Archive for January, 2008

Finally!

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Finally (although rather late), Dutch universities will require some teaching qualifications of their teachers. The situation used to be such, that to be a teacher in the Netherlands, you needed a special diploma. Different ones for teaching toddlers (4-6 year olds), for primary school (6-12), and a variety for highschool depending on the level and the age group of the children (12-16/18). But then, to teach university students — incidentally, the highest education you can partake in in the Netherlands — no educational qualifications were required. Teaching is / was a duty bestowed on the University research personnel. Now arguments can be made for such a situation, but case in point is that even someone teaching toddlers has/had to have vastly superior educational qualification than those teaching the pinnacle of our society.

Now the rectores magnifici of the Dutch universities have signed an agreement on this. There will be a 200 hour study program which results in a “BKO” certificate. And apparently, they want to create possibilities for excellent teachers to further their careers — unheard of, so far the only way up at a university is research. Interesting times ahead, but all in all I am at least glad that we will have some teaching requirements for those who teach our finest.

Currently playing: Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, New Super Mario Bros (the minigames).

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Auchan credit

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Close to my work in Luxembourg, there is a supermarket — well, more a French hypermarché. Big does not begin to describe it; it’s gigantic. Humongous. And, in true Dutch fashion, they have a bonus-card-like system. You scan the card, and for some selected products, you get 5% of the price as a debit on the card. On Tuesdays, this is 10% (for most, but not all, products that grant you this). And sometimes there are special offers where you get more money or a larger percentage for a special product.

Over time, with careful planning (shop on Tuesdays! Buy into the hype, buy the products that come with money!), you can accumulate eventually some money.Enough to purchase Zelda: Phantom Hourglass at least :) :) :)

I’ll be trying that out in 3 hrs in the train, most probably :)

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CapsLock away!

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I have been forced to work once more under Windows. The experience is less than pleasant — most noticably the low resolution coupled with the lack of virtual desktops leading to desktop real estate being at an all-time high.

Anyway, under my trusty old Ubuntu I had configured CapsLock to double as a control key. It’s quite easy there. In Windows it is not so easy, but doable. There’s plenty of tips on the web (e.g. anticapslock.com). After a bit of Googling and browsing the following made the magic happen:

  1. fire up regedit
  2. open the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout”
  3. Right-click and add a new binary value named “Scancode Map”
  4. Give it following binary value:

00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00
02 00 00 00
1D 00 3A 00
00 00 00 00

Explanation: the numbers are in little endian, so swap every block of two. 00 02 is the number of changes; 001D is the (left) ctrl key, and 003A is the CapsLock key. The rest is header and footer stuff.

It works, I am a happy camper now! Now onwards, to copy&paste more stuff from LaTeX to Word :S
Edit: Do reboot your machine afterwards for the settings to take effect. This is, after all, windows :)

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Wii got 15,000+ nintendo stars!

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

And, on top of that, wii also have got err… somewhere around 25 stars in Super Mario Galaxy. Which is a cool game. Wii play, on the other hand… well, the tank game is cool. Perhaps some of the others will catch my fancy. Wii sports somehow never makes it in, funny that huh?

As for Wii Boogie: people claimed lack of a stereo sound output was unforgivable for a music game (Guitar Hero III) — well, you wouldn’t believe how damning lack of a decent font is for a karaoke game.

New Year’s Eve was a blast, really enjoyed it a lot. Rogier came round and somehow we ended up DIY’ing all over my room again (and scoring around 25 stars in SMG ;-). Stupid password expiration scheme of the uni chose to go off over the holidays, which means I am now about to go to work (managed to postpone it a bit, indeed). Finally finished checking a chapter for Mel’s thesis, but somehow didn’t get round to mailing it. Another biggie on the todo list. Beyond this, the new year looks fresh right now. Then again, it’s Saturday right now :)

PS: Upon rereading this post, I see that this one really totally fits the tagline of this blog (‘random rambling’) :)

PS: ashamed Happy New Year! (better late than never!)

UPDATE (14 january 2008): Apparently, Stars can be converted to Wii Points on a 4-to-1 basis. It’s not really very advantageous (if I remember correctly, you can also convert them on a 1 euro to 100 points ratio in a store (20 euro == 2,000 points)), but it is an actual, worthwhile use of your stars. Will consider this — but will need to get the Wii on internet first.

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