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hippietrail

07:13

no naked urls! but i don't know what a naked oy is in html d-;

and i found out about another bus from greece to georgia!

Roflcoptr

nice

how long does it take?

hippietrail

i don't think she gave me all the details but i'll get a person from the hostel to call them later for the rest

Roflcoptr

cool

good service

hippietrail

i got the name address and phone number of the agent in thessaloniki and advice that they're the best one (-:

hostels in greece are very few but very very good!

Roflcoptr

07:33

yes

sounds an interesting place

to do some backpacking

hippietrail

for me everywhere is interesting (-:

Martin Tapankov

@hippietrail: I was always curious what a seasoned backpacker puts in their bag -- is there some things that are absolutely essential for you to carry, but not for average Joe Traveller?

hippietrail

07:59

@MartinTapankov: I have a theory that all backpackers have at least one thing that other backpackers think is totally insane to carry around on a trip

until recently I always travelled with a pair of rollerblades

but now instead i mainly carry way more clothes than typical seasoned backpackers and way more books, especially language learning books and dictionaries

but this is of course a way to save money on gym membership and sporting equipment since carrying my stuff is a free workout and a great way to get back in shape and lose the weight i put on while i was at home working and saving money to travel

hippietrail

09:53

wow that was difficult

i can't get se chat to work in google chrome anymore. it says "just a second" for hours

Martin Tapankov

"clean cookies and restart browser" is the universal reply from SE support

hippietrail

i've tried control f5

Martin Tapankov

hard refresh?

hippietrail

i'm not restarting all my fricking hundred windows because of one broken piece of crap browserware! d-;

i ended up getting it to work in firefox. opera had the same problem as chrome this time

there should be a way to "restart" a tab that's exactly like restarting the browser but only for one tab

i tried closing the tab and opening the chat room in a new tab

anyway time to go out in the cold sun and look for bookshops and whatnot. i'll also look for a cafe with wifi though (-:

Mark Mayo

10:34

Firefox for the win eh ;)

Oh yeah, just been on the weekly #ttot (Travel Talk on Twitter) discussion (@AnkurBanerjee saw it too) where the post code 2FABE came up

it's something I've known about for a while, and having been a tester in past lives tried it out, as have other friends, and have always had it work (well apart from the one I sent a week ago, waiting on that one still)

it caused a stir on #ttot, so I made a question:

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Q: 2FABE - the 'secret' stamp postcard code?

I was told about this about three years ago, that if you were desperate and didn't have time to buy stamps for a postcard, merely putting the code '2FABE' would get your postcard to its intended destination. Sceptical at the time, I googled it and found nothing. Now googling it has a couple of ...

and tweeted it out as well

the #ttot continues in 11 hours time, if any of you are twitter users (9.30GMT on Tuesdays, both AM and PM)

Ankur Banerjee

11:13

Wonder whether it'd work in non-English speaking countries too.

Mark Mayo

11:24

worked from Greece and Malaysia, and Spain for that matter. And South Africa, which is partially non-English :)

Martin Tapankov

The Great Postmen Conspiracy

This makes a great feature question

Ankur Banerjee

11:48

Hey, BTW, did you know you can send anything by post from Malaysia to the US?

Roflcoptr

good question

i think we could push it

to generate some views

Ankur Banerjee

Heck. I meant you CANNOT send anything from Malaysia to US

hippietrail

12:17

time for a nice warm greek cafe

did you try variants of 2FABE to see what happens?

cannot send "just anything" or "cannot send anything at all"?

hippietrail

12:32

found even more greece/georgia bus info too

Mark Mayo

13:38

hmm

this site has a twitter account: twitter.com/StackTravel

then I noticed twitter.com/myvector was retweeting most of these questions

and that it has a website: travel-gurus.com

but it's been disabled

oddly it was a stackexchange 1.0 site

@hippietrail no, just tried those letters. Seemed a pity to waste postcards ;)

Martin Tapankov

Every SE sites (automatically?) gets a Twitter account some time after the private beta

hippietrail

where's you're experminter's spirit? (-:

for me, twittering is still only something small birds do

i need some advice on how to answer a question

on the greece-georgia bus question i've so far done one answer per company and each has received votes but now that i've found a third company i can make some gerneralizations

Martin Tapankov

Summarize everything in a CW answer and accept it. leave the others as they are

Mark Mayo

@Martin, sure, with regards to StackTravel

hippietrail

so i don't know whether to add info about the third company as a third answer, or delete one of the existing answers and merge that info plus my new info into one big bloated mega-answer

aha a third option (-:

Mark Mayo

13:46

but not the other one

and they've been tweeting since the start of the beta, impressively

hippietrail

is anyone any good at compositing two photos into one image using either the gimp or lightroom?

Martin Tapankov

Yeah, this is what I've been doing on TeX-SE, and it works great, if I get different answers to a question and it's difficult to choose "the best", then I write one big CW entry to summarize and compare solutions, and choose that as accepted. The other entries continue to get reputation as usual

hippietrail

i also have a huge bounty on the question so don't want to subvert that in any way

Martin Tapankov

You don't have to award the reward to the accepted answer

Another choice is to ask somebody to summarize the info for you, and award the bounty to that answer and accept it

hippietrail

i intend to award it to anyone who is not me and contributes any detailed answer (-: for instance i know there is probably a bus every day of the week but i've only tracked down three. also all of my info except one bit covers only thessaloniki and not also athens

also all of my stuff is patchy due to language barrier problems where some agents couldn't converse with me at all, and pieces got lost going through a middle person, such as the athens details

hippietrail

13:54

well there's some markdown that doesn't work in chat d-;

Martin Tapankov

"Currently the StackExchange image host imgur.com is experiencing issues with uploading images. "

got this on another SE site

hippietrail

no takers on joining two images then? i want to upload the photos of the two travel agents i found but i want them to be next to each other instead of each one huge photo on its own

hippietrail

14:16

this might do the trick:

►

hippietrail

14:31

argh! i hate graphics software!! \-:

grr layers suck

Martin Tapankov

actually the easiest is with MS Paint..

hippietrail

it doesn't handle images bigger than the screen very well

Martin Tapankov

yeah, true.. but if you run into trouble, I guess I could help.. I'm kind of resizing pictures for a living here

hippietrail

turns out my case was slightly different to the tutorial on youtube so it didn't work

i have two photos taken with the same digicam, but i took one horizontal and one vertical. i want to stick to square-cropped versions of them into one side-by-side rectangular image and scale it down a bit

i'm gonna try again with the horizontal one first...

nope because crop changes the size of the whole canvas or whatever you call the overall image rectangle

oh my god. after all that trouble it seems SE no longer allows me to upload an image from my computer but only specify a URL! wtf??

Martin Tapankov

14:54

see my message from above

I think imgur is having some troubles

hippietrail

would be nice to say that rather than just have the option silently vanish

i did see your message but i didn't deduce what the problems would manifest as

Martin Tapankov

well, you can always complain on MSO, if you dare tread in the jungles of opinionated trolls

8

Q: What's wrong with Imgur? Why can't I upload any images?

Imgur is having some trouble I guess. I can't upload any images on Stack Exchange. It looks they have some maintenance issues.

support images imgur

hippietrail

it seems everything computer related is making me grumpy today

if it's on meta.SO they can stick it up their jumper i'm only using the site specific metas from now on even for bug reports

Martin Tapankov

Yeah, I only go there after a stiff drink and an ample lunch

hippietrail

15:10

they are deaf, blind, dumb, stupid, loud, and trigger-happy, and possibly either drunk or insane. and did i mention bloodthirsty?

Martin Tapankov

oh, but it's so much fun if you are just looking for a good old-fashioned flame war

hippietrail

15:28

it's almost able to compete with #perl on IRC

i decided on a compromise. i submitted one more answer for one more company running a bus to georgia, and also a community wiki answer covering overall info

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A: What are the bus (coach) connections between Thessaloniki, Greece and Tbilisi, Georgia?

OK after even more research and legwork I have reached some generalizations (any of which may be wrong so please correct me): There are not actually bus companies operating buses between Greece and Georgia, but travel agencies chartering buses. A bus departs Greece headed for Georgia each day o...

including a photo of a nearby prominent landmark from wikipedia but not my photo of the storefronts of the travel agencies

now that siesta is over it's time to go check the last remaining used bookshop to see if they have the item i collect...

Martin Tapankov

they have siesta in Greece?

in the middle of October?

hippietrail

i was surprised too

but seeminly on alterate days!

on the days with siesta shops stay open into the evening. on those without they close really early

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