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Author Archive for Peter

Page 4 of 41

Melancholic

Published on July 23, 2006 in Society. 1 Comment

You Have a Melancholic Temperament


Introspective and reflective, you think about everything and anything.
You are a soft-hearted daydreamer. You long for your ideal life.
You love silence and solitude. Everyday life is usually too chaotic for you.

Given enough time alone, it’s easy for you to find inner peace.
You tend to be spiritual, having found your own meaning of life.
Wise and patient, you can help people through difficult times.

At your worst, you brood and sulk. Your negative thoughts can trap you.
You are reserved and withdrawn. This makes it hard to connect to others.
You tend to over think small things, making decisions difficult.

I’m a 7

Published on July 22, 2006 in Society. 2 Comments

You Are 7: The Enthusiast

You are outgoing and playful – always seeing the happy side to life.

You’re enthusiastic and excitable. You love anything new.

Multi-talented, you do many things well… and find success easy.

You prefer to keep things light with others. Opening up is hard for you.

Homage to beer

Published on July 21, 2006 in Society. 2 Comments

You Are Barney


You could have been an intellectual leader…

Instead, your whole life is an homage to beer

You will be remembered for: your beautiful singing voice and your burps

Your life philosophy: “There’s nothing like beer to give you that inflated sense of self-esteem.”

Brain gender

Published on July 20, 2006 in Society. 2 Comments
Your Brain is 60% Female, 40% Male


Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female
You are both sensitive and savvy
Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed
But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

The Five Factor Personality Profile

Published on July 19, 2006 in Society. 0 Comments
Your Five Factor Personality Profile


Extroversion:

You have medium extroversion.
You’re not the life of the party, but you do show up for the party.
Sometimes you are full of energy and open to new social experiences.
But you also need to hibernate and enjoy your “down time.”

Conscientiousness:

You have medium conscientiousness.
You’re generally good at balancing work and play.
When you need to buckle down, you can usually get tasks done.
But you’ve been known to goof off when you know you can get away with it.

Agreeableness:

You have medium agreeableness.
You’re generally a friendly and trusting person.
But you also have a healthy dose of cynicism.
You get along well with others, as long as they play fair.

Neuroticism:

You have low neuroticism.
You are very emotionally stable and mentally together.
Only the greatest setbacks upset you, and you bounce back quickly.
Overall, you are typically calm and relaxed – making others feel secure.

Openness to experience:

Your openness to new experiences is high.
In life, you tend to be an early adopter of all new things and ideas.
You’ll try almost anything interesting, and you’re constantly pushing your own limits.
A great connoisseir of art and beauty, you can find the positive side of almost anything.

From XP to Vista back to XP

Published on July 17, 2006 in windows. 4 Comments

I finally got too fed up working with a crippled PC and installed the Windows Vista Beta 2 on my laptop. It looks really nice, although slightly slow. I connected my camera and, lo and behold, the Picture import works flawlessly, creating a separate folder per session, the Vista Photo browser and editor remind me a lot of Google’s Picasa. Internet Explorer 7 has tabbed browsing at last, and seemed quite stable and robust. In all, I was quite happy to have a working system again.
vista performance: I'm a '2'
Continue reading ‘From XP to Vista back to XP’

Netgear SC101: crappy storage

Published on July 10, 2006 in hardware. 180 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

UPDATE: also read my post about testing the Netgear ReadyNAS (it doesn’t suck)
Storage porn

In my continuing quest for more and better storage, I have taken the following path:

  • Maxtor 5000DV, 120GB USB/Firewire, bought in 2003. Was dependable for 3 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
  • LaCie Porsche, 160GB USB, bought in 2004. Worked OK for 2 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
  • Iomega Desktop hard drive, 250GB 100Mb Ethernet, bought in 2005. Hasn’t broken down yet, but makes way too much noise (loud ventilator, running continuously).
  • Netgear SC-101, 2×300GB Ethernet, bought in 2006. Supports RAID-1 mirroring, which I needed after all my hard disk crashes. For my less-than-optimal experience, read on.

Continue reading ‘Netgear SC101: crappy storage’

Trackback wizard for Blogger users

Published on June 30, 2006 in Google. 1 Comment

Trackbacks are a good way to alert other bloggers that you citing them on your blog. It also helps to drive traffic to your own site (if your comment was insightful or tempting).
Unfortunately, some blog hosts like Blogger, Skynetblogs do not automatically send a trackback ping to all the blog URLs in your blog post. So how do you send such a trackback from your blogspot.com site to other blogs (provided they support receiving them, obviously)?

  1. put the following code in your Blogger template (e.g. below the actual post):
    http://web.forret.com/tools/trackback.asp?title=<$BlogItemTitle$>& blog_name=<$BlogTitle$>& url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>
  2. write your blog post with some links to trackback-able blogs
  3. go to the post page (typically /2006/06/this-is-my-title.html)
  4. open the trackback wizard by clicking the link that should now be below the post (in a new window)
  5. for each of the external trackback-able links: open it in a new window, find the trackback URL that is announced on the page and copy/paste it into the “Cited Blog – Trackback URL” of the trackback wizard
  6. find the relevant piece of text in your blog post concerning that link (typically the text right before and/of after the link) and copy/paste it into the “Citing Blog – Excerpt” field.
  7. Click “Submit Trackback” – you should get an “OK!” if the trackback was accepted

If the trackback was not accepted, it could be for one of the following reasons:

  • the cited blog does not support trackbacks: nothing you can do about it.
  • the trackbacks are closed (article is too old or too spammed): nothing you can do about it
  • caught by spam control (security is very strict): if you feel strong about the topic, contact the author
  • caught by spam control because you are a spammer: get a life