Yearly Archives: 2008

Printing in Linux

Got a new printer that does duplex printing. Linux support is great (thanks!), but I never noticed how horrible printing dialogs in Linux are…

First, tried printing in Firefox. A nice print dialog with tabs where you can select duplex and all that. Great! Next, tried printing from OpenOffice. Oh the horrors, they have their own print dialog with no possibility (apparently) to select duplex printing. So, I tell my wife to save as PDF and use PKDF printing. Printing in kpdf opens –how unexpected — yet another type of printing dialog with yet another layout. It took me 20 minutes to discover where to select duplex printing there (button “options”? no. Button “system settings”? no. button “properties”? finally!!!)

The KDE printer settings dialog apparently uses the same layout as firefox had used, while “kprinter” (the pde print thingie) uses the kpdf style dialog. What a mess.

I’ve come appreciate my Apple print dialog which looks the same all over the place (except when using OpenOffice that is….)

real world spam

Almut recently received a letter. A real, dead tree- paper letter from Spain. A spanish business mogul with last name Späth had died and just before his dead, he deposited 8m USD in a safe. So his lawer contacted her to get the money as his next of kin and be happy ever after.

There is “no atom of risk involved” as the lawyer who sent the letter had considered all eventualities and had “a licences to lose”.

We are glad that we’ll be rich soon. Now we only need to get a small sum to pay the fees before we get the safe with the cash.

SWISS – the airline – SUCKS

We booked a flight to Manchester in spring this year. As we didn’t know little Olivers gender or birth date yet, we entered the estimated date of birth and a double name with our preferred boy/girl name (SWISS were absolutely the first to get to know our preferred name choices)

Now that we know Oliver’s name and birth date, Almut called the SWISS hotline to check that things were alright and to modify the birth date and name if necessary (we were prepared to pay a little fee for that). And lo’ and behold, hell broke out. The call center dragon fumed and steamed and shouted that we should never have done this, and that by entering a wrong name/birth date the ticket would be invalid. How could we think to get away with this? We told her that the web form of SWISS absolutely required a name and birth date, so what should we have done? “We should have called her!”. Now we would have to rebook the ticket (which cost us 92CHF) and she should do this on the phone, but it would be much more expensive than if we did it ourselves through the Internet.

So, no thank you, we rebook ourselves. Problem is that you can’t rebook an infants ticket on its own, the web form requires at least the addition of one more adult. And the FAQs explicitely state that you can’t rebook regular tickets through the net, but you should call the helpcenter. And ahh the irony, and it also states: wrong name on your ticket? No problem, call the helpcenter and they will sort it out for a small fee. Somebody should have told that the helpcenter, I guess.

To sum it up: yes, we maybe botched it by daring to enter the estimated date of birth, but then what should we have done? And whatever we have done wrong, this is no reason for the helpcenter lady to shout at my wife and offend us. If customers never did anything wrong, she wouldn’t have a job. Impolite and impertinent!

To top it off, just when Almut told me of her adventures with SWISS, our secretary runs into my office, shouting that she just phoned 40 minutes with an impolite SWISS helpdesk and sent 4 emails, just to get a receipt for a flight cancellation fee. She still hadn’t managed to get them to understand what she wanted. We both agreed that SWISS no longer was on our favorite airline list.

Sorry SWISS, this is not the way to retain customers.

Night shifts

Why didn’t anyone tell me that little babies sleep a lot during the day, but never during nights? I think, ours is still living in a completely different time zone than we are (although we are adapting…).
The last couple of nights have been quite exhausting, as little Oliver is completely happy when lying on somebodies stomach, but starts crying as soon as put on his back (or belly) in our bed. Which means that we took shifts in having him lying on us.
Although, he is very good at casting quick glances whether we are still there during his sleep. Amazing ability!
Tonight was the first night where we could get some rest though. He slept for 6 and then for another 2 hours (and I didn’t even wake up for his night meal). Yay for that! I don’t know whether the endless repeat loop of Celtic Lullaby really tired him, or whether he just pretended to sleep to make it stop (I would have!).

All in all, we are very happy and exited still. He’s just so cute!
It’s amazing how little you get done all day, when caring for a baby. At least we already managed to send out all our birth announcement cards.