ttj - Tom Jones

The rate was almost exactly the same as the forex spot rate that day.  There was a 5% spread, but all the spread was on one side.  This seems to be how it goes with harder vs softer currency exchange: all the spread sits on one side. (EUR is second-tier and BRL is third-tier). There was a queue, with tickets.  The cashier counted the money under the counter, out of view, and then handed it over.  Every other teller I've dealt with counted it out in front of me.  But when I checked, the amount was correct.  I got a little paper receipt with a few numbers on it in typewriter.  No id was required, for once.  The resulting bumwad from the bank of toyland was well-used, grimy and smelly.  It was mostly in 100s, with a few 200s.

It took several attempts to find a Post Office.  In Rio, taxis are everywhere and cheap, but if you hail one and ask to go to a post office, you are unlikely to end up at a post office.  I tried three cabs before giving up.  The post office I found was hidden, so I walked past it a few times, and then found it. There was a huge queue.  I was in the queue for around 50 minutes. At the counter, the clerk entered the address.  I was sending a book, that I'd just finished reading, to my nationalist Scottish friend, so I had written "Scotland" for the country.  Last time, I accidentally put Wales instead of Scotland, and it did arrive, but this time I'm being less of a dick, so I put "Scotland".  Something isn't matching in the clerk's system.  I can't remember if they were looking up Edinburgh in a list of countries, or Scotland in a list of cities, but a category error of some sort was involved.  In the end, I had to write "UK" underneath,...

A friend recommended this Baban clock back in 2017.  I bought one and it seemed okay, so I bought a dozen or so. Then I started noticing the issues.  It's a mechanical clock, but it's not silent.  It's an alarm clock, so designed to go by the bed.  But, in the quiet of night, the grinding sound of the hands going round is annoying.  And it's not good at telling the time.  The one in my dining room was losing a minute every couple of months or so.  It was impossible to trust it. These negatives are enough to make it useless, but here are some positives anyway.  It has a nice user interface, with two simple nobs and a positional switch.  One nob sets the time, and the other nob sets the alarm.  The switch is on/off for the alarm. I've disposed of most of them, and there are a couple left.

When in Brazil, I tried to buy something on Amazon.  It reached a tiny form demanding my CPF.  There was no explanation of what this was.  I found out later that you have to register, and get a CPF number, in order to be able to shop in Brazil. Most in-person shops don't ask for it, but they can. I never got as far as registering for a CPF.  I did find an electronics mega-market, of sorts, at Av Rio Branco 156.  You can search for the product you want at some web site, beforehand.  You get prices, and the address of the stall / shop.  There are two more levels of address within Av Rio Branco 156: loja and st.  For example, maybe supernova is at loja 206 st 14. Despite the market's size, the range is pretty limited, especially for higher-quality items.  Name-brand items are several times normal prices because of import duties.  I was after a decent power USB-C charger for my laptop.  I'd travelled with just a travel USB-C power suppl...

In Switzerland, the safe room tends to have the feel of a nuclear bunker.  It's one or two levels down, and there's a thick steel or concrete door.  In Austria, it tends to just be in a partitioned room. In Switzerland, in several banks, they seem to think it's part of the service to lift your box down each time you visit.  Then, when it's heavy (gold is dense), they nearly drop it, or otherwise seem to struggle.  Some of the boxes are above head height.  If you offer to take it down, they will accept, but by default they will try to lift the box down.  It's a problem even with the smallest box, which is the size of a ream of B4 paper.  Gold is 19 times denser than water.  In Austria, they are apparently not allowed, by law, to lift the box down for the customer. The vocab is all over the place.  I've seen them called Tresorfach, Schliessfach, Safe, etc. There are bank-by-bank variations on how access is authorised.  The best ones have a...

Suppose you go into a shop and don't steal something.  Do you consider this an act of compliance?  Probably not.  It would be wrong to steal something, and there's some rules in place about that, and something to enforce that.  You didn't break the rule.  But this wasn't as a result of an effort around a notion of compliance.  The sign "shoplifters will be prosecuted" is nice and direct.  It states the transgression and the consequence.  What if it said "non-compliers will be prosecuted".  You might wonder: non-compliers with what?  If it means non-compliers with the laws against stealing, one might wonder why it doesn't just say so.  How about "compliers and non-compliers alike will be subject to ongoing compliance monitoring and compliance enforcement by our compliance team", to mean the same thing?  The compliance compliance test might be something like: if the focus is on the act of compliance itself, rather than the actual...

I just opened a picture using eog.  Then I opened a different picture using another eog, or so I thought.  It was impossible to interact with the second eog, including moving the window.  This turned out to be because the first eog had a blocking modal dialog open about printing.  Can you see how wrong this is? This is cross-document intra-application interference, and it is bad.  Very bad.   Similar problem in Apple's OS X when you switch to a window, and all windows "owned" by that application come to the foreground.  Only one of the dozen documents you have open with that application is relevant to the task you're doing, and the foregrounding of the other 11 block out the other information, in other applications, relevant to your task.  You thought you were using a windowing system so you could see the information relevant to your task together, but Apple have arranged that it doesn't work like that. True to GNOME's raison-d'être as a very...