About a week and a half ago, February 16th, Justyna and I got engaged! It happened in a hotel, just after sunset at the seaside, it was very romantic 
(Old picture, and I look a bit weird — but Justyna likes this picture)
Because Justyna is Polish we will probably do two weddings. The civil wedding end of November (hopefully) in Schiedam (the Netherlands, where we live) and the church wedding maybe in June next year in Koszalin, Poland (where Justyna is from).
We’re very happy
Last Saturday we went to Saturn, a huge electronics store in Rotterdam, to buy Justyna an iPod. Incidentally, this is the kind of shopping that I like, much better than acting as a clothes hanger for three hours in a row.
She got an iPod nano 4GB with a “cute” pink leather “jacket”. Great. When we got home we set it up. It’s always fun to see how people who are not that much involved in IT that much see things and what they notice. Of course the setup went smooth, you can leave that to Apple. What disturbed her, however, was Apple’s pushing of (1) registering her iPod which included giving her name, address, phone number and work industry and after that (2) pushing her to get a iTunes Music Store account, which means more information plus yet another user name and password. Even though she will most probably never buy any song there. Or, as she put it, “I don’t want a stupid Apple ID!”
We decided to break off the registration procedure. But now, every time you plugin the device, it will ask to register and then, every time you plug in the device, you have to click “Later”. We’ll see how long she will be able to resist.
Presentation Zen has been one of my favorite blogs for a while now. And the nice thing about blogs is that if you have enough of an audience, it’s a great opportunity for a publisher to get the author to write a book. That’s what happened to Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen and his book is out now. I pre-ordered the book and according to Amazon it has shipped now. Looking forward to it!
Powered by the sun.
I’m a long-time user of JungleDisk,the software that allows you to access your Amazon S3 space as if it were a hard drive. During their beta period were free, but now they charge a small amount. They keep improving their software and truly are committed to offer a multi-platform solution. They now offer a version in which you can mount your JungleDisk using fuse right into your file system under Linux. It’s still a beta, but it works well. As part of “Jungle Disk Plus” (their monthly subscription option — free for the first year) they now also give you web-based access to your files, which is very convenient.
Anybody seeing this as often as I do when going to Gmail?
For the past week now I see this every so often. Kind of annoying, especially when there’s an email you want to read. The “basic HTML view” usually works though, but it’s not the same.
Only minutes after my post about some advantages I found about Linux over Mac I already started receiving comments that OS X does, in fact, have all the features I mentioned. In Finder, if you start typing a name, it will go to that file or folder (this, apparently, even works in iTunes — I was so sure I tried that and was always frustrated that it didn’t work, but it does), and you can, indeed, set the exact path where you want to save any file.
Anyway, I’m back in OS X now. Parallels works again with networking and I’m compiling my stuff inside a virtual machine. It’s not perfect, but it works. The reason for the switch back to Mac OS X was that it was easier to get my new 24″ Dell screen and new Mighty Mouse to work there. I have an extended desktop now. One laptop screen (13″ 1280×800) and a 24″ TFT monitor (24″ 1900×1200). It’s amazing. So much more room for my Emacs 
(Click for larger version)
The wireless mighty mouse I got is ok. I have to get used to it a bit. The scrolling works nicely, I can left- and right-click now. The buttons on the side (the squeezing) is something I don’t use. You really have to squeeze for it to respond. But all in all, it’s not as bad as I heard people say.
