Life in Paris, my universe and potentially everything

Fail of the Week

Things go wrong, a lot of them and each day – the short hand internet way of expressing this is by simple qualifying something as “FAIL”. As far as I know this has mainly been coined by this blog which has an impressive collection of examples of “fail” and is a good means of wasting a lot of time.

My personal fail of the week tipped up when I was trying to get a Canon printer to work over the network and got the following error message (also made me wonder again why network printing always has to be such a drama, but that’s a different story):

W [03/Mar/2009:18:20:24 +0100] [Job 100] recoverable: Error Number : 311
Printer is in use or an error has occurred. If an error has occurred,
eliminate the cause of the error.

Remarkably useless, really (and no, the printer wasn’t in use…).

[update] Since this seems to be a common problem (there are quite a few people researching this on Google), the only thing I found so far is that at least in my case it helps to first clear the print queue on my computer and then turn the printer off and on again – YMMV. The printer in question is a Canon Pixma MP210 connected to a “Neufbox” (apparently running Linux) and I’m using a MacBook Pro, but Windows boxes on the same network occasionally have the same problem.

In case you no more about the problem or have a solution to it, I’d be very thankful if you’d post it here as a comment or drop my a line…[/update]

Baseball WM 2009

The days that I actively played are long gone, but I still like Baseball as a sport, which is why I’ll post a little advertisement here. In case you’re in Germany and also like baseball, you might already know this but if not, there’ll be a small-scale baseball world cup in Regensburg later this summer, from the 9th to the 13th of September.

The four nations that are planning on each sending a team are the USA, China, Venezuela and Germany, so in case you share my passion for this sport, this probably is your best chance to go and see a couple of decent to great games live. Details and tickets can be had from the official site:

Short Update on the Thing With Brand Names

For those who have read and liked the post I did last year discussing brand names and the perils of internationalization, there’s an update on my favo(u)rite for frozen diet food (in case you don’t speak any German: the other post also explains why I think this is funny). Things seem to be working well for them, as I recently discovered they opened their own stores:

Probably on of Paris finest frozen food stores: KOT

Probably on of Paris' finest frozen food stores: KOT

This is a picture taken in St. Germain (here), and apparently they do also have a second store in Paris called the “KOT Lounge”.

It looks like they keep expanding as they already made it to e.g. Belgium and the French speaking part of Switzerland. I’m kind of curious if they’ll do their homework properly before expanding further east, i.e. to Germany or the German speaking parts of Switzerland… :) .