therning.org/ magnus

I’ve long suspected that the EU politicians inhabit a different world than the rest of us. My suspicions have been confirmed during the last week. How they can expect to be taken seriously when they clearly aren’t taking the European voters seriously is beyond me.

Believe me, I understand that they all had a lot riding on the constitution. Just the fact that there was no plan B is proof enough that all of them had invested heavily in it. But please, and this goes out to all the EU politicians and bureaucrats, try to save a bit of your dignity and let the EU constitution die.

I had some problems producing proper Swedish characters in WordPress for a little while. This only happened when using Mozex and Vim to edit posts.

The solution was quite simple I use UTF-8 encoding throughout my entire Ubuntu GNU/Linux system, every application defaults to it. Except Firefox, it seems. Making sure that the Character Encoding was set to UTF-8 solved it.

I simply can’t stand editing text in the text areas using the editor in Firefox (Mozilla). Apparently there is still no edit externally command in Mozilla yet. Luckily there’s Mozex, but don’t try installing that version, use this instead (the original won’t install anymore). The original site is still useful though, since it holds a link to the arguments the different commands take.

We took advantage of the end-of-May bank holiday and went to visit Andy (now called Andreas apparently in London. Well, Twickenham to be exact.

We took off on Saturday morning by bus from Cambourne. We were a bit worried whether the bus would come or not. The night before we tried to go to the Cambridge beer festival but neither the 18:16 nor the 19:16 bus ever showed. No beer for us this year then Luckily there was a bus on Saturday morning and we had no problem catching the coach to London.

It was great seeing Andy again we spent a lot of time just catching up. Quite a lot has happened since we met the last time in 2000, just after we moved to the Netherlands. Besides talking over coffe/beer/dinner we also managed to take in a show on Saturday evening. The Producers was well worth seeing. Funny and witty as only Mel Brooks can be. With an amazing amount of lines “borrowed” from movies, both his own and others.

Sunday we went to the National Gallery. We decided to see the impressionists. It’s an amazingly good idea to make museums free, it means you don’t feel any obligation to go through the whole collection. Instead you can choose a part of it, making sure you don’t get museum fatigue. Of course it does help knowing that the museum isn’t too far away to make another visit in the not so distant future. We didn’t know that Westminster Abbey is closed on Sundays so we were forced to save that for another visit.