Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

For easter, I thought I would get myself the new Lotus Eggxige …

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The famous Lotus name could return to Formula One racing next season if UK Formula Three team Litespeed have their entry for the 2010 championship accepted by the FIA next week.

via The Official Formula 1 Website.

… or “Why you should pay attention to your chemistry teacher”.

A couple of days ago, a friend and co-worker of mine had a big problem. She mistook classic dish washing soap (the classically green liquid) to be special soap for the dishwasher, and put a pretty hefty dose of this stuff into her dishwasher, to wash the dishes. Hum.

The result looked somewhat like this, and her kitchen was full with foam because the stuff just kept flowing out of the machine :

H E L P  !!!

Then I remembered something that was buried deeply into a part of my brain that I didn’t use for years. Soap and oil , saponification , hmmm YES that should work! You use soap to get rid of your oil stains, then you can also use oil to get rid of too much soap. Or the foam thereof. Yes!

The magic recipe: put 10 to 20 cl of olive oil into the dishwasher full of foam, and have it run a quick-clean cycle.

The oil and soap will nicely bind together, and there we go – no more foam soap monster ! This should also work with any other oil… please avoid motor oil though

Happy dishwashing.

I just found one more personal reason not to fly with RyanAir again :

Ryanair Staff Give WordPress some lovin’

Yesterday, we launched our new corporate identity and rehauled website for my web agency VAlain SA. After 4 years of a relative inactivity in terms of image, this new identity was more than needed. The company, although still pretty small, is continuing to grow and expand. We have hired a second sales person who will start in the middle of march and plan to recruit one or two more people for the production team in the coming months.

VAlain SA Web Agency

My poor Bailey fell into our lake today – he slipped on the frozen border and wasn’t very happy about the 0 °C water

Anyway, he’s a good dog!

Urban Dictionary: mental masturbation.

Another example: discussing whether you shoulduse DISTINCT or GROUP BY in an SQL query to find uniques… it depends on the situation of course, but we had one where it’s the same, or “kif-kif” as they say in France.

Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped

Workers tasked with scrapping a safe at a steel plant in Hennigsdorf near Berlin couldn’t believe their eyes when euro bills floated towards them. The Berlin Postbank had accidently sent a safe containing 170,000 euros in cash to be scrapped.

via Young Germany: Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped.

The luxembourgish STATEC is the Service central de la statistique et des études économiques or, in english, the central service for statistics and economic research, in Luxembourg. It is a governmental institution, so the taxpayers basically pay for it.

Today I was positively surprised by their service. For a project we have at VAlain (www.wishlist.lu) , I needed some statistical information about births and weddings in Luxembourg, by geographical region. We simply sent them an E-mail with our requirements, and shortly afterward we received a custom made Exel sheet with the requested data.

Next time I’ll pay my taxes, I’ll remember this and bluntly imagine that the money I pay, only serves the STATEC

Also check http://www.statistiques.public.lu

My 4 year old Golden Retriever also loves Firefox. He even looks like the logo when he sleeps!

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