Soldering

This week is a special week called… Project Week! Ah yes, I remember it as clear as yesterday. Last Project Week, which is about two months ago, we had the entire week off! We were the new kids and the Project Week was mostly used for classes higher up, so we had nothing to do. This time though, they did find something for us to do and it’s… soldering. Two days… six hours each and nothing but soldering.

It sucks! But I guess nothing has only fun sides. Every job has it’s downside and soldering is the downside on this job. We need to be able to do quick repairs should something break and if that involves some minor use of a soldering iron then we are expected to fix it.

However 90% of our classroom has no idea how to do it. I did it as a kid a long time ago but I do not remember it being this bloody difficult. How hard can it be to solder two pieces of metal together? Okay in all honesty it’s not the soldering per cé that difficult, it’s the bending and keeping things in place that’s driving me insane. Whenever I try to bend something a certain way the metal just shouts: “FUCK YOU!” and seems to go live a life of it’s own. And when I do finally get it bent the way I want it I have to keep a tiny piece of metal against another tiny piece of metal and solder it together. You do know metal conducts heat quite quickly don’t you?

So yea, I haven’t burned myself yet though and I hope it’s not going to happen but the assignment they gave us was just retarted. We have to make the letters of our class code with metal and each letter can only be a little over 1 inch high. It’s a precision task like you wouldn’t believe and it’s really trying my patience. Today we have another six hours of soldering ahead of us so… more on this lovely subject later.

International Currency & The Internet

A little something offtopic I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention are the downright scams companies are trying to pull off on the internet these days. I’m sure everyone knows what I mean. An American based company sells their product in America for 50 dollars BUT when you try to buy that product from Europe they suddenly change the dollar sign and change it to a euro sign. So 50 dollars suddenly became 50 euro’s and at the current exchange rate I won’t have to tell anyone that’s some major bullshit, especialy because over here we ALSO have to pay 19% taxes over those 50 euros.

Let me just give you the math on a 50 dollar product right here:

$50,- = €38,- at the current exchange rate. (If I were to pay in dollars I would save 12 euro’s.)

€50,- = $65,- at the current exchange rate. (The selling company just made 15 dollars extra!)

19% taxes over €50,- = €9,50.

Which would mean that instead of saving €12,- I’d be paying €21,50 EXTRA! Yea that’s easy money, isn’t it. I’m surprised something like this is even legal.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up now is because I just noticed to biggest scam in history when it comes to the above matter. My Norton account expired so I went to the Norton website to renew it when I noticed that a new version (Norton 2009) had been released. I decided to upgrade from 2008 to 2009 and checked how much it would cost for an existing costumer to renew his subscription AND upgrade his software. After some searching this appeared to cost me a mere $50,- for a 1-year subscription + Norton Internet Security 2009.
I then decided to take the easy road and upgrade my subscription from my Norton software so I was sure everything went as it should. The software directed my to the Dutch version of the Norton website which was no surprise, until I saw the Dutch prices. On this version of the website I suddenly had to pay €108,- to renew my subscription and that didn’t even include the new software! I literally started laughing, this was absolutely ridiculous!! Luckily I’m keen enough to find a way around this bullshit and just bought the 50 dollar package from the website. It came as no real surprise that my Norton software then started to complain about the code being invalid but a quick stop to the live helpdesk fixed that problem. Not only did they give me a working code for the 2009 subscription, they also added 7 days to it for the trouble.

So this is just a general warning to everyone who regularly buys things overseas: Put some time into checking if you can pay with dollars instead of your own currency, even if you have to do some effort. It can save you a LOT of money!

Robin

Meer over dit onderwerp:

1. Solderen moet je leren
2. Moving Day!
3. OnAir OnLine: Het Begin van 9 Weken Stress
4. Making a Short Movie
5. Vacation Is over!