Flavio's blog » Uncategorized

Smooth operator

Flavio — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:52:14 +0000

This Friday the 13th was special. I’m not in any way superstitious, mind you, but I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary either. So imagine my pleasure when, rather than bad luck, I got an unexpected phone call: my new BMW F800GS was ready, registered and fueled, a whole week before the estimate I was given about two months ago. Not that I was fearing any significant delay from the Bayerische, but I’ve come to learn that such estimates are usually a bit optimistic… Between me and her stood only an unending pile of papers to sign and, of course, a sizable check.

Already a few hundred km on the odometer, unfortunately most of them under cloudy skies and even some light rain. Smooth is the keyword — smooth engine, smooth handling. Now if only the weather could get a little bit better…

A couple of reviews and in-depth descriptions for you:

from webBikeWorld
from American Motorcyclist

“He move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy…”

Free as in “we decide which fonts you use”

Flavio — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:09:08 +0000

Yesterday I found an article on digital rights management on the GNU web site. The article itself is interesting, although IMHO a little bit too biased towards the “see how many freedoms they could take away from us” angle — but that’s the way RMS thinks. However, I was disappointed to see that the article — the entire www.gnu.org site, in fact — was using the Bitstream Vera Sans font. Here’s the relevant part from the style sheet, and note the comment:

font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; /* favour free fonts!! */

Now don’t get me wrong, I like the Bitstream Vera fonts just as much as you do and I use them extensively, not just because they’re free, but because they do indeed look quite good — at least on Linux. But I was reading that article from the office on a Windows XP machine and the Bitstream Vera fonts don’t look good there, or at least not as good as Verdana. Anyway, that’s not the real point: if one prefers a different font, perhaps just as free like Isabella, what can (s)he do?

The funny part is, Stallman’s own site (http://www.stallman.org) doesn’t force you to use free fonts…

Bookmarks-wiki

Flavio — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:14:26 +0000

Finally, I put my bookmarks in a wiki.

(of course, it’s not user-editable; not yet, at least)