My collection of random ramblings

Genius :o))

As of next Monday, wearing a mask (or anything that covers your mouth and nose) is obligatory when shopping or using public transport. Because surgical masks are sold out everywhere, I dusted off my sewing machine and made some masks for the family.

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The puzzle of a puzzle is finished
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Current numbers:
63929 cases/ 560 deaths in Germany; 12257 cases/ 163 deaths in Baden-Württemberg

MIL lives in a village with 340 inhabitants. 2 of them have a confirmed corona infection. No one knows how many are infected without knowing it, and unwittingly spreading the virus. The next town 10 km away has 50 cases on 8000 inhabitants and is currently under quarantine.

MIL says she's careful, not leaving the house much and keeping distance. But she also tells me about the gossip that she got from different persons. That doesn't sound much like keeping away from everybody. She's 66 and her boyfriend (do you still say boyfriend at that age?) is 73. I wish they'd take it more seriously, but 550 km away, I can't do much more than talk over the phone and hope for the best.

Current numbers:
49.039 cases/322 deaths in Germany; 9729 cases/101 deaths in Baden-Württemberg

All throughout this week, the daily rise of confirmed infections was about 11-17%, while the week before it was 25-30%. And people already ask when the lockdown will be lifted. Fortunately, our Bundeskanzlerin is someone who does the smart thing - she's asked the experts on this topic, the virologists, and then followed their advice and declared that it's way too early to consider a lift of the restrictions already. We can't even know yet whether the lockdown and the ban on groups with more than 2 people have had any effect on the speed with which the virus is spreading because this was put in place only 5 days ago. That the rise was smaller this week already probably stems from the fact that many people already did social distancing voluntarily before it became an order.

Anyway, how to go on? The method of hammer and dance is the best option for keeping the number of fatalities low and the economy alive that I've heard about so far: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

And it seems that the virologists who advice our government are favoring this solution as well.

Current numbers:
29056 cases/ 123 deaths in Germany; 5333 cases/ 31 deaths in Baden-Württemberg

It's Monday, the numbers missing because of the weekend have been reported now and the rise is still not as high as before the weekend. Maybe it's a glitch; maybe we are nearing the peak of the first wave. The next days will show.
Numbers in Italy give reason to hope as well - today, they had the smallest rise in the number of deaths in the last 4 days, and the smallest rise in the number of new infections in the last 5 days.

Current numbers:
24852 cases / 94 deaths in Germany; 4300 cases / 23 deaths in Baden-Württemberg
Because the number of new infections has gone down a little, some are already rejoicing that it's over soon. Did no one hit on the idea that it's weekend and labs might do less tests than on weekdays? Or that doctor's offices are closed at weekends, so people with new symptoms probably wait for Monday before they seek advice...

Our Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel is in quarantine now as well, because she was in contact with a doctor who has tested positive. She'll be working from home now, like so many others.

In order to have something to do, I've started working on a puzzle. A puzzle of a puzzle :o)
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Current numbers:
22.197 cases / 83 deaths in Germany; 3818 cases / 23 deaths in Baden-Württemberg
This is gaining momentum :o(

Hospitals in Baden-Württemberg agreed to take over patients from our neighbor France because they have already more patients who need artificial ventilation than they have ventilators (and in Germany, there are still some free capacities)

It was raining all day, so the kids stayed indoors. The living room looks like a Lego bomb exploded there.

Hubby finished cleaning the storage cellar. A few days ago, he found out that there was a mouse inside. Most likely, Ronja had set it free in the house and it had found refuge in the basement. The mouse had left some empty chocolate wrappings and mouse poo all over the place. We put a piece of bread with Nutella in a trap, and about an hour later, the mouse was already caught.

Over the last three days, Hubby emptied all shelves, cleaned and disinfected them, and threw out everything that was chewed on or way over its expiration date. Then he put the rest back into the shelves and the sweets into a box with lid, for the case that Ronja brings another mouse in (the question is not if, but when).


Btw, end of last year, Hubby's company sold its part with the SAP consultants to an American company. In January, the new owner started to reduce the number of employees. Because of German laws, you can't just lay off people without a very good reason. So a common way here is to offer employees a lot of money if they sign a compromise agreement. Hubby (and about half of his co-workers) got such an offer, and after some consideration, he signed it in February. He finished his projects, instructed his co-workers so that they could take over his tasks, returned the company car and laptop, and, as of March, he is released from work, but still getting his full salary until end of July, plus about a year's salary on top.

There couldn't have been a better time for this to happen. He now has time to take care of the kids who have to stay home without having to worry about work. And time to clean the basement.

Current numbers:
19.848 cases/60 deaths in Germany; 3665 cases/17 deaths in Baden-Württemberg.

Bayern, Saarland, and the city of Freiburg (it is close to the region Grand Est in France, which has been hit by Corona particularly heavily) have ordered a lockdown, where people cannot leave their homes except for essential errands, going to work, or going for a walk alone. At the weekend, the other states will decide if they follow suit, and I suppose the lockdown will come for the entire Germany.

The weather has been nice, sunny and moderately warm. Wonderful spring weather. I am so glad that we have a garden. The kids have been playing outside a lot during the last days, which is much better than staying inside all the time.

Current numbers:
15.309 cases / 44 deaths in Germany; 2737 cases / 11 deaths in Baden-Württemberg.
Italy has now more deaths than China, with half the numbers of infected persons. This happens when the health system is hopelessly overwhelmed and not all cases can be treated properly anymore :o( Let's hope they reach the peak very soon.

All employees of my company in German locations are required to work from home now. Those who can’t, for instance data center support teams, need manager approval and must report their access requirements to a pandemic task force. For everyone else, the office buildings’ doors won’t open anymore. Canteens are closed, but there will be pick up points for take away lunches.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of people out and about who apparently haven’t understood the seriousness of the situation yet. Teenagers and young folks sit together in large groups, using the time off from school and university to drink beer and have BBQs. And even elder people who are at serious risk of dying from Corona go shopping, chitchat with others, and don’t keep any distance.

Current numbers:
11.973 cases/27 deaths in Germany; 2184 cases/7 deaths in Baden-Württemberg.
And the first COVID-19 case in my hometown has been confirmed. Apparently, already on Sunday, but I didn’t learn about it until today.

Our entire family had a hairdresser’s appointment today. We weren’t sure if we would still be able to go there, but so far, hairdressers are explicitly exempted from being closed. The hairdresser was not happy about this exemption. If she closes her shop without official orders, she won’t get any compensation for missed business (not that she makes much money anyway). A substantial part of her business is going into retirement homes and cutting the residents’ hair. No visitors and service providers like her are still permitted to enter these facilities. This is the second heavy blow to her business in less than 12 months.

The first blow, btw., came from the Finanzamt, the German IRS. They did a tax inspection, and looked deeply and thoroughly, but couldn’t find any irregularities. They used her tax accountant for hours and hours to show them all the documents and answer their questions and whatever. Of course, the Finanzamt doesn’t pay for these hours, and a tax accountant doesn’t work for free, so the hairdresser got the invoice, and it was not small. And when the Finanzamt couldn’t find anything, they accused her of not making enough money. They alleged her of black labor and demanded about 25.000 EUR additional taxes from her, for work that she didn’t do. Money, that she doesn’t have. And she can neither afford a lawyer to help her, nor prove that she didn’t work more than she declared in her tax declaration. Honestly, how should one prove that they didn’t do something?

At the moment, she’s pretty fed up, ready to file for insolvency and close down the shop.

As I have Mondays off, today is my first day of working from home. I’m actually surprised that the infrastructure is holding up so well – almost everyone at SAP is suddenly working remotely, and the tools didn’t break from the massive use (yet). Dialing in, conference calls etc. are all working without visible decrease in stability or quality.

As any facilities taking care of kids are closed as of today, BigBrother and LittleSister are at home too (already since last Friday, as I had taken a few days off). Plus, we have another kid here as well. His mom is a single parent who works as landscape gardener – impossible to do remotely - and she has no one else to look after her son. He’s in LittleSister’s kindergarden group, and he has the same first name as BigBrother. This resulted in a funny situation: we call them with first and last name to make sure which one we’re addressing, and then BigBrother thought we were mad at him because we used his full name :o)

Thinking of tasks to keep the kids occupied, we decided it’s time that BigBrother learns to cycle. It took him about an hour to figure out how to get from standing to driving without falling over. The actual driving/keeping balance was a no-brainer for him, he managed it as soon as his bicycle got momentum. I know that children's brains are wired in a way that supports learning new things, but it never ceases to amaze me when I see it happening in real life.


Current numbers:
7636 cases/20 deaths in Germany; 1105 cases/4 deaths in Baden-Württemberg. Baden-Württemberg is now the state with the second most confirmed infections (slightly ahead of Bayern). No confirmed case for my hometown yet. But several cases in my company.

Cases are still rising exponentially. So far, Germany mirrors the numbers of Italy, where the situation is beyond dire, with a lag of 8 days. Let’s hope the recent measures to slow the spreading of the virus will take effect quickly and we won’t arrive at the same disastrous situation in a week’s time.

Not sure how reliable this site is, but if the virus indeed escaped from a an US lab, I'd not be surprised: https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-further-evidence-virus-originated-us/5706078

I haven't posted here in ages, but I think it's time to revive this journal. I feel like I should write down what's happening right now, so I can go back later and re-read details that I'll forget otherwise.

These are some current numbers:
COVID-19 cases in Germany (83 million inhabitants): 4.838
Deaths: 13

This is a relatively low number. But our health system has been economized so much in the last years that full utilization and high efficiency have become prerequisites for the survival of hospitals. As a consequence, many hospitals (that didn't perform exceedingly well) and also doctor's offices (where the doctor retired and no successor could be found who was willing to continue the work under such circumstances) have been closed. Thousands of jobs in the health sector have been cut, and the people who are still working in this field are helplessly overworked already without a crisis adding to the workload. So I'm afraid the capacities for proper treatment of COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms will probably be exceeded sooner than later, and then the number of deaths in relation to the number of infections will inevitably rise.

I'm living in Baden-Württemberg (11 million inhabitants) with:
COVID-19 cases: 827 (third most after Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern, about 3x as many as the next one Niedersachsen)
Deaths: 3

My city has no confirmed case yet, but the next town 7 km north has 1, and the next city 20 km east has 17. I suppose the virus will reach my home town soon, or, more likely, it's already here, but with not testing people who have symptoms, but haven't returned from a high risk area or who had been in contact with a positively tested person, you'll never know.

It's only been a few days when life was still comparatively normal. Everyone was asked to often wash hands, keep away from large gatherings of people, and sneeze/cough into a tissue or your elbow. Who returned from a high risk area should stay at home for two weeks, and that was it.

Then, events were unfolding rapidly:
Last Thursday, my company advised employees at especially high risk (> 60 years old, with pre-existing conditions, pregnant, people with a newborn, or anyone who has such a person in their household) to work from home. So I informed my co-workers that, because of my insulin-dependent diabetes, I'm going to work from home starting next week. A couple of them followed suit. Fortunately, for a software company this is no issue at all.

More and more municipalities prohibited events with more than 1000 attendees.

On Friday, Bundesliga soccer matches were canceled, and other leagues followed suit. Bayern announced the closing of all schools and daycare facilities starting Monday. During the day, the other states followed suit. Baden-Württemberg will close schools, kindergartens, and daycare facilities for smaller children starting Tuesday and until after Easter.

Saturday: More and more areas ban gatherings with more than 100 people, and order the closing of restaurants, cinemas, fitness studios, public baths.

For the last two, three weeks, people have been hoarding groceries and toilet paper. But while many shelves in grocery stores were empty, you could still get food and necessities. The more costly brands of pasta and rice were still available, and Hubby got even our usual brand of toilet paper from Aldi on Saturday.

Of course I'm concerned, but not panicky yet. We have enough food in the basement to last a while. I have enough insulin, insulin pump supplies, and blood sugar sensors stocked up for about three months. I can work from home, and Hubby doesn't have to work at all at the moment, so it's no problem to take care of our kids at home. We live in a house with a garden, so even if we should be quarantined, we can still go out into the garden for some fresh air.

My biggest concern is currently my daughter's tendency to have simple colds often affect her lungs. What started out as a bit of coughing evolved into pneumonia a couple times last year. It was always diagnosed and treated early enough to prevent her from getting seriously ill, but still, I'm afraid that she might be the exemption from the rule that COVID-19 is going easy on children. We're keeping her (and her brother) home, minimizing the risk of infection as much as possible, and hoping for the best.

So much for the current situation, it's become rather lengthy already, so I'm stopping for now.

You out there, take care of yourselves, and let's hope we all stay well through this pandemic.

Directly in front of TehHouse, they're flushing drains. BigBrother is glued to the window; and very impressed what a great holiday entertainment program we have organised for him ;o)

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Our cornelian cherry tree bears many fruit this year, and they are ripe now. Hubby picked about 3 kilograms today, and didn't even have to touch the higher branches above his reach.

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I made plum puree, and I'd like to share the recipe with you.

Ingredients:
7.5 kg zwetschgen, as ripe as possible
1/8 liter vinegar
300 gr brown sugar

Stack the zwetschgen (halves without pits) in a cooking pot in such a way that no zwetschgen skin touches the pot's bottom or sides. Every once in a while drizzle some sugar on the fruits. Finally add the vinegar.

Let it sit over night. The sugar will start to pull the juice out of the zwetschgen.

Place on a stove on low heat and let it simmer for about 6-8 hours (uncovered, so the steam can get out).
DO NOT STIR! Once you start stirring, you'll have to continuously stir until the end to prevent scorching.

It's finished when the volume has reduced to half. Use a hand blender to puree the mass. Add more sugar if it's not sweet enough for you. Add spices if you like (I usually add cinnamon).

Continuously stirring now, bring the puree to a boil again and then quickly fill it into sterilized jars to preserve it.

In the picture, you see the outcome of boiling 5 kg zwetschgen (2/3 of the recipe above).

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Easter is officially over. Got rid of all remaining Easter bunnys today and made a very chocolatey chocolate cake.

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In the interwebs I found a very easy recipe:

250 g butter
4 eggs
150 g flour
1 tsp baking soda
4-6 chocolate Easter bunnys or Santas

Melt the butter and the chocolate. Add eggs, flour, and baking soda.
Grease a springform pan and fill it with the batter.

In a convection oven, bake for 30-45 minutes at 150 °C until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Before serving, dust with powdered sugar.


Remarks:
Because there was so much chocolate, I cooled two of the small bunnys and crumpled them instead of melting, and then added the pieces to the batter at the end.
The recipe calls for a lot of butter, but half or less is probably more than enough. While baking, the butter came running out of the cake pan. The final result still wasn't dry. So the next time, I'll try less butter.

Oh, my LJ became a teenager ten days ago...

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

Just came back home from watching Star Trek Into Darkness. It was great! Loved it! Will post more coherent thoughts maybe later...

Today, in one month, the wait will be over, finally! :o)

Sometimes I feel really stupid. Especially when I discover something that was obvious to everyone besides me. Like...

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Tonight, we're going to see Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters in the cinema. I'm a bit afraid to look up Jeremy Renner, who knows in which roles (besides Hawk Eye) I already saw him without realizing?

Last night, I stumbled over Pathfinder on TV, and while watching it, I wondered all the time who played the main character, because he looked so familiar... Imagine my surprise when I looked it up and found out it was Karl Urban.

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Happy Pi Day!

Notepad++ is a very nice editor for VBScript. If you open a .vbs file with it, the syntax will automatically be highlighted because VBScript language support is already built in.

With only a few steps, you can also invoke the debugger of your choice from within Notepad++, which makes it easy to edit your script, test it and edit some more without having to manually switch between different tools.

You can call Wscript.exe for debugging VBScript from Notepad++ in 64-bit Windows 7 as follows:
Go to folder %APPDATA%\Notepad++.
You should find a file named shortcuts.xml there. At the end of node <UserDefinedCommands>, add the following key:
<Command name="Debug VBscript" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\wscript.exe /D /I /X &quot;$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)&quot;</Command>
Now you can start the debugger from the Run menu of Notepad++.

A few remarks:
Notepad++ overwrites shortcuts.xml on shutdown, so you should use a different editor for this change, while Notepad++ is closed.

For some reason, the 64-bit version of Wscript.exe will just run the script without stopping for debugging. That's the reason the 32-bit version residing in the SysWOW64 folder is being called.
If you want to set Windows to always use the 32-bit version for handling .vbs files, you'll have to change the path to Wscript.exe under the registry path HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VBSFile\Shell\Open\Command. The (Default) value will read something like "%SystemRoot%\System32\WScript.exe" "%1" %*. Leave the value intact but change System32 to SysWOW64.

For further information about shortcut.xml, find a detailed description here.

Under Run -> Modify Shortcut/Delete Command... you can assign a shortcut to invoke the debugger in Notepad++. Alternatively, you can set the parameters Ctrl, Alt, Shift and Key in the String that you add to shortcuts.xml.

If you need a file open dialog in a VBScript, you have plenty of possibilities in XP to do it quick and easy. In Windows 7, however, they don't work anymore. Google found me a few ways to get a file dialog in Windows 7, but they all had flaws like not working for all file types, or not being able to be starting in a pre-set folder, or only returning the file name, not the full path, or needing ActiveX components that I just couldn't get to work.

In the end, I found jsShell, which provides dialog windows that just do what you expect them to do and are easy to use. And even I was able to get them to work.

Of course, there're a few steps needed to enable them:

Download jsShell.zip (180 KB) and unpack it.

In order to work in 64-bit Windows, move jsShell.dll to %WINDIR%\SysWOW64 (usually %WINDIR% is C:\Windows). Do NOT use System32!

Register it to Windows:
Right-click cmd.exe - Run as Administrator and type
cd \%WINDIR%\SysWOW64 <Enter>
regsvr32 jsShell.dll <Enter>

Set Windows to use the 32-bit version of WScript for .vbs files. In the registry, there should be a path HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VBSFile\Shell\Open\Command. The (Default) value will read something like "%SystemRoot%\System32\WScript.exe" "%1" %*. Leave the value intact but change System32 to SysWOW64. That will cause the 32-bit version of WScript.exe to handle .vbs files.

Once you've set it up, you can invoke a file browser dialog in VBScript like this:

Dim objJs

Set objJs = CreateObject("jsShell.Ops")
myFile = objJs.OpenDlg("Select file", "txt", "C:\MyStuff")

(See also the demo scripts coming with jsShell.zip)

I used to have a list of all movies we own in my Palm Pilot, so in case we were shopping and stumbled on DVDs on sale, I could check if we already had a certain movie or not. Now that the Palm is retired, I tried to get this list in my Samsung Galaxy S2.

I decided to use the Memento Database app for my movie list, because I don't need a super fancy movie management app with lots of unnecessary bells and whistles, a simple DB table is more than sufficient for my needs.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as copying the csv file to the phone and import it to Memento. The special characters, e.g. umlauts, all got mangled, and there were too many entries to fix them manually on the phone.

A bit poking around revealed that the importer was fine, the file got already screwed up when it arrived on the phone. Turned out the character encoding was wrong - it was ANSI because it came from a Windows computer and Android uses UTF-8.

NotePad can also save files in UTF-8 (the SaveAs dialog has three fields - file name, format, and character encoding), but now the file looked good on the phone but Memento only imported empty records.

A bit more poking around finally led me to NotePad++, a free text editor. Besides UTF-8, it also has an encoding option UTF-8 without BOM and that was it. After saving the csv file with this option, the umlauts arrived safely on the phone and everything got imported correctly into Memento :o)

ETA: I wrote a VBA macro that creates a correctly formatted and encoded csv file from an Excel sheet and posted it here.

Every year we face the same "problem" - what should we do with all the currants from our garden? There's only so much you can eat directly. We have one red currant tree, but it bears enough berries for two or tree.

Today, I made some jam, and it tastes yummy! At the weekend, we'll visit my aunt and uncle and my cousin and his family, and these will be nice little presents.



I took about 1.5 kg red currants, added 2 bananas, heated it up, passed it through a sieve and got 1 liter of thick juice. Cooked it together with 500g 2:1 preserving sugar and a drop of lemon juice and voila - six little glasses of jam.

Schnurblecar reached 370000 km this week. This will probably be the last big round number for a while. At the beginning of April, Hubby finally got a company car and is using this one for driving the big distances now. I'll use Schnurblecar for getting to work and back home, which is not nearly as much as Hubby drove with it, which will slow down the odometer considerably.

Now we need to get rid of Hubby's old VW Gold IV, because we don't need three cars. I hope someone will buy it, it's 12 years old but still in very good shape and has only travelled 160000 km, which is nothing compared to Schnurblecar...

On my last Saturday in Bad Mergentheim, Hubby visited me and we took a tour through the wild animal park near the town. It was a nice trip, beautiful weather and lots of interesting animals, but look for yourself:

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Ahahaha! Brilliant summary of the Twilight movies, and now I can save the time to watch them :o)

If 'Twilight' Was 10 Times Shorter And 100 Times More Honest

If 'New Moon' Was 10 Times Shorter and 100 Times More Honest

If 'Eclipse' Was 10 Times Shorter And 100 Times More Honest

If Twilight 4 Was 10 Times Shorter and 100 Times More Honest

This happens to me from time to time - I'm trying to log on to an SAP system and end up typing my password in the user name field, because pressing TAB didn't really register.

(In)conveniently, the history of the things entered in an input field like the user name comes up when you start typing, and I don't want anyone to see my password pop up while I'm trying to log in the next time.

But there's help: Alt+F12 -> Options -> Local Data -> History -> Clear History is getting rid of the input history.
This menu can also be used to completely disable input history or to customize how many different entries will be kept for how long etc.

This will be of no use for most of you, but I'm posting it anyway so I know where to look it up the next time this happens to me :o)

ETA: There's also a way to only delete the one wrong entry without clearing the entire input history.
Go to the field, press SPACE to open the input history, use cursor keys to go to desired entry, press DEL.

At work, my way to the internet leads through a proxy. At home, it doesn't. I'm using my Thinkpad at work and at home, so I've always changed the proxy settings in Chrome from 'use proxy' to 'not use proxy' and back again. This was annoying and I tried to find ways to speed up that process.

Inspired by if0x's post about Chrome shortcuts, I tried to find one that opened the proxy settings menu directly to save me a few clicks.
I didn't find such a shortcut, but something even better – you can start Chrome with additional parameters, and one of them overrides the proxy settings derived from Internet Explorer.

All I needed to do was to create a second desktop shortcut for Chrome and add --proxy-server= to the shortcut target string to start Chrome without using a proxy. It works like a charm and I'm a happy surfer now. :o)

I'm probably one of the last people on earth going from Windows XP to Windows 7, so this is more a reference for me than any help for others, but there you are:

Where to find a few things in Windows 7

User settings
The folder ...\Documents and Settings\<Username>
is now ...\Users\<Username>

SendTo folder
The folder ...\Documents and Settings\<Username>\SendTo
is now %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Change the background picture/color for your user:
Right click on screen -> Personalize -> Desktop background

Change the background picture of the logon screen:
Start -> Run -> regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
Set the DWORD value named OEMBackground = 1
(If it doesn't exist, create it. And of course be careful when tampering with the registry and back it up first if you're unsure!)

Create folder C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds, put the picture there and name it backgroundDefault.jpg
The file should be less than 256 KB and the resolution should be the same as the screen resolution, or it'll auto-adjust to fit the screen.

Change the shadows for the text on the logon screen:
Start -> Run -> regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI
Set the DWORD value named ButtonSet to one of the following:
0=Light shadow, 1=Dark shadow, 2=No shadow
(If it doesn't exist, create it. And of course be careful when tampering with the registry and back it up first if you're unsure!)

Enable Quick Launch toolbar
Right click on Taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar...
Enter in Address Field: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
Press Select Folder

Enable Recent Items
Right click on Taskbar -> Properties -> Start menu -> Customize -> Recent Items

Enable Address toolbar
Windows 7 has brought back the Address toolbar that went poof with Windows XP SP3, yay!
Right click on Taskbar -> Toolbars -> Address

Change icon size for Taskbar icons
Right click on Taskbar -> Properties -> Use small icons (or not)

Change icon size for Taskbar toolbars' icons
Unlock Taskbar, right click on now visible toolbar handle -> View -> Large/Small Icons
(small icons are smaller but the rows have the same height as large icons, but at least they aren't as wide)

Show menu bar in Windows Explorer
To temporaily view the menu bar, press Alt
To permanently view the menu bar, press Alt and select Folder Options -> View -> Always show menus

Map Network Drive in Windows Explorer
Tools -> Map Network Drive

Enable folder tree view in Windows Explorer
Tools -> Folder Options -> General
Select both Show all folders and Automatically expand to current folder

Quick change of thumbnail size in Windows Explorer
Hold Ctrl and move the mouse wheel to increase/decrease icon size
(this also works for icon size on desktop or font size in browsers, so pay attention to where your focus is)

Friends, who have plum trees with more fruit than they can eat, invited us to go and pick as many plums as we want. Hubby and I did so on Friday evening and picked two buckets and a big bowl full of plums.

The two buckets (~5kg) went into a plum cake and into the freezer for making more cake later. The big bowl (~8kg) went partially straight into our stomachs, and I made plum purée for the first time in my life. Hubby's mum has a very easy to follow recipe, and it worked out very well, much better than I'd anticipated. Now we have 12 jars of yummy plum purrée waiting to be eaten.

And here's the recipe, in case you'd like to try it out:

Plum Purée

Ingredients:
- 7 kg plums (the more ripe the better)
- 300 g brown sugar
- 1/8 l vinegar
- cinnamon

Instructions
- Cut the plums in halves, remove the stones. Stack the plums into a big pot, flesh facing down and skin facing up. Every now and then, put some of the sugar between the plums. When you're done, also add the vinegar.
- Let it sit over night, so the sugar can start breaking up the cells and pull out the juice from the plums.
- The next morning, put it on low heat and let it simmer until it's lost about half of its volume. This will take 8-12 hours.
- DON'T STIR! As long as you don't stir and the heat isn't too much, nothing will burn. Once you've started to stir, you need to keep on stirring because otherwise the mass will burn at the bottom of the pot, so keep off stirring until the end.
- If enough water has been lost, add some cinnamon and add more sugar/vinegar if it's too sour/sweet for your taste. Use an immersion blender to make purée. Fill the still hot purée in jars and enjoy yummy plum purée for the next months :o)

Yesterday, I read an interesting article about Spiritual Intelligence (SQ). It's the willingness to do good things, to help others and be altruistic.

The author took the view that it's human nature to help others, even if they don't get rewarded for it.
As proof, they wrote about an experiment that was done with people from all over the world, from very many different ethnic groups and all levels of society. They gave money (the amount was roughly two day's wages, but I suppose this doesn't really matter) to a person and told them they could keep it, but had to donate some of the money to another person that they didn't know. Only if the other person was satisfied with the amount they got, they both could keep the money. Otherwise, no one would get anything.
It turned out that most people gave almost 50% to the other person, which the experimentators saw as proof that people are inherently fair and generous. Some more, some less, but all in all less egoistic than we all think.

I don't agree with that conclusion at all.
First, if people were fair, they'd shared the money exactly 50-50 and not just roughly. This already shows they were egoistic, trying to keep more for themselves.
Second, I think they'd happily donated much less money, but they were afraid that the other person wouldn't approve, which would mean they'd end up with nothing at all. So they did not really share their money, they actually gave up the amount of money that they deemed likely to earn the other person's approval.

But it also showed that they apparently didn't think it over very much. 50-50 seems like the obvious choice to make the recipient approve of the deal. But if the receiver wouldn't approve of their share, they also wouldn't get anything. So I bet most receivers would have approved of much less, as long as it was more than nothing (or almost nothing), because little money is still better than no money. And the donators would have gotten away with donating less money than they actually did.

Or are people smarter than I think and they realized all this and still gave roughly 50%, just out of kindness? And the experiment was indeed a proof for people's inherent generosity and fairness? What do you think?

Today, I made currant meringue tart for the third time in a few days. The first try was way too sweet and the base wasn't a big success, but after adapting the recipe a bit, it turned out very yummy, and even Hubby (who's not a big fan of currants) didn't complain that I made the cake again :o)

( Recipe, in case you'd like to try itCollapse )

Today is the second anniversary of my DW account!
I found DW following yvi, logged on with Open ID and soon got an invite code that I used to create my own account on DW. Didn't take long until I stopped writing posts on LJ and only posted on DW anymore. But I keep crossposting everything to LJ because most of my friends are still there.

The stats read as follows, but I have no idea, how many of these posts/comments are actually written on DW and how many are imported from LJ:

Created on 2009-04-27 07:31:07 (#126569)
2,392 comments received
464 comments posted
1,320 Journal Entries

Incidentally, my 7th LJ anniversary was 20 days ago, but I missed it...

Cool, if you google for the number 241543903, you'll get pictures of people putting their head in a fridge...

This morning in the bathroom: I took my towel from the hook and about a half second before I touched my face with it, a spider fell from the towel. Eeek! After this, I was awake...

Speaking of being easily scared - yesterday evening, I was working out on the treadmill and didn't hear that Hubby had come home and come up the stairs. So when he suddenly stood behind me and spoke to me, I was so startled I let out a very loud shriek. Oops.