phew !

A good friend of mine sent me this picture of his desk at work, located a good 50 km south of Munich.

We all know that the higher the office temperature, the lower the office productivity, so i wonder why some employers just refuse to shell out 400EUR for a decent airco - knowing that they are likely to lose more money overall because of the reduced productivity !

Anyway, Thomas: perhaps you can apply some of the tricks described here to keep your head cool while coding away !

Want your own personal bank card?

A couple of days ago, my bank announced the availability of a new service: they put together a website allowing you to create and personalize your own bank card. Woo-hoo, I thought and headed over to their site. So I put together below design, thinking my wife would be thrilled to have the Czech flag embedded on her card.



To my surprise however (I didn’t read the small print ofcourse - always read the small prints when dealing with banks!) I got an email the next day that my design was rejected. They pointed me to a pdf (dutch only) explaining what is not allowed on the card.

Here’s a rough translation :

• copyrighted material like logos, slogans, brands, drawings, trademarks, domain names, company names.
  
  (Fair enough i guess, but what if you’re the copyright holder ?)
  
  
• advertising or promotional material
  
  (understandable)
  
  
• images of well-known persons like actors, musicians, sportsmen, comic-heroes or any images referencing these.
  
  (darn)
  
  
• addresses, phonenumbers, URL’s, account numbers and PIN numbers
  
  (duh)
  
  
• naked (or half naked) adults or children, or sexually explicit material
  
  (guess the lawyers wanted to make sure on the wording for this one, being in Belgium and all that … )
  
  
• images portraying hate, violence, discrimination, obscenity, blasphemy, political ideas, religion, criminal activities, asocial behaviour or groups of people acting in an asocial manner, guns, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, insults, payment methods of any kind, symbols like flags or the Red Cross.
  

I honestly believe they could’ve made it easier for themselves had they simply reversed the rules and defined what is allowed rather than what’s not !

So to summarize: this doesn’t look nearly as interesting as I thought it would :-(

I will still scavenge openclipart though and see if i can come up with something decent …

Any other suggestions ?