I just spent 80 DKK on buying April March‘s Chick Habit album, although I could have purchased the songs one by one, and only having had to pay 56 DKK, because I already have the Chick Habit song.

But then, the real stupid in this is obviously me, because I didn’t look properly into this. But still. (It’s a great album, though.)

I’m a Dropbox user. (That link is a referral link, which will earn me 250 MB of additional space if you register.) Not a power user, and I currently only use .9% of my 2GB free plan, but a user nonetheless.

I have, however, found a very useful use case for the service. In my Documents folder, I have a Writings/DRAFTS folder. This is where I store drafts for posts on Simply Jonathan.

Now, Dropbox works this way: you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. You can choose the location of this for yourself, but the default location on Mac OS X is ~/Dropbox.

The important thing to notice is that these are not identical. And only stuff you put in your Dropbox gets synced.

Not to worry, though, because a little UNIX style magic is all it takes. Using the power of symbolic links (symlink), I was a able to achieve exactly what I wanted: having Dropbox sync an out-of-scope folder or file.

Now, symlinks are nothing new, and this was not a matter of whether a symlink could live in the Dropbox — it was merely a pleasant discovery that it also synced the contents of it.

How come I end up where I started?
How come I end up where I went wrong?

How come no browser in the history of humanity has had an ‘open in this window’–button? Because they assume people don’t use target="_blank"? They do.

And it’s obviously not to keep buttons out of the interface — when tabs came to browsers, they implemented ‘open in new tab’. So what is it?

(Yes, I know this can be achieved with user scripts, I just wonder about why it has never been built into the browser.)

Forever awake he lies shaking and starving
Praying for someone to turn off the light

$ python -c 'import time; print time.ctime(1234567890)'
Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009

One way or the other, I probably won’t be able to remember, but it’s fun anyway.

(Hat tip, Thought Palace.)

Christmas is here. Tomorrow, I will be seated with eight of my nearest family members to celebrate. That same night, lots of presents will be unwrapped by yours truly. (In Denmark, it is custom to open presents on the 24th.)

I don’t hate Christmas. While its relevancy, seeing as my family is mostly made up of atheists, is questionable, I like taking a night off to have a nice time with my family. Enjoying company and extravagant food is certainly something I enjoy.

But something I don’t like about it is the presents. I don’t mind presents when they’re personally picked; only, they rarely are.

Wish lists. Wish lists are what I really don’t. The problem with wish lists is that they’re essentially order forms; and when you get to my age and has a decent income, it becomes a question of whether someone else will buy it for you, or whether you will buy it yourself. And that really takes the fun out of it, at least for me.

Mind you, I don’t hate all presents. Giving children a thing they have wished for is certainly okay, because they have no other way of getting it. (The argument could be made that they don’t need all this stuff, but that’s another matter entirely.)

And then there are personal presents. The ones where the person giving the gift has personally selected it, based on what s/he thinks the receiver really needs. These are obviously okay, because they take out the unwanted, order forms, and put in what’s needed: care.

Merry Christmas, and may you receive more presents that others think you’d like, and less of what you yourself think you’d like.

What do we have for entertainment?
Cops kicking gypsies on the pavement.

My favourite football team is Brøndby IF. Over the summer, they signed a player who had formerly played in the youth ranks of the club, but later signed for the large Dutch club Ajax Amsterdam. His name is Michael Krohn-Dehli. After returning to Brøndby, he has made an instant impact on the team, clearly fighting to be one of the best players in the entire league.

I’m a great fan of Michael’s play, so it seemed natural that, in buying a new Brøndby shirt, I’d get one with Krohn-Dehli on the back.

So I ordered such one at the newly opened online Brøndby shop. I placed this order on Friday the 14th of November (a week ago now). Yesterday, however, I received an email telling me that unfortunately, Krohn-Dehli shirts had been so popular that they had sold out. I would have to wait for a week before I could get mine.

This, all in all, was quite decent. Sure, it’s bad to sell out before you can inform new customers that you have so, but I would certainly have placed the order anyway. The great thing, however, was that they went at greater strides to satisfy me.

Yesterday, Denmark played Wales at home in a friendly. (In a game we lost 1-0, alas.) This match was played on Brøndby Stadion, which — you guessed it — is owned by Brøndby IF. What the shop did was to offer me two tickets, absolutely free of charge, that I could pick up at the stadium.

To rephrase: they offered me free tickets worth about 200 DKK, because I would have to wait another seven days to get my order. That is damn fine service. This essentially turned an experience where I could have become a little sour (“why didn’t you write so on the page?!”) into one where I was deeply awed with their generosity.

Of course, they could offer me the tickets, because they had far from sold out, and there was no chance that they would. My coming to the stadium would only result in a little more potential revenue from beer or hotdog purchases. Still, I found this a perfect example of how to treat your customers, once you mess up on your end.

(Also, because it was with such short notice, I was unable to attend. So in effect, they made me more than happy with the experience of shopping with them, and they didn’t even have to give me the free tickets.)

Tim Bray, How I Use my Mac:

I don’t use iTerm and I don’t use tabs and I don’t use screen. I just keep as many Terminal.app windows open at a time as necessary, and rotate among them with command-`.

Holy bloody crap. Not that he doesn’t use iTerm, but the command+` thing. I didn’t know. For years, I have been using Witch, which is a fine app, but is painfully slow on my old Powerbook. Thank you, Tim Bray, for enlightening me.