Weblog | August 2004

The Internet is 35 years old.

After standing in line at the postoffice with Sting-fans and Faithless-fans, I finally got my hands on the Rammstein tickets. Hurah!

Hold on, windows update deemed it necessary to install XP service pack 2. Hope everything will turn out okay.
Update: everything seems fine. So far.

A bunch of things I wanted to mention. I installed Workrave just now, to help manage my (micro)breaks. Read this Tricks of the Trade article, which has some interesting tips. And then there's the LOTR Sting FX Sword from the ThinkGeek newsletter. Very cool.

Father Ted is still grand. Time for another marathon.

Went on a bit of a shopping spree today. Bought a bunch of computer games, something I hadn't done in a while. But they were having a sale. Can you blame me? ;-)
So now I own Settlers IV, Anno 1503 and -finally- Empire Earth. I also bought the Hobbit and half of the first season of ER on DVD.

Filled out a survey in order to participate in the beta program for the upcoming ColdFusion release, which is called Blackstone. Hope I'm selected.

They're making fun of Black Metal. I do appreciate the music, but the author is right. The look can be hilarious. I just read Why specs matter. Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes. Gotta love that analogy.

Finally got round to upgrading my local PHP installation to version 5. All went well, except for the MySQL extensions which are turned off by default and which took me a while to realise. Oh, Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 from the manual might come in handy to.

I'm pleased to hear Therion will be joined by Tristania and Trail of Tears in november.

First of all, I finally got my hands on an MP3 Player. It's wonderfully tiny and I can reuse the memory card from my camera. Though in time I think I'll buy another card to make things even easier.

And then there's the photo on the right. It's here because I went gliding with my colleagues yesterday. I was a bit nervous when I got buckled up in the seat, since I'd seen how steep the take-off was. But it was really great, especially once the cable was released and we were flying. It's so quiet without the usual engine sounds. I even got to see a buzzard next to the plane at one point. All in all definitely something I'd recommend you try. More pictures can be found in the gallery.

Opening of the Olympic Games airs tonight. Oh, speaking of games, found DHTML Lemmings via slashdot and it rocks! It's so much like the original it's scary. Well done.

Learnt a valuable lesson this morning. A normal coat will not keep you dry from rain. A raincoat will.

Some of the entries in the Horror Poster Contest are almost as scary as the QSleeper. Are people really this fearful?

Sorry to talk about the weather. Again. But I've had it with the heat. Why is there no airconditioning here at work?
Anyhow, watched Zomergasten last night. Quite interesting, though a bit of a disappointment. Nice to finally see a part of the Bill Hicks show, the one Tool used in their Aenima song. And since the entire show is made available on the VPRO website, I can finally see the whole thing.

A bunch of articles I plan to read but don't have time for at this very moment.

• The Science of Word Recognition or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma
• Fool's World Map, visualizing the world map which many fools in the world imagine.
• Classical Computer Science Texts
• The ones that got away, about movies that were never made. Including info on Kubrick's fascinating Napoleon project. Starring Jack Nicholson!
• A Crash Course on Irate Calls, for tech-support workers in India
• List of company name etymologies

Most links are taken from kottke.org.

Desperatly in need of Weegbree, since I still don't have a decent way to keep out the bugs at night. I've been bitten on several inconvenient places. Sigh. There is good news though, since my dad is placing my new roof window at this very moment. More light and more air will be the result. Hurah.

Spend the day shopping the The Hague. Despite the heat it was still a nice day. Bought a number of things, including the following, which are the result of a successfull trip to the bookstore, Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough, Pauline Gedge's Lords of the Two Lands trilogy (The Hippopotamus Marsh, The Horus Road and The Oasis) and The Long Walk by Stephen King. I'm particularly pleased with the latter, since that is one of my favourite shortstories and it was -untill now- impossible to get my hands on a copy.

Just got back from the cinema. Went to see the new King Arthur movie. Though quite entertaining, it lacked much in story and depth that the original legend did have. Not to mention all the obvious inaccuracies. Shame.
By the way, it was prologued with the trailer for The Village, which really impressed me. So despite all the bad reviews, I am quite curious to see the complete film.

Finally got round to implementing some decent error handling for this site. Not only will the user get a nice error, the info is also stored in my database. Which will hopefully help me find out where possible problems exist.
The first thing that struck me was completely unexpected, though. Apparently there are a number of sites linking to images on this domain, a number of which no longer even exist. Might have to look into a way to stop that from happening, with Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention from A List Apart perhaps.

Oh, I completely forgot to mention that, if I can get tickets, it looks like I'm going to see Rammstein in November!

I'm reading the manual for PHP's new object model and browsing a number of chapters from Upgrading to PHP 5 by Adam Trachtenberg on Safari.