Where sanity and logic end…

In The Netherlands, students get a special public transport card, which they can use to travel throughout the country for free. Since this card was valid 24/7 (except for the holidays), students started some cheap courier system. The government wasn’t very pleased with this kind of “abuse”, so they decided to split the card in two categories. One valid throughout the weekend and one for during the week. Which brings me to the curse.

For a long time I used to have a weekend-card. Just recently, I changed the card back to a week-card, since I wasn’t really able to visit some friends of mine unless I paid for the ticket. So now I can just enter about every train and bus I want without having to think about buying a ticket first.

Last weekend, I “just” boarded the train, without buying a ticket again. This was the 2nd time in 3 weeks or so. Recently, they also changed the policy for people travelling without a valid ticket. When you are being checked, you’re bound to get a fine of 35 euro’s. Of course, I got checked :(. I was waving around a bit with my travelcard, hoping the controller wouldn’t notice I didn’t have the weekend-variant. Unfortunately he did, and I pretended I was looking for the normal ticket in my wallet, which I didn’t have of course. It took only a second for me to figure out this was probably the most stupid thing to do :), so I just said to the guy that I had simply forgotten to buy a ticket, because I was used to having a weekendcard. It was an honest mistake, but it does sound a bit suspicious coming from a student, assuming I’m not the first one who ever had this “problem”. Lucky for me, the controller himself thought it was a waste of money to give me a 35 euro fine for a 2.40 euro ticket, so I just had to pay for the ticket instead. Thank you controller!

My point of this post is actually that splitting up the card in two timeframes was probably the worst (or best, depending which side you are on :p) thing they could do. People get used to things on the long term and are therefor sensitive to make errors when routines change. Unfortunately a small error here can cost you 35 euro’s. I’m sure it happened often enough. I hope that whenever somebody finds himself in the same position as I was, (s)he will also have such a nice controller as I had.

Just a quick one since I’m in a rush. Last weekend I spent 2 evenings rehearsing and recording two songs.
I’ll upload one of the songs here so you can get a sneak peek. (It’s just the music, no vocals yet). I’d also like to say that this is not the final version of the song (other instruments are experimental at this moment)

I had some problems with my computer for quite some time now.
Games started to crash at random points. One would normally assume this is due to some faulty graphics card. In my case that’s true. Using some diagnostic software, it turned out to have some faulty memory. So, I got the brilliant idea to see if I know someone with a PCI-E graphics card, so I could use that one for a while and see how it goes. Of course, it didn’t. Why would it? After all, computers are there to piss you off.

So, the graphics card didn’t seem to be the problem.. What else could there be? Just my regular RAM?
Since I just bought some new RAM (see my previous post), I decided to test my memory. It wasn’t pretty to see what happened. At a certain point I got about 60 errors. So I started removing all my memory sticks, to test them individually on each memory slot (yes that is a lot of work). When I came to the 4th stick of memory (a new one, 1gb in size), I stopped scanning after 65% and 1029 errors!

Right now I’m halfway through testing, it’s incredibly time consuming.

Just to give you some information on how far I am:

_ 1 2 3 4
A O O - -
B O O - -
C O O - -
D X X - -

where the numbers represent a memory slot, the letters a memory stick(A and C 512mb each, B and D 1gb each), O pass succeeded and X pass failed.

Just to be sure I will continue testing the sticks on the 2 remaining slots, you never know….

Damn new memory…

P.S. Phas, this also answers your question