Juni

This precious moment

Back at work. Trying to stay awake. Maybe a glass of water will help. [...] That's better. I wanted to post yesterday, but my dad's got a new computer and is having some problems with the ISDN card. So I couldn't get online all weekend. Well, not on sunday anyway. I didn't try on saturday, because that was Ozzfest day! No wonder I'm so tired. But damn, what a great festival. (Check out the complete bandlist at MetalfanNL.) We had sunshine all day, I even got sunburn, which has never happened on a festival before. Luckily I was prepaired for anything, with sunlotion, sunglasses, a sweater and my plastic rainponcho.

Ozzfest

I also brought some food and a bottle of water, which was confiscated at the entrance. Which I don't understand, because I was allowed to keep my sunlotion. But okay. There were 10 of us and half went by car and the other half (including me) went by train to Nijmegen Central. From there we took the bus to the festivalterrain. Despite the extra busses, it was crowded with people in metal outfits. Not to mention the ever penetrating odor of beer, sweat and hasj.

Lees verder

Jakob

I've borrowed the book Homepage Usability, which is Jakob Nielsen's latest. I've been wanting to read it for quite some time now, so I can't wait to get stuck in.

I was wondering how Tool came about its name and a search on Google brought me to Band Name Origins.

In a 1994 interview, Danny said that the band's name stands for how they want their music to be a tool to aid in understanding lachrymology ("the study of crying").

Wentelteefjes!

I had Wentelteefjes for lunch! Anyhow, I've heard some good things about Movable Type (the 'personal publishing system') and have been looking forward to installing it on my server at home, for a bit of experimenting. The thing is that I need to install Perl before I can use it. I have experience with PHP, ColdFusion and a number of other things, but I had yet to enter the eerie world we call Perl. So wish me luck.

Smile!

I read an item on smilies in blogs on So Very Posh earlier this week. And though I'm no big fan of smilies in general, I must admit that I tend to use them occasionally. And the article kept lingering in my head, so I just added a few extra lines to my script. Just in case I want to use the darned things. But I promise I won't go overboard. ;-)

Boudicca

I also wanted to include a link to this article on Boudicca, because she is one of the main characters in Pauline Gedge's excellent novel The Eagle and the Raven, which I finally finished reading yesterday.

British queen of the Iceni (of Norfolk), properly called Boudicca. Her husband, King Prasutagus, died in AD 59 or 60, leaving half his property to the Roman emperor and half to his daughters. The Romans, however, seized the kingdom and began to despoil it, thus provoking the Iceni to revolt. Boadicea led them in sacking Colchester, London, and Verulamium (St. Albans). Her army was eventually crushed by the Roman governor Caius Suetonius Paulinus, and Boadicea took poison.

Qotsa

I went to the Ticket Service website, to order tickets for the Queens Of The Stone Age in the Melkweg on June 24th. But unfortunately they've sold out already. If only I had tried 2 weeks ago. Sigh. I really wanted to see them perform live.

Witch

I read in the Encyclopedia.com newsletter that the First Salem witch was hanged on this day in 1692. So here's a link to a Salem Witch Trials website. Just for your infotainment.

Uhm, what else. Oh, A List Apart still doesn't have a new issue, but Jakob Nielsen has a new Alertbox out, about redundancy in user interface.

CMS

I still haven't found the time to install Movable Type, and now I've come across Nucleus, which is a weblogscript that uses PHP4 and mySQL to reach its goals. It looks really good. I had been thinking of writing something similar myself, but this could save me a lot of time. Now I only have to find the time to try it out.

Update: Quickblog looks pretty good also.

Dreamweaver

A colleague of mine just installed the new Dreamweaver MX. Apparently they're going to drop ColdFusion Studio, because it's been integrated with Dreamweaver. It's strange to see the familiair Studio panes in the slick Dreamweaver style. Luckily the program offers a lot more tweakable features and better integration. All in all, I think I like it. But I have to use it for a while before I give my final verdict ;-).

Ergonomic

IBM Healthy Computing is devoted to helping you use your personal computer comfortably, providing extensive ergonomic and environmental information at one location.

Viva la France!

I'm starting to get a bit sluggish, like one usually does right after lunch. A good time to write some stuff, that's been lingering in my head, down in this here blog. Hopefully I'll be fully awakened again soon. We went to the Greek restaurant yesterday evening, to celebrate my brother's last exam. It was good. Ate too much, though. And awaking with the taste of garlic the morning after usually isn't much of a treat. But okay.

Both my parents and my brother are going on holiday in July. I have no plans though. Partly because I'm going for my drivers license in August, which will cost enough already. But also because I don't know if and when I have to go into hospital in the coming months. Oh well, I have to learn to be patient anyway. And I have plenty of time to go on vacation in years to come. But I might still get away for a while this year, because my parents have asked me to join them for a week or so, they're going camping for a month in France. Which I'm still thinking about. But I think I will, I'd like to get away, haven't been anywhere in ages.

I'm doing some work on our Intranet now and thinking about the coming redesign of our customer extranet, which I plan to do soon. And I'm also reading parts of the evolt tip harvester. So I'd better get on with it.

Mark

Die Rückkehr der D-Mark » a number of German stores have switched back from Euro to the Deutsch Mark. I also read that SilverStream has been acquired by Novell. Can't believe it still exists. I had the privilege of receiving a demo about 3 years ago, and was mighty impressed with the product. Shame it was so expensive.

Quote

Knowledge is a text-based application. (from Textuality)

Quotes

i was gonna call 911...but i was downloading a file and other quotes can be found at the Quote Database at geekissues.org. Or maybe you'd like to create your own SuperHero at the HeroMachine. If you're really bored, you can take a look at this Pop Song Lyric Generator.

Movies

Back at work today. Why is monday so difficult on some days. I just can't seem to focuss. Meanwhile, one of my mailaccounts is being bombarded by the W32.Yaha.E@mm virus. Sigh. Last night my brother and I rented Battle Royale [IMDb] on DVD. It's a Japanes movie, starring Takeshi Kitano, about 42 high school students, who are forced to kill each other on an uninhabited island. Though disturbing, I enjoyed it considerably more than Dude, Where's My Car?, which we also rented, and was quite bad.

Heatstroke

It's still tropical at the moment, but the wind is picking up and storm has been predicted. Hope the heat will break soon, because I can't take anther night like this on. It was over 30°C last night at 23:30 when I went to bed. Even my ceilingfan didn't help much. Anyhow, we're playing Metallica's classic Master Of Puppets here at the office. Makes me forget about the heat and it helps with coding :-D.

Animation

I watched the 1978 Lord of the Rings video, which I bought recently. I was amazed at the visual similarity between this one and Peter Jackson's version. Though I have not seen all of it, I like what I have seen. But I'm not sure the hobbits really had seventies haircuts in Tolkien's mind. ;-)

Virginia

Ik lees net over Etymologische broodjes-aap, over onder andere de Amerikaanse staat Virginia. Die heette aanvankelijk Windgancon, of 'Wat dragen jullie vrolijke kleren' - het antwoord van de indianen aan kolonisten die de naam van de streek wilden weten.

Longhorn

I've just read an item on the upcoming release of Windows XP's successor at Tweakers. It's called Longhorn (this is a direct link to a zip file, which contains the movie in wmv format). Smooth and all, but I'm not impressed. Hope it's a very early beta. If it even is serious. But interesting to see though.

Outshine

I'm currently listening to Celestial Season, and their beautiful song 'Outshine'. Shame they split up. Anyhow, here's the end of the song.

'm restless in a world where all the eyes are meant to see

I'm restless in a world with all the shiny jewellery

I'm restless in a world where all the lies are meant to be

if I had a chance I would turn the world to blue

if I ruled the world I gave that world to you

Features

Another relaxing weekend. I've been doing some reading in the garden, when the weather was nice. And when it wasn't I've been working on a new PHP/MySQL version of my blog. I have some cool features in mind, which I'll get into in weeks to come. But I think -hope- it will be an improvement.

Danzig

I'm listening to Danzig's latest, which is called 777: I Luciferi. I like what I've heard. As I just read on Amazon » Danzig's new album is easily the best thing Glenn Danzig has done in ten years, topping even Danzig 4. Well, I like Danzig 4 a lot and I have only heard the new album once, so I don't know about that. But it's definitly an improvement on his previous few works, because they were disappointing, to say the least. Glad I bought it.

Weird

There are some weird Quizzes at Seethru. The entire site is weird, actually. But in a cool way.

Away

I've just got back from my brothers presentation. He had to defend his thesis, which he did successfully. Hurah! And now I'm going to pack for my week in France, next week. We're leaving tomorrow, quite early to beat the traffic. It'll be strange to sleep in my tent again. That's been a while. But I'm looking forward to it. And even weirder to be without equipment to get online. Well, I might have a change to dash into an Internet cafe. :-) Or maybe I can use my mobile phone to blog and check my mail. That'll have to do.

Choices, choices

I've finished Jean Auel's The Shelters Of Stone. Sigh. Can't wait untill I can start with the next book, but it'll probably take some time before that one will be released. Shame. Maybe I can start all over once more, starting from part one. But I've also gotten some new books from the library. So I might read those first. Among the ones I've chosen are King Hereafter: A Novel by Dorothy Dunnett, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul. I was also hoping to read Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I was unable to get my hands on a copy at short notice. So that one will have to wait.