This week we bought a very expensive gadget: a new car!
After many visits to many car dealers we were very fed-up with searching. We are happy that we made a decission, mainly because that means that we can spend a Saturday at home, or just walking around. The car is expected to arrive at the end of September.
I just read ‘How to tip properly’ on lifehacker, and was very surprised to read about pre-tipping:
In busy clubs or at crowded bars, it is acceptable to “pre-tip” the bartender. This encourages him to respond promptly to your needs, and it keeps you from waiting at the bar. A pre-tip is always at least 5 dollars (and more often 10 or above, depending on how crowded or upscale the bar is). Despite the amount, it should not comprise the whole of your tipping. One dollar for every 2 drinks afterward is typically sufficient to maintain their interest.
What a huge bullshit!!! Why did we let it go this far?!
First of all, tipping is a way to express my thanks for the delivered services. If I decide to pay a little bit extra, I decide how much I will give. In many places I read tipping rules like “you should always give 10%”, but for me there is only one rule: how do I value the extra service delivered to me. I put emphasis on extra, since I always assume that normal service is already included in the price. I pay for a coffee, and you bring it. If I read in the quote above that I have to pre-tip in order to encourage the waiter to respond promptly to my needs, I’d rather go to another place, since this waiter is simply not doing his job! He should be paid less, not more!
Furthermore, why do we only tip in bars and restaurants? Don’t the hairdresser and the cashier of the supermarket work just as much or even more? And who ever gave a tip to the electric co.? OK, skip that last one, since they will never do something extra for me.
The point is, I see tipping as something general. If you do something extra for me, I pay you extra. If you deliver the basic service, e.g. you bring me my cup of coffee when I order one, I pay only the required amount. A tip is something you need to earn!
Today, I proudly present my latest work: BryteNet.
BryteNet is going to be the name under which I am going to manage my hosting activities. I am certainly not going to be the cheapest hosting provider, but my prices are far lower than the average European hosting company (XS4ALL still asks €23 for only 50Mb space) and I can support you in English, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan.
Furthermore, the only limits I put in my packages are disk space and bandwidth. I offer unlimited POP3 mail, mail forwarders, FTP accounts, mailing lists, mySQL databases, and subdomains; you decide how to use your space!
Go have a look at the site, and tell me what you think of it.
Coming back from my holidays, I found an awfully empty homepage on this site. For the moment it will stay like this, since I am wading through hundreds of e-mail messages (you will get your answer), comment spam (none of which made it to the live web), dirty cloths to wash, photos to develop, and a new site to launch today :-D.
Stay tuned!
Just a small note to point you to a new feature on this site. As of today Brain Tags has a Folksonomy page, showing the most important themes I write about in a visual way.
To make dreams come true you need two things: focus and time. Without focus a project takes way too much time, and without time…
Anyway, I had a dream that I wanted to come true. With some spare time in the weekend and in the lunch breaks, which are 2½ hours here, the second factor was available. I struggled a little bit more with the first factor, since I tend to jump from database design to logo design to testing out e-mail automation. But I managed to stick to my plan:
Everything is fully operational, but it has a horrible design. I hope to fix all that this week, take my summer holidays and open the site on August 1st.
This is way too cool! Google released Google earth, a Windows desktop application to access their geographical data.
Saying java is better because it works on all platforms is like saying anal sex is better because it works on all genders.
– Mike V.
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd…
“If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully-grazing flock and calmly answered, “Sure.”
The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM Thinkpad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130 page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says… “You have exactly 1586 sheep.”
“That is correct; take one of the sheep.”said the shepherd.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?”
“OK, why not.” answered the young man.
“Clearly, you are a consultant.” said the shepherd.
“That’s correct.” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answers the shepherd. “You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business… Now give me back my dog.”
Our car is about to reach 300.000 km, and the bills of the garage tell us that it is time to say goodbye to our Fiat Punto and start looking for something else.
The first question,new or second hand?, was quickly answered; as the second hand market is almost inexistent here in Spain. Everybody buys new and keeps driving it until the car reaches the same stage as our current car. We will probably end up buying a new car, unless we are lucky enough to buy a showroom model.
The second question, what kind of car?, was also easily answered: we live in the city centre, so big cars are out of the question. And considered my length and the fact that we regularly use the car to go away with our friends, really small cars are also not suited for us. So that leaves us with the regular tourist cars and MPVs.
Since every brand offers these models, we made up a list of all dealers in Lleida and started to visit them last Saturday. Unfortunately, almost all of them were closed, since the day before was a bank holiday! In the end we managed to visit the dealers for Peugeot and Renault, and came home with a lot of information about these cars.
We also bought some magazines with the typical list of all brands and models in the back, and while browsing all that information I quickly noticed that I simply had way too much information. I need a way to get rid of all surplus of information, I won’t buy a Ferrari and don’t have the slightest idea whether 150 Nm is OK or not, so fired up Google to search for the table in the car magazines in text or Excel format to play with.
Without success. It seems like all the car sites have been made only for car-enthusiasts. Usually the first selection you have to make is the brand and the model, which is exactly the information I want the site to give me! I am very disappointed in what I found.
When I am looking for a mobile phone of €50, I have hundreds of sites to help me, but when I am making one of the biggest purchases of my life, I fall into the hands of the salesmen without any help from the Internet.
