2009-05-30 19:44:00
Thanks to Danny Choo's recent A week in Tokyo post I now know the name of my favorite ice cream snack. How could I not know the name? Because it's Japanese and I've only had it two or three times. I can't read the label, but I sure as heck recognize the wrapper.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Jumbo Choco Monaka.
Two hollow waffles, lightly coated in chocolate and filled with vanilla ice cream, pressed together with a thick slab of chocolate in between. <3
kilala.nl tags: cooking, japan,
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2009-05-27 16:52:00
*le sigh* I guess that the previous owner was in a hurry to finish a few things.
In all the hallways I've found that his last whitewash job was done without removing any of the fixtures and lamps. So every ceiling has a 20cm circle in a darker colour, with a rim of thicker paint around it. That's gonna leave a mark.
It gets worse in the attic though. There he used the same strategy, but not with whitewash. No. No, this time it was with spray-on plasterwork =_=
So what does that leave us? A huge wall with none-too-pretty plastering that's got a big "hole" of bare wood. I guess we can always glue on some fine grit to simulate the original plaster, but it's suboptimal.
Anywho... Today was a good, but exhausting day. The house is now fully stripped and I've made good progress with the ceilings. All ceilings on the ground and first floors have been "bordered" and I've managed to fill in about 15m2. By my estimates I'll need another full day to finish the ceilings. Then I'll need two days for all the walls, possibly three. It's going to be tight, but I'll make it.
kilala.nl tags: house, meh, annoying,
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2009-05-26 22:11:00
So... This morning I decided to take the long way to the new house, driving part of the route I'll be taking to work in the future. As I'd expected, the A6 / A1 connection (where all of the province of Flevoland tries to get to Amsterdam) is pretty much jammed around 06:30. This means that I'll have to leave pretty early if I want to take the car to the office. Assuming that I'll still work in Amsterdam, of course; going the other way will be a cinch.
Traveling by train's always treated me well, so even getting to Amsterdam won't be a problem. I'll just hop on at Almere Buiten, which is no more than five minutes cycling from our house. Either way, things will work out :)
The house is coming along pretty well. We've had the keys for two weeks now, but we've only started actual work last Sunday. Yesterday and today I've:
* Stripped 90% of the house for painting. Every fixture, shelf, ornament and light has come off so I can give everything a fresh coat of paint.
* Stripped 100% of the previous owner's crappy electronics.
* Spent an hour with the contractor that'll put in our new bathroom.
* Spent two hours with the electrician, discussing what we want from him. It'll be an interesting job that's well worth the money. Now all I need to get is that quote *anxious*
* Tidied up the front yard.
Tomorrow I'll strip the remaining 10%, dust the whole place and commence the painting. Thursday I'll stay in Utrecht to clean and watch Dana while Marli goes to the hair dresser's. Saturday and Sunday will both be family days, so no work will get done either. :/ I hope I'll make it!
Ah! I've also made use of the bathtub ^_^ I'd forgotten how great it feels to sit in an actual tub, as opposed to standing under a shower. Even after eight years, my bathing reflexes kicked in immediately and it was like I'd never gone. *sigh* I -love- having a tub. I think I'll reinstate my old Sunday-morning-soak-for-an-hour ritual ^_^
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2009-05-24 22:08:00
I don't know what it says about me, but I do <3. This song came up in discussions at least twice this week, so I just had to post the video.
EDIT:
Of course, there's this classic as well. Another favourite of mine ^_^
kilala.nl tags: music,
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2009-05-24 19:11:00
Today is our fifth wedding anniversary. ^_^
Yesterday we had dinner at Sazanka, which is the teppan yaki restaurant of Amsterdam's famous and hella-expensive Okura hotel. Awesome food and a great evening! <3
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2009-05-24 18:50:00
Today we had a few relatives over in our new house to make some preparations before the actual painting starts. One of the tasks to be performed was the removal of the cable ducts that the previous owner had installed. Overall these looked pretty good and they gave us wall sockets all around the room. Thinking we'd make short work of the removal I turned off power to the living room and we got to work.
The previous owner was a pretty meticulous person. He'd kept most of the paperwork to the appliances they left behind, he'd also kept a lot of original paperwork for the house itself and he'd performed regular upkeep on the house. All of this led me to not question his documentation of the power breakers in the hallway. Unfortunately I should have and I really should've tested everything before setting off.
We'd already gotten to the last piece of ducting when my step-brother-in-law Hans suddenly piped up.
Hans: *jerk*
Hans: Say, are you sure the power's of this ...
Hans: *bonk*
Us: O_O
Us: Holy shit!
Yep... All of the power running through the ducts was actually NOT branched from the breaker labeled "living room", but from the one marked "microwave". It seems that, when the new kitchen was put in in 2001, the owner'd spliced his new setup into the newly created power group for the appliances.
So Hans took a hit, a rather nasty one. He jerked back, spoke a sentence and then collapsed. I think he was out for less than five seconds, because he regained consciousness while I was putting him in the recovery position. He was breathing, responsive and alert but we called 112 anyway. After answering their questions they assessed that an ambulance was not required and Hans concurred. A minute or two after getting zapped he was already completely lucid and confirming that he felt OK.
The rest of the day he was fine and I dropped him off at the station in Almere. On the way home his headache got worse though, so his landlord took him to the E.R. about an hour ago. The doc gave him a once-over and they're now waiting for the results. Youch... :( I'm worried...
Obviously we're NOT keeping the ducting because the wiring inside was also quite shoddy. For some reason the guy hadn't used proper solid core wire, but had used braided copper wiring. In places it was more like speaker wire than electrical wiring. After this afternoon's mishap we all went through the house, top to bottom, identifying any and all crappy wiring. The bottom line: each and every room will need cleaning up :(
* The living room has only one -real- wall socket. I'm getting in an electrician to put in one or two more in a -safe- way.
* Our bedroom's ducting will stay in place (because it looks good), but I'll take out all of the wiring.
* Dana's bedroom has plenty of real sockets, so we'll dike out all the ducting.
* The attic was a fscking mess. All ducts were run from the two real sockets, with 70% of the ducting being branched off from the socket that also runs the washer/dryer. I'll get the electrician to fix the power in the attic as well.
* This last item was also a piece of work! They guy'd made two new, shiny sockets for the washer and dryer. Unfortunately behind the wall we found that both were spliced into a single plug which was plugged into a socket.
It's a miracle the guy's handywork hadn't sent up the place in a fire years ago.
EDIT:
Got an update from Hans: he's fine. He went to l'hopital because he woke up less coherent than he usually is. He wasn't slurring his speech or anything, just not thinking as quickly and clearly as usual. Like we zapped the clever right out of him :) Anywho... The docs confirm that he's fine and that there's no damage.
kilala.nl tags: house, body, health,
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2009-05-19 22:36:00
About an hour ago a big-ass truck entered the communal gardens of our apartment building. Noisy and unwieldy it was, laden with a huge open container. I had no clue WTF was going on, but it was backing up right against the flat across the garden. There even were two coppers keeping an eye on everything.
Then, around 2230, loud crashes and bangs were heard across the greens. Yup, people were throwing stuff from the forth floor balcony into the dumpster. Big, shiny, metal things. Overhearing one of the neighbors outside my window mentioning something about "flower power" it became clear: someone'd built a weed plantation and'd been busted.
Now there's something you don't see every night! Thank $DEITY, because the ruckus is awful :/
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2009-05-19 21:44:00
Taking a page out of the good book on Open Coffee networking events, I've decided to start one for Almere. Following the example of the original Open Coffee event, we'll gather every month (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!) to meet new people over a cup of hot Java.
To get things going I've opened the Open Coffee Almere group at LinkedIn.com. With a bit of luck we'll get a few dozen members soon.
To make the group stand out a little bit I've worked with InkScape for a few hours. By combining the Almere coat of arms with the common logo for most Dutch OC groups I think I've managed to create something unique. Besides, I didn't feel like re-using the same low-res image all the other groups use ;) By making the logo a vector image I've guaranteed that we can resize it to -any- size without loss of quality.
EDIT:
I've set up a simple Wordpress site at opencoffeealmere.nl to act as a face to the masses.
kilala.nl tags: work, other tech, internet,
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2009-05-18 18:18:00
Holy carp! You leave the room for two minutes and they learn something new! o_O
I went to the kitchen to put my plates in the dishwasher and upon returning to the living room I think to myself: "Wait, that's not how I left you...". Surprisingly, despite wearing a Camp spreader, Dana managed to flip herself over from back to belly. I guess the little, white label on the corner of her playpen mat was interesting enough to take the gamble!
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-05-15 21:40:00
While rummaging about the web last week I ran into this OP for a cartoon series that I used to love. So, guess that theme song! I'm looking at you Nik, though it might ring a faint bell in Menno's head as well.
kilala.nl tags: geeky, tv, childhood,
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2009-05-15 13:37:00
Little under two hours ago we had the deed to our new house in Almere notarized. Champagne for everybody! ^_^
kilala.nl tags: house,
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2009-05-14 17:25:00
Today Marli started packing books into boxes, to get our move to Almere on its way. While chatting and packing we were suddenly disturbed by the familiar beep-beep indicating that the baby monitor had lost its DECT signal. What the?! Yeah, Dana had gotten a bit bored and decided to take a closer look at the hardware in her bed ^_^
Dana had a check up for her hips yesterday and unfortunately the news is neither good, nor bad. The doctor couldn't find any improvement not enough improvement to warrant enthusiams, because her legs still aren't slotting into place. However, the Camp spreader seems to be doing its job insofar that her legs are in the right location. She'll have another check up right before we move to Almere and then we'll decide how to proceed. Maybe there's an operation in the works. :/
Also... Last week I decided to get Dana started on more solid foods. She's been eating the basic pureed foods for a while now, so I got a few jars of the chunkier stuff. We fought for two dinners, with much coughing, gagging and vigorous eye-rubbing. After that though, she'd gotten accustomed to the "weird" food and now she's loving it :) Glee!
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-05-10 14:39:00
A lot of people now in their twenties or early thirties will remember the Samurai Pizza Cats cartoon series which was aired in the early nineties. Despite (or is it "because of"?) it's completely mangled english translation the show was hilarious and had many, many fans!
In Japan (where the show was knows as Kyatto Ninden Teyandee) companies released many cool toys, including plastic build-your-own action figures similar to today's Gundam toys. Because I'm a big fan of the show and because I love learning about Japanese toys and such I thought I'd devote a new section of my site to the series. I thought I'd give it the same treatment I gave to Arrow Emblem so photos of the merch and info on AV releases would be saved for posterity.
Little did I know that people had already beaten me to it! The lovely Violet and many other, knowledgeable fans are using the Edoropolis fora to gather anything and everything they can find on SPC/KNT, from doujins and fansubs to the latest auctions for collectibles. I'm still tempted to make a site that gathers all the actual files, but that will have to wait till another day. For now the Edoropolis fora will suffice for me and are an awesome resource for SPC/KNT fandom. ^_^
kilala.nl tags: tv, anime, manga, japan,
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2009-05-10 08:02:00
Recently on JapanSoc I saw a very cool blogpost come by from Tofugu, regarding Tenso.com. What Tenso does for you, is setup a local Japanese shipping address and then forward any incoming mail to your domestic address anywhere in the world.
This allows you to save some money on shipping from sites like Amazon.co.jp, but even better: it will allow you to partake in Yahoo Auctions, without using costly middlemen! This way I might actually get my hands on some Arrow Emblem goods without paying through my nose! /o/
kilala.nl tags: japan, internet,
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2009-05-07 06:10:00
At work, that is...
Yesterday I returned to the office to find fifty emails waiting for me, among them a request from an application developer. He was running into a problem that was mystifying him and his colleagues thought it might be a Unix security issue. It took them a while, but in the end someone lead them to me :)
I spent almost two hours with them, quickly learning about Essbase, Oracle and a tiny bit of Java along the way. In the end the problem was not with Unix security, but with the way they were trying to achieve their goal which was inelegant. We did manage to find a workable solution and I had a damn good time! The past few weeks have been filled with drudge work like politics, security auditing and red tape, so this little learning/debugging session was the needle hidden in the haystack. A golden needle...
Which leads me back to something I've been thinking about ever since seeing The sky crawlers, but I'll get back to that later. Now it's time to catch my train!
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2009-05-04 20:38:00
Ahhh, we're back. It really was an awesome weekend at Anime 2009 and it was definitely one of our best festivals ever. If you're interested you can read my convention report.
Let me just say that this was the most relaxed A2kx weekend I've had in years! The crowd was much bigger than usual (400 more than last year, totaling at 1800!) but there never were any huge crowds of screaming teenagers. Menno: we all (Hans, Harmen, Peter, Marli) agree that you would've enjoyed yourself because, unlike 2007/2008, we never felt "too old". The audience seems to be mellowing down a bit :)
kilala.nl tags: anime 2009, anime 200x,
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2009-05-04 18:09:00
Nothing to see here. Just a dummy post for my own records.
kilala.nl tags: health, hyperventilation,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.