Chatham House Rule

I stumbled on this: BBC's Bill Thompson on the result of careless blogging and the Chatham House Rule...

As a totally unrelated sidenote: my blog showed up on Google, for the first time! Not a very nice though, but it is a start...

Burglary

Last night at 3.45 AM people tried to break into our house. In fact, they did break something (a roof cupola), but they did not manage to get in. Too fat, probably.

I heard the noise, and was just on time to see them climb down onto the street. Two black men. Police reaction was very quick, within five minutes they were here - I don't even know who called them.

Later today I'm going to the police station to check for info.

To be continued.

Car accident

Please meet Toby and André (a.k.a. Dréke).

Toby is sort of a Jack Russell terrier; he has been around since a few years as my grandmother's pet / guardian / leftover food processor / table thief. Toby is the most intelligent and stubborn dog I know. He is quite good at catching birds (prefereably pigeons), and he likes a good fight.


Dréke is a genuine Cocker Spaniel, still a bit of a puppy. He takes his walks with my uncle and crazy cousins. Dréke is very hairy and very very cute. He unfortunately also has a habit of gnawing on anything he sees. Did I mention both of these dogs live in the same house, and have regular doggy fights?




Now, this is the result of transporting the two of them in the boot of my car, with a roll of loo paper tucked away in a hidden corner...


It took me almost half an hour to clean the boot (both doggies were quite wet, and muddy). I collected all the shreds of paper in a plastic bag, which immediately took off in a gust of wind. So another 30 min. to search for wet, dirty loo paper shreds in the wet snow.

More on Toby, Dréke and their black friend Arko later.

India

This caught my attention: as you probably heard the last time you called a helpdesk, more and more call centres/helpdesks are outsourced to India. This article describes the racial abuse Indian helpdesk people have to endure from Western European or American callers.

Main reason seems to be the general feeling that these Indian people take away European/American jobs.

I must admit I'm surprised by this attitude, being a helpdesk person myself. I don't think that many jobs are taken away. In fact, I strongly believe most Western European/American people don't want to work in a helpdesk / call centre. What the f*, they don't even want to call a helpdesk!

Now I admit there are a lot of rubbish helpdesks, but still... Is that an excuse to be impolite, or even outright abusive, when calling one?

I've had my share of angry/abusive callers, mostly when dealing with end-users (e.g. when helpdesking for Belgium's largest cable internet provider). In a business-to-business helpdesk, what I'm doing now, things seem a bit more polite.

Any comment is welcome - your helpdesk stories as well. But please do not flame me for the bad experiences with my collegues you had in the past.

To be continued - mostly by an explanation of the difference between a call centre and a helpdesk.

Allah?

Just came across this: Verizon (Yahoo, in fact) forbids the word "allah" in it's mail addresses, even if your name happens to be Callahan or any other combination with the letters "allah" in between.

More info here.

Hmm. Wonder what they will do with existing adresses? I'm not sure it is not a hoax though - I'll try tonight, with gmail as well.

UPDATE: apparently Allah's mailserver is back up again - see here.

Secure?

It will be a bit of an ongoing story: security and pc's. I've had my share, doing the work I do. Following this thought, I can tell you I'm a Macfreak. I refuse to use Microsoft Windows privately, unless I absolutely have to. I'll stick to Mac, thank you very much.

So, here's a link for all the other 'freaks reading this. Have fun.

To be continued.

Psychology

I witnessed a nice phenomenon yesterday evening, during a wine&cheese party organised by one of my wife's friends.

The guests were mostly EU public relations/public affairs people, plus some non-EU (even IT!) people like me.

Now, at a certain point I noticed all PR/EU people standing in the middle of the room, laughing and shouting a conversation to each other. The IT people were out of the way, next to a wall, trying to do serious conversation and actually listening to each other.

Comments are welcome. Pictures will follow.

R

The end is near

The end is near: the first Trojan for Mac OS X has arrived. Not particularly surprising, given the plethora of viri/trojans attacking the Windows platform.

I have mixed feelings towards this. On the one hand I feel Mac OS X finally starts to get the appreciation it deserves (finally enough users to create a Trojan for it); on the other hand one cannot use the absolute safety of OS X as an argument with ignorant pc users anymore.

Anyway, this particular Trojan was not very harmful. One would have to confirm opening a program where one expected pictures, click OK a few more times, and then enter the administrator password for the computer.

Even if you would manage to do all that, the Trojan will fail to infect most applications installed on the computer.

In fact, if you type your admin password as easy as that, you deserve to be infected...

To be continued.

Food

As my wife and one of my best friends do a blog, I felt I could not lag behind. I'll leave most of the writing to them. They are quite a lot better at it than me, anyway.

Who am I? Everybody calls me Roel, on the internet (here and here) people know me as "perelaar". I'll tell you the story behind my alias later...

I'm happily married, not so happy about living in the center of Brussels. I'm into all kinds of weird computer stuff, mostly Apple, into food (lots of food), photography, and reading. In fact, you see me on the picture preparing food and wearing goggles to avoid onion fumes getting in my eyes.

In case you wonder: the title of my blog is a dialect word. It's origins are unclear to me, but in the area I grew up in it means something like "much ado about nothing".

To be continued.