The dream and wishes of so many people all around the world now finally paid off.
Obama is the 44th president of the united states
Tag: Personal
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Codelist for the universal remote MD 41666
Just because I’ve been searching for it quite some time, here is a link where the codelist for the Medion universal programmable remote control MD 41666 is available as download.
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Stressful time
Yes, the promised additional photos are still lacking presence. Yes, there are still blog-updates happening every two to three weeks. Yes, I know.
Sorry for that. I’ve been trying to keep up with work and the stuff we have to do this semester for the university. This time we’ve got a project assignment in almost every subject also with some quit tight schedules.
Also at work there have been some interesting changes as we have made significant changes to our Scrum development process. We changed the teams completely and also mixed up all of the upcoming tasks which means that the new teams have to adopt to the new areas they’re working on now. But so far I think it works even better than expected and we’re producing results faster than we hoped. I’m quite positive that this will advance even more in the near future. Exciting times ahead…
What has been some sort of a setback in the last weeks were some expenses I had to take for my car. A big regular maintenance, some rust removal (rust has been no surprise but the amount was unexpected) and a change of my handlebars. New winter tires were also necessary. Bye bye, last months salary 🙁 At least it’s cheaper than having to purchase a new car (with more unexpected sidecosts) and I’m dependent on being mobile. But I think my car is now prepared for some more years to come.
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Back from the holiday
Yes, it has been quite some time since my last posting. Almost a month, what has happened in the meantime? Well, most importantly we have been on our holiday. We spent ten days in a Magic Life resort at the coast of the Red Sea in Egypt, namely the "Kalawy Imperial". The time there was great and you may expect some pictures and more soon.
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How mobile provider A1 pulls the money out of your pocket…
Some time ago I received a short message on my mobile where I was offered to extend my binding to A1 (my mobile provider) for another period and receive some credits for that. At that time I did as I was told in the message and answered with "Yes" via SMS.
Last month I got the bill from A1 with a ridiculous amount of payment and immediately called the call center. There I was told that my contract was canceled because I didn’t extend it back when I was notified. The lady on the other side of the phone said, that I had received a notification that my contract was exceeding via short message on my phone and that I didn’t respond to that. So my old contract was converted into a standard contract. When I responded to the lady that I indeed did answer the SMS to extend my contract she replied that I either had to call into the callcenter for that or send a response by mail, not by SMS.
After a bit of back and forward between the callcenter agent and me I became stressed out and agreed to add some options to my new contract and lower my costs. It was impossible to return to my old contract as it had already been canceled and a new similar offer is limited by customer age (youth tariff) so this was also ruled out for me.
What still bugs me is, that I opted out of receiving account-critical notifications from my provider via electronic communication and still my contract change was only announced via SMS. Also, the conversion of my contract was not stated anywhere and if I didn’t have a look at the payment amount on my bill I wouldn’t have noticed.
The call center agent was quite friendly and can’t be blamed for how its employer treats customers which are not part of the majority customer base where cash margins are already quite slim so that it has to try everything to press money out of the minority of customers with nonstandard conditions. I’m still with A1 because I doubt that the other providers will treat customers differently. After all it’s the same market with the same conditions for those companies…
Lesson learned: If you receive any notification about your account from your provider, even if you have told him NOT to notify you over this channel, call the callcenter and check back.
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Stressing
Yes, it’s been again quite a while since my last posting. What has happened in the meantime? My term at the university is over, I had the last two exams for which I learned quite a lot and for some of which the results are still not available. After the last exam we had a BBQ with our study-colleagues which was quite nice and lasted all night long. Stayed overnight in a tend there… At work I’ve been the replacement for my group leader and so had more stuff to do and organize than usual. This has been challenging as in terms of know-how I’m still not experienced enough in the area so that I could replace my colleague completely. And last weekend my brother celebrated his 25th birthday with three other people who grew 25. We were invited to a remote location to stay overnight, eat, drink and have fun. It was a great place there although until we were able to find it we had to ask for the way and survive lightning, thunder, extreme rain and hailstorms. Sadly my darling had to fight with tooth-problems for some days already and couldn’t enjoy the party 🙁
And between all that I’ve been attending a Swedish-course. It’s interesting to learn that language but with so little time it’s really a rarity when I’m home and the sun still shines. Most of the time we don’t even eat at home, but on the way and when we arrive home it’s already bed-time. Quite some stuff at home which waits to be done at some time.
I really should try to get more sleep…
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It’s getting hot
And today is another day where the thermometer hits values in the area around 30°C. Shouldn’t be so spectacular, as we’re having summer and the sun shines almost all day. Well, this reading is from inside an air-conditioned office!
In the recent few days, I’ve been feeling somewhat uncomfortable and I completely blame the temperature for that. This is somehow strange for me as this is not the first year with such climatic conditions but the first year where I experience physical problems because of this.
Maintaining concentration is now clearly an issue…
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End of learning term
Yesterday our last lecture for this term at the university took place. This concludes the second term and leaves just most of the tests open which will have to be passed in the next weeks. Last Wednesday we already had our Russian final exam. I expected to be quite bad in this as I’m normally quite bad in languages but I think I did surprisingly well. Of course, now I don’t have time to dig deeper into that language but I plan this for later.
So, on to the next ones…
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Building continues
I just got noticed, that the tilers have finished with my new toilet and bathroom. I’m quite excited, that after some slow times finally a major step in the construction of my own personal living space concluded.
There are still some big steps ahead but the bathroom and toilet were the largest part of leftover work which has been open for the foreseeable future.
Altough I haven’t seen the final result myself yet, I saw the tilers results of yesterdays work. Awesome.
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Some visual impressions
Yes, I’m still alive. Just had quite few spare time because I had to manage to get my tiles and organize everything with the tiler (which is still not finished). Furthermore work and university have been quite time-consuming lately.
Nevertheless to give you a bit of an excuse, I’ve found a few seconds of time to play with my cam again and here are the two shots which I like most.
The first is a tunnel exit where I had only seconds to get the cam, turn it on and fire, so please excuse the low image quality.
On the second picture I tried to make some long-exposure shots of a fountain but only this one at 1.5sec came out nicely and not too overexposed. I still have to practice at this. Furthermore I want to buy a small tripod because I couldn’t find a nice location to stabilize the cam during the shot but had to place it on a trash bin and tilt it a bit with a handkerchief.
Enjoy.
