Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The bull is off the premises...

That was an email I received yesterday at work. Apparently, a bull had entered the office campus last week while I was on vacation. Although the bull was considered to be harmless and friendly, people were advised to go jogging or walking somewhere else during lunch!

...talking about bull stories!

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Farber's gone ... there IS justice after all?

I was reading through the newspapers that arrived during vacation this morning, and learned something great: Farber has resigned!
For those who do not live in Bergen County, who is Farber and why is this such a big deal?

Farber is the state's D.A. (District Attorney, Officier van Justitie). Her boyfriend got pulled over for not wearing his seatbelt (pretty stupid during a Click it or ticket campaign), and while the police officers where checking his license (revoked) and his car (expired registration), he called the missus.
So, while he was handed out citations, the state D.A. arrives, in a state vehicle with a trooper as driver (Farber doesn't drive herself since she had 12 standing traffic violations). This is where things get interesting. The normal procedure for an offence like this is that -apart from getting a big pile of summonses - is that your car gets impounded. Not in this case, the car was escorted to the local D.M.V. (Department of Motor Vehicles), where mr. Goore got his license reinstated and a new registration for his car.
Yes, for normal people this would take at least a full day of very skillful fighting bureaucracy, but mr. Goore got his stuff handed over as soon as he arrived there. Of course, his girlfriend mrs. State D.A. calling to the D.M.V. had nothing to do with it.

So far, just some real stupid stuff that -for any normal human being with some moral fibre- would mean instant resignation. This is where ms. Farber is making all kinds of interesting remarks:
  • I just did what everybody would do for their partner (except that we wouldn't since we wouldn't have such a powerful position)
  • I didn't say anything, and it was not my intention to influence the police officers (who tried to void the tickets they wrote out after she arrived at the scene). Suuure...
  • I wasn't there to help mr. Goore out, I just wanted to retrieve some sensitive papers I left in his car (now that's showing how good of a D.A. you are - leaving sensitive state paperwork in the back of a van)
  • I just misjudged the situation a bit (not a bit, besides that, it's your job to judge situations, nice to know that you're not very good at it...)
So this week, ms. Farber resigned from office, stating that the state is putting its 'ethics bar too high'. Her partner is fired from his state job as well (no reason given...) - together they've lost a total of $220,000 in income. And for what? A $600 traffic ticket.

Friday, August 18, 2006

An unexpected vacation encounter

The last thing I expected to see at my vacation at the shore (my hair cutter explained to me that in New Jersey you refer to 'the shore', in NYC you refer to 'the beach'. I told him that as a Dutch-born, I should refer to that sandy strip as 'the beach' but he replied "You're in Jersey now") was a real live shark.
Granted, most people - including me - will think of 'shark' as an 800 pound killing machine as seen in Jaws, and not the shrimp-like creature (this picture, courtesy of Cabo Yachts, is a good example of the monster that I saw) that I saw, but still.
This was a live shark, with tail, fins, gills, eyes, teeth, the whole thing.
A f##ing shark!
In New Jersey!
The family sitting next to us at the beach came with it out of the water. Probably lost and stunned by the (relative) cold water temperature. I heard that it was probably a Sand Shark (hence the picture of one), but I can't be sure about that - except that it really was a shark.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Some marvelous freeware

Diddlbiker works in a non-IT environment, and that means that the goodies-bag is as good as empty. Don't get me wrong, my employer does not skimp on what they do provide - Windows XP, latest version of Microsoft Office, decent virus scanner, etc.

It's just that for any of those handy-dandy extra tools that, as a geek, you have uses for, but unfortunately, none of the suits do. It is tempting to install local copies of whatever you've bought at home, but most EULA's don't provide in that.

So, I set forth on the task of finding out what is actually free. Oh, did I mention that it has to be good as well? It is surprising what you'll find once you start looking...

Editor:
Notepad++ - this text editor is good, and I mean really good. It has even replaced my payware Textpad editor at home - since Notepad++ is sooo much better! Some features: multi-document support with tabs, column selection, syntax highlighting, executing scripts/preview in browser, code folding, find & replace with regular expressions, and still a 'lightweight' look & feel.

Zip:
Izarc. Windows XP has standard zip functionality, but I think that it is a little bit too transparent. The de facto standard is of course WinZip, but that has it's limitations - especially with spanning (that might have changed over the years but they lost me when spanning still needed to be done through 3.5" disks and everybody else in the industry had a better solution). For years I used Powerarchiver, and I still think it is a very, very good product. But Izarc is almost as good, and completely free!

Picture Viewer:
Picasa. ACDSee is great, but not for free, and the latest versions started to turn into bloatware. Irfanview is really good, but doesn't allow you to view the contents of an entire folder at once. Picasa is, if you're willing to accept that it is from evil Google, a very nice product to use.

PDF Creation:
Go2PDF. Creating PDF's used to involve expensive software (Adobe Distiller), or complicated setups with GhostScript and all kinds of reroutings. Go2Pdf is simple to use, and offers a full feature set.

If you know of any other great freeware, please let me know!