A Cab Driver in Düsseldorf

The manners were professional, although I was surprised that he had to use a navigation system to find a nearby hotel, which was not even a small one.

The he complained when his navigation system sent him all around a roundabout and back the way we had come. He told us that the system needed a service it was constantly giving wrong directions. It took me 5 monre minutes to find out why: when the system said "turn right" he started thinking "does this mean right here, or the next one?" and almost always took the wrong turn, although the system had incicated the right one! I guess the driver needed a service too :-)

Eventually we managed to get to the hotel, having driven 25km instaed of 15km. A professional that he was, he only changed us for the 15km, so it had only cost us time - so far!

When we got into the hotel we asked for our rooms in our names and to our suprise there were no reservations! Also in the name of our company: none! I asked for the name of the hotel - we had arrived at the wrong one!

So we had to get another cab to get us to the right one, which now not only cost us more time but also money.

We were so happy to arrive safely in the end!

Create your own ring tones for your mobile phone

This works great with my Siemens phone, but should work will all phones that support .mmf sound files. Now you can have virtually any sound as your ring tone.

1. create a sound file in .wav format on your computer (download, record using the freeware tool No23 Recorder, convert from mp3, ...)
2. convert .wav to .mmf using this tool
   
3. move the .mmf file onto your phone, I used the Siemens Data Suite, I would guess that every manufacturer gives you a similar tool
4. choose new ring tone, done

I personally recorded my son saying "Dad, your phone is ringing!". I find that spoken ring tones catch my attention much better than music, which is around everywhere.

Can you hear where that ambulance is coming from?

Because humans have ears on each side of their head, they are able to localize most sounds. The direction of high-frequency sounds is pinpointed based on their volume level in each ear, and low frequency sounds based on their arrival time in each ear.

But Guy Moore, an assistant professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, said human ears do not do a good job finding the source of sounds around 1,000 hertz using either method, so that a noise in that range seems just as likely to be coming from the television to the right as a purse sitting to the left.

"That's also why it's so hard to tell where an ambulance siren is coming from in traffic," Mr. Moore said.

I may be time for some people to think about the frequency our sirens use. After all it might make a big difference if you could tell, where the sound is coming from!

Fitness Sells

In the eighties is was "sex sells", but people have become blunted, so nowawdays you would probably show something that is rated as porn to create an (illegal) eye-catcher. And even then this would probably not raise your sales by a single point.

At the same time, people have also grown more egocentric, wanting to show off. A good way to show off is to display ones fitness. So you could say that today the new motto is "fitness sells". And by that I do not mean that sports gear sells any better than it did in those days! What sells is some pacard that you can pin onto yourself to show how hale and hearty you are.

For example: cars used to sell through half-naked women standing in front of them, not at the local car dealer - alas! - but in advertisements and car shows. Now what sells are cars that give you a sporty image: sports cars and SUVs that burn a lot of fuel, offer not enough room, are uncomfortable, etc. But don't you just love them!

Or look at those walkers, nowadays they can show others that they are in great shape by displaying nordic walking sticks. Most of them do not even know how to use these tools, I have seen some bad postures about some of those walkers, they will probably not experience the inteded profit of those sticks but end up with a problem with their spinal discs!

So if you have a product you want to sell, just look at how you can make the would-be-buyer think that it shows others that he/she is in great shape. It is not necessary that your product creates that good shape, nor is it necessary that the buyer is in good shape (just look at those guys driving sports cars).

Linux under Windows

Recently I wanted to run some Linux software on my PC and was wonder how to do this without having to boot a different OS, i. e. leaving Windows.

I came across Cygwin, which does not do the trick, it is only a port of useful Unix tools to Windows. Anyway, for those who like the standard Unix commands and like working in a shell, this is great!

Next, I installed CoLinux, which is basically a virtual machine, which can run any bootable image. It works fine, speed is great, you can even run XWindows and connect to it via VNC! There are, alas, some limitations like having no access to sound, bluetooth, etc. Whatever hardware is locked by Windows is not available to an OS running under CoLinux.

So what about using a Windows program instead. VMWare Player did it for me, now I have Ubuntu running in a separate window and can easily work with Windows and Linux at the same time. I still have to figure out how to make my (Windows) harddrive available to Ubuntu, but it worked for my CD-ROM, so I am sure there is a way.

So now I have the best of both worlds combined :-)

Thanks to all the people who put instructions in the web. I found the following extremely useful:

CoLinux: http://faif.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Skydev/Howtos/colinux.htm

VMWare and Ubuntu: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/11/07/vmware-player-ubuntu-installation.html

Free OS Zoo: http://www.oszoo.org/ Download images of different OSes that can be run in VMWare Player (however, I prefer to create my own images off the installation CD)

Cygwin: http://cygwin.com/