface of the VROM side of things. I bare with you, all the way to the McDonald's.
• In between all this there is much time being spent on the wonderful Girls A-team of the hockeyclub MHC Steenwijk. We aimed for the highest leaugue and reached that and we even were in the top spot for a couple of weeks and presently we are in the second spot and we have plans not to go any lower than that. And that is an understatement!
• Then there is a great project going on at my present employer. We are preparing an online service, SaaS, and plan to go live in the next couple of months. there is still a lot of stuff that needs to be done in the project, but it is absolutely exciting. I will remain hush hush for a while, but I will let you know on this blog when things become closer to the launch!
• After my time at Vicrea I now have moved onwards to yet another insurance company, Achmea to lend a hand in some projects. An interesting environment I should say.
• Also some websites are in the progress of being built, so that takes some more time away from me.
• I know that I am forgetting stuff here ..
• And finally, my family and me are about to embark on Our Big Trip to visit my brother and sister in law in Bloomington, Indiana. That will keep us away for some three weeks and hopefully I will find time to update either this blog or my Dutch Hyves pages. The latter is probably not visible to everyone and it is in Dutch.
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So, thats the update for now.

Rests me nothing more than to wish everyone a good and healthyy holiday season!

Activation required

.. or who wants to live forever?

Yes, I have a laptop and yes it has Windows Vista on it. Yes, slowly and surely I begin to learn to live with its quirks and annoyances. I begin to find the little knobs you need to find to turn off those nasty warning screens. I mean, three dialogs warning me when I drag and drop some files to my C: drive? Honestly!

And then the confusing options when I want to go home. Should I:

1. let the laptop Shut Down?
2. put it to Sleep?
3. let it Hibernate?
4. or just close it down and see for it self what it does?

This is not a quiz with prizes but all answers are welcome in the comments.

Anyhow

Last night I put my laptop into Hibernate and this morning I woke it up again and Norton Internet Security welcomed me with this screen.

The message box in Dutch

You have decided to skip activation. This proces takes less than a minute. You have to activate your product within 4325464 days. Otherwise it will no longer work.
Do you want to activate now?

Now, I must remember to activate it in about 118 and a half century. Now, I just hope my laptop still is around by then. I will have to pass this on to my offspring. Because I don't think I will be around to remember.

On being treated like a pirate

... Hasta la Vista baby!

In a shocking article "WARNING: device driver updates causing Vista to deactivate" James Bannan from the Australian APC Magazine reports on his completely legal copy of Windows Vista almost closing down on him after having replaced his video card and updating some device drivers. Apparently, the anti-piracy miracles inside Vista decided that there was enough evidence of a major hardware change that it concluded that it had been copied to a completely new system!

Exchanging the video card or updating the driver for his hard drive by themselves was not enough to start the deactivation, but combined it was just enough. In the comments to said article there are reports taht even things like a number of creating encrypted volumes can trigger this unwanted behaviour.

Long live the pirates!

Also in the article it is made clear that the pirated version you can grab of Torrent sites completely ignores this Activation check. So the group those lovely people over at Microsoft want to tackle just continue without a glitch and the Joe Average who updates his device drivers directly from the hardware manufacturer and maybe exchange a piece of hardware is in danger of getting stuck with a helpless copy of Vista ...

It seems like the world has turned upside down.

iPhone, youPhone, wePhone

.. or noPhone?

Eventhough not too many people read this blog, not like thousands a day, I do get one or two odd visitors every now and then. I have seen people with huge monitors like 6000 pixels wide, which are in fact quadruple monitors (ow, how I envy just the deskspace for that setup!). But now apparently an iPhone has made to this site.

Weird!

But interesting!

Good Cheap and Fast Service

.. sounds too perfect to be true

In fact it is too good to be true.

Anyway, two out of three aint bad.