Yes, I know I've talked about shopping in Holland before, notably grocery shopping, but this keeps coming up. Aside from deciphering opening hours, figuring out what to buy (using algorithms to determine it), and paying for it, there are new aspects of this activity that come to fore ever so often.

See, in my area there is one Lidl, and a bunch of Albert Heijns. Not much of a choice at all. I'm sick of Lidl, because although they're cheaper, they have the most wacky set of items. All kinds of ultra cheap products that I'm not so confident about buying, but very lacking in the realm of common products. So I stopped going there, which means I'm left with Albert Heijn. Now this widespread Dutch chain is somewhat peculiar.

See, in Norway, if you go to Rema1000, you know that it's open 9-21 (9-18). Weekdays until 9pm, Saturdays until 6pm. And it doesn't matter which Rema1000 store you go to, every single one has the same opening hours. There may be some exceptions for stores that are dead in the center of a city, there may be longer opening hours in the summer, things like that. But for the most part, 99% of the time, you know that this store is open at certain hours everyday.

Albert Heijn, meanwhile, doesn't play like this. They categorize their stores by location and size. And then set opening hours individually for each store based on that. And based on the season. And based on the formation of ice glaciers in Antarctica, seemingly. What this means in practice, is that whenever I need to go shopping, and it isn't within the dead certain opening hours (10-18), I have to check when they're open. A few months ago when it was cold, I couldn't find a single open Albert Heijn in all of Utrecht on a Sunday. Last Sunday there were 5. Next week noone knows. Today (Thursday) they're open until 21, but in winter usually until 18. So while they enjoy rolling the dice in Albert Heijn head quarters, I'm left wondering.

Another thing that's causing me distress is being pulled over for speeding. As such, my location is sub-optimal, I live about 100m away from the main police station in Utrecht. And I don't care to bike any more in line with party policy around that building either, I still do what I've always done - bike with common sense. The other day I did something less than brilliant. I was crossing a street (with no traffic) on a red light and there was a car coming up on my left (I was on the bike sidewalk). It was turning right, while I was going straight. Turns out it was a cop car on a half-siren (lights flashing, no sound effects). I didn't see it until I was actually in the middle of crossing. It's a good thing they were busy.

Then I get to the store (did you think we were done with that topic?) and I'm parking my bike. It doesn't have a kick stand, so I have to lean it up against something. It's after 8pm, so the main shopping rush is long gone, there aren't that many bikes left in the little bike parking lot. As I'm locking my bike, through the rear wheel, the front leans over to the right a bit and falls on the bike that was standing next to it. So the bike is now in free fall, it falls onto the bike next to it and both of them go down. This wouldn't happen at rush hour, the parking lot is densely populated then. But at this time, the bikes are about 1m apart and this domino effect is made possible. I finish locking mine up, then I go over to the other two and put them up. As I'm doing this, a guy comes up to one of them, it's his bike. I say "sorry about this" and he gives me the most distant and careless "no problem" ever. I almost expected him to say "dude, that's exactly how I park my bike, I just throw it on the pavement". Well, most of the bikes in circulation are from World War 2, so it's not like I knocked over some delicate machinery, but you would still expect people to care at all. I bet I would get stick (or at least nasty stares) over this in Poland. :D

So I go into Albert Heijn and here's the thing. There's no bread after 11. They put out the bread in the morning, people buy it and if you come in at noon, it's all gone. All they have left for you is either some fancy, expensive bread, or alternative bread products, like bread with raisins dipped in sugar etc. This used to be a problem for me, my bread consumption is really high. But recently I stopped buying bread and I only get Wasa knekkebrød.

Then I go to the checkout and here's another Dutch quirk. In Norway, we have a conveyor belt leading up to where the cashier sits, then another belt right in front of her, finally a third conveyor belt beyond that. So all in all, the length of the whole thing is about 4m or so. This ensures that even when people do volume shopping (ie. a shopping cart and a half), there is enough space for them to unload their stuff, then load it into plastic bags. There's also a sliding divider at the end that separates your items from the next person's. Over here, (it does depend on the store a bit), the belt going to the cashier is shorter. So there's a lot less space on it. Then the belt from the cashier is shorter too, in some cases it's not even there, just a small counter where your items accumulate before you load them up. This makes it more awkward around checkout, there's less space, you try to stack your stuff in layers so that you can unload it all onto the belt and put the basket away. Then after you pay for it, sometimes your stuff gets mixed up with the person coming after you. If there's no belt going from the cashier, you make people wait for you to load up your stuff before the next person can go as there's simply no space. At Lidl, they actually have an extra long belt to the cashier (implying that people will be buying in high volumes) and then just a small counter afterwards (so after being scanned, their items will fall on the floor unless you bring trained packaging personnel).

Unfortunately, there is no Plus in my area. That seems to be the-supermarket-for-Norwegians, their stock is arranged logically, their checkout counter is normal size, they accept credit card on payment etc. It's also a little cheaper than fancy Albert Heijn. Sort of the Rema1000 equivalent.

Firefox 2 is in beta currently, beta2 release candidate 2. So that means it's going to be some weeks before v2.0 goes gold for public consumption. I was a little hesitant about installing the beta, knowing that in the past upgrading Firefox has brought with it bugs and certainly shut off popular extensions.

What most attracted me to it was whispers that the memory leaks have been greatly reduced, and performance improved. Firefox (originally Phoenix) started out as a nice stripped down version of Mozilla. Then gradually, it accepted so many features that it became rather heavy, especially on slower machines. It is a good thing that performance is being addressed continually, even though I doubt Firefox will ever match up to Opera in that regard. I haven't run any benchmarks to verify, but the new Firefox does seem a little faster. Noticeably, scrolling is faster.

A welcome new addition is a built-in session saver. I have been using the SessionSaver extension since the dawn of man basically, finally it is a built-in feature. When you close Firefox (or it crashes), it will restore your tabs and pages opened in them (new option in the settings).

Tab handling has improved. Every tab has a close icon, but you can also close tabs by middle-clicking on them. I thought this was a bug to begin with, I accidentally closed a window while filling in a form, but it's just a quick way of closing tabs. If you do close a tab accidentally, use History > Recently Closed Tabs to bring it back.

A new feature is a built-in spell checker (supporting a range of languages) for all form input. It highlights typos as you write, with the familiar red underline. While this isn't something I consider a major breakthrough, I'm sure a lot of people will love it.

Finally, a bug fix. in Firefox1.5, when you have the bookmarks drop-down menu open and you scroll with the mouse wheel, it will cycle between tabs. In Firefox2, it does the logical thing - scrolls the drop-down menu.

Extension wise, Adblock and Flashblock both work, Dictionary lookup doesn't yet.

No pun or euphemism this time, the title says it all. Years ago Jon Lech Johansen broke the code that prevents DVDs from being played on software that isn't supplied by the movie industry, in an effort to play back store bought DVDs on his linux system. He was sued (with considerable pressure from our friends in the US), and cleared of any wrong doing. To complete the story, needless to say, there was not even one piece of software for linux at the time, supplied/endorsed by the industry, to play DVDs. And there isn't today, as far as I know.

So today people can play DVDs on linux, but not in a legal way (depending on where you live, hopefully not in the US). Jon's work has also given rise to projects like divx, xvid and the general mass distribution of movie titles, because he released the code openly (which made it possible to read DVD discs), and not just in a ready-made application. So much for DVDs.

Let's switch to music. If you buy and mp3 player today, most likely it will only work with the egregious Windows Media Player and put all kinds of restrictions on how you can transfer songs to it and how you can transfer songs from it. Not to mention that it completely kills your choice of what music player to use with your mp3 player. Not only that, most players don't support a free and open format like ogg vorbis, they will support mp3, wma and whatever proprietary bs.

If you buy and iPod, you can use it with iTunes (and probably Windows Media Player), but you certainly cannot use it on linux. That is, until someone wrote the code to allow you access to it. You also don't get to play ogg files. iRiver, the manufacturer I have given much credit (and a couple of sales through recommendations, in fact) switched their newest product lines to the Windows Media Player hell, so now if I buy a new player from them, I can't use it on linux anymore. There are companies that do support (or at least not block) linux on their players, but they're few.

So you see, when you buy a song from iTunes today (which you shouldn't, if you value your freedom), you don't actually own the song. You own it on iTunes and your iPod (and probably Windows Media Player), but no further. Not on your iRiver, not on another device or even music player software. I read a blog entry where someone described how they bought a Seinfeld DVD only to find out it was completely useless to them as the person could not play it in linux, because of DRM restrictions.

DRM (Digital Rights Management), ie. restrictions on how you can use digital content, is an abomination and I encourage anyone buying any kind of digital content to be very vigilant about what exactly they are paying for. Check all labels on the box, ask the salesman if necessary (chances are he won't know much). If you buy online, check the licence agreement (or simply google/wikipedia for an opinion on the company's restriction policy). Above all: research, research, research. Or be stuck with a product you can't use and a store that won't let you return it.

I moved to Utrecht in January this year. At the time it was cold, I was wearing a thick Norwegian made winter coat (so you could survive in Antarctica with that basically). After a few weeks, the coat was definitely too much, so I bought a thin jacket. Even so, I was surprised at how I was sweating basically everyday. Almost everytime I left the house and wanted to take care of business (at my pace), I was sweating. I know I'm in bad shape, but is it this bad? Well, I got used to it.

But now that I got in less than three days ago, I am definitely feeling the difference. The humidity here is ridiculous. People are wearing pants and sweaters, whereas I'm in shorts and a t-shirt and I'm still sweating when I'm out there. There is no way I would come home sweaty after some quick business in town in Trondheim when it's 16 degrees out, this is not normal.

Relative humidity for September 5, 2006:

• CNN weather
• Utrecht 95%, Trondheim 79%
• BBC weather
• Utrecht/De Bilt 75%, Trondheim 89%
• kweather desktop applet (source unknown)
• Utrecht/Soesterberg 93.8%, Trondheim 76.8%
• goutrecht.nl
• Utrecht 73%
• weather.com
• Utrecht 94%, Trondheim 82%

So trying to find out from established sources fails spectacularly. All I know is, the humidity here is way too high. So I either have to move very slowly or I have to prepare to sweat. :lazy:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is something I noticed in Italy. I'm not saying it's an Italian specific thing, but that is my association at least. See, Italians are temperamental. If you make a mistake, they won't gently tap on your shoulder, whisper "I'm terribly sorry to disturb you, sir" and *then* tell you what you "could have done differently". No, they will come right out and say it, yell it most of the time. If you make a small mistake in traffic, you get car horns going off all the way around you, because order must be preserved.

Here's the rub. Italians will stand in line at the post office or the check out line in the supermarket for an hour without issuing a hint of complaint. They will happily blather on with their friend (or on the cell phone) without the slightest sign of alarm of urgency. This is what I call Italian patience, because in spite of being so impatient in some contexts, they can be incredibly patient elsewhere. Why get pissed off about waiting in line? There's nothing you can do about it anyway, this is just the way it is.

I had a long list of things to do today, and I haven't done any of them, because I don't have Italian patience. At the student desk, you take a number and wait your turn. My number was 30, t-h-i-r-t-y, numbers beyond the current number being served. At a processing rate of about 5 minutes per person, that means I would be waiting 2.5h. It would probably be closer to an hour, because of all the people who took a number, realized how long they would be waiting, and went home. They open tomorrow at 10, I intend to be there at 9.50.

At the bank there was a similar line, and at the train station, ditto. I do wait my turn when I don't have a choice - waiting to board an aircraft, waiting for a bus, waiting in the check out line. But I refuse to waste time waiting when it's completely pointless. And it's not because I manage my time so efficiently that it would set me back, I just cannot accept that 5 minutes worth of business requires waiting 45 minutes in line, it's a matter of principle. If I accept these ridiculous waiting times now, I will never get anything done efficiently ever again, it's all a question of mindset.

Adding to my woes is the delightful ever-present wind that totally sucks blows the fun out of biking and the fact that UU is increasingly a messy construction site. Not only did they not finish anything before the new semester, they have stepped up the degree of chaos since I was last here in July. Since the book I needed wasn't in the store, I went to the library. Well, I tried. It turns out the entire stair case of the building that houses used to house the computer science department is closed off for asbestos removal. So the elevator works, but most of the floors have been shut down entirely as well, including the top floor where the library is once was. There is a note in the elevator about where the various departments have been moved to, but no mention of the library.

Is there such a thing as Polish temperament? I think I may have it.