heroid’s blog

Well, here we go with my story… One week ago i was trying to fix my brothers computer. While chatting on IRC from my laptop and a friend of mine, offered me one of his laptops one he didn’t use anymore. And i accepted the offer, and he shipped the laptop with a postal service in France called Cossemilio  If i recall.

Last Friday i got a letter from the Customs telling me that i should go and pick the laptop up, and on Monday I went to pick the laptop up with my cousin, we went to the Customs and they told us to go to Intereuropa and pay the Customs fee which was 110 € Duh! We went there and had to wait for half an hour for the guy who managed the bills, the friend that shipped the laptop wrote 400 € as total value of the laptop although its worth less.

Anyway, later we went to the Customs with the bill and told them that we paid and they got the laptop it was packed, then starving since i didn’t eat any breakfast and had to wake up at 6:00 to go to Prishtina and then Fushë Kosovë to pick the laptop up i went and bought a 7 Days and a Coke since i didn’t have time to get a Doner or Kebab, unlike the bus with which i came to Prishtina this bus was empty (The bus from Gjakova was full of people some where even standing) it was only me and a women as passagers, i left the laptop on a seat and slept a bit and listened to music after waking up casually.

After 2 hours in the bus i arrived back home with the laptop in a plastic bag, i walked fast back home because i had to go to school in 1:00 it was 12:20 when i arrived in Gjakova, at home i quickly left the laptop on a table and my father turned it on while i was walking upstairs to change my clothes into the School uniform, when i went downstairs my father told me that the screen was broken.

Pretty much the postal service did this, they threw the package with the laptop somewhere or left something over the package, so it broke, and i couldn’t file a complaint or anything because thats how things go here so Today i fixed the sccreen, the cd-rom and got a wireless USB antenna for the laptop and ended up spending 100€ in total 210€ for that price i could have bought a laptop locally in Kosovo.

I hope after the Goverment changes in Kosovo the Customs fees will be lower and i hope that the postal services will be also safer, and not making people end up paying lots of money…

Well, after almost a week of Organisating  it turned out to go well, we didn’t have that much people as in the Software Freedom day although it was really decent. Cmon who can get 10 new people for a Mozilla presentation on a saturday, we even had some guy come from Deçan, his name was Besart.

The first presentation i did was delayed, we had to make it at 10:00 but we started at 10:30 and i started talking about Mozillas history in General, then another presentation was from Jon my dear friend, he talked about Mozillas project called Jetpack, also there was another presentation from Endrit Vula a new member of our GNU/Linux User Group his presentation was about installing firefox in various operating systems.

Also we had some arguments with some people asking why i use firefox, and i showed him the real reasons, that it is Trustworthy, Secure, Fast, and flexible after all which web browser can preform almost all the stuff an operating system can, most of the people who came where Firefox users, in my presentation i covered lots of material like the History of Mozilla, where Mozilla is today, Firefox 4.0, Addons, Plugins, the firefox forks,  thunderbird, firefox personas and much more stuff.

I can upload the presentation somewhere, although it is in Albanian, i got to read all my notes, im using the presentation console in open office. Its awesome and doesn’t let you forget anything while presenting it and you can write various stuff about that slide, after the presentations Me, Jon, Endrit and Besfort and two other guys went to get some food, we went to this nice place called Allorja to get some burgers, we took some pictures, and there was an old guy he took the pictures of us and after that he said could you take a picture of me and my friend (his metalhead friend also old) that was hilarious, after that we went to visit the city for a bit and then went to have a coffee, i had some Bozë a fermented traditional drink and a piece of cake, there we made some bussiness cards for Besfort with my “Wife” how im calling my laptop :), and they where too busy so they couldnt so we went for another bozë and some tulluma at Sharri a place they make the best sweet stuff in the city, we had some motivating conversations, there was this guy called Adrian who came only once at a meeting last year and i have given him an Ubuntu cd at the time, he actually uses ubuntu and likes it a lot, it was nice to hear that, it didn’t turn out to be really cool, although it was productive after all, we have some more people.

And Besart from Deçan said that he is looking forward to get into gnu/linux and start a GLUG at his city until then he will be visiting us every saturday. Anyway i learned something after this. When i want to organize something the next time i should advertise a month in advance, just in case it goes right and we get more people.

p.s I also did an nice poster design, and we advertised on the internet (in telegrafi.com, pcworld.al and openworld.al). This event was also supported by Mozilla and was in the list of the Mozilla Balkans Events.

A blogpost made by Besfort Guri about the Mozilla Day in albanian: http://besiguri.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/mozilla-day-ne-gjakova/

Pictures by besfort: http://www.flickr.com/photos/besfort-guri/sets/72157625051888185/