Regensblog

It was a good trip — we got some important stuff done, planning some short-term projects to get us over the hump we’re expecting in the coming months. It was nice to get to know my team’s local boss better, show my own boss around town a bit, and get to see Iasi what Iasi is like outside of extreme weather conditions — I’ve been during the hot spells and one of the few snowstorms in recent memory.

Apparently the food delivery service they used to use in Iasi in lieu of a canteen has started to declie in service but rise in price, so they go out for lunch much more often now. Here we are at Alila for pizza. It was pretty good!

What struck me on this visit (number 6 or 7 since November 2006…I’ve lost count) the most were are all the changes since July 2007. My team has moved to another building completely — one that took less than two months to construct. It’s made out of old shipping containers that have been hitched together. It sounded pretty terrible to me when they described it, but the interior is a completely modern and well-equipped office building.

When I first started visiting Iasi, all purchasing stuff was happening in the main building — with the goofy architecture. Then my department moved to the building on the right for a while, and since August last year, they’ve been in the one on the left. And the whole location is pretty much out of space at the moment. They’re looking for a new home in another part of town that will allow them to effective double their current head-count by this time next year.

It’s not just the office that’s changing though — the rest of the town appears to be in an upswing as well. We spotted a Mercedes-Benz Taxi, halied him and arranged for him to pick up my boss early Wednesday morning for an airport trip. He had good results, so I called an reserved a trip with him as well. This seems be the entreprenurial spirit that probably was lacking under the communist regime.

Good evening from Iasi! After dinner tonight, I took the camera out with the Gorillapod for some night shots. You can click on them to make them bigger.

Now I’m tired, so I’m going to bed. Big day tomorrow and the rest of the week, actually. You might not hear (see?) from me again here until after I get home on Saturday.

Prior to my trip to Romania tomorrow, I wanted to get a haircut. I’d been having very good luck at C&M on the corner of Am Römling and Ludwigstraße and their 11 € haircuts. Two quick, thorough, and very professional haircuts in a row done by the pleasant, if weird-looking Matthias, had me convinced I’d found a new favorite barber.

Third time wasn’t a charm, however. Matthias was busy with other clients (and I don’t know how to ask for a particular friseur — or whether they even do that, since this place works on the take-a-number FIFO format). I got a pleasant young-looking woman. I asked for a trim down to my usual 6mm and I thought all was well until suddenly another stylist came over to exlain that we had a problem. It seems the original one had cut a swath shorter than 6mm into the back of my head down by the neck and the only way to fix it was to cut that section of my hair down to 3mm or so and fade it longer up into the 6mm on the rest of my head. All staff members were apologetic and immediately offered to do this cut on the house due to their mistake.

But that looked dumb. So I had them do the whole head (barring the top) down to 3mm. OK, I like it short. But that made my beard look dumb. Once I got home, I tried trimming my beard so that it was shorter than the hair on my head, but that also looked less than optimal. So I trimmed the whole beard off (see below). I am kind of sad to see it go and return to the daily or nearly daily shaving regimen.

So, two points to ponder for the future:

1. Should I go back there again next time? The first two haircuts were brilliant. The third one less so, but they did do their best to make up for it.
2. Can you believe I wrote three whole paragraphs about my own personal grooming?

going a little too far?

Originally uploaded by cliff1976

Lolspeak is dead. D-E-D dead. Long live Lolspeak.

This is the proof.

This is the reason we tell everyone to come visit in May.

I took both of these shots from the outdoor section at the Kona cafe on Sankt-Kassians-Platz. I’m already in full-on t-shirt, shorts, and sandals mode, but as you can see, not everyone else is.

I had high hopes for Kubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron) with regard to bluetooth transfers from our mobile phones to our computers. Apparently it got better for most of the world from 7.10 (the Gutsy Gibbon) to the current version, but not for users of Symbian-based phones like our Nokia E50 and E61i models.

Then I noticed apparently receiving bluetooth file transfers from our Mac mini to our Kubuntu Linux machine running 8.04 worked just fine — so why not from our phones? Was it related to our phones or to the software on our Linux machine?

It’s apparently related to the bluez-utils package in the Ubuntu repositories. A user posted on launchpad.net (original post here) that using the bluez-utils package from the Debian “sid” (unstable) repositories worked for him.

So, get the unstable bluez-utils package from here, install it with

sudo pkg -i bluez-utils_3.30-3_i386.deb

reboot, and that’s it…at least, that’s how I did it. I hope I’ve saved someone some self-hair-pulling and googling.