Stories swirling through my head
My life has been so active over the last few months, there’s a lot I need to put in order in my head. Not that I’m going mad or anything, but I’ve noted very often in my past that I do best in dealing with things by writing then up in stories. And my mind is swirling with one in particular. Nothing concrete, as yet, but fantasy, as usual. I feel the need to start writing again soon. Which will be hard, since it’s been a few years since I last written a story. I might post it here, though.
Bart is at What The Hack this weekend with my PowerBook. His iBook broke down the day before he was to go to WTH. Since I knew how much he wanted to go, I lend him my PowerBook. I’m glad he’s enjoying himself with it, but I do miss playing World of Warcraft a lot :) Yes yes, I know, I’m addicted.
Not buying yet :(
One of the things I really like about having my own company, is having an accountant. Monique and I asked him to see what he could do for our mortgage. Yesterday we went to visit the appartment again and were even more exited than before. It really is a lovely place. Afterwards, we had a meeting with our accountant.
Well, to make a long story short, we would have to spend about 900 euro’s a month just for the roof over our heads. That’s something we cannot afford. So we stopped looking and decided to wait until I have a decent income. I’m fully expecting this to be somewhere in the next 6 months, so we’re counting on that.
Too bad, but better to live with our parents than to have trouble with making the ends meet each and every month.
Follow up and Rink’s work
Yesterday went kinda bizar. We had an appointment with the mortgage advisor, but I had to cancel those because one of our customers had networking trouble (a whole company without Internet…), which had a higher priority, of course. When I canceled the advisor, my accountant called that he wasn’t on vacation yet and that he’d be able to look at it this week. Which is a great relieve for me, since I honestly think he can get us a better deal than any other, because he has insight into my own financial situation. For all others my finances don’t count, because I’m an entrepreneur. They want to see the earnings from the last three years, which isn’t enough by far.
This morning I called the house broker that we were interested and want to visit again tomorrow, with parents and all. I told him we were interested in the appartment, if we could get the money together. So at least the appartment won’t be sold in the meantime.
On another note, a friend of mine made the headlines today. Rink made port of FreeBSD to the XBox and all kinds of media are reporting on it, which is kinda cool :) I hope it makes slashdot :) I’ll collect some URL here:
Golem.de (german)
Gueux.be (french)
The OpenNET Project (russian)
Found something…
I’ve noted here many times that Monique and I are looking for a place to live. Well, today we found something that might be worth it. At €112.000,- not very expensive and it’s really not large at all, but it’s in the centre of Roermond, near the train station. And close to an Interstate, so Monique can get to her work easily.
So now we’re looking into a possible mortgage. Since only Monique’s income counts, it’s gonna be hard. But then again, since I do have (some) income, we can go for a mortgage that should wouldn’t be able to afford if she were on her own. Things are looking good. Very good. We’re really looking forward to moving in together and we kinda made the decision today to really go for the appartment.
There are some drawbacks to the place, though. It’s right next to a large parking place, but they ask stupid rates for monthly passes. I’m not going to pay €109,- a month just to park the car there. But there are other options. It seems the city of Roermond sells parking licenses to her citizens for just €30,- per three months. That’s quite affordable. And you’re allowed to park anywhere in the centre where there’s payed parking. Quite a good option, even though those places aren’t supervised.
The other thing is that we need to pay €170,- per month in maintenance (which does include all heating costs) for the entire building. We think this is kinda much, but we can bare it. Especially when we keep in mind the money shortage will only be a short while… CIDEV is moving on and earning more and more profits…
Tomorrow we have a consult with our mortgage expert (the one that offered my dad’s mortgage too). Sadly, our accountant is on holiday till the 13th of August and I don’t think the appartment will wait that long… So we’re going to go ahead with my dad’s advisor.
UPS is quite good
Since we had a broken hard disk, Western Digital had to replace it. They send me a new one, so I could use that packaging to send the broken one back. They only asked of me to send it through a trackable courier. Since I had some trouble in the past with TNT, I wanted to use UPS.
Now, their website is a bit overdone, lots of options and I quickly lost my way, but after about 45 minutes I had my order entered. I was also able to tell them when to collect the package from my home. I told them friday (today) between 9am and 2pm. I kinda expected them to arrive early, so at 1.50pm I got nervous and called UPS. When I had the guy on the phone, the UPS collector rang the doorbell :) 1.55pm. Very, very nice. I like that.
He did tell me though (the guy that collected the package) that he wasn’t sure if he’d make it and his dispatcher told him to try to collect the package at least before 4pm then. He tried to get here before 2pm though and he obviously made it. Good service. I shouldn’t be so impatient :)
We’ve got proof!
Go take a look here and zoom in to the maximum setting. Finally! I always told you! Proof at last!
MOVIE in 30 seconds and re-enacted by bunnies
Gotta love this site. I watched them all.
Mac OS X-ishness
Today I’ve been looking at iTunes during my lunch break. You know, that’s yet another thing Apple did very, very well. I’ve read reviews about iTunes and most of them were quite good, but honestly, you don’t know what they mean until you’ve experienced it yourself. I logged in using my AppleID (of which I had forgotten my password, so Apple send me to the “iForgot“-page, quite funny), entered my credit card data and was allowed to buy the song Everlasting Love from Jamie Cullum. Very, very nice.
You can listen to the first 30 seconds of each song (Bart informed me of that, because I really missed that feature), buy complete albums or just individual songs. You know, no more illegal downloads for me. For 99 cents per song, that’s a reasonable price. A bit cheaper for older songs would be nice (they might even do that, but haven’t really looked into it yet), but on the whole very, very reasonable. Yes, I’m hooked. Yet another reason to buy an Apple.
The Wonderful World of Child Abuse in The Netherlands
Here in The Netherlands, we have a wonderful justice system. It’s really out to protect most people, even the criminals. But it refuses to protect the victims. It makes me so mad. I always thought out Justice system was put in place to protect the innocent. It doesn’t, and we’ve seen one of the worst sides of it now.
I’m trying to anonymize the story, but people close to me will probably know what I’m talking about. Nevertheless, here it is.
Imagine you’re a young girl. Things haven’t been going your way, recently. For some reason you don’t yet grasp, your mother went to live with another man and she refuses to come back to live with you and your father again. And your father spoils you with all kinds of gifts. You go to your mother once every two weeks for a weekend and whenever you’re there, you don’t really want to leave anymore. You were always more your mother’s daughter than your father’s.
Your father finds a new girlfriend and the woman has a daughter, only a year older than you. You play nicely together and your there often. But the girl is kind of intimidating, she does some sort of fighting sport and she’s bigger than you are. You can play nicely, but sleeping together is never fun. The other girl seems obsessed with your body and wants to put things inside of it… Yes, you read that correctly. (You know, I even get tears in my eyes from just writing that down.)
Since you can’t really talk to your father, you endure it and wait for a time to talk to your mother. The next weekend, when you’re with your mother, you talk to her when you get a moment alone with her. You spill your guts and you can see your mother is very disturbed with it and wants to help you. But you also know that mommy and daddy aren’t even close to best friends anymore. When you leave for your father again, you don’t really want to go. But you trust on your mother to make things right. After all, you’re not even 10 yet and you know those things that happened aren’t suppose to happen.
Now for the story of the mother.
Your daughter tells you she’s been abused. You’re furious and your first reaction is to strangle that other girl. You consult your legal counsel and your friend, who’s a police officer. After a second time, you decide to go to the police. Maybe a drastic measure, but you want to protect your daughter and the police is there to protect. Right?
Wrong. The police tells you square in the face they’re not about to do anything, since the girls are minors. You should talk to your (ex-)husband and tell him not to let it happen again. You communication with your ex-husband is at an all time low, mostly happening through your lawyers. And you suspect your ex-husband will intimidate your daughter to not tell you anything anymore. After all, the battle for custody has only just started. Besides, you’re very afraid the judge will see your complaint as a tactic to get the custody over the kids. You don’t want to loose your kids, because you’re convinced you’re a better parent than the father is.
So the police doesn’t do anything. They let you tell your story, they even make a rapport, but they refuse to even give you a copy of the rapport under the guise of “not wanting to help you lawyer too much”. How can this happen? Why don’t they help protect the kid? What crazy land are we living in? It gets even worse, since they tell you that first you need to complain with the father, if it happens again
WHAT FUCKED UP LAND ARE WE LIVING IN?? How in the world can this happen? The Netherlands seems to be a Walhalla for child abuse! Even if the perputrator is a minor, the child needs to be protected! How can we call this justice? I’m furious and I have been furious for days now. There’s absolutly NOTHING we can do to help the child. It seems the dutch authorities want you to abduct the child, so they can sue you for their incompetence. I’m so friggin’ mad. And I have no idea what to do at all.
Things okay again
The doctors (2 of them) just left, they couldn’t find anything worth investigating. They think it’s an extreme reaction to the stress she had these last few days. Which is a story apart I desperatly need to blog about, but not know. Need to get some sleep soon.
Things going wrong
Hanneke fainted about an hour ago. She was gone for no longer than a minute. My father and I had to carry her up to their room. There she fainted again and was again gone for a few seconds. We called the doctor by now and after a lot of questions (man, if she was dying she would be dead by now, so many questions!). By then she was enough with us again to answer some questions from the doctor directly. He told us that if she didn’t recover in 30 minutes, we had to call him again. She got worse.
Now I’m waiting for the doctor to arrive. Nothing to do and that bothers me the most. If I could only do something. So I decided to write about it, to vent some steam.
I hope my Guild helps me recover Mulguy from the Scarlet Monestery’s Library…
Motherly Angel
(Wrote this post last Sunday, but forgot to publish it, since the pictures we took were too dark :()
Since we have the little chicks in house (and no, they don’t smell, their feed stuff smells more than the chicks themselves), the dogs that run around the house get a lot of exposure to the chicks. Which is fun, since they all react differently to the little things. Anouk and Cyril, both older dogs, tend to ignore the chicks altogether. Aagje has ditched the notion of “possible playpals” after she noted the chicks didn’t move from their cage. But Angel is absolutely stricken with the chicks.
Now, you need to know that Angel is my favourite (well, Angel and Aagje both switch places quite often in my “best-liked-dogs-top-ten”) and she’s a really sweet dog. There’s not a single drop aggressiveness in that girl. She’s been terrorised a lot during the first few months she lived with us, because both Anouk and Aagje didn’t accept Angel as part of the pack. These days, we keep Anouk and Aagje apart from the others, which works quite nicely. And the effect this had on Angel is astonishing, she’s seems to be a whole different dog than just a few months ago. Much more outgoing and nicer for eveything and all.
Hanneke and my dad really want to breed with her soon, but they’re both anxious to know if Angel will be a good mother or if she will not know what to do when she has a litter. Some dogs are good mothers, others are really bad mothers, not knowing what to do with this little dogs and having trouble with all those hormones coursing through their bodies. Angel could be either. But today, she showed some behaviour that makes us think she might be a very good mother.
Since the chicks are in house, she’s been really watching them. At first, we made jokes about how the chicks would stand next to her when she was near the cage and she was licking her lips. But as times passed, it seems more and more that she’s really affected by the fragile, young chicks. So today Hanneke wanted to see Angel’s reaction to a chick when it was close by. To make a long story short (well, it’s already a long story, but I’ll end it here). She was very, very sweet with the chicks.
(No pictures, since they failed :()
Another screendump
This one especially for Tom :) Just look at the nice chat-screens :) All different, yet all the same :P
Screendump for the Light’s Reach
Since we had some arguments about our ugly, ugly Guild tabard, I decided to create a new one. Since our Guild Master is such an Internet n00b that he only has a friggin’ NOTMAIL address, I’m forced to put the screenshot here, on my blog. Enjoy.
Painting of the Future
Sometimes when I’m working, I just get ideas that are, at that moment, quite interesting. After looking at how my Apple Screensave (I was having lunch) was displaying pictures and zooming in and out of them a bit, I started thinking about The Home of the Future. Of course, each home of the future has several touch-screens on the walls, to easily access all the high-tech gizmo’s we have sprewn around the house.
But what do those display when they’re not in use? Why, pictures of course! Artistic usage of screensavers. I can imagine photographers selling subscriptions to their site, so your screensavers get a login to download new pictures from the site every day. And of course your unread RSS headlines are displayed now and again on the screen. Maybe your stock quotes, if you’re interested in those kinds of things.
The Information Age has just started. Mark my words.
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Printing to Remote Cups server from Mac OS X.4.1
Since I only use the Canon S600 that’s connected to my father’s pc, I needed my PowerBook to connect with that machine. I’ve been looking for the solution for a few hours (since it seems not doable from the Print Setup from Mac OS X), and I finally found a very simple, yet effective solution here. You need to create a file in your home-directory called .cupsrc and put the following to lines in it:
ServerName anouk
Encryption IfRequested
I added “anouk” to my /etc/hosts file. Not sure what the second line does, though. But now it works like a charm, and that’s what’s most important.
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Switched to Ubuntu
With the tv showing heart rending eyewitnesses reports in the background, I feel the need to report on my progress of the Ubuntu installation on my dad’s desktop. The first results are very, very promising. Ubuntu feels a lot faster and has a lot less trouble with many things. For example, Hanneke (my dad’s girlfriend) had trouble with certain email in Evolution. They would lock the program and crash it. Under Mandriva, that is. With Ubuntu, she uses almost the same Evolution and has no trouble at all.
I did have to install some programs for my father to use, like KMail, which aren’t usually installed under Ubuntu, but I wasn’t able to import his KMail-tree into Evolution, so I saw no other solution for it. Well, switching to IMAP one of these days would be a really good thing. Also, I had to tweak the KMail config file (~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc) a bit to point to the directory Mandriva uses for email under KMail, which is ~/.Mail instead of Ubuntu’s default ~/.kde/share/something/more/here. That was easy to find out, but I can imagine people having difficulty with that switch.
All in all, I think they’re very happy with the result so far. I’m considering switchin to the development branche of ubuntu on thei machine, though. Some things could be a bit better imnsho.
Terrorist attack
When I got behind my computer at about noon, Bart told me there had been some explosions in the London Underground. At the moment, Blair and other persons, have already told the world the six explosions are almost certainly a coördinated terrorist attack. I feel sorry for all those people that were hit by such an attack.
I’m afraid these kinds of attacks do nothing but harm. It doesn’t help with anything at all. I don’t see why people get so sick with hatred that they decide to attack innocent civilians. I mean, yes, the USA is still keeping their prisoners under torture in Guatanamo Bay. Yes, they do terrible things to those prisoners. But how can honest civilians, just taking the public transit to work, be blamed and punished for such things? Terrorist attacks only help to increase hatred between all parties.
I’m afraid these terrible incidents will be used to push normally undesirable measures through parliament. I hope people will keep their heads on.
