Maurits thinks aloud

Just recently is finished “Svartir Englar” by Ævar Örn Jósepsson (I read the Dutch version) although I was pretty bored after the first twenty pages. After finishing the book I realized that I should have stopped after those initial pages since this has just been a waste of my time. The question then came up how many books I was going to read about the end of my life.  In his book “Metamagical Themas” Douglas Hofstadter learns us that it is actually pretty straightforward to come up with answers to questions such as “how many books are there in all the libraries in the world”. In my case it is far more easy: I will probably live for another 40 years and I finish 1 book per week on the average. So I still have about 2000 books to go. Might be a bit more or a bit less, but for sure I’m not going to finish 10.000 books.

How much shelf space will those books take? Let’s suppose those books are 2 cm thick on the average. That makes a total of 40 meter shelf space I need. In my house I have a wall that is 5 meter long. If I can put 8 shelves against that wall it will be completely covered with books. So my whole life that I have in front of me only fills one single wall.

Maybe I should start selecting my books a bit more critical

Sometimes you need to download a useful program from the internet, say Google Talk, and install it on your PC at work. And suddenly you are confronted with company policies about certain url’s that are blocked. I very well understand that you shouldn’t visit the Playboy site during working hours, but sometimes these url filters really become annoying. Of course I could have downloaded Google Talk from a different site that wasn’t filtered, but there is another straightforward approach: Continue reading URL blocking…

I’m not happy at all. My 3 yo daughter has scribbled on my tft screen with a permanent cd/dvd marker. Hopefully when I’m back from work I can remove it. I know quite a few people read my blog, so if there are any useful tips to remove the ink from my screen, I would be very grateful.

Edit: thanks everyone for the tips! In the end the marker pen was quite easily removed by alcohol-free baby wipes. Now we only need some educational advice to prevent these kind of things to happen in the future

Seems that over the last couple of years at least some of my tax money was well spent: for the first time I was able to fill in my income tax using a native Linux program. Hooray for the Dutch tax department. Now can I please have some of my money back

Now imagine that my mom uses a Linux system. And let’s also imagine that she just bought a new 20 inch LCD because her eyes are getting worse and someone gave her a nice video card because her old one didn’t have DVI output. Then the following conversation over the phone could take place: Continue reading Linux and moms…