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About my break

So, I said before I wanted to take a one week break, and just relax, watch TV Series, Movies, Anime, read some books. There’s a huge ocean between what you hope and what happens most of the times, this time I found a galaxy between them.

So, Monday I’m first woke up by my UPSes beeping, because the power company started having problems (as usual, in Italy during summer), I slept about four hours, and I couldn’t sleep in the afternoon, as I was called to be explained the new job I’m currently doing (data entry, sigh). Tuesday I was waiting for receiving my AppleTV (with HDMI cable) – I needed something to give me back control of my laptop, and this was the most straightforward alternative to watch Anime and TV series on my TV – so I woke up early, but the courier (UPS) did not came till 16, just half an hour after I did go to sleep in the afternoon, as I slept about four hours that day too, and my data entry job was paused because of problems with the application I should have been using. Wednesday, I was waked up by my parents who forgot I was sleeping, just three hours of sleep, and I got an urgent – different, albeit for the same company – data entry job to complete in just one day; twelve hours to sleep. Yesterday, the data entry job resumed, so up again with little sleep.

And let me say something about UPS. They are one of the most expensive express couriers, they previously had a perfect record with me, although one of their drivers once whined about he having to come to my house (that is outside city) too often. This time they screwed up quite a bit. When you order an AppleTV with an HDMI cable from the Apple Store, they send you two boxes, one for the AppleTV itself, and one for the cable (probably to make it easier to the storage to handle the shipments), the invoice is also printed and attached outside the box rather than inside. The AppleTV box came to my house Tuesday afternoon as expected, but the HDMI cable wasn’t there. It was shipped, by mistake, to Madrid, Spain, and came the day after. For Google Maps, there are 1.829 km between Mestre and Madrid, and the only things they have in common are the M and the r letters in the name.

Anyway, the AppleTV is a nice gadget and works quite well, even if the Samsung TV is giving me a heartache: the image coming from the HDMI cable at 1280x720p (or 1960x1080i if you prefer) is displayed with a slightly different resolution and not scaled. The result is that a border of the whole image is missing. This is probably not a problem for most users, it’s still a problem for fansubbed Anime when the subtitles appear too close to the border. And I can’t find a way to contact Samsung Italy without calling them (and I didn’t of course have time to call them).

The data entry job is being quite stressful, it’s taking a lot of my time, and is making my break hell; in particular, the web application used to type in the data uses PDF forms rather than standard web forms, but this wouldn’t be that much of a problem, if the designers of the PDF forms used the wrong order for tab switching of the inputs (what the heck were they thinking? were they drunk?) so I need to use Acrobat Reader 6.0, that does not support the tab order embedded in PDF files and creates its own (correct) order; if I use Adobe Reader 7 or 8, pressing tab moves you around the page like crazy. And these people get paid a lot more than I am.

*sigh*

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