Germany – Land of Opportunities

I lately found this picture in the internet. A tweet pointed me to it and I had a hard time to breathe normally again after I rolled laughing over the floor. This really contradicts every experience I made with ‘good old’ Germany.

About five years ago a friend of mine, Kenyan with an master in computer science from a well known Russian university, wanted to come to Germany for work because she had several friends in Germany. Another friend of mine who runs his own software development company was willing to see her. Because, like most of the time, everything went on short notice she didn’t have the time to apply for a business visa and came with a visitor visa to Germany. After the successful interview with my friend she tried to get a working visa but was denied and had to leave Germany again.

Everybody who is following the news should know by now that the demographic changes in ‘good old’ Germany are already leading to a lack of skilled workers because the Germans are getting too old. So how can it be that a civil servant can deny someone who is skilled and has a job opportunity in Germany the appropriate visa?

My wife is Chinese. We married in Switzerland and left for China because she wanted to pursue her career as judge. After a while and because her Chinese career was ended by marring a foreigner, we tried to go to Germany. Hahahaha … don’t worry I will never try to come back to Germany again. It seems that my wife only gets a visa for Germany when she is able to speak German. As it is she speaks fluently four languages but unfortunately German is not between those.

Luckily there are still countries in this world which really appreciate skilled workers who want to work in their country and contribute to their society 😉

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Flying in Australia

In Australia you are usually flying when you want to see another city because the distances are quite big and the speed on the roads not very high. My favorite airline is Virgin Blue. The prices are reasonable and they cover nearly all of Australia.

The only issue I have are the delays. Nearly every flight I take at the moment is delayed due to some reason. To make it clear, I do not object against a delay when an error in my plane is found and they have to bring another plane from somewhere to arrange the flight. But to sit at night on an empty Canberra Airport without dinner, all shops already closed and you don’t even get a free Coffee … I think in this point Virgin should reconsider their strategy of keeping their customers happy.

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HP Region code for printer

While I was living in France I needed a new printer/scanner and decided to buy a HP Photosmart Premium, a combined office machine with everything you need for your home-office. It was not really cheap but it was said that buying directly from the internet would give a 50€ cash-back.

The machine itself runs fine apart some minor problems while scanning but …

The first problem I had was to get my cash-back money. I tried to contact the support via mail and received the answer I should try to call a certain support line. I tried but could not get anyone on the phone so after some tries I just gave up and thought I might as well live with the price I paid. Anyway, the ink for the printer cost quite a fortune and you learn fast where HP makes its real money!

Now I moved to Australia and naturally I moved my printer too.

Lately I ran out of yellow ink and went into a shop to buy a replacement cartridge of yellow. In the shop I was already astonished that there were no 364 cartridges to buy but 564 cartridges which are described as valid replacement for my HP Photosmart Premium c309a.

Back home I got shocked. Not that the cartridge didn’t fit. It was looking exactly like the 364 one which I wanted to replace … but the printer denied to use this original HP cartridge which is the right one for my printer !!! (in Australia)

I called the support and learned that each HP printer has a region code which can be altered three times only and that because I moved to Australia I have to change the region code now. But they could not help me directly and I cannot change the code myself as it seems, the passed the issue to a second level support which should call me within 48h. Naturally I didn’t get any calls.

Since then I had about half a dozen mails exchanged with the support and each time I got a phone no. to call where I am promised that I will get a call from someone who can change the region code of my printer for me.

So far I am still waiting (about 2 week now and several attempts!).

In the meanwhile I learned from the support hotline that if I change the region code my other (nearly full cartridges) will not work any more because they are bought in France! A full set of cartridges cost about $100,- AUD … are they insane?

My conclusion … after so many years of buying HP notebooks and printers from laser to office machines I am extremely disappointed and will not buy anything from HP any more.

And I can only warn everybody to reconsider if he wants to buy from such a Producer because this is purely rip-off of their customers.

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Finally Moved

Hey everybody!

It took some time but I finally made it, to move my blog to a new server, update to the newest WordPress version and also update my plugins.

Hopefully I will have some time to write new articles as well 😉

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Big Brother is watching You

It is about 4 week ago that I switched from my favorite browser Firefox to Googles Chrome. On my Windows 7 system Firefox simply used too many resources.

Today I updated my Spybot installation which protects my registry and made a system scan. What shall I tell you it found 26 tracking cookies on my computer which I caught during only the last 4 weeks. My main usage of the internet is to search for programming informations.

Perhaps I am a little naive but I see no evidence that a session cookie must remain on the computer of a surfer after the user is logged out. Personalization of a website like on Amazon is a nice thing but I think that I should be able to surf in the internet anonymously and only get a personalized view once I reveal my identity intentionally as by logging in.

Instead of anonymity even the browsers reveal more and more informations so that these can already be used as identifying fingerprint as shown in the EFF Panopticlick project.

If you think that all this doesn’t matter to you it is perfectly OK with me but be aware that the companies who are tracking you and your behavior are making a lot of money with your data. What do you get in return? Databases full of tracking data which, connected to a real person, will make you and your doings completely transparent.

What will be the logical next step after connecting you as a person with the sampled data …. ? I don’t think that needs much inspiration.

Be aware when you surf in the internet that many eyes are watching you!

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