EVOL.reverse

The past weekend we rented a car to go to IKEA. The car was a Citroen Berlingo HDI, quite nice I must say. The thing is, as I left my friend’s house after watching the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday, I noticed a small dent on the car

After I realized I couldn’t do anything else about it I ended up calling Europcar and they told me to call the police. So I called the police and they did a damage report which I then delivered the next day to Europcar.

You see, I have a car and I left it in Portugal (2 months now) because I’m a bit fed up of cars and besides I’m always concerned about damaging the car, myself or someone else while driving. A bicycle is just fine for what I need now. So I thought: “damn it, I rent a car two days and this happens!”

So you can imagine my face when I got a phone call from Europcar today and they told me the car had already the problem before I rented it. They said they were going to through my damage report away. It didn’t happen during my rental period! Christ, how about warning clients and telling them the car is damaged before renting the car?

Me and Ana got this nice flat in Darmstadt now. What we didn’t knew at the time we took the flat is that its only 2min from the Grosser Woog, which is a beautiful in-city lake. In the summer everyone goes there for swimming and sun baths. Here is the path from our place to the Grosser Woog. That’s great!

• to the nearest Portuguese restaurant (haven’t tried it yet but must do)
• to the center (this would be by car, on foot its actually closer)
• to work (from the new apart., might vary but this is probably the shortest path to cycle, old path)

Next step is to include some geo-referenced photos.

Thanks to a friend I’ve come across German earworms lessons and just had to write something recommending them. They are basically music mixed with basic German sentences. The idea is that you can learn basic pronunciation and words by just listening without playing any special attention or doing anything, kind of subconscious learning. This is very nice! I can’t say it works because I’ve just started but its easy to follow and I’m finding it fun as well

Once a week there’s usually a curry club meeting that consists in ordering curry from an Indian take-out, but this week we had the pleasure to eat a special home-made curry from Asha and it was great. Thanks!

Beautiful software is one that does things that you don’t expect and things that are actually useful for you in some way (e.g. that reduce the effort for the task that you have in mind).

I can think of at least three examples of such software:

• Mozilla Firefox - It’s plugin-based architecture and its capacity to update, etc. makes it a great piece of software. The tools that the community around Firefox created (XUL Runner, XPCOM, etc.) make an excellent base to develop other great desktop applications.
• Gcc – the GNU compiler collection is a hardcore piece of software. Maybe one of the most complex pieces of software available today as open-source and with such brilliant minds working on it.
• Wordpress – this open-source blog engine is a wonderful web application. It also has a architecure based on core+plugins and has capacity to update, themes, etc. It makes an excellente base to develop other web-based applications.

Woke up today to find a beautiful white blanket of snow covering everything on the streets. Since this is a scenario I’m really not used too I had to take some pictures and found this one particularly funny because of the marks on the snow.

Check the ESOC notice board for house rent ads.

Note: Contrary to what one could expect the Internet thing for house rental in Germany/Darmstadt isn’t that great. Although there are many ads on-line, they are all posted (or being advertised) by an agency and if you through an agency you’ll most likely be charged one whole month of rent for it.