Final day @ TU Delft

Today, August 31, is the final day of my contract as a PhD student in Delft.
As of tomorrow, I am unemployed…

Yes, of course, I still have to work on my PhD thesis, but I’ll have to do that in my free time. And next week, I’ll be moving home, so not much free time left then.
I’m not sure when and how often I will be back in Delft, I’ll just have to see.

It’ll be pretty weird.
Since September 1995, I have been here at Delft University. First college, then in 2000 my Master’s project at the Computer Graphics Group, and since September 1st, 2001, my PhD project at the same group.

That’s 36% of my entire lifetime I’ve spent here…

Well, I guess it’s time for something completely different.

You’ll hear from me. Benjamin, signing off from Delft….

User manual translation

This afternoon, we got a nice little package in the mail.
Because we ordered ADSL a few weeks ago, we received a free MP3 player. Nothing special, some unknown brand, but still a very nice, 256 MB MP3 player.
That’s not what this entry is about, however. It’s about the user manual…

It seems to me that the manual has been translated from Chinese, via Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, to French, then Russian, back to Chinese, Korean and finally to English. Let me quote (yes, literally) from the manual:

Not need to drive the USB dish function
need not to manage the procedure, can pass the “my computer “directly “can move dish” proceed the document operate, having no need in WIN2000 above system gearing the procedure

Encrypt the dish mode
make use of with the supplementary tool in machine, can be direct to divide the dish as two dishes, combine to encrypt an among those, conceal the space, keep to encrypt the part not been seen from, but conceal the secret

recording/reply to read
can pass the microphone recording and keep to WAV and ACT speech text file of the format, the eligibility chooses the part replies to read or contrast to reply to read

Boycott Internet Explorer

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.
(…)
You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

I totally agree with Paul Thurrott, I couldn’t say it any better myself.

(From Slashdot.)

Why I use Jabber

This is the reason I don’t use MSN Messenger!

Read through the comments of this blog entry (in Dutch)… Are these people for real?!?