Ben on a hot tin roof

2010-01-24 | Filed Under Amusing, Reminiscing |

Renting a flatI fondly remember when I first moved out of my parents’ place. It was an exciting time: I could eat nothing but frozen pizzas, drink nothing but beer, and spend my entire weekend doing nothing but watch TV on the couch, and nobody could interfere.

However, the first step when moving into your own place is to actually find and rent a flat. Otherwise, moving day arrives and the guy with the van asks: “Okay, where does all this stuff need to be shipped to?”, and you realise that you have absolutely no idea.

And so, I scanned the newspapers and online ads, and ended up going to see just a single flat that sounded promising. I met with the landlord, who was a very nice guy, and he showed me around the small apartment that I hoped would become my new home. I tried to make a good impression to stand out from all the other applicants, and as we parted ways, he said he’d give me a quick call to let me know whether I could have the flat or not.

Flash forward to a couple days later. I was busy at work when my mobile phone rang. “Gable speaking”, the person at the other end of the line said. And this is when it happened: my most embarrassing misunderstanding to date.

It was my potential landlord on the phone, Mr Gable. As it turns out, he was calling to offer me the flat. However, while being shown around his flat, I was so preoccupied with making a good impression that I hadn’t noticed or remembered what his name was. I just thought of him as “That dude who owns the flat I’d like to live in.” And so it never even occurred to me that the person I was speaking to was my potential landlord.

Unfortunately, an old mate of mine from school days is also called Gable. So naturally, he was the first person who sprung to mind when I heard the name. I deduced that he had heard I was moving to Bavaria, and wanted to wish me luck, or say good riddance, or something along those lines. As was customary at the time, I greeted him by enthusiastically insulting him: “Gable, you old nutter, how are you? Still as thick as two planks? I’m trying to work here, you’d better have a good reason for interrupting me, you old fart.”

To Mr Gable’s credit, he didn’t hang up then and there. “I’m, uh, calling about… the, uh, flat.” I turned a shade of red that could have lit up all of Amsterdam’s red light district. I apologised profusely, telling him that I had mistaken a 55-year-old man in a suit for a 19-year-old beer buddy. To my never-ending surprise, he laughed it off, and I moved into his flat two weeks later. Which just goes to show… erm, something.

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Simplicity on rails

2009-09-25 | Filed Under Annoyances |

As a techno-geek and software developer, I’m very much in favour of technological advances. Yet sometimes I cannot shake the feeling that things have gotten a tad out of hand.

Consider rail travel in Germany with the Deutsche Bahn. A trip with the train used to involve the following: get on the train, buy the ticket from the conductor, lean back and enjoy the view.

But today, technology has made things so streamlined, integrated and generally buzzword-worthy that the old approach was considered laughably archaic, thus resulting in the much improved method we get to partake in today. First, you open the Deutsche Bahn website, where you search the timetable for the train you intend to travel on. Then, you purchase a ticket by creating a DB account and entering your personal details such as address, DOB and credit card number. Once payment has been confirmed, you are sent an email containing a PDF of your ticket that you have to print out. Once on the train, the conductor uses a high-tech gadget to scan the barcode on your printed ticket, then pulls your credit card through the gadget to confirm your identity. And after this process-optimised, welcome-to-the-future extravaganza, you are finally invited to lean back and enjoy the view.

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The movies, ten years ago

2009-06-13 | Filed Under Journal |

Time really does fly; and for me, nothing demonstrates this more clearly than looking at movies that were released ten years ago. You know: movies that you can vividly remember going to see at the cinema, and still consider to be “recent”.

While pondering this recently, I realised that 1999 was one hell of a movie year:

These days, I’d be happy if each year included just a single blockbuster movie that lived up to these (warning: depressing word ahead) classics.

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Fast lines in DirectDraw

2009-03-30 | Filed Under Software development |

When building applications that include a direct-manipulation user interface, I tend to go with DirectDraw, as this API provides a seemingly simple and efficient way of implementing interactive graphical surfaces. However, as this article demonstrates, simplicity isn’t always necessarily a good thing.

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Spare change we can believe in

2009-03-03 | Filed Under Journal |

For years, I had been waiting for this opportunity.

When standing in line at the supermarket checkout, I tend to quickly dig out my spare change and count it, so I can react quickly when the time comes to cough up - can I pay with coins, or do I have to get out some paper cash?

Yesterday, at the back of a particularly long queue, I counted exactly €4.78 in change before returning it to my pocket. When it was finally my turn to pay, the cashier mumbled “That’ll be €4.78″ in that exceedingly unfriendly manner that must be a mandatory part of the training they receive here (”Lesson One: Why the customer is annoying scum”).

Making a big show of it, I jingled the change in my pocket, and finally pulled out a seemingly random handful of coins that I thrust at the cashier before wordlessly walking away.

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Exhilarating malfunction

2009-01-14 | Filed Under Amusing |

Today, I had an interesting brain malfunction.

As I was rummaging through the attic, I bumped into a box of old 3,5″ diskettes that were full of software I wrote fifteen years ago. Excited and eager to see what my code from back then looked like, I ran to my notebook only to realise that I no longer actually have a 3,5″ disk drive.

“I know what I’ll do!” I triumphantly declared to my startled cat. “I’ll just use VMWare to create a virtual Windows XP installation, and set that virtual machine up to have a disk drive.” Exhilaration, as they say, is that brief but exciting interval between having a brilliant idea and realising why it is actually a stupid idea.

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McService

2009-01-12 | Filed Under Annoyances, Journal |

Recently, a mate and I sought out a McDonald’s drive-through, as we both had a bit of a hankering for overpriced grease. We ordered two limited-time-only-and-therefore-the-same-price-as-a-small-car Clogger Burgers and a variety of smaller bits and pieces. As we checked the bag to make sure everything we had ordered was actually in there, we noticed that we had only been given one Clogger.

“Excuse me, there only seems to be one Clogger in here, but we ordered (and paid for) two”, I politely said to the lady behind the window. She said nothing for a moment, regarding me with the kind of contempt normally reserved for people who have been caught in a compromising situation with a chicken. “Yeah, there was only one Clogger left in the heat tray” was her gum-chewing response.

After politely insisting on being given our second burger and then waiting a geologically significant length of time, we were wordlessly handed the second burger without so much as a humble “Sorry, here you go”.

But seriously, “There was only one left in the tray”? What kind of mental process precipitates that kind of remark?! Surely only an aggressive brain disease can cause anyone to believe that kind of reasoning is acceptable?

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The food industry must hate me by now

2008-12-09 | Filed Under Amusing, Vacation |

I seem to have a knack for unintentionally confusing and/or offending anyone who tries to serve me food.

Incident 1: Sir Dogs-a-lot

While on vacation in California last year, a waiter in an Italian restaurant overheard my mate and I talking in German; as he had spent a few years in Germany, he came over for a quick chat. He introduced himself as Doig. “What an unusual first name”, I exclaimed in a friendly manner. “Yeah… it’s an old Irish name”, he explained.

This got me pondering: if someone introduced themselves to me as Doig, I would assume their name was Doug, and that they just had a weird accent. “I bet people call you Doug a lot”, I opined. The waiter looked momentarily stunned, politely lied “Oh yes, people call me Dog all the time. Woof.”, and excused himself, never to be seen again.

I can only imagine him retreating to the alley, weeping uncontrollably and over-dramatically asking himself “Am I *that* ugly? Mother was right!” while howling at the moon.

Incident 2: The non-ordered pizza

While on vacation in Florida this year, my chum and I decided it was time for lunch. We chanced upon a Little Caesar’s pizza take-away, a chain of restaurants that neither of us had ever been to, and so naturally we were a little hazy on the required protocol. Furthermore, there was no-one ahead of us in line, so we couldn’t observe and then copy their behaviour. Bravely, I stepped up to the counter.

Pizza guy > Hey guys. Cheese or pepperoni?
Me > Pepperoni, please.

The pizza guy then turned around and got a box of pizza out of the heated cabinet behind him. I pondered: aren’t pizzas normally made to-order? Then why did this guy have one ready and waiting? Uh-oh, somebody must have called in and ordered a pizza, and he assumed I was that person, who had come in to actually pick it up. As I am a nice guy, I didn’t want to take away someone else’s pizza, and so I pointed at the pizza and responded:

Me > Um, I didn’t order that.

Of course, anyone who has ever been to Little Caesar’s before knows that they always have a few pizzas waiting in heated cabinets, so they can serve customers very quickly. So imagine what this whole incident must have looked like to the poor guy behind the counter:

Pizza guy > Cheese or pepperoni?
Me > Pepperoni please.
* Pizza guy puts pizza box on counter
* A couple of awkwardly silent seconds pass
* Ben points at the pizza box
Me > I didn’t order that.

To the guy’s credit, he didn’t start throwing things at me. (For the record: it was an exceedingly decent 14″ pizza considering it only cost five bucks.)

Incident 3: My cup floweth over

Later during the same Florida vacation, we were in a fairly pricey restaurant, intent on eating several metric tons of beef. You could tell it was pricey because I didn’t have to explicitly ask for a chilled glass to go with the beer I ordered. (In less classy places, they will indeed ask if you actually want to bother with a glass. Who on earth drinks beer out of the bottle in a restaurant?!) When the waitress arrived with our drinks, she poured beer from the bottle into my glass; and next to it. Actually, mostly next to it; the table was awash with beer.

As she spread out paper napkins to soak up the spilled beer, she apoligised for making such a mess. “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just suck it out of the napkins when nobody’s looking.”, I replied, hoping to defuse the situation with a bit of self-deprecating humour.

She didn’t even smirk.

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Avoid duplicate code with delegates

2008-09-10 | Filed Under Software development |

This post looks at a common system architecture (using business objects, proxy objects and command objects) and describes how code duplication can be avoided in certain situations. While all example code is in C#, this approach can be applied to most other languages with just minor tweaks.

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Tour de Farce

2008-08-07 | Filed Under Journal |

Today, I bought myself a new bicycle. Actually, I’m using the word “new” quite wrongly: (a) the bike itself is a second-hand model, and (b) it isn’t actually replacing any other bike, as I haven’t owned anything with pedals since I passed my driving exam in 1996.

As I attempted to climb on for the first time in well over ten years, my right calf - unaccustomed to such exertion thanks to years of living behind a desk - immediately cramped up. My mind raced how I could nonchalantly explain away my sudden grimacing and grunting to the perplexed bike salesman, but in the end the best I could come up with was “Cramp!”

Eventually, I managed to clamber aboard. As I took the bike for a test spin around the block, I realised the old saying “You never forget how to ride a bicycle” is quite accurate. I also discovered that there is a very good reason why the phrase doesn’t include the word “gracefully”: the first couple hundred metres were exceedingly wobbly.

It also didn’t help that I was too busy concentrating on not falling over to even consider trying to change gears, so for the first few minutes I laboured away in a gear evidently designed for conquering almost-vertical Alpine trails: for every three dozen pedal rotations, the wheels moved about an inch. The previous owner obviously took the “mountain” part of owning a mountain bike very seriously.

But eventually, I managed to ride around with something almost approaching aplomb, and figured out how to switch gears without having to stop and inspect the controls. At this pace, I’ll be in the Tour de France next year! After all, I’m twice the man Lance Armstrong is… literally.

Oh wait, did I say “Tour de France”? I meant… “pub”.

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