Raw Matter

A registered letter to my girlfriend: the check came back because the bank couldn't cash the check to an account not belonging to the person who's name is on the check. Yada yada yada! At least, my contact at the bank agreed that this shouldn't have happened, so I can send the check back to the bank - directly to him, this time - instead of having to go the bank in person again (banks here around have quite annoying opening hours, so that I'd have to take at least 3 or 4h off from work to go to the bank.)

As I wrote recently, I have published an article on the pool.ntp.org project in the Linux Journal. As such contributions are paid for, I talked with them about how they'd pay me (from the U.S. to Switzerland.) Option 1 was that they'd send the money by wire, but would have to take off USD 35 for fees. Option 2 (and their default) was that they'd just send me a check. Now, USD 35 is quite a bit of money, so I opted for the check.

Turns out that the USD 35 for wire transfer come close to the fees I have to pay to get this check cashed now. Furthermore, not having a real bank account, I can't cash the check at all (I have an account at the post, which handles almost all things you usually do with money, up to and including stock and bonds trading and mortgages. It's just no real bank - no credits, no private banking etc. And also no cashing checks in most circumstances.) because banks only cash acheck if you have an account... Finally, I could cash the check to the acocunt of my girlfriend, by going to the bank with her and bringing along my passport, and then transferring the check to her, so that she could cash it to her account. Cost: a lot of time, and CHF 30 (which is approx. USD 20) plus whatever the U.S. bank charges for check processing.

As was announced on the relevant mailing list, I've finalized my plan to get rid of the pool.ntp.org project. Ask Bjørn Hansen is now leading the crowd, I hope he'll have as much or more success as I did in the first years of the project.

You probably have heard that the state of Massachusetts (USA) will use use OASIS OpenDocument v1.0 as the official document format for all documents in the government, and in communication between gov't and its contractors. And you probably heard, too, that Microsoft Office does not support this document standard, and for some inexplicable reason does not want to support it in the future, either.

Of course, the above is not strictly true: there is an explanation for big evil Microsoft's behaviour, as is described, for example, on Groklaw. (There are many other sources, too, just follow the links inside the Groklaw article, or use your favourite search engine.)