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Am I a trader ?

I’m an IT geek with a real affection for FLOSS, but I’m not anti not-FLOSS (hmmm, weird sentence 🙂 ). I also use Microsoft on a daily base, Mac on a weekly base because my customers use it. At my company nearly all software is opensource, +90% of our operating systems are Linux.
I always try to push my customers to FLOSS software but in the end they decide what happens. I understand that some people see it black and white, but in my daily business live I’ve seen a lot of cases where opensource isn’t the best choice (yet). I would love to bring a product up to speed with the closed source competitors, but most of my customers don’t want to wait on that, so they choose a closed source product. We as IT people see that this is a bad choice in the ultimate end, but in the near future they need a solution and then the closed source is a better option.

So am I a trader? Hmm in my eyes not, but then again in some people there eyes I maybe am. Like the saying goes:
The truth is in the eye of the beholder 🙂

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the friendlyness of belgium banks

Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to the bank. We wanted to know how much we could loan to buy a house. In the weekends we are always in my birth-town and during the week we are in Leuven. So because it was weekend we scheduled an appointment with the bank in my birt-town. The day started badly as we couldn’t find a parking space, I had to drive 3 rounds before finding one. I already dropped my girlfriend off at the bank. When I entered the first thing the lady said was that our bank account wasn’t attached to the their office but to the office in Leuven. She mentioned this several times during the conversation.

She started explaining all kinds of stuff, things we actually didn’t need to know. We just wanted some figures to know in what kind of categoy we could start looking for houses. After an hour here next appointment showed up and we still didn’t have an answer, so I bluntly said, could you please just give us figure. At the moment we still don’t have one and that was the purpose of this meeting. So she made one for us. When she did, she saw that there was a lot of information missing on our bank account to give us an accurate figure. So she had to improvise a bit.

During the whole conversation she was unfriendly, simply because we weren’t attached to their office. I understand that they probably get funding according to the bank accounts attached, but you don’t have to be unfriendly. What I don’t understand is why she did this. Doesn’t she understand that it is thanks to people like us, who want to loan from there company that she gets paid? I go into a bank and want to get a loan, I’ll be paying 100.000 € interests part of this money is here paycheck. Okay probably the bank in Leuven will get slightly more but then again thanks to here we won’t loan it at the bank we visited so neither will get the money. I really hate it that most flemish banks think they are almighty, because they are not. If I want I can close all my bank accounts and move to another bank. It’s a free market, remember?

In the end,my girlfriend and I decided we are going to move all our money from our current banks to another bank (maybe even a not Belgium bank).