2006-09-30 11:40:00
Now -that- is what I call sleeping in ^_^
I just woke up about half an hour ago... I guess I just really needed some sleep. Don't think I'll go back though (to bed), since there's a shitload of work to be done around the house. Let alone the grocery shopping...
kilala.nl tags: rhythm,
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2006-09-28 22:33:00
Mr. Kitty objects! He really does want to go out and catch mice! Right after Heraldo. |
Oh my! The Ars Openfora are now host to yet another wonderful pictures-thread: the DIY Demotivational Posters thread. Everyone's pitching in with their own take on the demotivational posters (because don't we all just -hate- the "motivational" ones?). |
kilala.nl tags: internet, fun,
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2006-09-27 22:27:00
Numb3rs ain't half as good as this stuff... |
So I decided to just hang out and vegetate on the couch tonight. I could've been getting some studying for my LPICs done, but the day's been hard enough already. |
Anywho... As most people probably know I love math. These days I may totally suck at it and I've forgotten most of the stuff I learned in college, but that doesn't make me love it any less. To me, math is the only true universal language. One of the very few things in our world that is almost always true and infallible.
Naturally, movies and stories that delve deeply into math interest me. I loved Pi and Cryptonomicon. So I thought I'd give Numb3rs a try.
Weeeelllll... Let's just say that Numb3rs is to math, what CSI is to criminal forensics. Trying to make science look cool. Unfortunately unlike CSI, Numb3rs doesn't achieve the same degree of success. And the acting's pretty sucky as well :/
Ah well :) Time for bed...
kilala.nl tags: tv, movies, maths,
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2006-09-26 06:01:00
Gawd.... The past few weeks waking up has been damn hard! It's like my whole body's fighting me to stay asleep :/ Maybe I -do- need more sleep... But not today, 'cause now I really need to clean a few things up, what with a few people coming over tonight.
Also, yesterday I took part in my first VVE meeting. VVE being the Vereniging Van Eigenaren of my apartment building, which freely translates as "Home owner's association". Our building's VVE hasn't been very active for the past few years, which has led to some problems for the long-term. All in all, if we were to steady our course as it is right now (and if the calculations made by our backing organisation are correct), then we'd have a deficit of around 300k by 2015. Not a very pleasant thought!
So we'll be turning things around, tweaking the plans here and there, hopefully getting the approval of the rest of the neighbours. You see, one of the biggest problems these buildings have is that the people living there are just not committed to the building. They see no reason to offer up their time and/or money to make the buildings look nice and be well maintained. Most of them reason that they'll only be living here for a few years, so they can move on before things turn crappy.
Now, of course that all well and true if you look at it. But it doesn't make it a proper way of doing business!
What's worse is that usually most of our neighbours don't care about the VVE, the meetings, the maintenance and whatever. But three years back, when there was the matter of a large expenditure to improve our building's in a -very- nice way, they all turned up to shoot the plan down. They just didn't want to spend the additional money, for the reason mentioned above.
Seriously. How do you convince people who think they are looking out for their best interest? On the one hand there's their money that they don't want to spend. On the other hand, there's their apartment and the building it's in that needs serious maintenance and renewal of certain materials.
Well... I guess we'll have to be very persuasive if people -do- turn up in throngs to protest.
kilala.nl tags: rhythm, house, annoying,
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2006-09-24 09:04:00
So I made it back home in one piece. My trip back took me around 7.5 hours, which was mostly due to me driving a little bit faster :p
I have to say that the A45 route up north is much less glamorous than the A3 :( The Rast Hofe all look much older and less fancy than the ones on the A3. Ah, but they sufficed anyway...
I'm thinking of moving my summaries from the previous blog posts into one big page in the Sysadmin section. Reckon that should prevent Google from raising the Archives above the Sysadmin section when it comes to Nagios.
/me starts immediately.
kilala.nl tags: work, nagios, website, conference,
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2006-09-22 23:27:00
< moved to Sysadmin section, to keep Google from messing up >
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2006-09-21 17:10:00
Astounding by the way, the amount of Apple laptops I see around here. Less than at SANE'06, but still, around 35%. \o/
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2006-09-21 17:01:00
< moved to Sysadmin section, to keep Google from messing up >
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2006-09-21 14:19:00
For the conference I had Snow buy me the iMic and a nice Philips microphone. For now though, I'm not completely happy with the setup.
* The mic is omnidirectional and thus doesn't pick up much of what person out in front is telling, while it does pick up quite a loot of noise from the room.
* iMic is a USB device and it seems that it claims enough CPU resources to mess with the rest of my system :(
Lunch was nice though! <3
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2006-09-20 23:21:00
< moved to Sysadmin section, to keep Google from messing up >
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2006-09-19 21:13:00
The next few days I'll be in Germania... Nurnberg, to be precise.
Together with around eighty other Nagios administrators and experts I'll be attending the first, annual Nagios Conference. Over the course of two days, we'll get a chance to meet up together, exchange ideas and generally have a go at improving both Nagios and our knowledge of the software. I'm looking forward to it quite a lot.
Maybe I'll even meet up with a few of the mailing list members :) I'll bring the camera and I'll try to snap a few quick pics.
kilala.nl tags: work, snow, nagios,
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2006-09-19 09:05:00
Arrr! And what a fetching wench she be! |
Yargh, ya scurvy dog! |
kilala.nl tags: internet, geeky, fun,
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2006-09-18 21:20:00
Not bad, for a first try. |
You may remember from past blog posts that I was quite envious of my friends who got to taste okonomiyaki in Japan. To me it seems like one of the tastiest things I could eat while in Japan. So when the discussion on #mangadvd turned to a newly discovered okonomiyaki restaurant in Amsterdam I finally decided to give it a try myself. |
Using various recipes on the web I decided to give it a try with the following ingredients:
* Around 150gr of wheat flour
* A few dashes of water, to make things sticky
* Two eggs
* ~200gr of shredded cabbage
* Three spring onions
* A small packet of strips of bacon
* ~250gr of ground beef
Both the bacon and the beef were fried before starting the real work.
I mixed up the flour + water + eggs + cabbage + bacon into a very chunky and stiff mixture. After heating two pans thoroughly I put in the batter. The consistency was actually quite good: not runny and things really stuck in place. After frying the two okonomiyaki for a while I put the ground beef on top and pressed it into the still sticky batter. After around six minutes, the okonomiyaki were properly cooked on the bottom and were easy to flip over using a very large spatula. Fried them on the other side as well for a few minutes and they came out very nicely.
Now... Marli had hers plain, while I had mine with mayo and Worchestershire Sauce. While the flavours were all quite nice, there were a few things that went wrong. These are the most note-worthy things that I should keep in mind the next time I'm gonna try making this stuff.
* The batter had too much flour and water when compared to the amount of cabbage. This made the mixture much too rich and heavy.
* I should have used only one egg, instead of two. The second egg made things too rich as well.
* Less bacon as well. Again: the fatty taste made things too rich and heavy.
Anywho... It wasn't half bad for a first try. Let's see if it goes better the next time.
kilala.nl tags: okonomiyaki, cooking, japan,
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2006-09-18 08:42:00
Yesterday evening the full staff of the Anime 200x festivals gathered over dinner, together with the wives. Aside from just meeting up for the fun of it, we were also there to discuss the future of our beloved festival. We all love putting the fest together, but we also agreed that we had reached our limits. Organising a three day party for ~1200 people is hard work for five people to manage.
So... What are the results of our meeting?
Well... I had the results up on this page for about a day, but I deemed it wiser to take them down again :D My colleague staff members would like to keep the lid on things for a little while longer. At least until we can give you more details.
Sorry I took'em down :)
Now I need to go and edit the comments made by a few people *sigh*
kilala.nl tags: anime 200x, anime 2007, friends,
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2006-09-14 21:18:00
Creating my own, custom icon set for Mac OS X will be quite large a job I've learned so far :)
Basically what it boils down to, is that you:
* Create a nice icon using something like Gimp of Paintshop.
* Create an icon template using IconoGrapher.
* Size your icon down to 128x128, 48x48, 32x32 and 16x16. These four images will be used in Iconographer.
* Each "size" also requires that the mask you need is of the appropriate size.
* All of this rolled together makes a "new style" OS X icon, that can be used all through the OS.
Shit loads of work, but very interesting!
Here's the first six I've created so far. What you cannot see in this image (due to the lack of Alpha stuff), is that each icon has nice rounded corners.
From left to right: Chicken of the VNC, Adium, Adium offline, Adium away, Adium idle, Adium alert. The five Adium icons are bundled into an icon package that can be installed in Adium. The first Adium icon is used in the IconoGrapher template.
kilala.nl tags: apple, other tech,
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2006-09-14 09:14:00
Great. Now that I've started tweaking the look and feel of my iBook I'm sorely tempted to start making my own icons using IconoGrapher. That black/white icon set was quite limited and I'd love to make my own custom set to fit all the apps I run on my laptop.
Right now I have a beatiful b/w dock, with a few of those fugly MS Office icons scattered through it. Yuck...
But I must resist temptation. I doubt whether my client would be pleased if I wasted their time on this :p
kilala.nl tags: apple, other tech,
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2006-09-13 22:46:00
Well, it took me a few hours of tweaking, twisting, turning and hacking, but now I really love the whole look and feel of my iBook.
The past two days I'd been complaining about how Apple has introduced -yet-another- GUI look to OS X with iTunes 7. Mind you, I love the way it looks but it's the fact that it's the sixth GUI look in OS X! That makes for one big mess! So instead of sulking about it, I spent a bunch of hours perfecting my iBook.
* Uno, to unify all OS X apps to one window style.
* Candy Bar, to change all the app and system icons.
* A clean black/white set of icons.
* A clean light blue set of icons.
* I switched as many apps as I could to a greyish theme.
All in all, I love the clean black and white look of everything. Gone is the colourful mess of icons in my dock! This feels so much better ^_^
kilala.nl tags: ibook, apple, other tech,
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2006-09-12 22:51:00
There aren't many things that I get compulsive / anal about, but my music collection is one of them. So now that Apple introduced iTunes 7 which lets you browse your library by album cover, I -have- to get album art for all my CDs! And since 90% of the unlabeled stuff is all Chinese / Japanese, I can't just tell iTunes to get the art for me because it's not in the iTMS. D:
What a great time for my OCD to kick in. I should've been in bed for an hour by now.
kilala.nl tags: meh, music, other tech,
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2006-09-12 19:04:00
Money well spent I'd say! Or, not spent actually... |
Today, Niels and Atomsk tipped us at #mangadvd about web store Rightstuf.com's Bountiful Bargains discount action. Until the first of October you can order Geneon (Pioneer) DVDs at a steep discount. Ten DVDs for $50, or twenty-five DVDs for $100. |
After talking the matter over with Marlijne (we've been trying to save up money for the past few weeks, as opposed to spending it at once like now), I put in my order. As you can see from the picture above, it ended up saving me a boatload of dough!
Including SandH my order ended up at $187, which translates to roughly e138, meaning I end up paying around e5.2 per DVD! \o/
Here's the stuff I ordered. They're all full TV series.
Rumiko Takahashi Anthology - 4 DVDs
Sherlock Hound - 6 DVDs (Miyazaki's work is so fscking awesome!)
Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar - 7 DVDs
X/1999 - 8 DVDs
w00t!
kilala.nl tags: money, anime, internet,
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2006-09-11 01:39:00
Great... My love of coffee (see below) gets me into trouble tonight. After having two cups of too-strong coffee earlier this evening, I find myself unable to sleep. An upset stomach and the caffeine are keeping me awake :(
I guess I'll get started with my work for tomorrow, which means I get home from work early as well. I just hope today won't be a repeat of the last time I didn't sleep at night. That was the day I stepped on top of my iBook and broke the screen o_o
kilala.nl tags: rhythm,
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2006-09-10 21:06:00
Why yes! I would indeed!.. |
Dutch coffee brand Douwe Egberts has proclaimed the 16th of September to be national Neighbour Day. |
So far, here's my list of coffee's, in order of preference:
* The cappuccino served by an Italian restaurant in Nieuwegein. I've no clue which brand they serve.
* A so-called "Sulawesi" coffee (indonesian), purchased at the Simon Levelt chain of coffee shops. They provide you with an excellent range of coffees and teas, but at times can be horribly expensive.
* Kanis & Gunnink. Ordinary coffee, suited for brewing at home. My parents used to drink this stuff for years.
* Douwe Egberts Rood Merk. Ordinary coffee, suited for brewing at home.
The odd thing about DE is that I've had some -very- good coffee served to me at certain restaurants, who tell me that it's DE. Why is it that their coffee tastes so much better than the cup I brew at home?
Oh well... Marli and I will be looking into buying a new coffee machine RSN. Our current coffee maker - water boiler hybrid (of the Princess brand) just isn't very good and actually makes lukewarm coffee :(
Suggestions for a proper coffee maker are more than welcome!
kilala.nl tags: coffee, drinks,
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2006-09-07 09:00:00
Wuaaaagh! |
This is awesome :) The BBC, in all their wisdom, genius and humor instated the BBC Fear Forecast back in 2005. This part of their website would provide parents with insight regarding that season's Doctor Who episodes. |
The reviews provide some excellent reading material. For one, because it's interesting to see how kids react to fear. But also because occasionally the parents also pipe up with funny stuff. Like so.
Samuel is trying to work out the plot possibilities. "Has there ever been another Doctor in this era?" Dad studies him curiously: "What kind of 8-year-old uses the word 'era'?" he asks Samuel's mum.
...
In the eery hospital. Adam: "There's SOMETHING in this hospital." Samuel: "The spooky music is really scaring." Dad: "It's not music from that era." Mum: "Shut up."
Such a conversation would be very liable to take place in our home <3
kilala.nl tags: internet, doctor who, fun,
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2006-09-06 23:45:00
Freaks me out. Rather a lot, really. |
On Ars Technica I've just started a thread in the Lounge called "What freaks you out?". It starts out as follows... |
kilala.nl tags: tv, doctor who,
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2006-09-04 10:03:00
Well, at least he didn't step in front of a bus or something.
Good bye Steve! Thanks for all the wonderful times you showed us! ^_^ Your show was actually the only one Marli would watch that had snakes in it :p
kilala.nl tags: holy shit,
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