Timesheet template (calc, LibreOffice) for 2012

January 4th, 2012

Just in time (almost) for a new year I finished my basic timesheet for 2012 and if you’re interested, you can download it from here: timesheet-2012 (right-click and select “Save as…”).

What it contains:
-Months split into sheets, preceded by an overview sheet
-Adjustable settings for working hours per day
-All time fields are formatted to show a 24 hour clock.
-Weekends, holidays and days with reduced working hours are marked in different colors
-Swiss holidays resp. holidays for the city of Zurich (all in English)
-Some working days come with reduced working hours or half-days, these are included as well.

What it does:
-After you enter your starting time, finishing time and how much time you spent at lunch, the sheet will update the monthly total which in turn will update the total in the Overview sheet.
-Compares your daily efforts to the working hours per day and calculates a positive or negative overtime total, incl. red coloured negative overtime hours

What it does not do:
-Update itself for the next year. If you want the same timesheet for next year, you have to manually update the weekend color markings
-Adjust the holidays to different regions or countries. Frankly speaking, it’s all hard-coded :-(
-Allow for several entries per day e.g. if you work from 8am to 10am, from 1pm to 3pm and finally from 7pm to 9pm you will have to enter e.g. starting time 8am / finishing time 9pm / break 07:00 (3 hours + 4 hours)
-Convert your spreadsheet to a nicely formatted, printable output.

Notes:
If you’re unhappy with my timesheet, feel free to use it as a basis for your own (hopefully) improved version. Here are some learning steps I had to take:

-Calculating time difference in Calc (or any other spreadsheet software?) is a bitch. The crucial point is the cell formatting, not the cell formula. Most likely, you will have to customize an existing format. Have a look at the formatting of any cell in the “+/-” columns.
-Colored results are easy. Again, have a look at the formatting of any cell in the “+/-” columns.
-Copying a formula from one cell to another  will automatically adjust the referenced cells in the formula. You probably knew that and I knew it too. To prevent this from happening: precede a cell reference with a “$” e.g. “=F16″ should be written as “=$F$16″. Maybe you knew that as well. BUT! Did you also knew that references are also shifted per sheet when you copy sheets?
If you happen to have two sheets (“Overview”, “January”) with a reference of “=Overview.C18″ in the cell A3 in the “January” sheet and you copy the “January” sheet, rename it “February” and place it before the last sheet, the “=Overview.C18″ reference will automatically be adjusted to “=January.C18″. Apparently, these references don’t refer to a sheet’s name by default (as expected?) but refer to the relative order in which the sheets are ordered. In order to fixate a reference across sheets, use the “$” again e.g. “=Overview.C18″ should be “=$Overview.$C$18″

Last but not least, you can password-protect your sheet. Select “Save As…” and check the “Save With Password” checkbox at the bottom of the Save dialogue.

HTH some…

Damn weather! *grmbl*

January 4th, 2012

There are those days when you get the feeling everybody or everything hates you… e.g. this morning I got up and saw that it’s raining outside. Nothing spectacular so far but none of the shoes I wear day in and day out are water-proof. One pair leaks, the other pair is made of a non water-resistant fabric. And don’t get me started on the sandals…
As I don’t like the feeling of clummy, cold and wet socks, I decided to wear my hiking shoes while commuting just to keep my feet dry. My exact thoughts were “I’ll wear the hiking shoes so my socks won’t get wet.”
I usually walk to the train station to get some exercise. The walk takes about 18 to 20 minutes. It was already raining when I left the house but it was a slight drizzle. However, after a couple of minutes it started raining really hard and some more minutes later my jacket was dripping, my trousers were clammy and wet and water started running down my shoulders and also into my trousers. When I arrived at the train station, everything was wet except for my head which was protected by a cap and my socks, thanks to my hiking shoes.
My wish had come true.

Here’s the conclusion:

If God exists (which he doesn’t), he/she/it is either…
-a sadist
-a child
-a foreigner who does not speak my lingo

Why?
The postulate “I’ll wear the hiking shoes so my socks won’t get wet” does not mean “as long as my sock stay dry, I don’t care about the rest”.
If you get this wrong and act ‘to make it so’, then it’s either “on purpose” (sadist), you’re just screwing around with people (child) or it’s an honest mistake because you have no clue what’s going (foreigner not speaking the lingo).
It’s a moot point to discuss somebody who does not exist but given the evidence in the People’s collection on what they conceive to be a collection of texts written by somebody who does not exist, “sadist” and/or “foreigner who does not speak the lingo” are the most likeliest explanations. They’re not mutually exclusive and given the time and location of some collected stories, the “foreigner” thesis would explain a lot.

Even though I have been in my office for two hours now, my clothes are still not completely dry. What a start to this day….

All the best for 2012!

January 3rd, 2012

Hi everybody!

2011 is over and done, welcome to 2012. May you find peace, self-fulfillment and happiness all year round. If you’ve been reading my posts, please continue to do so in the future ^_^

Cheers!

夜は怖いです。。。

December 16th, 2011

なぜか分からないんですが、こういう話題に対して、日本語はふさわしく感じます。

私にとって、夜は怖いです。いや、幽霊や怪獣が怖いわけではないんです。ちゃんと寝室を掃除していますので、そういうものはいないはずです。
私が怖がるのは、眠れないことなんです。 基本的に、私が眠ること好きです。一日頑張って、疲れたままベッドに入るは一つの楽しみです。問題はベッドに入ってから始まります。
私は昔から簡単に眠り込めないひとです。寝るまではすごく時間がかかります。また、仰向きに寝ることは生まれてから全線できません。そうすると、横になったり、腹這いになったり寝るしかありません。ですが、腹這いに寝るのは背中に悪いです。いつか夜中に背中が痛くなります。正確に言うと、背骨が腰とつながるところです。原因は腹這いに寝る時、背骨が曲がったいるらしいです。
さらに、私の眠りは薄いです。夜に何回も目が覚めてしまうんです。覚めると、また転がってしまう。

時々、自分のことは不思議だと思います。あまり眠りとれないようですが、朝になると、また問題なし起きれるし、あまり寝坊も感じないんです。一体、そのエネルギーはどこから来るでしょう。
言われたことがありますが、「年をとると、もっと睡眠時間が必要になるぞ」って。もう若くないですが、まだ老人ではない私は、まだまだ大丈夫だと思います。それにしても、すぐ眠れる人は羨ましい。。。

今までは色々な対策をとってみたです。例えば寝る前パソコンを使用ではなく読書する、ベッドに入ってからメディテーションのように深く息を吸うとか睡眠茶を飲む。そいつもどいつもあまりに役に立ったないんです。少し助かるのは睡眠のタイミングだと感じました。みんなにそれぞれに睡眠リズムがありまして、そのリズムによって眠りやすい・にくい、起こりやすい・にくい時があります。睡眠スケジュールに合わせて寝たり起きたりするのはやっぱり少し力になります。

他人の経験が教えて欲しいと思います。ぜひ、自分の意見や経験をコメントに書いてください。

The king is dead, long live the king!

December 14th, 2011

After another masterworks of forgettery* of my MP860, this time on a flight to Istanbul (not Constantinople) I had to re-use my old Samsung Yepp for a couple of days. The device still works fine but 500mb diskspace is not enough space anymore to store more than just a couple of albums containing contemporary .ogg files.

So I ordered a new Transcend Multimedia Player, a MP870. The device is not expensive and can do more stuff than I care e.g. the new version can play .rmv files. Thanks for the effort but I’m not interested in painfully converting any media files to watch them on a 5×4 cm screen.

Apart from that, it does everything the old MP680 was able to incl. synching with Banshee.

* Forgettery: Self-coined term which denotes carelessly forgetting e.g. a gadget under circumstances in which other people wouldn’t forget anything.

合格了新HSK

November 30th, 2011

如果你读了这个话题,你已经知道。。。

我合格了新HSK四级!很高兴!

为了考试新HSK,我参加了考试准备课。那个课别的人也合格了。所以我祝贺他们!

Don’t let Banshee scare your removable device!

October 9th, 2011

As you might know, Banshee replaced Rhythmbox as default media player in Ubuntu as of 10.10. Apart from being written in Mono (which I consider a weak point), Banshee is a more temporary media player with support for many portable media players and online stores.

I sport a Transcend MP860 which I described in one of my earliest post. So far, I was just manually copying files to and back to the device using the shell or Nautilus. It works but I wanted to see whether I can use Banshee for that as well, since my music collection of 5800+ songs is already being managed by Banshee.

The first couple of tries were not succesful. Dragging folders from 1) to 2) didn’t work as I was hoping.

Dragging folders from 1) to 2) didn't work

Banshee would start converting the .ogg files to .wav files. As the MP860 can play .ogg files, no conversion should be required.

The context menu of the device in Banshee was not helpful either: right-clicking the “8.0 GB FileSystem” and selecting “Device Properties” does supposedly allow you to change settings, but in my case only .wav was available.

As so often, Google to the rescue! Sometimes it’s frustrating though. Nothing but bug reports about format conversion problems or promising hints that end in 404 error pages. Fortunately, I found another post that treats a similar sort of problem with Banshee and removable devices. The steps outlined in that post helped me fix my problem. I will show you what I needed to change to fit it my requirements…

Below is a screenshot of my MP860 when I connect it via USB to the pc:

The directory structure on my MP860

These are the default directories and the MUSIC folder contains my audio files in a two-tiered structure e.g. <band>\<album>

Now, in order to make Banshee recognize the MP860 player as a media player that’s capable of playing .ogg files, I needed to touch the following file in the root of the MP860:

cd /media/disk (<– your player might be mounted with a different name)
touch .is_audio_player

Fire up your favourite text editor and edit .is_audio_player to contain the following lines:

audio_folders=MUSIC/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/ogg

It’s probably self-explaining, but here you are:
The first  line must contain the path to your music files.
The second line… I actually don’t know. My directory structure is two levels deep… I have no idea where Banshee would copy files if the folder_depth were 3.
The last line specifies the output format that your player knows. If the file format in Banshee matches the output format specified in that line, no conversion will take place. The files will just be copied. In his post (see the link above), Activ8specifies several non-ogg formats, separated by a comma. Check out his post for the exact syntax or feel free to experiment!

HTH some.

 

Getting attached to abstract things and what happens when they get lost ^_^

October 1st, 2011

I started this homepage more than ten years ago (and made no money out of it at all since then)

My registrar is in the U.S. and since I reserved this domain for ten years, I was pretty miffed when last weekend the registration run out. OF COURSE the administrative email address I registered back then has been non-functional for quite a while so I never got any warnings. After all, 10 years on the internet is like half an eternity!

Only when the homepage was not available anymore I noticed how dear it is to me. I don’t think I’m a cyberaddict (iAddict?) but I’ve put a lot of time into that site after all.

Fast forward to me scrambling to get my page back online… fortunately it all went well but since I re-registered the page for another ten years, maybe the same will happen again in 2021.

Starting folder in Python’s gtk.FileChooserDialog …

October 1st, 2011

I’m at best a knowledgeable beginner in Python but after seeing how badly Bashee Player is at synchronizing your music library with your portable devices, I thought I’d give writing my own synch tool a try…

First hurdle: The starting folder in the gtk.FileChooserDialog as taken from the Ubuntu package “python-gtk2-tutorial”

After reading several pages of documentation, I found a post where a user did something similar and the same worked for the filechooser.py that comes with the examples:

dialog = gtk.FileChooserDialog(“Open..”,
None,
gtk.FILE_CHOOSER_ACTION_OPEN,
(gtk.STOCK_CANCEL, gtk.RESPONSE_CANCEL,
gtk.STOCK_OPEN, gtk.RESPONSE_OK))
dialog.set_default_response(gtk.RESPONSE_OK)

dialog.set_current_folder(‘/path/to/your/folder’)

Of course, that’s still hard-coded but if you put in a variable and put the variable into the preferences that the user can edit… voilà!

Hope this helps someone!

Haltet Eure Umgebung sauber! II

September 17th, 2011

Im Januar (schon acht Monate her!) schrieb ich über meine Abfallsammelaktion im Bereich Allmend – Arn – Zugerstrasse in Horgen, ebenfalls als Leserbrief in der Züriseezeitung.

In den vergangenen Monaten ging ich noch ein paar weitere Male Abfall sammeln, allerdings nur noch Alu-Dosen und Pet-Flaschen. Brennbaren Müll nehmen ich nur noch selten mit, da dieser in Gebührensäcken entsorgt werden muss, die ich auch noch selber bezahlten müsste. Aber so verzweifelt bin ich noch nicht…

Jedenfalls gehe ich in letzter Zeit morgens und abends jeweils zu Fuss zum Bahnhof und lese jeweils weggeworfene Dosen auf, die ich entdecke.

Ausserdem bin ich diese Woche am Mittwochabend mit dem Fahrrad Richtung Arn, Obere Einsiederstrasse und Obere Bergstrasse Richtung Beichlen (Wädenswil) gefahren und habe wieder Dosen aufgesammelt. Vor allem in der Nähe der Schluchtalstrasse lagen ziemlich viele Dosen rum. Insgesamt waren es wohl 40 Dosen.

Auffallend ist immer wieder, wie viele Dosen Red Bull weggeworfen werden. 90% der Dosen sind Red Bull, die restlichen sind Bierdosen oder die Energy-Drinks aus Migros und Coop. Lassen sich daraus Rückschlüsse auf die Idioten schliessen, die einfach Dosen aus dem Auto werfen? Wahrscheinlich nur bedingt, aber wenn man schon älter ist (aber immer noch < 40) fühlt man sich leider doch gelegentlich im Klischee der egoistischen Jugend bestätigt.

Heute bin ich dem Fahrrad von der Allmend, Horgen nach Thawil zum Einkaufen gefahren. Leider kamen da auch wieder ziemlich viele Dosen zusammen, insgesamt wohl an die 20. Die Verteilung der Getränkemarken war gleich wie entlang anderen Strecken, auffallend war aber, dass ab Horgen Oberdorf via Feldweg, Feldstrasse bis zum Dörfli in Oberrieden nur sehr wenige Dosen lagen, dann aber ab alte Langstrasse (Höhe Big Ben Pub) bis Thalwil wieder vermehrt Dosen am Strassenrand lagen.
Meine Hypothese darüber ist, dass im Bereich Feldweg / Feldstrasse / Dörfli überdurchschnittlich viele Einfamilienhäuser liegen d.h. dass sich dort viele Eigenheimbesitzer befinden.
Diese Eigenheimbesitzer besitzen neben einem Eigenheim wohl auch ein Verantwortungsgefühl gegenüber ihrem Wohnquartier und Ihrer Strasse, während Mieter in Quartieren mit einer überdurchschnittlichen Anzahl Bewohner in 2. Generation oder 3. Generation Immigraten wohnen dieses Verantwortungsgefühl weniger ausgeprägt ist (“mir gehört das hier nicht, deshalb spielt es keine Rolle wenn ich Dosen auf die Strasse werfe”).
Als Unterstützung für diese kann ich anführen dass an der Einsiedlerstrasse, auf der Höhe Gstaldenrain, fast täglich wieder neue Dosen im Gebüsch oder an der Strasse liegen. Wir sprechen vom Gebiet mit den hohen Blöcken wo viele Einwohner ursprünglich aus Ländern wie Serbien, Kroatien, Montenegro etc. stammen.
Hier nun aber den Schluss “Ausländer werfen häufiger Abfall weg als Schweizer” zu ziehen wäre wohl vorschnell und zu verallgemeinernd. Wahrscheinlich müssen weitere Faktoren einbezogen wie Bildungsniveau, das sich auf die Art der Arbeit auswirkt, die jemand ausüben kann, welches sich wieder auf den Lohn auswirkt, welcher mitbestimmt wo jemand wohnen kann. Ausserdem bin ich überzeugt, dass nur ein kleiner Teil der Leute in solchen Wohnquartieren zu faul und rücksichtslos ist um den eigenen Abfall mit nach Hause zu nehmen.
Aber es liegt wohl in der Natur des Menschen zusammenzufassen und zu verallgemeinern. Und Dosen liegen am Boden, egal wie viel man darüber diskutiert wer sie nun weggeworfen hat.
Ausserdem stimmt es für mich, dass ich diese Dosen sammle und entsorge – ich kann damit zu einer angenehmeren Umgebung beitragen. Schöner wäre es allerdings, wenn das mehr Leute tun würden bzw. es gar nie so weit kommen würde.