Royal Dutch Mint 2011 Commemorative Fiver (obverse)
The photo above shows a commemorative, silver-plated €5 coin issued by the Royal Dutch Mint in honor of their 100th anniversary. As a concession to modern technology, the reverse features a QR Code that encodes a URL—apparently the first of its kind. This is a bold move, as coins presumably last longer than URLs (not to mention QR Codes!), a reality that doesn’t seem to faze the designer, Juan José Sánchez Castaño:
Some people are worried about the fact that QR Codes will disappear in the future, or the coin will not be connected or linked any more to this webpage. [The] internet can also change or disappear in [a] few decades, and so [can] the coins, who knows? The Roman Empire disappeared centuries ago, but nowadays we still enjoy their coins and we know their meaning. As Marshall McLuhan said: “the medium is the message”. The QR Code is the message. The representation of the time we are living is the message, no matter what is encoded on it. The QR Code is a part of the design, part of the message and a beautiful way to close the circle of the one hundred years.
In April, Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) shipped with a new window manager called Ubuntu Unity. I tried to like it, really I did! But it just kept getting in my way. The Launcher made it harder for me to figure out what applications were running, the Mac-esque disappearing Global Menus were painful when I had several windows side-by-side, and the Dash forced me to know in advance what program I was looking for (recall is harder than recognition). What worries me about disabling it outright is that the upcoming release of Ubuntu (Oneiric Ocelot) will apparently not offer the classic window manager at all. In the meantime, I made the following changes to have a workable and consistent environment.
Disable Ubuntu Unity
To revert to the classic look and feel, select “Ubuntu Classic” from the Session select box in the bottom panel before you enter your password to login. You’ll only need to do this once. If Ubuntu automatically logs you in, “Log Out” using the on/off button in the upper-right and follow the previous instructions.
On the plus side, our new bungalow in Amed has wireless internet at 40,000 rupiah/hour, on the downside, they block port 22—a first in all of my travels! So I couldn’t SSH into my webhost and update Justinsomnia or La Vie Soleil via Subversion. Angst!
Picture me, on the couch of a budget hotel, laptop on lap, connected to wifi at $5 per 50 megabytes, surfing the web with images disabled (to save bandwidth), checking my email, paying off my credit cards, checking my bank account balance, cellphone in hand, calling Sprint to cancel my cell phone service, calling my bank and credit card companies to let them know I’m traveling.
I have to admit that paying for internet access by bandwidth is a little frustrating. I don’t want to run out in the middle of doing something important, so I take every available precaution to limit my usage. With Flash blocked and images disabled, I can get a lot done, but I do miss wandering around on Google Maps. And I haven’t had a chance to check up on blogs in over a month.
Stephanie and I found a rare cafe with free wifi where I was able to update all my container ship posts so that when you click on the image you get an enlarged version of the same. Check it out. I also spent some time wrapping my head around latitude and longitude GPS formats, so I went back and cleaned up what I’d posted to be a little more standard (with links to Google Maps in the degree-decimal format). Unfortunately the cafe didn’t have power outlets or public restrooms, so our time there was short-lived.
One minor setback. The satellite modem was held up by customs because I’d listed the value at $1,500. Apparently anything leaving the country with a value over $1,000 needs some additional export control form. I’m not even sure what the thing is “worth” since it was just a rental. Kicking myself right now for not putting down $500. And of course it was Friday night when I found out (it boggles the mind that I even got the notice, mailed to the budget hotel, which I’d entered as my return address, on the last night we were staying here), so I have to wait to do this on Monday. What else do I have to do, right? But it still burned me—especially because I was so good about shipping it back the very day we arrived in New Zealand. C’est la vie!
Update: Called New Zealand Post on Monday, explained the situation, they told me to fax the details to them. So I had to find a place to send a fax, and conveniently found one near where we’re staying. They released it for shipping on Tuesday, so hopefully it won’t arrive too long after I’d planned.
