While I'm Blogging Away...

Just to wrap up that business about becomming 30 :) I was sick for a few days, but been up and running for a while now. It's just been really busy, so I haven't had that much time to blog.

DOH!

I found the title field....it was a setting (actually the only setting besides username and password) on the widget. The other problems are still there though, but I've found one good thing about the widget; I can make it zip away by pressing F12 (together with the rest of the widgets) and come back to it later when I've found the information I needed. This is quite a feature since I do manage to crash safari once in a while, or accidentally close the tab that I'm working on :)

More from the wunderfull world of Google (or if you're not a fan of Google; more from those we-want-to-take-over-the-world-but-keep-saying-that-we're-not-evil devils in mountainview). They've release three new widgets for the OS X Exposé feature http://www.google.com/macwidgets/. I'm writing this entry in the new Blogger widget, hoping it will actually work. They claim to make it fast and easy to post to your blog, but I'm not sure about the 'easy' part. For starters, I can't seem to make a link in my text?! There is no menubar to work with, and I can't ctrl-click on the text to get a context menu either. Besides that I can't resize the window, with the result that the header of my blog "Random Mumblings by Dennis Newel" won't fit in the title of the widget-box and the box only get's longer when I add more text. If I ended up writing something really long, it wouldn't fit my screen any more....oh yeah, and it doesn't look like there's an option to add a title. I'm a bit excited about how this will all end up looking. I guess it's an OK start, but I don't see it as a good alternative to logging in and blogging through a browser. It surely doesn't beat the Firefox plugin Performancing (http://performancing.com/firefox)...

Turning 30 Was Toughter Than I Though

My whole body aches, my nose is running and I had a fever of around 40 degrees yesterday...I hope it "just" a cold and nothing to do with the age. I had a really nice birthday though, with a surprise dinner with family and friend. Luckily I didn't start to feel bad untill saturday, and it was only during sunday that I got seriously sick and in need of drugs to keep me going... It feels like time for another nap...amazing how much you can sleep when you're sick. I must have slept at least 14 hours since yesterday after lunch :)

The Big Three Oh

Today is my 30th birtday. Yup, according to quite a few of my friends I'm now officially an old man! :)
Technically I'm just a fraction older than yesterday, but it's not untill today that I'm officially 30.

My brother left a message for me on my cellphone, asking me if it hurts to be 30 and I've been thinking abit about that. It doesn't actually hurt. My knee hurts, but that is from banging it on the wall while climbing yesterday and my throat hurts a bit, but that's probably just another spell of the cold comming on.
I know that many people get desperate and go soul searching when they reach 30 (and 40, 50, 60 etc. :) ) but I don't seem to have the need for that. It seems that the people who panik around thier 30th birthday, have set a lot of goals that they wanted to achieve before they turned 30, and all of the sudden they are there, and haven't managed half their goals.
There is no problem with setting goals, and I've had a few of my own that hasn't been met, but I think the most important thing with goals is to be realistic about them. Sure I would have liked to have a big house, a nice car and live in Canada, but that just hasn't been possible mainly due to the Canadian immigration office. Sure I'm sad about not being where I thought I would be when I turned 30, but it's not the end of the world. It's not certain that 30 years are half of my life, I might become 100 or more given the advances in medicin these days. So why should I be in a hurry to reach a lot of goals before I'm 30? There's hopefully pleanty of time left, and I have a feeling I'll only shorten the amount of time I have left, by becomming all stressed out and worrying about not having achieved all I wanted before turning 30.

Or I could just be trying to convince myself that there is nothing to worry about, and that way hope not to become depressed about becomming 30?.....nah! :) I'm still young and have pleanty of time to get where I want to go.

The new stats are in...

The Canadian immigration statistics for the whole of 2005 has been published, and it's gone from a minimum of 21 months to 23 months...not exactly what I exspected.

It got me thinking though, with all the fuss about those stupid drawings could we claim to be refugees, scared of staying in our own country? Nah...probably not. Mainly because I would have a hard time trying to feel scared about living in Denmark, even though I regularly pass through the most crowded train station in Copenhagen.

I do wish the drawings had never been published, since it's gasoline on a fire that need not continue to burn, and since it will probably only lead to a greater devide in Denmark - greater than the xenophobic Danish People's Party has already managed to make it. It's sad to see the good international reputation Denmark once had, being utterly destroyed by one ignorant news editor who thinks you need to provoke to be heard. Another really sad thing about this mess, is that the Danish People's Party will probably only become stronger and more influential, which again will only be fuel on the same fire that's raging now...

At the moment, I'm not exactly proud to be Danish, and I wont hide that this way of dealing with other people is one of the reasons we want to move to another country. It's simply getting too straining to listen to the debates and hatred towards other people. I'm not saying it's a one way problem, but the way the danish press treats immigrants and fugitives is not exactly helping the situation, and it only makes the cultural divide seem so much larger than it really is.

Todays Dilbert

...why haven't I thought of that reply before? :) I don't mind when it's family, but I've helped quite a few others in my time that didn't always think of returning the favor...

Hacking a car

Cars have always been one of those things I never understood much of. I've look under the bonnet of a few cars before, but what you could see was mainly just a big slab of plastic. Since we got our old Ford Escort from '91 last year, this has changed a bit.

Shortly after we bought the car, the thermometer in the cooling system needed to be replaced. I was told which spare parts to get, and roughly where the thing I needed to replace was located, and I actually managed to change it without damaging the car or myself too much.

Since then, I've gotten to understand more and more about our car, and have been able to fix a few other minor things, but the latest one was too difficult, and I needed a professional so I got hold of my dad :) (he is a trained ford mechanic, and even though it's been more than 30 years since he worked as a mechanic he still now what he's doing).

The problem was with the fan that blows air into the car, and that can be quite a big problem in the winter, with steamy windows and frost that wont go away because we can't blow warm air up on the windows. We started out last week, looking at the wiring around the switch that controls the fan and found that it sometimes just didn't get enough juice to be able to send a signal to the fan, telling it to start. A temporary fix seemed to solve the problems, but after a few days it was back.

Last night we went all in. We took apart most of the dashboard to look for faulty wires as well as remove the fan itself. We tried to replace a wire from the fusebox to the switch, but it didn't help, and after having tested a range of different wires running to and from the fusebox, dashboard and fan, we decided to do a quick hack. Somewhere in the electrical system there is a flaw, which results in too little power for the fan to start, and we then needed to make sure it got power, without running at full speed the whole time.

Having tried a few different configurations, we ended up pulling power directly from the battery via a control switch that is also hooked up directly to the switch and an almost randomly chosen wire that is live when the ignition is on. The result is that the fan works (even if the engine isn't turned on, and even without the ignition is on but with the light on - a strange side effect that also serves as a reminder that the lights are on :) ) but it is most definitely not the "authorized" way of doing it, and we're bypassing a few different systems on the way.

Most certainly a hack, even though I've never thought of hacking a car :) Quite an interesting experience actually...