archive for

# Having money, yet not    04'03'11 14:13

I spent a ludicrous amount of time this morning getting money from where I have it now to where it needs to be... totally maddening. It's sitting here, but how to get it across the border to another account? Either it's a high fee and at least five working days delay, or an even higher fee (really high) to wire it, and then still no guarantee.
So this is the solution: I've got a Dutch friend in the same city who still has a Dutch bank account. Let's call him Robert. He however absolutely can't afford to go in the red. So in comes another friend, let's call him Mike, with a special Dutch bank account.

  1. I will transfer my money tonight to Mike, on his special merchants' account
  2. Mike's really helping me out here, as he's got enough dosh to put the money in my overseas' friends account today, before my money reaches him (it'll probably arrive after the weekend).
  3. Then Robert takes it out of the wall monday and give it to the friend who really needs it by then.

Insane, isn't it? The only fast, reliable way without paying through the nose. Man, it's good to have friends.

# Fever    04'03'07 19:41

One nasty fly. From nothing to 39 in half an hour, all I knew was that I needed to be in bed, now, and that's where I stayed for a few days. Only today I've been really up again. The living room was in the state I left it in Tuesday evening, halfway sorting papers and a washing waiting.

And boo, boo, I missed the perl mongers' workshop on Friday that I was looking forward to.

Websurfing is no fun when the temperature rises like that, and only when it started falling a bit I realised that the router I was using to extend the network to my bedroom was probably having its firewall on. No wonder I couldn't ssh anywhere nor look at my test websites, none of which are running on port 80. Oh, and it was daisy-chaining NAT/DHCP, though that turned out not to make a difference at all. The marvels of a 30 euro little black box.

Still, one amusing discovery was the Glasgow Survival site. Is Glasgow the Rotterdam of Scotland (or better, of the UK?) Or is it vice versa? Harbour cities, past glory, ugly projects, a north and south side that can't stand eachother and naturally have their own football club, and ned culture... Rotterdam gave the world Gabberhouse after all! (Rotterdam could definately do with a subcrawl thoug, one to nil).

Meanwhile, mlMac was pumping bytes around and so I finally had a look at the US edition of the brilliant BBC sitcom, Coupling. My God. They are really hilariously unfunny.

# Orkquaintences    04'03'02 15:01    link

Orkut, yes, I've been tempted, too - played with it over the weekend. Social networking sites seem to value quantity over quality which I found very quickly: almost immediately a 'friend of a friend' invited me to join his friends. I mailed him back, thanks but no thanks. No friends-inflation for me.
Joey sums it up nicely, with a Star Trek parable. How appropriately geeky are we.
Oh, and note the term orkquaintences was coined in the comments. That one might make the OED in 2006.