Recently my left headlight broke. I thought I'd change it quickly, but after half an hour of fiddling I decided to ask my dealer to do it for me, while I was looking. That was not a bad idea. It turned out to be not so straightforward after all, and you actually need tools (which you don't get when buying the car) to …

Of all inventive minds, the religious mind must be the most inventive. It can justify a massacre by refering to a book that essentially says "Thou shall not kill".

... maybe the title should be "Two Stupidities A Week", but since both stupid actions had to do with measurement, or rather the lack thereof, let's stick with the proverb. Stupidity #1 Last Saturday my brother and I went to a motorbike scrapyard for some advice, and maybe a new rotorpuller we could borrow. …

Does Oracle complain about not being able to drop a table for a currently connected user, but you are sure you disconnected? Do the sessions "hang" in "inactive" state? Just log on as system, and execute the following query: SELECT 'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || '''; --', …

Last week I tried to pull the rotor by using a rotor puller, and a socket (from a socket wrench set) to block it. The socket burried it's way into the first thread of the crankshaft. After realising this, I tried to fit the rotor bolt, and it wouldn't go in. Since only the first thread was damaged, I carefully drilled …

For some reason I've been selected my the google company to have the new interface of gmail, where you can use google talk without even installing it! Yes you've read that right. When I log in to Google, I immediately see a quick contacts list of people who are online (on googletalk), and I can chat with them as if I …

Getting the "Could not find an adaptor for class Foo" Mesage in Tapestry? You probably forgot to make your class Serializable. A simple description of a possible problematic situation follows: Suppose you have some simple class, like so: public class MyItem { private String itemname; public String …

For some strange reason, my brother's Kawasaki KLR Tengai dead-stopped. After starting it again, it made some strange noises. It also had lost a lot of oil somewhere along the way, so we decided to not run it again before we found the cause of the trouble. A few weeks ago we encountered a funny problem, we couldn't …

In the early days, Adobe Acrbat Reader was a great tool for reading PDF files. But in the past months, it has transformed into a slow-starting, update hungry irritating tool which pops up questions about upgrading parts of the program you didn't even request to be installed. If you have the older version of Acrobat …

Found out about this link by accidentally browsing accros Ian Lewis's blog. You can find out what your movie rating is. It seems I'm not for "all ages". :-) Suitable for 12 years or older. Starting to get interesting now, with more adult-themed storylines, but we're still talking in mild doses. You may find …