tobias.kochs-online.net

Because I have to trade casual nekkidness against shirt and tie soon, I was looking for a low priced cleaning service here in Paderborn today. Since results are applicable and so maybe of interest to others, I made a short list of charges for shirts and other possible dis-/advantages of these services:

Grünewald GmbH: 1.80 €; large parking lot at no charge; Marktkauf right next to it; closes at 20:00
Die Textilpflege: 1.85 €; kind personal; in exceptional cases cleaning over night; chargeable parking at the underground parking lot Königsplatz
Textilreinigung W. Meier: 1.85 €; pickup and delivery service (5 € inside of Paderborn); closes at 18:30
Ruhe Textilreinigung GmbH: 1.85 €; noone reachable by phone at 19:45 o’clock; chargeable parking at the car park Liborigalerie

To my disappointment none of the companies offers a flatrate. Usually the shirts are ready for pickup after two days everywhere. Except for Die Textilpflege all the imployees I talked to were so impolite, it caught my eye – and I do consider myself as being quite tolerant toward a lack of service.

Update: On my way home from work I stopped at Waschsalon Karin (somtimes called Waschsalon Isik u. Kelinc as well) in Sennelager today. And guess what – they elude the dictates of the textile care cartel here. 1.60 € per shirt for dry cleaning, 2.10 € for washing, ironing and locker-ready. In addition they do have a real nice employee and I cannot help feeling you could bargain for a package deal or a flatrate – maybe that’s because of the owner’s origin…

If WordPress’ visual editor TinyMCE stops working after you have edited the config file tiny_mce_config.php and begins droping error messages telling you “Cannot modify header information – headers already sent”, make sure the config file doesn’t start with a byte-order mark (e. g. 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF). It seems Windows Notepad writes these bytes to the file if you edit and save it with Notepad.

To get TinyMCE running again, get a fresh copy of the config file and overwrite your flawed one with it. If you need to edit the config file try a different editor. WordPad did the job for me. Just to make sure you are not running into the same problem again, check the edited file with a hex editor of your choice and see that it’s not starting with EF BB BF.

When Zooomr released it’s API to the public earlier this summer, I hoped someone would use it to add Zooomr support to WordPress. This topic became important again, when my brother began to fill up our precious webspace with more and more photos. I recommended Zooomr to him as a hosting service for his pictures, but since he’s not that much of a techie, I started thinking about an easier way to add Zooomr photos to WordPress articles than looking up the photo URLs by hand at Zooomr. This is how I found Trent Gardner’s great WordPress Flickr Manager – a plugin for just this purpose. Unfortunately the plugin is focussed on Flickr as you can guess by the name.

So I had to rewrite some of the code to match it Zooomr’s API and to my honest surprise it worked quite well. The plugin reached sort of a first stable alpha and although not all features supported by WordPress Flickr Manager are working, the most important of them do. This is a feature matrix of WordPress Zooomr Manager:

Because I’m a bit short of spare time right now, I’m gonna release the modified plugin in it’s current state. I’d LOVE to see someone improve it or – even better – integrate both Flickr and Zooomr support into Trent’s WordPress Flickr Manager. If you need further information on the modified code or the Zooomr API, I will happily provide it for you as far as I can.

Download WordPress Zooomr Manager

When I just came home, I had to discover my new neighbor’s dog took a dump right in front of my apartment’s door. As if that wasn’t enough, the dog also whizzed below the flower box and had a fight with my watering can. Needless to say that the owner obviously doesn’t even think about taking care of the mess.