zoo & Gent

This weekend was mostly taken up by a visit to Gent to pick up my repaired Espace. Then we went shopping in the city, which was nice but everything seemed a little too calm for us: no crowds on the street, shops not filled with people. A much more relaxing shopping experience then Antwerp.

Sunday was a visit by a friend with their 2 year old. Our played along nicely and we all had a nice time.

On Wednesday I went with our son and his friend O to Plankendael, the out-of-the-city park of the zoo of Antwerp. It was fantastic weather, they played a lot, I had an unexpected encounter with one of my nieces and they both braved the extremely high slide in the big tower (3 stories high).

Of course when we arrived home I was exhausted, but they were not :-(.

Oh, note that I'm posting my technical stuff more to my other blog which is syndicated on planet debian and grep.be. Livejournal people can friend pvaneynddeblisp.

modern times

A colleague at work got his 'final end of year bill' from his electricity supplier. In Belgium you pay every month an amount based on the guess of the supplier of your usage. Because , he claims, his new house is drying out, so requires less energy to heat up, he consumed about 20% less energy then last year so their estimate was too high. Good: he gets 400 € back. Bad: the amount he has to pay a month goes up.

So he phones them up and asked why. The reason: the program to adjust the guess based on the usage of last year cannot handle a negative amount (you payed too much) so the program thinks the last estimate was 400 € a month too low instead of too high, so it adjusts it upwards. Next year it will adjust it even more up :-).

Now I know that the ABS function in FORTRAN exists already since the late 1950's so I think the problem is not their programs, but that this is an easy way to get an interest-free loan out of people that don't watch their bill with a eye for details.

just sick

goldfish in a deep fryer