I told somebody on ask.mefi not to put money there back in August. I'm curious what he did in the end.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 2:57 AM on October 8, 2008

Isn't Hari Seldon supposed to show up in times like these?
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 9:48 AM on September 30, 2008

I've asked a similar question a while ago. I now own both a Sony PRS and an iPod Touch. The first one works very well, there are tools out there that convert PDFs nicely and do stuff like chopping off the whitespace at the borders to allow better magnification and so on. I'm quite happy with it, the only negative is that it's ugly as hell, and obviously designed by idiots. Use it for a couple of minutes and you'll know what I mean. But still, it's a workable solution and you can get it cheap... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:55 AM on September 28, 2008

Chi Rho.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 10:14 AM on September 14, 2008 marked best answer

I've worked for a couple of years with violent teenagers, and must admit that I totally overlooked contemporary poetry as a motivator for their behavior.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 10:08 AM on September 12, 2008

Airports usually have a box where you can donate it to charity.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:59 AM on September 2, 2008

Fixed term savings account is a good idea, but be aware that there's some controversy regarding Icesave deals. I believe the controversy is regarding whether the Icelandic banking system could really guarantee the savings if one of the three or so banks fails. Deposits in savings account are usually insured up to certain sum.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 5:37 AM on August 29, 2008

I'd use Google Apps. Tagging, sharing, even email retention, the Sites thing which can be quickly customized to do very powerful stuff, all without having to install a single server. And it's way cheaper than hiring the person who'll recover your data after your mySQL database got corrupted.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:32 PM on August 26, 2008

I don't know, I doubt this trend. British youths here in Amsterdam seem to get stoned like all other tourists.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 12:05 PM on August 24, 2008

James Surowiecki writes about 23skidoo's technique in Wisdom of the Crowds. There have been experiments where people were told "you're supposed to meet someone in New York, but you don't know the time nor the place. Where would you be at which time?", and a good part of the people gave the same answer (noon at Central Station, I think).

So yes, the people wouldn't move randomly at all in a realistic scenario.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:18 AM on August 23, 2008

I think netbros' idea is good, teaching guitar could work pretty well. My guitar teacher was a grumpy former sailor who ran away from home as a kid. We usually spent the time drinking tea, he telling stories from the past, and than playing a bit. I loved it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:34 PM on August 21, 2008

Personally, I take a long term approach; I just wait until they die out.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:53 PM on July 15, 2008

You can define them for yourself, which you seem to be doing, so you're fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 10:18 AM on July 11, 2008

It's Bug 78414, and if I read the 200+ comments correctly, it's kind of hard to fix.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:22 AM on July 8, 2008

If you don't have one yet, use it as an emergency fund. It will allow you to pay unexpected expenses without going below zero, which means you don't pay interest, which probably will save you more than you can earn by investing. Put it in a high yield savings account that allows quick withdrawal.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 2:01 PM on June 30, 2008 marked best answer

I went to school in Germany class 11 to 13. From what I remember, we read Kleist (Der zerbrochene Krug, some novels), Kafka (Die Verwandlung, some shorter stuff), Max Frisch (Andorra, Stiller), Goethe (Faust I and II), Joseph Roth...
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:50 AM on June 13, 2008

Everytime I read "Austrian physics" I know there's Zeilinger inside. That guy is just annoying. I root for whomever will debunk him.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 12:12 PM on June 5, 2008

Communication skills. Cite: being human.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 7:37 AM on June 1, 2008

This database has the location, a church in Ornavasso. It describes it as "four men in the river invoking the Virgin Mary", and files it under "transportation incidents". The artist seems to be unknown.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:27 AM on May 8, 2008 marked best answer

The church where the painting is located has a collection of over 1000 ex-voto. I guess it's pretty save to assume that somebody commisioned it after being miracolously saved from a transportation incident in the river, but haven't been able to find out more.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:44 AM on May 8, 2008 marked best answer

I got lost repeatedly at Bruxelles Midi. The platforms are not arranged in a very consistent order.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 7:25 AM on April 13, 2008

Just a nitpick, but are you sure they function as PDC/BDC? I'm asking because that term refers to NT domains.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:04 PM on April 11, 2008

I'm just guessing, but I'd expect FCoE to have slightly better performance. FC is designed to have a low protocol overhead, and in a typical iSCSI SAN you don't use the features of IP (like routability). So I guess iSCSI has some fat that's not really needed.

If I were a buyer I'd take iSCSI all the time, just because it's easy to understand. I work for a storage vendor, and my impression is that true FC skills are not really widespread, while everybody gets iSCSI once... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:07 PM on April 8, 2008 marked best answer

If you're going to Maastricht to see this, you could stay at the Kruisheren Hotel, which is a church converted to hotel. Maastricht is just beautiful - I got a tour from an architect friend, and it's a really beautiful town.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 8:44 AM on December 30, 2007

Mister Mole by Luis Murschetz?
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 5:00 AM on December 23, 2007 marked best answer

I fail to see the complexity on the programming side. Collecting all that metadata, yes, that's HARD.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 7:25 AM on December 20, 2007

I'm a techie male in my early thirties, and if somebody tried to force me to do stuff in Sharepoint, I'd be very reluctant to cooperate. Your problem as I see it is not so much the level of techiness, but the fact that people often have their own way of doing things, often religiously fine-tuned over decades of professional experience. Read some productivity blogs, and you'll see that there is a lot of different ways of doing something as basic as handling a to do list.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 6:52 AM on December 4, 2007

As far as I remember, Poland made a lot of noise and laws to prevent EU citizens (especially Germans) to buy their land, precisely because they expected everybody to come over and buy land cheaply. You may want to investigate if you´d be allowed to buy in the first place.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:11 AM on November 13, 2007

If you've got any kind of IT affinity at all, you can easily get a job in one of the many multilingual helpdesk/support centers. Speaking any european language will help, as these are usually providing support for the rest of Europe, and the environment can be quite fun, if working with people from all over Europe is something that you'd find attractive. These are low pay jobs, but they will pay your bills. As there's a high turnover rate, they're always looking for people. Employers in the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 10:31 AM on October 21, 2007

It depends on your specific requirements, but most companies don't take images of everything, they standardize on a few particular configurations, and keep a couple of standard images. That way you only need to backup user data, and there's tons of options for that. A backup agent running on the clients pushes changed data to the backup server, which also controls the storing of data onto your array/filer/SAN/whatever. That's the way at least Legato, Tivoli Storage Manager, and Veritas Netbackup... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 10:27 PM on October 11, 2007

You sad MLM guys make me laugh.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 12:52 AM on August 29, 2007

I basically grew up with goats. There are tons of interesting things to know, but the one thing that I always found most remarkable is how status-conscious they are. I'm not sure if this was specific to our North Italian breed or if it's applicable to all goats, though. We gave bells to some of them in order to find them more easily up in the mountains, and they interpreted them as status symbols; if you gave a bell to a weaker one, the others would beat it mercilessly, as this seemed to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 1:49 PM on August 23, 2007

I live in Amsterdam. Where these guys at the central station? If so, it's eastern european/ gipsy stuff, I think. I've seen them a couple of times there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 12:07 PM on June 14, 2007

Thanks for the answers so far. To clarify, I'm not so much looking into explanations of specific protocols; what I'm after is an abstract way of think about them. Imagine you've never heard of protocol X, grab the spec and start reading - what goes on in an expert's head? I guess something like "oh, I see, it's a layer y protocol. Stateless, hm", etc. So he's got abstractions in his mind that he uses to assess the new protocol. But what does he think exactly?
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 8:36 AM on April 25, 2007

The fastest way to get a vertical search engine going is probably Google Coop. I suspect it will be hard to get better results without a couple of years experience with search.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 12:32 AM on April 21, 2007

For what it's worth, I used to feel the same way about all things electrical. I never had the impression to really get it. I went on to study physics, realized at some point that the answer to what a voltage really is can be arbitrarily complex, forgot everything about it, and now treat electricity as something that kinda flows out of the wall and gets eaten by my devices. Jobwise, I'm doing fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:48 AM on March 28, 2007

Reverse engineer yourself. What are you doing or feeling exactly? Are you perfectly in tune with all your desires? What is missing for perfect happiness? There might be wishes which you don't permit yourself to have, that's why you want to see them as some external to "you" (as in what's up with my brain, as if your brain is somehow not you!).

Try to find out, then to reconcile with the official behaviour you're allowing yourself to have (lifelong commitments, etc).
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:21 AM on March 14, 2007

I think the mur des je t'aime is pretty cool, it's a wall with I love you written in many languages. It's not too crowded usually, just some couples standing there kissing, very special athmosphere.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 3:08 AM on March 9, 2007

Audiophilia, being about very subjective impressions, is one big holy war. The only agreement seems to be that Bose is crap.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 8:47 AM on March 2, 2007

I've been to one of their schools for 3 years, and so have a lot of people I know. You'll get a lot of different opinions, mainly because the anthroposophic/waldorf/etc movement is quite pluralistic. It ranges from friendly treehuggers to rabid sectarians to individualistic anarchists to conservative christians. It depends a lot on the school and the local community itself, at least it's that way in Germany.

Relationship-wise, if you're a convinced... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 6:45 AM on February 7, 2007

Well known and apparently decades old scam. Stay away.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:51 AM on January 30, 2007

It's a problem that looks simple at first sight, but in reality it is completely ill-defined. The same is true for content management systems in general. Nobody is ever happy with their blogging software, for example.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 8:06 AM on November 29, 2006

pracowity, that's more or less it. And if you consider that their support for Bush is often just used as a provocative device, their position is far less irrational than it would appear at first sight.
posted to MetaFilter by dhoe at 5:16 AM on August 25, 2006

The best book I've ever read on Hegel is Charles Taylor's Hegel. I'd suggest reading it before all others. It's very readable and clear.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:38 PM on August 3, 2006

Now that the people with phobic tendencies stopped reading this thread, it's safe to point out that it does happen with pythons as well.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:47 PM on May 22, 2006

Sorry, correct link.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 11:49 PM on May 22, 2006

I'm offline for two weeks per year each year, which only works by being somewhere where there is no internet access. As soon as I'm back in the civilized world, I'm back at 10 hours per day. Deciding to cut back internet usage never worked - and I did stop smoking after ten years, so it's not like I've got a dramatic lack of willpower.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 7:41 AM on May 9, 2006

You could get this card. Free entrance to all major museums, free transportation, a canal cruise, all for less than 50 Euros.

Amsterdam is full of people coming here from everywhere. I'd be extremely surprised if you'd stay alone for long.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 4:23 AM on April 29, 2006

SMS was originally invented to allow "operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network" (source).
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 12:32 PM on April 17, 2006

Another thing to check is whether you've set up some policies or restrictions on the router. It happened to me, I played around with the settings when the router was new and then forgot about it until a year later, when weird things started to happen with a new client.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dhoe at 12:32 AM on April 8, 2006