Jan-Piet Mens

Photo: Tomas Rücker

Windows, version five point one,
Has died and gone to heaven.
I'm passing up on version six
And going straight to seven.

via.

The first four chapters of the book are sealed, and ready for printing.

Spell checking, re-reading, removing overfull hbox (you don't know what an overfull hbox is? You haven't lived! ), re-reading, etc. Then there are the diagrams: move that box left a mm, un-bold that word, align the caption, highlight the arrow. A huge amount of last-moment changes and tweaks. Nothing serious mind you, but a lot of work nevertheless.

Four chapters down. Twenty to go. And eight appendices (appendixes).

• Cleaned up a mail queue with many thousands of messages in it, resulting from aborted ClamAV updates that "somehow" trashed their .clv files.


• Heard that a v.i.p. was given a BlackBerry device with a number that was reserved for someone else…


• Implemented a schema change on our LDAP directory, and drove that out to all thirteen servers, without a hiccup.


• Messed around with Skype,callto:// URLs and small Skype icons.


• Explained to sundry why their mails were delayed (see above).


• Explained to a mail admin what an MX is…


• And all sorts of other stuff I don't want to write about here.

A good friend took ill three weeks ago: he suffered from lack of air and pains in the chest. He was immediately hospitalized, and a lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed on December 27th. I made a date to go and see him today. Ten minutes before we arrived at the hospital in Koeln Merheim, we were informed that he had passed away during the night.

I have known Georg for twenty six years. He was two years younger than I am.

Bonne route, mon ami!