www.qianqin.de

To survive the ongoing price war in Germany, almost all big companies have reduced their service level to a minimum. What used to be free has become quite pricey. Service numbers are a good example. They used to be free or on a 0180-2 basis (€ 0.06/call). But lately, they were swapped against expensive 0180-5 (€0.14/min) or even 0900 (usually above €1.00/minute) numbers. It wouldn’t be so bad if the service would actually improve as expected if you pay money to talk to the service personnel, but in reality, they get even worse. Long waiting lines and user unfriendly interfaces make you pay for wasting your time. Luckily, there usually is a way to get rid of the pricey part.

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All my friends know that I am a huge Logitech fan. I own 9 mouses, 4 keyboards, 2 Bluetooth headsets, 2 remotes and 1 Bluetooth music receiver made by Logitech, which almost all are still in use (just for the record: MouseMan iFeel, MX 700, MouseMan Traveller, LX5, V500, MX 1000, MX 1000 Bluetooth, MX Revolution, MX Revolution Bluetooth, S510, 2x diNovo Desktop, MX 5500 Desktop, Mobile Freedom, Mobile Traveller, Wireless Music, 2x Harmony 885).
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I always say that you can easy distinguish a computer amateur from an expert by looking at his taskbar. If it has only one row, he’s an amateur. An expert knows the advantage of multi tasking and needs a lot of space in the task bar to navigate through the programs.
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Today, I finally got VDSL. Actually, I was supposted to get it 2 weeks ago, but T-Com managed to have a shortage on the VDSL2 hardware (and refused me to pick some up from one of their stores where there was hardware) and then after I got the hardware, they needed 1 week to activate my VDSL2 line. I think I paid at least € 10 to call their support hotline preventing them to test what else can be done wrong. I wonder how long others had to wait. Anyway, I’m now a lucky guy who didn’t get VDSL25 but VDSL50 with 50Mbit down and 10Mbit up! So now, it’s time to test the line.

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As my girlfriend decided to go on a bike tour with her little sister next week, a new bike was needed. Also, her old bike, which is her little sister’s bike now, needed to be tuned street safe and easy to drive. So first, we went to “Real” a supermarket chain. They had some really cheap bikes from € 99 up to € 300. We found one for € 229 with seemed pretty nice and bought it. There was no service for installation, so I had to make the bike work. The bike was called “Travel 400″ and had a full chrome look with front suspension and a hard tail. We decided not to get one with Full suspension because we needed a robust carrier.

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When you walk around in China, you can find people walking around and collecting empty bottles. I always thought this phenomenon only exists in not-yet industrialized countries. The people are so poor that collecting those bottles and selling them to a garbage dealer allows them to make enough money to survive. But during the last few weeks, I began seeing the same phenomenon in Berlin, Germany.

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Well, it’s christmas time. I guess everyone is having fun with their families, so enjoy your holidays! My belly is full and it is time for me to enjoy myself with a round of Natural-Selection.

I managed to get some new domains for me. After seeing almost all domains being taken away, I was still able to get two with my name:

qin.at and qian.at

.at-domains are from Austria and still pretty expensive, that is why they were still unregistered. But due to an upgrade of services of our hoster, I got them for free. The normal price for an .at-domain is around € 49.00 each year plus setup fees. Well, you might find some new stuff there about me soon. Or shall I say http://qian.at/creating.a/new.website?

After a long long break, university started again this week. And just as usual, the problems began.

So Sunday evening, when every lazy student like me realizes, that he has to get up early the next day to go to the university, he goes to set his alarm clock. But what time am I supposed to set it to? So here was my first problem: I didn’t have a time table because I was too lazy making one before. Well, I went back into my working room, started Firefox and opened TU-Berlin’s Homepage. One click on “VV” (university calendar) and I should be able to quickly plan my new term. Well, at least I thought so. My next problem just started. It seemed that TU-Berlin had so many more lazy students like me that the “VV” server had crashed by a deady DoS-attack (Denial-of-Service Attack) from thousands of evil little student computers owned by those lazy people just like me. So no way to look up courses now, or is there? Well, I called Jonas and asked him to send me a list of courses he has finished already so I could catch up. So now we used Google and tried to find our courses. And again the problems started. The results were mainly from 1994-1998, where the first websites started for those courses. But nonetheless, we found our courses after hours of searching. Here are some courses I’m taking this semster: Automatic image analysis, Analoge and digital electronics, embedded realtime systems and computer graphics.

Einstein said, when you move faster than the light, you will see the time running backwards, making it possible to see the past. Well, I had a little different experience with seeing the happenings of the past.

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