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# George Harrisson 01'11'30 10:04 link

George Harrisson has died, and if he went the way described on the BBC news site, he went beautifully, in prayer and peace. Be well and be fab, George.

Sad though, that of the Four, the world's lost John 'Imagine' and George 'My sweet Lord', and we have Paul 'horrible performance at the pattriottic concert for NY', and, well, Ringo.

# yet another moving day 01'11'29 09:47

at work with a big backpack, a small one, my bass and a few bobs and bits that i always forget that i have to bring as well. it's moving day again. thanks for your house wil, i enjoyed it, especially being greeted by the smell - your front door opens to another world, like the moment the doors of the plane opened in Mumbai airport. guess it's a lot of incense and asian food that do the trick, well i did my best to honour it.
cheers & welcome home.

# wot, me? 01'11'28 12:38 link

yet another test. hm. and i don't even do im, usenet, memepool or gsm... [via luuk]

I am 50% ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET.
I am pretty addicted, but there is hope. I think I'm just well connected to the internet and technology, but it's really a start of a drug-like addiction. I must act now! Unplug this computer!

# 01'11'27 13:27

winamp started playing another tune from the random playlist and i thought, i didn't know i had some joy division - for a brief moment. it was new order's primitive notion from their new album. they surely progressed over time (grin) (though after the intro it all sounds to start different. b.summer took part in that experiment where this bbc art program put some artists on prozac for half a year and they reported on what it did to their art - and surely, new order seems to be less depressed and cynical now.)
(i should put a clever web link here to a disturbing essay on that project. no time though)

# moving in the dark 01'11'26 22:42

the downside of moving from place to place: this morning, the @^#% fuse went, now where the !*[;% are the breakers? ah, in the hallway cupboard, the one that doesn't open with this key. nor this one. nor with this one, damnit. (five minutes with a candle in the dark), ah, this one...

# she knows me so well 01'11'26 22:12

my sister sure knows how to woe me. she's studying in madrid for a year - for my birthday, she sent me the book 'tranvias de madrid' with a little note, that if anything, this is what'll get me to learn spanish.

# fashion 01'11'26 19:11

cycling home, through the rain and cold: so many girls, and women even, showing their bellybuttons even with a winter coat on. incredible!

# need i say more? 01'11'26 19:05

tagliatelli al arrabiata. Simpsons on the bbc. aaaaaah.

# what to write and what not to 01'11'25 23:12

what to write, and what to keep off this public log. so much has been happening in my life recently, much more than seeing Ani DiFranco this friday, spending saturday morning in the darkroom and a long leisurely autumn walk this afternoon. That leaves out quite a bit, doesn't it? But not something i can write about here. It has to do with love and care, with some people that i love much more than i realise but also in a different way.
Meg wrote about a visit to the hospital friday that must've been very awkward. How far would you go? She doesn't write what the visit was for, probably the best thing to do. Hope you are doing well and take care meg. i've been reading your blog for a while and it's as if you're a neighbour a few doors away, and i care about you (and i am a sentimental bloke, i know).

# be, ba, bs 01'11'25 18:59

did i ever mention the machinery behind this blog? with machinery, think Metropolis, or Modern Times, or just that QUeen video that took grabbed everything in those movies and made it a Freddie. Huge wheels, steam, naked workers. Well, just a perlscript really, called by three shellscripts: be invokes vi on the xml file that holds the data, then calls bs. ba not baracus. BlogAdd. Add an entry to the data (all from STDIN, good old friend, where I'm typing this now) and call bs. bs takes the entries and the template files and writes it all out.
oh, the joys of being a luddite or just another perl hacker. Blogger is nice, but can it do scp? and greymatter is v.nice but i can't run cgi scripts.and anyway. i love ssh, diy and unix shorthand.

# being original and assorted ramblings 01'11'23 10:36 link

madhu menon notes a trend in weblogs: dotted grey line borders (check), 11px Verdana for body text (check), grey body text (check), Kottke's silkscreen typeface for navigation (...ah.) [and anyway, this design is basic bluerobot.com]
rambling on: weblogger.nl added this blog to their list, which is nice (traffic! aaaah!) - except that they got my name wrong. i'm used to having a difficult name and people mishearing and misspelling it (not just with sakaama - with driek just as much) but hey, this is a cut'n paste job and I have to admit i am a little annoyed. ah well.
BTW, in India they pronounce my name with a stress on the first syllable, in the west on the second. Apparently, it could also be japanese (meaning something like a bendy, difficult to travel road through the mountains i was once told). wonder how they pronounce it?
wish i had comments now. i'm curious how you'd pronounce it, just from seeing it up there. let me know (for my email: it's the ~username @ xs4all.nl - hang on, i should have a form somewhere but can't find it now). ok, back to work!

# on time 01'11'22 13:48

... and i even managed to be at work on time this morning ...

# that was a great party 01'11'22 03:22

Udghosh, many happy returns, and thanks for a great party!

# choco-chai 01'11'20 15:01 link

always happy to see a new place where they serve chai - but at the Bagels & Beans I just had choco-chai. The horror.
[ Gotta try everything, at least just once; and the girl behind the counter promised me to make me something else if it would've been undrinkable. She had never tried it herself, so that was fair. Well, it wasn't bad enough for that. Still, cinnamon, chocolate and kardemon make a strange threesome, so just for once, ok?]

# solitaire 01'11'20 11:06 link

A colleague who visited another university library was full of the impressive design of the building. Especially the gallery of office rooms, separated from the main hall only by a glass wall - though only partially see-through, some people had had difficulty adjusting to, as he put it, the thought that everybody could see them working hard on solitaire.

Which reminded me of an ashram story. I spent three months in Osho's ashram in Pune, India in '97 (see who?). It was an interesting time to be there in many ways... but let me stick with solitaire. The first email kiosks were springing up then, where you'd pay a substantal amount of rupees for every thousand bytes typed. There were billboards on the streets advertising mobile phones, 33k6 modems and computer courses - changes were afoot, that was clear. And then, one image can put the finger on what was previously just hanging in the air. One day, I left the main gate and saw a commune worker working her computer in the small office next to the gate playing windows 3.1 solitaire in that way most of us know so well: bored (*).
In, of all places, an ashram.

(*) [which is precisely why, at my work, it's not included on a standard workstation - though I'm sure some managers higher up pulled the strings necessary to get a custom install]

# haiku's 01'11'20 10:01 link

I set up Marion with a blogspot account to share haiku's and other poems, and she's started posting!

# boooing! 01'11'19 09:51 link

The new mac-only computerstore in town (we've been waiting too long) has a fine sense of history: opening the door plays a random mac startup boing.

# 01'11'19 08:54 link

I tend to put a copy of vim (gVim on macos and win) on every machine i need to do more than a few minutes work on. (not that I use much more than the core vi set...) vim Time to put a donation in the mail when i've got proper access to my giro again. That's a promise!

# Hoofddorp 01'11'18 19:21

desolation, then and now.
Shot three films of early sunday morning sadness. Hope i can develop and print them soon.

# wrapping up the weekend 01'11'18 18:36

i miss cable internet. writing blogentries offline puts up a threshold - a little one, but enough to let the moment pass. i had a great weekend and have a few things to write about, i'll just wrap it up. Evenings with friends, great evenings. As for the observations: Romke insists on sitting in the kitchen when smoking a joint - on very incomfortable, high barstools, a deliberate move away from the lazy couch. And it worked! Can't get sleepy-stoned on a barstool. Just talkative high. Strategic.
Saturday, watched Chocolat with my friend Sonja, whose cat and house I'd been sitting recently. She likes Johnny Depp, a plausible excuse. God, what a weird movie. It looks like one of those hollywood remakes of a sparkling french flick, with any trace of edge carefully airbrushed out. Predictable to the extreme. We had a great time bitching about this movie together: pausing the vcr and tell eachother how we'd think the plot would dissolve (which it then did). Funny. We had more fun than we'd have had with a movie that actually would've been really good. And anyway, it was good to see Sam again. The sweet little bugger.

# it's all bill's fault 01'11'15 16:47

Over half a day without a net connection.

few things as annoying as a windows workstation that just gives up. ie. after returning the primary logon to the protocol it was on before i tested out connecting to a remote nt server in another department, it just failed during startup. murphy's law in effect, my cdrom turned out to be broken, its replacement ditto, and all in all it took five hours to get up and running. more or less. more or less up and running, that is. up and running for half an hour til spontaneous reboot.

I've never mentioned here before how much i love my iBook. Not just cause it's the most gorgeous computer i've ever laid my hands on (no, i've never touched an Indy , ok) but as a longtime mac user and unix geek, OS X is a match made in heaven.
And did I mention how gorgeous it is? With the apple logo glowing in the dark, and the frosty white icing. Even the power supply looks beautiful. haven't been as glad with a computer as when i bough my Duo 230 (to show you my age ;-)

# meanwhile round the corner 01'11'14 13:05

saw this morning that the nice Tibetan restaurant around the corner of the house i'm staying in is no more. There's now a chinese place instead.
a scary form of think global, act local. i hope not, i'm sure not. but it gives me a little shiver.
(not to mention that it was good food for small prices - and tibetan's much nicer than standard chinese)

# a Sam update 01'11'13 12:07

There's a fun side to my current nomadic lifestyle: I get to know some of my friends really well while they're absent. The house I moved in yesterday belongs to the guitar player of the band who's in India right now. I've been there numerous times, but it's very different now that I have to find my way for mundane activities as fixing breakfast. A kitchen is a mirror for the soul.

Anyway, on to Sam... first thing i noticed in this new house is that it is empty. No cat. No hairs, no litterbox. No feline welcome upon entering the door. It is really strange. The love side of our love/hate relationship surfacing again.

# update 01'11'13 11:05

inbetween moving all my stuff over to yet another house, i also managed to clear up the pages behind this blog - home, photo page, and the who? page to lift the stale air off it. enjoy...
(and it even was my birthday yesterday. just had to ignore it totally, pretend it'll be next week or so)
cp: lulle bij de bus - Raggende Manne !

# terrorism ruled out? 01'11'12 16:50 link

According to Ananova. Doesn't really change anything actualy. Doesn't make the current terrorist threat less dangerous, or the reasons for it less real. Complacency always lurks around the corner.
This is an illusionary world. Let's face it, and all of us, in our own way, small or a little bit less small: let's do what we can. Go a little bit further than you normally would.

# another plane down on NY? 01'11'12 16:32 link

just like last time, the first sign was total internet outtage (apart from the dns problems that persisted today) - when all else fails, then there's the radio. Just heard that another airbus crashed in NY, apparently Rockaway.
I'm not suprised - well this was to be expected. Bush's been giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted. And the same, my heart is beating fast again, the sensation 'this can't be true'.

makes the link i posted just before this news all the more relevant. let's help the afghans - if anything that'll work in the long run.

# help de afghanen (nl) 01'11'12 16:16 link

# sing! 01'11'12 14:47 link

the weekend also involved singing this song. as loud as you can! whether you know dutch or not, go for it...
lyrics about the song - scroll down to number 13

We're thinking of you, Ramses. Love and take care.

# a little teaser 01'11'12 13:41

gotto write more later, but one thing as a little teaser. the weekend ended with champagne.

# internet, internot, ... 01'11'12 13:36

what really sucks: a flaky dns server. worse than the internot: the intersometimes.

# this is a small web 01'11'12 13:14 link

Bu-sy day (maybe i'll have some time to write about this morning later - and then there's this weekend, choc-a-bloc with events some of which of a shattering nature. hell, later). just check my favourite blogs - hey, wrote a little something about my mom ( here ) then spotted a fellow english-writing dutch blogger. Opened her blog (here) to a passage on her dad... which made me think about my dad, too. And he's just sent me an email , too. this is a small web. all the greater for it, innit.

# i scream, you scream 01'11'09 14:09 link

As you can spot on their website, Australian is a hip joint. Their chocolates are quite good (no match for puccini or Jeannette, but still) and so is their icecream.
But today I went out for a milkshake. Don't know why, with temperatures just above freezing point, but I treated myself. So, a big chunk of Australian Belgium Chocolate made into milkshake is good - and then I mean, yummy. Did I say it was delicious?

Funny thing though, this Australian Home Made chain that popped up just last year but has at least five stores open already. I've never seen or heard them elsewhere, but they don't look like they're just an Amsterdam Thing(tm) ... And then the people they employ, it's more a social club for backpackers-in-exile than a shop sometimes. Though in their most recent shop they must've run out of english speaking scandinavians, cause there are two incredibly dutch lads behind the counter. Not that they pay more attention to the customers.

# now more than ever 01'11'09 10:41 link

Visit a refugee camp

# anything goes... at least, anything will go. 01'11'08 18:07

(...hi JR!)
The friend who lent me out her camera called - could she have it back when the course finishes? Of course, it was the deal, plus she's got a good subject coming up. But I'm damn well going to miss her 1968 vintage Praktica. Better use it while i've still got it... expect the photo section to be growing.

# Hannibal 01'11'08 18:02 link

Oowee. My smurf name. Just wondering, the one with the eyes or the one with the elephants?
(via brainsluice)

# a cat update 01'11'08 13:49

no scratches or bites since i wrote about him. on the contrary, it's as if he knows it won't be long before i'll move to the next place on my grand tour of friends-on-holiday's houses. new behaviour: he likes not just to have his head scratched thoroughly, but even to have me cup his whole head with my hand. Covering his ears even. I haven't heard him purr all those weeks - he's truly a disfunctional cat - but i swear he's trying when i do that. poor thing, maybe he just wants to be held. we must be starting to look like eachoter.
And he lets me pick him up and cuddle him! woo-ee! I hadn't though i would - but i'm going to miss him. Maybe I'll let him in the bedroom for our last few days together.

# 404 01'11'08 13:04 link

'No DECsystem should be without one!'
(from davidgagne.net)

# dark 01'11'07 16:27

it is eerie, eerie dark outside... four o'clock and it's as if i'm working a very, very late shift. It is nearly pitch black. No, that's an old photo.
but after a morning of job interviews and a struggle with a database that would not work, suddenly everything went woosh and i gave myself a little random webbrowsing time, hopping from blog to blog. Interesting question from Meg - what do you answer when people ask where you are from? That's just like how are you doing. Do people really want to know or is it just the phrase? Where are you from vs. Where are you coming from?
Anyway, when geographically speaking, I live in Amsterdam when I'm in the real world, but in the warped reality of the twohundred small villages that make up this city, I live in Noord. The part of town famous for the song So bored in Amsterdam Noord and not much else... simply overlooked by the citydwellers. Them's all farmers up there, y'know? Even the Southeast, Courboisier-style Bijlmer is not looked at with such disdain.

Good for them. The north is a well-kept secret. Good thing nobody's reading this ;-)

# bu-sy... 01'11'07 09:27

oh no! political meeting yesterday then an urgent need to relax and unwind afterwards... finished that damn harry potter book in bed (that latest, way too thick one - ending with a cliffhanger. Ouch). Now off to reading resumes then doing job interviews and so much to do. Wonder. Why do i feel so speedy?

# Bring back Bicycle Repair Man... 01'11'06 11:59 link

Despite the recession, Amsterdam life seems to be getting ever trendier.

Bike needed some urgent repairs, so off to the nearest repairshop from work. "Well, I'd have time for that on tuesday week", the repairwoman told me. "Do you want to make an appointment?" I was a bit stunned. Bicycle shops have always been the proverbial drive-in store to me. Appointments are for the dentist.
That was last week. And I made the appointment. Every time I told it to someone, it got more hilarious. An appointment for my bike? So this morning, went there before work.
What are all those people doing there...
Hey, isn't that the bike shop...
There's a queue on the sidewalk! Four people waiting. A lady with a flat didn't have an appointment and could only be helped next week - so she was mending the tire herself outside. A guy who needed to have some spokes replaced - no appointment either, so he went off to find another bike shop where they'd still work the old way.

(I can pick it at six tonight... but whatever, it was worth it already!)

# cat (2) 01'11'05 00:53

Sammy didn't quite want to come close to me at first, but that changed rapidly. At eight in the morning, weekdays or weekend, he'd come near the bed and start complaining, until he'd get his food. First, with loud, complaining cries, then by jumping on the bed - still carefully avoiding my body. After a few days, he started to come in during the night, lie on the bed a bit closer to me. That made me feel chuffed, especially when I could stroke him and he'd purr - well, I said to myself, you did it, you're in.

But it was not to be like that. Getting more and more confident, Sammy now pushed his getting up time earlier and earlier, crying out loud from five in the morning... I tried to talk him out of it, but he didn't listen. Instead, he started to march across the pillows in the early morning, first past my head, then just stepping over me. To get attention, he started nibbling on me as well, and in days, the soft chews became bites.
I put him out of the bedroom, closed off the bedroom door. I could hear him screach, claws on the floor. Then he started to jump the door. All in all it took him a noisy half an hour to figure out how to open the bedroom door. Six in the morning, I badly want to sleep, and he starts walking the pillows and my head again, claws out. And my nose started running. I didn't know I was allergic to cats. Well, maybe I wasn't. Or maybe just to him... this is getting way out of hand...

So, now I sleep alone again. I liked having him near my feet (sure beats a hot water bottle) or even within strokes' length, but I gave him a finger and he scratched my whole hand. So I throw him out of the bedroom at night, close the door and hang a chair on the handle - he hasn't found a way around that. But looking at the door, with that chair hanging off it, its legs hovering just above the floor, I can't help feeling that I've barricaded my door to keep him out. People don't keep cats. Cats keep people.
So play it, Sam.

# Francisco doet het weer! (NL) 01'11'05 00:50 link

Met een mooi essay, zij het dat hij natuurlijk zijn oude stokpaardjes weer bereidt. Niets op tegen natuurlijk. Maar belangrijker: hij leeft nog - dan zal het met het internet ook wel meevallen.

# mooi woord (NL) 01'11'01 18:23

Mooi nieuw woord in een verder taaie lezing zonet: "meereisend". Gebruikers zijn tegenwoordig niet veeleisend, niet veeleisender, maar meereisend.

# uh-oh 01'11'01 14:24 link

Actually I work in a mix of both... scarily accurate...

I AM 30% GEEK.
I probably work in computers, or a history deptartment at a college. I never really fit in with the "normal" crowd. But I have friends, and this is a good thing.
Too much time on my hands (not).