I think the standard of living in Poland will decrease during the next 2-3 years. The GDP growth doesn’t cause the increase  of salaries, because most of it is being consumed by administration, and stupid money transfers, like the promotion of unemployment or earlier retirements for privileged groups. That’s why i think more often about the emigration.

However, I still don’t know which country should I chose. I’m not going to move to any country with worse perspectives than Poland. This is why I don’t consider Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia etc, despite quite warm climate. Southern Europe is also not an option due to current fiscal crisis – even bigger than Polish. I don’t like Scandinavian socialism, despite relatively high salaries there.  The best option for me would be some non-EU country, but that’s currently impossible, or at least difficult.

Personally, I thought of Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria or Germany. Czech language is quite similar to Polish, so it would be easy for me to learn it. I was to Czech Republic last summer and I liked it – nice people, beautiful country and excellent beer Regarding German-speaking countries – I know German basics, but I can learn more. Do you think those countries are good choice? Or maybe you could recommend me something?

I agree with some points – for example, that consumption has dominated our lives. This is because the global overproduction, thus increased supply, of material things. The good example may be a computer games industry, which creates the demand for a new hardware. They work as a “fashion creators”, but working for IT instead of clothing I don’t play computer games, so my 2008 netbook is doing very well with most of its daily tasks, like browsing the web, watching videos or listening to music. I also bought my simple Nokia 2700 in 2008 and it’s still working (but I have to admit that I’m thinking of buying a new phone).

Some tricks that companies made on us are very cruel. There are even magazines (like this or this) which consist only on commercial articles, tests and descriptions of different – mostly electronic – stuff, targeted to typical consumers, making us want all these things.

]]> http://mike987.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/the-story-of-stuff/feed/ 0 mike987 http://mike987.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/firefox-or-iceweasel-5-in-debian/ http://mike987.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/firefox-or-iceweasel-5-in-debian/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:46:13 +0000 mike987 http://mike987.wordpress.com/?p=262 ]]> I used to work on Iceweasel 3.5, which was installed by default in Debian Wheezy (testing). But after I’ve read about a new release of Firefox and its advantages (mostly how fast it is), I decided to switch.

If you want to  install Iceweasel 5.0 (which is the same as Firefox 5.0) on your Debian-powered computer, there’s a simple way to do it. You just need to add:

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, followed by:

wget -O- -q http://mozilla.debian.net/archive.asc | gpg --import

and then just simply do apt-get update and apt-get install iceweasel, which in fact will update your current Iceweasel installation to the latest release. (You can find more information about installation here)

I must admit that this update was a good idea – the new version of browser is much faster than the previous 3.5, which I’ve been using till now (but still not as fast as Windows version). It also uses less memory and processor. All add-ons and plugins work fine with new Iceweasel (excepting one, but it isn’t even worth to mention).

That’s what I heard from my boss some time ago.

There was a vacancy in my department and our principal asked if anyone would like to apply. As I currently have the lowest position in the department, I decided to apply for it. Unfortunately, my boss told me that despite I have all required skills, he is not willing to let me take this position, because he was looking too long for a good person to do my job and he doesn’t want to lose me.

Few days later I also had a conversation with my boss. He explained me more detailed reasons of my rejection. Starded talking something about better opportunities for my self-development on the current position, and that he doesn’t want to lose one of his best employees. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound reliable – especially considering the fact that:

1. I’m the only person in his department who is still temporary-hired, which means I’m the first one to fire,
2. I”m also the least paid employee in the department

Boss promised me also "soon promotion" – I just have to wait about one year, because currently all promotions have been canceled due to weak financial situation of the company. (Here I must explain that the promotion in my company sometimes means just switching to fixed-period contract instead of current temporary hire, or just changing the position name with greater responsibility, without salary change).

I think my boss underestimates the opportunity of my quit.

It started in 2009 – few months after I came back from Finland. I had some savings, but they were going to finish and I didn’t want to be financially dependent on my parents. So I was looking for a job while writing my bachelor thesis. For some job which would give me some money for living, letting me develop my skills and gain my professional experience at the same time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one… so I started working for a telemarketing company.

It was outsourced project of selling mobile phones with subscription for the biggest mobile operator in Poland, conducted by external company. I hated my job from the first day and I knew I quit when I’ll find something better. Our office was in a big room (or rather hall) with cubicles. Every work station consisted of a computer (with Debian on board!), an IP phone and headphones. When you enter this hall, all you can hear are lines from the sales script, like “this solution is prepared especially for you“, “it will let you save money” or “where do you want us to send this wonderful set?“, repeated by telemarketers.

In fact, telemarketing is very hard and stressful job, despite it doesn’t seem to be.  You have to read your sales script dozens times a day, hearing “thanks, i’m not interested” in  every 9 of 10 calls. But despite that you know the customer won’t buy it, you still need to keep trying. The script is so boooring that after few days of work you stop thinking of what you are saying. Every day looks exactly the same. After some time you don’t even pay attention on what your customers are saying – you just answer their questions automatically. You should be pushy, ruthless and rude. And patient. Patience is very important to not discourage yourself., when you hear “no” almost all the time. I think the most of people are not aware of the specific character of telemarketer’s job when they receive a sales call.

Despite the fact that I considered this job to be just temporary, I’ve spent there six months. Six longest months in my life. Suddenly I took my headphones off and told my manager that I quit. Just like that, without having any other job – it was a spontaneous decision. It was exactly one year ago but I remember that day as it was yesterday. The sun was shining when I left the company and everything seemed more beautiful for me, even the fact that I have no job I decided I will never work as a salesperson again. But never say never…

I decided to wake this blog up. The reason is – I’d like to improve my written English. I want to stay in touch with the language I used to speak for almost a year. Besides, someone may find useful the stuff I write.

What I’m going to write about? That’s a tough question – lack of topics is often the beginning of the end of a blogger. I’ll start with some updates from my personal life (and I don’t care that no one is interested – I just want to practice English), maybe some tips for Linux or Aspire One users. I can’t exclude more personal posts, like my opinions about current affairs.

So expect a new post soon!

1. Select the chart placed in OpenOffice.org Calc and copy it (Ctrt+C).
2. Open OpenOffice.org Drawing application.
3. Paste the copied chart (Ctrl+V).
4. From the File menu, select the Export option.
5. Choose the output format (JPEG) and filename. If you want the output image to be cropped to chart size, simply tick the Selection box.

And this is the final effect:

Good luck!

I bought my domain in Polish domain registering company nazwa.pl for approx. 3€ I use free web hosting on orgfree.com – they provide very good hosting service with 500MB disk space, 5GB daily or 100TB (!) monthly traffic limit, php, MySQL5 database, FTP support and phpMyAdmin (whatever it means) – it’s much more than my WordPress installation requires, and that’s all for free! Moreover, we can install WordPress, phpBB or joomla with just one click. I think it’s the best free hosting I could find.

I also have another (commercial) website idea, but it’s still in its infancy so I think it’s too early for sharing. I can only tell it’s something connected with social blogging. I’ve installed joomla! on my other orgfree.com account and now I’m testing my idea.

So if you understand Polish, you’re welcome to visit www.stocktrader.pl!

How did I fix it? Instead of the line:

/usr/local/bin/acerfand

in my /etc/rc.local file, I added:

start-stop-daemon –start –name acerfand –startas /usr/local/bin/acerfand –background

Now the acerfand script is executed at startup. I hope this tip may be helpful for somebody.

EDIT:  There should be double minuses before –start, –name, –startas and –background, but – as Erwin noticed – wordpress transforms double minus into dash.

Hint: if you want to reinstall system instead of upgrading, and keep all your installed software, the trick is very simple – it requires using just three commands. Before formatting drive, you should save your packages list in a file by performing dpkg –get-selections > installed-packages-list in terminal. After fresh system installation, you can install all packages from the list by typing dpkg –set-selections < installed-packages-list, then sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade. You can also edit the list and remove lines containing the software you don’t need, but you should watch out on dependencies. Reinstallation may take some time, depending on how much packages you have on your list – in my case, it took over 2h. (I found this trick here, but hte command dselect just didn’t work for me).

Installation was incredibly fast – it took about 20 minutes to install it from pendrive. (Nice surprise – wireless works out-of-the-box in live CD version!) After installation, I noticed huge improvement in booting time against the previous version (even though I was using customized kernel) – now system boots in about 30 sec, measured from grub to login screen. Login screen itself has also new, refreshed appearance, as well as the default Gnome theme.

All hardware in Aspire One works out-of-the-box, excepting the right-side card reader (the left-side one works). Even the image from the built-in webcam in my opinion is better and doesn’t frame.

OK, now it’s time to tell about bad experiences. When I logged in first time after installation, system freezed and all I saw was black screen and a pointer. Even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn’t help and I had to hard reset my machine. Next time everyhing was ok. I don’t know what wat the reason, maybe some of the files from my /home catalogue (which I left) weren’t compatibile with the new Gnome version. I also had problems with sound while using Skype (sometimes I couldn’t hear anything during call), I hope to fix it soon.