Massively Parallel Procrastination

An untitled post

So today, I met Florian, an RT user/hacker who lives in Berlin. He took the day to show me around town and then show me one of his RT implementations.

They (http://www.lambda-bb.de/) are a local peer-counselling service for gay and lesbian teenagers. They use RT to track all correspondence with the kids they're counselling. They've made some neat changes to comply with German privacy laws and ease things for client interactions.

And some things that were really, really important but still sort of terrifying. If an email message includes certain keywords like 'rape' or 'suicide', it bumps up the priority and sends out extra alert mail.

Looks like the interview for iX is going to be done by email sometime later.

There was a concert I wanted to go to tonight, but I was running late, it was in a part of town I haven't yet dealt with and my feet hurt like hell. So. I'll have to wait until The Sounds break in the US and go see them at a stadium ;)

Oh, and I bought a toy today. A new nokia 3650. From a nokia shop in Berlin. It was the least satisfying medium-big purchase I've made in a looong time. I got treated like dirt, they ignored my request to try the phone before they rang me up, the sales guy attempted to assert that the reason the phone didn't work was because my SIM was 'old',
he said that if it didn't work, he wouldn't take it back (In german. to the friend I was with, after it was too late (I didn't tell him that if he fucked me, I'd walk out of the shop, call AmEx and initiate a fraud investigation ;)). He eventually figured out that there's a firmware bug with that version of the phone and that the SIM _needs_ to be pin-locked. And then when I asked why the hell the firmware was loaded with vodaphone customization, he told me I could take it to any Nokia service point and have it flashed up to a current generic firmware. I decided I'd be happier walking out and going to a nokia shop in Britian to have them flash the phone. And he lied about the tax-free stuff going in, claiming that they had everything I needed to present to customs to get the VAT refund at the airport. Except they claimed at the end to not have any VAT refund forms and that I'd be fine without one. Which I'm 99% sure is a load of crap. *sigh* I really should have walked out at the beginning.