jan's diary

Every morning I skim NY Times online? Why? Because it is free for “strangled her baby and then her four cats” and “see what famous1 eats for breakfast.” Instead, I can read interesting stuff on why iPad, who was slaughtered in the tech press, sells better than warm loaf and how the standard of time has evolved over the years, just to mention two recent articles.

Yes, it does cover Libya and the tsunami in Japan as well, but there is so much more to news than war and catastrophes. A secret not realised by most news papers.

Ah, one more thing. NY Times filters the comments from readers, making those who are published sometimes more valuable than the article itself, compared to unfiltered comments in other places that read like pure and poor garbage.

One sad thing about NY Times is that they are planning on going commercial, charging for access. They tried it once before and failed. I hope they fail again.

Another sad thing is that their videos can’t be embedded in blogs. Here is a must see video on iPad.

WorldCat is the world’s largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online.

Three of my articles and my master thesis are listed.

View Gran Canaria Schools in a larger map

Jan Thomas signs his drawings and his balloons. Not to be left behind, Sebastian does the same.

The conversation is in Norwegian and Spanish and took place at Sam San today. The participants are studying tadpoles and fish in a pond.

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Voice recording converts your GoGear player into a handy dictation machine. Besides playing music or listening to the radio, you can also record notes or reminders for work or school, record shopping lists and phone numbers – even song lyrics. By pressing the recording button and speaking into the built-in microphone, voice messages are compressed and stored in the built-in internal memory. Voice recording gives you a highly portable voice recorder allowing you to record anything, anytime and anywhere! – Read more

I bought this device a few weeks back to record ideas I have before I forget them. Since then I have discovered that there are other things worth recording. Three examples.

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Having lunch at Tesco Lotus super market in Rayong. For some reason the food court shares space with the computer game and play sections. Noisy is a mild description!

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Having lunch at Romson’s restaurant on the beach. The waves make a soothing background noise.

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Chatting with Sebastian while he watches an episode of his favourite cartoon, the Backyardigans!

I have been copying files today and it made me feel real dumb. Read on and you see why.

1. I was copying 6GB to a USB drive and was told it would take 139 minutes. I have only USB 1 so I have to live with low speed so I went for a walk. When I returned two hours later the machine had done 3 minutes of work and flashed questions like these on me:

xxx is a read only file, do you want to copy it?

You stupid cow! Why didn’t you ask me that before you started copying? Give me all options before you copy and when I return from my walk you will have completed the job.

2. I was copying 6GB to a USB drive. After 55 minutes a message appeared:

The file xxx can not be copied. It is corrupt. Press OK.

I pressed OK and what happened? Did it skip the file and copy the next? No way! It just stopped, leaving me to find out which files had been copied and which had not.

3. The error message at the top I take to mean that Windows XP can only copy files that do not exist. There are possibly better interpretations, but life is too short for me to find out.

So why did all this copying make me feel dumb. It made me feel dumb since I am a typical member of a race that buys Windows more than any other operating system in spite of its unfriendliness and sheer insulting behaviour.

Update 25 May:

I downloaded Teracopy today:

TeraCopy is a free utility designed to copy/move files faster and more secure. TeraCopy can resume broken file transfers. TeraCopy skips bad files during copy and even shows the skipped files at the end of files transfer. Calculates files CRC checksum on the fly to speed up source and target files comparison. Seamless integration with Windows Explorer allows you to keep working with files as usual.

Five years ago I bought a Gateway Laptop in Miami. It was just before Gateway closed all their retail shops. I paid around USD 1500 for a machine I have been extremely happy with. 

Today I can buy Gateway’s T-6345u for USD 430 + freight. Comparing my old machine with this new one is staggering. The Ram goes from 512Mb to 2GB, the hard disk goes from 60GB to 320GB, the weight drops to 2.5kg! Battery life = unknown.

Then I read this that made me think again ordering a Gateway product.

Here are the most popular portable computers at Amazon.com.

• Play Go Online Against the Computer
• Go Software and Online Resources
• 361points.com/blog