April

My first post. Still testing.

Wow! It works, I've uploaded my first post...

This blog, by the way, is continued from my Xanga page.

I have just done the colour test at emode. Great site btw.

"You're brown, a credible, stable color that's reminiscent of fine wood, rich leather, and wistful melancholy. Most likely, you're a logical, practical person ruled more by your head than your heart. With your inquisitive mind and insatiable curiosity, you're probably a great problem solver. And you always gather all of the facts before coming to a timely, informed decision. Easily intrigued, you're constantly finding new ways to challenge your mind, whether it's by reading the newspaper, playing a trivia game, or composing a piece of music. Brown is an impartial, neutral color, which means you tend to see the difference between fact and opinion easily and are open to many points of view. Trustworthy and steady, you really are a brown at heart."

You can do the test yourself, go to Emode.Com: Tests, Tests, Tests.

Seen on coolsig.com: "The three most dangerous things are a programmer with a soldering iron, a manager who codes, and a user who gets ideas."

"Let's face the obvious. Yesterday we were nerds. Today we're the cognitive elite. Let's conquer." - Chester G. Edwards

"Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else." - David Knuth

"As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual." --Latka Gravas in "Taxi"

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." --Bertrand Russell

"We have to believe in free will. We have no choice."

"You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer."

"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"

Tweakers.net - Lenoxx DVD9000 review (1/5). I want this!

The Netherlands will get superfast DSL in 2002. Please hurry! I am currently using ISDN at home. I don't have access to Internet through cable or ADSL. I want broadband and I want it yesterday!

"I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped got a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the starts and made my peace with the darkness." --Heinz Pagels, physicist and quantum mechanics researcher before his death in a 1988 climbing accident.

I have to remember that I have to fix the poll for The Lyrics Archive. After that is done, and I have added a few new features (including a high resolution stylesheet, which I'll also implement into The Hermit's Tower) I need to submit my site on the following page Allaire: ColdFusion Featured Site. Wouldn't it be cool if I'd get mentioned there?

Also I am reading the features for the beta 3 version of the new ColdFusion 5. Sounds pretty cool. Take a look at the Allaire Beta site.

Just received some feedback, regarding my work. Good. But the thing is that I now use Dutch as my language, but since the site uses partners in the United Kingdom, the reports will have to done in English. Okidoki. But my reports for school will probably have to be done in Dutch. Hmmm. Tricky situation.

Descision Time! Shall I go to the Graspop Metal Meeting, featuring Bad Religion, Boiler Room, Cradle Of Filth, Dropkick Murphys, Farmer Boys, Judas Priest, Kill II This, Macabre, Marduk, Megadeth, Merauder, Mod, Motörhead, Orphanage, Primal Fear, Savatage, Shelter, Sick Of It All, Six Feet Under, Suicidal Tendencies, The Haunted, Unleashed, Within Temptation.

Or go to Waldrock, featuring Apocalyptica, Biohazard, Deftones, Devin Townsend, Fantômas, Opeth, Spirit 84, Suicidal Tendencies.

My third option was Dynamo Open Air, but this has been cancelled this year, because of the Foot and Mouth outbreak. And the line-up was very good. :-(

It featured After Forever, Amen, Backfire!, Behemoth, Brightside, Catastrophic, Cradle Of Filth, Destiny's End, Deströyer 666, Discipline, Disturbed, Dreadlock Pussy, Dropkick Murphys, Dying Fetus, Exhumed, (Hed)Pe, Ignite, In Extremo, Krisiun, Liar, Lost Horizon, Macabre, Length Of Time, Merauder, M.O.D., Motörhead, Mudvayne, Napalm Death, Nasum, Nevermore, Opeth, Pain Of Salvation, Papa Roach, Savatage, Saxon, Severe Torture, Shelter, Slipknot, Soulfly, Spineshank, Static-X, Symphony X, Terra Firma, Tool, Union Underground, Vader, Wicked Mystic, Within Temptation.

I was watching a documentary on World War II a few weeks ago. It contained loads of footage, even a lot of coloured film. This surprised me, because you don't see that very often. It was quite strange, and even brought it closer. Quite strange. Ofcourse it also featured a bit on Winston Churchill and his famous We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech. However, I realised I only knew the end bit.

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

I deceided to look it up online, soon. But as this always goes, one forgets. And I did for a few weeks. But suddenly I remembered and did a search on Google, and found the speech in its entirety. Check it out at the link in the first paragraph.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters - I joined! Exciting. I have been a member of Tweakers.net for quite some time, and read Slashdot daily. But didn't join yet. Untill now! My ID is 446928. Unfortunately my name 'mirthe' and my default nickname 'avari' where both already taken. Darn! I had to go with 'mirthe_v'.

Okay, now that I have everything sorted out, I can start with the important stuff. What am I doing at the moment? I am reading up on the whole CSS purity movement. I love all that stuff, HTML is so cluttered. I am currently working on a complete XHTML validity makeover for my website. Have to make sure all the tags are lowercase and use all the correct tags. I even found out I had pages without doctype declaration. Shame on me. If you want to read more check out A List Apart or CSS Layout Techniques.

Monday is our national Queen's Day (Koninginnedag - more info on Koninginnedag.nl which is in Dutch. Check out this site for some English information). Hurah! A day off, and parties everywhere.

Also next week: Remembrance Day and Liberation Day in The Netherlands (more info). The Netherlands has its own way of commemorating the Second World War and celebrating the country's liberation from five years of occupation. Unlike most countries, the Netherlands sets aside two days to mark these events. The first is a day of solemn commemoration; the second a day of public rejoicing with the young at the centre of attention. After a day of looking back at the past, the nation turns its hopes to the future. On 4 and 5 May the Netherlands affirms its pledge to provide a haven for all its citizens.

I ache for storms. This is how I feel! Sigh... Only 32 minutes, and then I'm going home. :-) Take off my shoes, have a cold drink, watch some television. Ahhh. And then only one more day until the weekend. I wish I had a time accellerator. I don't. I'd better invent one pretty soon. If only I had more time. But I haven't invented a time slowing down machine yet either. Sigh...

The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate. This rules! Big time!

I am now experimenting with my template. Hope it works. Can't believe it's already thursday! Almost the end of my third week on the job. Only 18 more to go. Then I'll have graduated (from my school, the SvC) and can enter the working class. Check out the site at e-Vision.nl and I am working on a maintance module for Channel4cars.com, in ColdFusion and SQL Server.

WIN2K is even easier to deface than NT (source: The Register). This doesn't make me very happy. However I have been running Windows 2000 for quite some time now, with my great friend Blackice. This seems to do the trick. I dread to think what has been going on on my PC before installing BlackIce.

My favourite band at the moment is Opeth. Click here to view The Official site or buy Blackwater Park, their latest release. It is one of the last bands I really want to see live, but haven't had a chance to. Hope they'll play Graspop this year!

Just wanted to say "Bon Voyage" to my brother Tjerk, as he will be stepping into the bus this very minute, which will take him all the way to Spain (Lloret de Mar) for the coming week. Have fun, and don't drink to much. Maybe you'd like to check out his homepage: This is the title...It is?....Yes it is!

Sometimes I find myself taking in very shallow breaths of air. A while ago I read a book on Yoga from the local library and there was also chapter on breathing. However I didn't really have to time to go into it at great length. But when I was standing at the busstop this morning I was reminded of it, and made a mental note to myself that I needed to look it up online. So I did. You should check it out. Hatha Yoga breathing: Yoga recognizes three separate forms of breathing - diaphragmatic, intercostal, and clavicular. Complete yogic breathing combines all three, and constitutes the ideal technique.

"On 25 April, prior to a routine shut-down, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 began preparing for a test to determine how long turbines would spin and supply power following a loss of main electrical power supply. Similar tests had already been carried out at Chernobyl and other plants, despite the fact that these reactors were known to be very unstable at low power settings.

A series of operator actions, including the disabling of automatic shutdown mechanisms, preceded the attempted test early on 26 April. As water flow diminished, power output increased. When the operator moved to shut down the reactor from its unstable condition arising from previous errors, a peculiarity of the design caused the power to surge dramatically.

The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames. The graphite burned for nine days, causing the main release of radioactivity into the environment. A total of about 12 x 1018 Bq of radiation was released.

Some 5000 tonnes of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead were dropped on to the burning core by helicopter in an effort to extinguish the blaze and limit the release of radioactive particles."

I can't believe that was already 15 years ago, yesterday. I still remember it happening. I remember how we (all the way in Holland) couldn't eat spinage or use tealeaves for months. And ofcourse the horrible footage all over the news. Also a scarry thought: similar, but modifed reactors continue to operate in Russia and Lithuania. For more info check, The Uranium Institute | Nuclear Industry Issues | Chernobyl.

I am currently reading Ember from the Sun from Mark Canter. I'm not very far yet, but it's quite promising.

Here's what I watched last night. One Fine Day (1996): George Clooney (playing someone rather like though not identical to his ER character) and Michelle Pfeiffer play a pair of lonely single parents, both afraid to get close to someone and be hurt again. No big surprise, when they end up having to split child-watching duties on one hectic day, they go from attraction-disguised-as-hostility to falling in love. But hey, it's a romantic comedy. Just because you know where you're going doesn't mean the journey's not a lot of fun. All four of the main characters (parents and kids) are attractive and multi-faceted, and the misadventures are funny and touching, both. The kids are real people, the lines are funny, the chemistry works... this isn't a great movie, but you could spend two hours a lot worse. Check it out.

Just finished the website for Conink Consultants BV. This was just phase one, with static pages. Soon phase two will follow, an intranet like webbased application for the people at Conink to use while working on projects. Plan is to do this in ColdFusion. Look forward to it, it has been far to long since I've started a real, big, hands-on project.

Freecom Beatman MP3 player for 8cm discs. I want this! I am currently looking for something to replace my discman with. I'm just afraid the discs are quite expansive. Maybe I'll just wait untill the Creative Jukebox is el cheapo.

Goodmorning, friday oncemore. Last day of the week! I have to say I'm looking forward to it. My shoulder and neck hurt like crazy. I have been reading up on the situation, but I haven't read anything I didn't know already. Anyway, the following page was quite useful. Keyboard Retraining II - "Mousing" - Articles - TIFAQ. I think I'll have to make an appointment with my local Reiki master again. That seemed to do the trick last time.

I found out yesterday that e-Vision (where I work) is moving from Zijlbaan in Leiderdorp to Rooseveltstraat in Leiden. [Map of Leiden] I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'll let you know.

I just checked the status of my latest order at A&B Sound. I ordered Casino, True Romance, The Big Lebowski, The Usual Suspects and 8MM. All on DVD. All are waiting in the warehouse, except for The Big Lebowski, which is in backorder status. Darn. I hope they arrive soon. By the way, The Usual Suspects and Casino where presents for my birthday from my parents and The Big Lebowski has been ordered by my brother. So don't think I'm extremely rich. Unfortunately, I'm not. :-(

"Alleen op de wereld (Alone in the World or Nobody's Boy)" by author Hector Malot is one of my all time favourite children's books. It's about this boy, Remi, who is all alone in the world. It's very sad. But that matches my current mood. To make things even worse Winamp is currently presenting me with the beautiful, but quite depressing, "Who wants to live forever" by Queen.

Anyway, I feel a bit like Remi today. My brother is going on vacation to LLoret de Mar in Spain this week, and my parents are going to Paris for a week and a halve starting wednesday. Also half the country is free, because the schools are always free the week between Queensday and Liberation day. But that isn't relevant for me anymore, because I have to work. Sigh. Well, atleast I have monday off, and I'm thinking off taking friday and the monday after that off also. I still have 2 free day's from april.

The Queen and the members of the royal house: since today is the birthday of Prince Willem-Alexander I couldn't not include a link. So here you go.

The ErgoMinder Home Page - this too is a rather good page on Repetition Strain Injuries and prevention.

I just found out we are going to eat at the Greek Restaurant, Akropolis, tonight! Jummm!

Weekend! How I've longed for this. My brother has gotten on the bus safely, or so my mother told me. The house seems quiet. Strange. I wonder what it will be like when one of us, or both of us have moved out... I think I'll go and check my mail now.

Just mailed to people at work that I won't be in tomorrow. Still feel lousy. Hope I can get some sleep tonight. I should go to bed now. Why is it that even though you always know what's best for your, you hardly ever do the right thing? I should go to bed. I will! Maybe I'll watch some television first...

Dinner on saturday was great! The night after was a bit rough, though, because I already had a cold in the days before, but this evolved into the flu. Fever and everything. Why does this always happen on your day off? So I had very bad night and the day after (yesterday, sunday) wasn't much better. Spend it sitting on the couch with a box off tissues and a glass of water, surrounded by bottles of variations of pills. Pills for fever, pills for headache, pills for a sore throat. Well, atleast I'm feeling a bit better today. Don't know if I'll be going to work tomorrow though. We'll see.

"Kort na het drukken van het nieuwe programmaoverzicht werd bekend dat Tool in 013 speelt. De nieuwe cd heet 'Lateralus' en ligt op 12 mei in de platenzaken. Eigenlijk hadden Danny, Justin, Maynard, and Adam, beter bekend als Tool, op Dynamo Open Air opgetreden, maar MKZ en de gemeente Lichtenvoorde, zorgen er voor dat het beroemde metal-festival niet door kan gaan. Op donderdag 24 mei (Hemelvaart) heb je dus de unieke kans om deze wereldband live in 013 mee te maken. De voorverkoop start zaterdag 5 mei om 10.00 uur 's ochtends. Landelijk via Ticket Service (zie voorverkoop) en (natuurlijk) bij 013 boxoffice. Kaarten kosten hfl 50,00 (+ hfl 6,00 serv. kosten)."

I have to get tickets! [check out the website of 013 Popcentrum Tilburg for more information]