Category: General

One of the supermarkets I go to used to have self-scanning handhelds based on Linux but recently changed to Windows CE based scanners instead. I have no idea why. Can’t be the resilience, since I saw at least as many disabled scanners as I used to see with the old ones, if not more. One in ten, maybe.

This is how one of the new one typically looks. Motorola, Win CE and crashed. But the interesting thing is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to have bothered to actually adapt Win CE much to handhelds. The errormessages still assume a user, a PC, and the usual set of input devices. How else do you explain the recommendation to check your network settings and to see if your network card is properly seated. I mean, the average shopper…?

And grandma Jonsson, please do a warm reset. But first click the OK button with, um, with my umbrella? A mouse? (Note: not a touchscreen at all, and no mouse dangling from the handheld scanner either.)

Oh, grandma, please contact the vendor of SPB2_CE.exe. That’s, um, who?

And just for kicks, this is how the holders look when the cover is missing. Several were missing, in fact:

Yes, I know what it looks like, but I promise, it’s made of plastic and not porcelain.

So I had this old office chair that’s been with me since 1982. It was expensive back then, which explains why it lasted this long, but lately it’s become wobbly. The back rest seems not to know exactly what’s vertical and what’s not. Parts and padding are falling off every now and then. It’s a German or Belgian make, forgot exactly which. Good stuff, for its time.

Looking around for a new chair, I couldn’t find much except IKEA, and their chairs aren’t really good quality. Don’t get me wrong, I buy a lot of stuff at IKEA, but I wouldn’t buy an office chair there. I didn’t find any other decent brands that I could test and experience, either. There are lots of brands and types, but it’s very hard to find a store where you can check them out, and I won’t buy an unknown chair sight unseen or seat unsat. About the only chair I would dare buy on reputation alone is the Aeron. It’s the chair a lot of programmers expect to get, just as they expect to get top end workstations. It’s a top end office chair. Just google it.

Now, price… in the US, you can find the Aeron for around $950, which isn’t exactly cheap but considering the current exchange rate, it comes out to around 6000 SEK (I’m in Sweden), which is only twice the price of most decent office chairs.

Checking out the official Aeron prices from the Swedish distributors is bound to make you sick; around 15000 SEK, plus tax. That is $2500 plus tax! Jeez… how the h… can they mark it up like that?

Second hand, you can find Aeron chairs in Sweden for around 7-9000 SEK, but then you have no guarantees. I found them on Blocket.

Next, I checked out prices in the USA and found Home Office Solutions. They’re selling it new for around $750 and free shipping within the USA. I called them and asked if they’d ship to Sweden and they told me they can’t sell new chairs to me, due to Herman Miller prohibiting them from selling outside the USA. Good old market protection in action. However, they can sell “Certified Refurbished” chairs anywhere they want, and these go for a little less, $718 plus $199 shipping (when I bought it), including a 12 year warranty. Yes, I ordered one, plus the casters for hard floors, around $30 extra. I expect to pay around 5% customs. The VAT will be added by Fedex, but I’ll get it back on the company VAT account, so it’s of no consequence. At the current exchange rate, this chair will cost me around 6000 SEK.

The chair arrived today (it took a week) in perfect condition. Even examining it in detail, I can find no sign it’s ever been used. I’m sitting in it right now and it’s simply great. Here are a couple of pictures of it, including my little son who I had a lot of problems convincing to let me use it.

I highly recommend buying this chair, and if you do to get it from Home Office Solutions. There may be other good places to get it, of course, I didn’t check them all.

Update 26 aug 2008: just got the invoice from Fedex, and I was only charged 100 SEK admin costs and VAT. No customs charge. So the grand total comes to around 5600 SEK plus VAT, just a whisker over a third of the Swedish internet mail order price for a new chair. And as I said, you can’t see the difference. What a deal.

Update 19 september 2008: this chair is heaven. It’s so good that I just want to go sit in it all the time, and while I’m there, I could just as well get some coding done. Developer managers out there, if you don’t get this kind of seat for your developers, you’re missing out on a great ROI opportunity. Payback time? I’d say a week, but I’ll claim less than a month, to be on the safe side. Ok, two or three months at the Swedish prices, but still. (No, I don’t have shares in Herman Miller or Home Office Solutions or anything related.)

Browsing through the people LinkedIn recommends I should link to, people it thinks I may know, I just discovered that LinkedIn not only flags what people I may enjoy contacting, but it often clearly flags what people to avoid.

There are a small number of people around that I’ve had a very bad experience with. Anyone that recommends any of these guys or is recommended by them, is automatically very suspect to me. One explanation for the recommendation is that they’re similar in character (a bad sign). Another is naivité (not a much better sign).

In other words, LinkedIn may be a valuable tool to filter out people you should avoid and not waste time on. Maybe even more so than the other way around. When someone you know and trust links to someone you know and mistrust, it has a tendency to diminish the trusted person more than it enhances the mistrusted person. Especially recommendations have this effect. Simple links may not mean that much.

So, be careful who you link to, and especially who you recommend. Or who you accept recommendations from (you can decline, you know). It may reflect badly on you.

Today I got this email from FON:

…in which I am accused of being a profiteer and someone who doesn’t care about promises made. Jeez.

Continue reading “FON abuse”

I have this “letter to the editor” on my desk that is too good to throw away, still I don’t know what to do with it. So I’ll just translate it freely from Swedish and post it here for your enjoyment.

The letter is a response to another letter to the editor from “LS” and goes like this:

“I’ve been a pilot all my professional life, largely with SAS. The last five years I flew long distance with Boeing 767 and Airbus 340 to, among other places, Thailand. LS’s statement that a trip to Thailand corresponds to a release of two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is an exaggeration of colossal magnitude!

“An A340 weights maximum 260 tons when it departs from Copenhagen and has 261 passengers, 11 crew. That means 272 persons on board.

“Releasing two tons of carbon dioxide per person would come to 544 tons. The fuel load is about 100 tons, of which six tons remain after landing in Bangkok.

“To ensure that the discussion on environmental impact remains credible, such absurd statements as those of LS must be avoided.”

Now, I must admit that such incredibly unscientific remarks from a professional airline pilot scares me more than a little bit. I never saw a response to the above letter to the editor, so I assume a lot of readers swallowed it whole.

With the numbers above, two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is entirely possible. If you don’t see how, go back to your high school chemistry, or ask any high school kid, and they’ll tell you how this works out.

To be entirely fair, the number comes to almost 1.3 tons per passenger so LS exaggerated a bit, but I think the pilot who wrote the letter thought it came to 94 tons divided by 272, that is 0.35 tons per passenger. It sure looks like that from his letter.

And, no, I’m not going to publish the pilot’s name, even though he signed his letter to the editor in full. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

PS: this isn’t an april fools joke either.