Seems like AON is trying to fool consumers. They have launched (quite some time ago but I saw it now for the first time) a commercial campaign against mobile internet. They say that “real broadband” is better, faster and cheaper and also that if you have reached your limit you will have to pay for mobile internet but with “real broadband” you pay from 4 euro more and have flat rate. Ok, lets compare We will take the cheapest AON has to offer, that will be AON speed 500. This will be 20 Euro a month and receive 500MB traffic included and a speed of 512kbit/s down, we will ignore upstream. This means you could download with max 64kb/s! And what if you exceed the included 500MB ? You pay 7 cents for each MB! Oh, almost forgot, you need a phone connection for AON ! This means you also have to pay the phone, this is NOT included in the 20 Euro. Now let’s look at what one HUI has to offer. You pay 10 Euro a month and get 250MB for this, if you want extra 250MB you pay 5 Euro. So you have the 500MB for 15 Euro. How about the speed? See for your self

I didn’t watch MTV or VIVA since a long long time (over a year if not already two). First of all, the music they play is mostly crap. Second, the commercials, the ring tone commercials are just unbearable! Then they have got so many stupid shows. ehmmm… wasn’t MTV supposed to be “Music Television”? So who needs shows about the 16th birthday of some stupid kids? No matter if anybody knows them or not. Anyway, gotv also has commercials (why shouldn’t they) but they have maximum one commercial about ring tones and way on a higher IQ level then the stupid commercials from MTV. Enough complaining today, it’s way to hot …

On Monday I received my One H.U.I (hell fast, ultra simple internet) A fast internet connection for my laptop, from wherever I am in Austria. One delivered real fast but unfortunately there no drivers for Mac, even though they promised that it works for Mac, of course the drivers for Windows are available on the Modem itself which has about 150MB space on it. After some research on the One homepage I found out that there should be a CD in the package, which seemed like they have forgotten. Well this can happen so I called One to ask if they can mail me the drivers or give me a link where I can download the drivers, but this is not possible, they will send me a CD with the drivers. This really pissed me of, how hard can it be to offer the drivers for download like for example Vodafone does! Since I didn’t have the drivers yesterday (Thursday!!) I called the hotline once again and the lady from the hotline told me that the drivers have been sent on the 6. April, which was today! They need 4 days to send out a cd? I still don’t understand why they don’t offer the drivers for download. They told me that they have send some thousand Packages without mac drivers and that’s why it took so long to send until they have sent me the CD. Look one, this is, from my point of view, it would have been easier and a lot cheaper to offer the driver for downloading then sending a CD by mail. I am used to stupid things like this from T-Com/T-Online in Germany, but One? Anyway, the problem was solved by the hotline by calling some One-Shops and asking if they have a Mac driver which they could copy me!

Most people in Europe might know the debate that is going on in Germany at the moment. They are trying to forbid so called “Killergames” like CounterStrike since they accuse the games for being the reason why kids in past became killers and ran amok in schools. Most politicians and media have here the same point of view, forbid the games, then the problem is solved. So I was very very surprised to see on “Welt der Wunder”, a “knowledge” show on RLT2, that really did some research before opening their mouth. They interviewed a doctor that measured the brain activity while someone was playing counterstrike. The doctor said “The only thing these people are able to do after playing the game, is clicking the mouse very fast. There is no reason why a player would start killing”. A different person, no idea what function he has, played the games before giving a statement, his opinion was that the games can be used like a script for how one could do his mass killing, the same how books or movies can be used for that, where violent movies are twice as bad as the so called “killergames”. Ever heard something about forbidding violent movies? I don’t understand what is going on in the heads of the stupid politicians. Just look a bit at the past, forbidden games where the games that where most successful after they where forbidden. Lets say that in Germany the games will be forbidden. There is still the internet where one could get the pirated version of the game. So the result is, the state looses money by taxes it didn’t get from the sales and the people would still get to play the games. And once again, the politics saved the day

I almost forgot how bad the german TV was … it even got worse now. Since I have my receiver and watch most of the time Cinemax, HBO, Discovery and National geographic I got rid of all the bad memories of the german TV, but now in Berlin where I don’t have a choice, except not to turn on the tv, I had to find out that the german tv got even worse. There still are some nice series but most of the time it’s only crap! Ring-tone commercials didn’t really change, but the late-night shows did, the ones where there was some girl in bikini trying to convince some stupid fools to call and solve the riddle to win some money, well now the girls don’t have a bikini anymore, they now are half naked, hoping that by showing their tits, more fools will call. What doesn’t the TV do for money? Oh, and for this high quality tv they want to charge money now. But not all german channels are like this, I really like Terranova, but it seems that I’m a bit to young for the commercials on that channel, the target group seems to be people above 70 years, anyway much better then the ring-tone commercials that seem to have as target group people with the IQ of a chicken (sorry, didn’t mean to offend chicken!).

I usually don’t post blogs regarding my work but I think this one is worthy for being blogged. Last month I attempted the first part in Budapest.

“ISTQB – Certified Tester, foundation level”

I was rather optimistic about this Certification, or rather about the seminary and learning some new things, but I was quite disappointed. Things like skipping pages from the material but then get questions about that skipped material at the exam. The material was also extended, my colleagues that did that seminary one year ago, had 25 pages in the “syllabus” we (the 4 of us that didn’t have time one year ago) had the same 3 days, but our syllabus had now 73 pages. Things like the moderator not knowing answers to example questions without looking at the result page didn’t really increase my mood and the trust in this seminary.

I always had this problem since I have my Panasonic NV-MX300! I do not know how to explain the problem so I will demonstrate it with this movie

Noticed the squares appearing two times at the beginning? This can be only from the camcorder. I do NOT have this on the tape if I play it with my camcorder (the same as used for recording, as mentioned, the Panasonic) on TV I do not have these problems. It can not be from the software, I had this in Pinacle, Vegas on windows and also on the Mac in iMovie and Final Cut so there is no way this could be from software or the OS. Neither could it be the hardware, it occurred on my old PC (1.7GHz), Laptop(3GHz), Mac Mini and on the iMac. I once had to capture a movie from a different camcorder, also Panasonic but a different model and there I did not have this problem. So what is this and how do I solve this? Or is there some external device I could use to capture the tapes?

I love this message from the Hitachi RMA, hmm… what should I press?  I agree or I don’t agree? The best thing was, they REALY asked me this also on the phone !

In order to create a RMA, please read and respond to the following:

Export Compliance Certification

By clicking the “I agree” button, I agree that Hitachi GST products will not be used for the design, development, manufacturing, testing, stockpiling, or use of biological, nuclear, missile or chemical weapons.

Yes once again I had nothing better to do then move servers, fuck and today it wasn’t even raining. Ok I came across a lot of problems as usual, one was that I decided not to use debian testing anymore, I wanted only stable ! One of the problems was that stable had mysql4.0 and my old database was 4.1 and of course there where problems while trying to import the database, but hey, there is a nice parameter –compatible=mysql40 sounds like exactly what I needed … After I finished the server almost I found out what “compatible” means for the sickheads who implemented this parameter. “compatible” means that this line: `object_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, will be transformed into this: `object_id` int(11) NOT NULL default ’0′,