This has bugged me for a while, but I havn't bothered to rant about it yet. Paypal. I have an account (with the imaginatory name jonas@gnu.org), but I have no way to withdraw money from it (yet). The reason? With Paypal, you can only withdraw money to a US bank. This means that I (a) have to find a US bank to open an account in, and (b) find a way to transfer funds from the US bank to my normal bank.

Why is this impractical? Because I'm in Europe. I can't very well fly over to the US just to open a US bank account to use for withdrawing Paypal funds. The solution? Find a bank that allows foreigners to open accounts from abroad. This seems pretty much impossible.

Next rant; C++. I decided that my first step will be C++, from which I will then evolve into learning Java. The reason is that I took one look at C++ and decided it is crap, so I might as well learn it first and then be able to appreciate the beauty (relative!) of Java, instead of being depressed by the uglyness of C++ after having learned Java. Maybe I'll find time to finish up C++ tomorrow, but there's a possiblity it will take until friday until I can find the time for it.

Tomorrow will be spent on two tasks; first going to a drivers school and getting some papers so I can eventually (within four years) get a drivers license. Eventually, I may need a drivers license if I'm to work more than 10-20 kilometers from home. This leads to the second task of tomorrow; visiting a city roughly 70 kilometers from where I live to see if the job as IT manager is something for me.

And finally, something to relate to yesterday; after I wrote the entry I spent some more time tinkering with OpenAFS and eventually got it to work with surprisingly little effort and only two or three reboots. Not only am I able to access my own AFS cell, but I've also made a mountpoint for Stacken's (stacken.kth.se) AFS cell, so I can see their public information, which is a nice nicety of AFS.