As loyal readers might have noticed, my blogging is currently pretty slow. This can mostly be blamed on the physics exam I’m expecting to take on October 6 and is not likely to change much until then (and the oral exam some time later).

Note to the marketing department: Cultivate the thinking of the people responsible for scheduling these exams. “We’ve done exams at the end of the summer semester before, and nobody showed up, so, as a service to you, we’re offering the first exam after the summer break so that you can concentrate on the math exams at the end of the semester and prepare during the summer break.” How about simply cutting the courseload to a level that’s reasonable for people to actually handle within the semester? Gah.

Case at hand: I’m trying to change the DSL account for our place from my girlfriend’s name to mine. This seemingly requires filling in a one-page form with a whopping 28 fields, and it seems I’m dumbed down enough by the ease of digital text editing that this is actually too hard for me.

Take 1: I actually got pretty far, but the second to last field got me. Instead of the name of my bank, I wrote in its numeric identifier.

Take 2: Instead of her mobile phone number, I wrote in mine.

Take 3: I started filling out the form and instead of her information filled in mine at the very start.

Since every subsequent attempt actually looked less promising than the one before (and would consider it a disgrace to submit a form that has crossed-out text on it), I gave up on the paper method and downloaded Jarnal, which is pretty nice tool for annotating PDFs (and lots of other stuff, like collaborative doodling). Now, the form is annotated all nice and clean in TrueType fonts, and I’m left to ponder if it’s actually a good thing that it has come to this.

So, last month, upon logging into EMusic, I was presented with the fait accompli migration of my account to “EMusic Europe”, complete with a special magical discount. I was slightly suspicious of the whole process since I couldn’t figure out what it was for, but since there was nothing I could do about it anyways, I decided to wait and see. My favorite explanation was something about diverging access to catalogs based on location, but it took me until this month’s credit card bill to figure out the actual most likely cause: EMusic Europe charges its fees in Euros, while I paid in US dollars before. Suddenly, I pay EUR 13.84 instead of USD 14.99, which translated to EUR 12.13 the last time I paid, making the “special discount” a 14% price hike as far as I am concerned. Argh.

Leszek Kołakowski in “My Correct Views About Everything”:

True, I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was 20 years old but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older, and so, I was much less omniscient when I was 28 and still less now.

I’m glad it’s not only me, then.

Officeguns was yesterday. If you want to reign supreme over your coworkers in this day and age, you need to build Office-Supply Ninja Stars. It’s much harder to justify a frag with one of these as “an unfortunate accident”, though, so be careful to read the warning at the top.

Hat tip: gmiatlich.net.