2010-09-30 23:21:00
Today I spent the day working in another office, while the rest of my team was moving between offices. Dick had his iPad on shuffle and along comes a song that makes me say "If I didn't know any better I'd say this has some Suzanne Vega-ish qualities!". Apparently there was good reason for this because the song -was- by ms Vega.
Then tonight, while studying, the iTunes "Genius Mix" kept throwing more Suzanne Vega at me, including the rather sensual "Casual match". As this post's title suggests it has been years since I last listened to any of my Vega CDs. I think it mostly due to the fact that I've been avoiding them because they were my ex's favourite CDs. An odd and possibly faux reason to "avoid" listening certain songs, especially since Vega's music really is genius. I'll give them a whirl RSN, then finish off with my favourite female singer: Tori Amos ^_^
kilala.nl tags: music,
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2010-09-30 21:24:00
Today was Dana's fourth visit to kindergarten, which she continues to severely enjoy. We're told she plays nicely, has lots of fun and doesn't cry when mom leaves :)
Since she's started going to kindergarten we've noticed her speech changing ever so little. One awesome thing happened tonight and it took me a while to realize what was happening. After her bath I was dressing Dana on her commode and she was drumming on the wall and a box of wipes, all the while making noises.
"Ey Thay Dee Hee Fai Se"
She's counting ^_^ The noises she was making are unpronounced versions of the dutch counting "Een Twee Drie Vier Vijf Zes" which in english would sound like "Ayn Tway Dree Feer Vaif Zes". Nice!
She also perfectly understands what we say to her, so when I want to giver her a drink and ask her to bring her cup, she will in fact do that. Clever girl :)
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2010-09-19 19:05:00
Mmmm-m! <3
I cooked a meal of fresh spatzle and what is apparently called carbonade flamande (which I always just call stewed beef).
The meat was a triumph, judging by the orgastic sounds coming from the other side of our dinner table. The spatzle came out perfect, despite this being my first try. Dana -loved- them! It really is very easy to make a fresh batch, it's kind of like (European) pancake batter which gets pushed through a colander.
kilala.nl tags: cooking,
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2010-09-19 18:51:00
This weekend we celebrated Dana's second birthday with friend, family and neighbors.
My mother'd come over from Finland for the occasion, which was very nice. We have nothing of the stereotypical mother-in-law problems, thus making her stay-overs a very pleasant event. :)
Friday we took a few of Dana's grandparents out for dinner at Bobbie Beer in Almere City. This chain of restaurants just screams "family friendly", in its food, its decor and in its staff. A great time was had by all! Unbeknownst to us the staff has even prepared a little treat for the birthday girls, as witnessed on the left. The had some sparklers and sang her a song as well. She was bemused ^_^
What else? On Saturday more family came over for coffee and cakes, as did a few of our neighbors who brought along their kids. It was busy, busy, busy, but again it seemed like everyone enjoyed themselves.
Happy birthday darling girl! <3
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2010-09-16 00:00:00
A few weeks ago we met with two of FoxT's VPs who'd come over from the US to Amsterdam. During our two hour meeting we were told of many awesome features to be expected in future versions of BoKS (or "FoxT Access Control" :) ).
The future looks bright! I for one can't wait to get my hands on 6.6.x to start testing and learning! :)
kilala.nl tags: boks, sysadmin,
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2010-09-15 17:52:00
Ars Technica has an article that surely gives rise to some thought.
Ninety-seven percent of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science accept the evidence for evolution, but at least 40 percent of the public thinks that major differences remain in scientific opinion on this topic. Clearly, the scientific community isn't succeeding in making the public aware of its opinion.
So why is it that the general public either:
A. refuse to accept things that scientists have accepted as fact
B. think that scientists are not as largely in agreement as they are
B would possibly be a case of a lack of proper PR on the side of scientist, A could be caused by many things like utter pig-headedness in the general public.
Read it here: Skeptics discount science by casting doubts on scientist expertise
EDIT:
Funnily enough forum member Squidz leaves a comment which explains what the article just couldn't make clear to me:
To keep things in the terms of [marketing], when the question is asked of two economists, how will policy A affect market B, one economist says there will be a large increase in economic activity and the other says there will be a moderately large increase. [...] However, the two essentially agree, there will be a non-trivial increase in activity. They merely disagree on specifics of the scope (say $100 million versus $125 million). However, the public sees the disagreement between the two and interprets it as the question being open for debate.
In a world of sound bytes, and "telephone game" style information transfer, the essence of the story (economists agree policy A is beneficial) gets buried in the noise (economists do not perfectly agree) and [thus people believe] that there are experts who agree with their personal [...] beliefs.
This makes a lot of sense to me and I see it in my job every day. A group of techies are working on a problem for their customers. By each email and each hour the conversation between the techies will get more heavily laden with technical terms and discussions, leaving the actual customer confused. It's much better to keep the tech discussion away from the customer and then to only inform him of the final solution.
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2010-09-14 22:24:00
As a security guy this comic makes 100% sense and it is in fact a very likely scenario. It is also the one reason why we (Marli and I) never use the same password twice, either between accounts or when rotating them semi-frequently.
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2010-09-14 20:53:00
Earlier this week I received an InMail from one of the Open Coffee Almere regulars. She's been with us from the start and we get along quite well. The young lady wanted me to recall the name of "the other guy" who helped set up the OCA. "That was Arjan," I told her, "though he never really got involved. Why?"
Because just the week before she'd met a gentleman claiming to be the founder of Open Coffee almere ^_^
Supposedly he works for the La Place chain of restaurants who own the current venue for the OCA. My friend was arranging her own, local Open Coffee and met the guy at her local La Place. The conversation got rolling and then that little gem popped out.
As the title says: I guess I could/should be flattered, because at least someone thinks my volunteer work is worth taking credit for :)
kilala.nl tags: work,
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2010-09-14 09:41:00
This morning I found a disconcerting email on my iPhone, which I'd only received because of the phone's always-on IMAP connection to our mail server. In the email our hosting company Dreamhost.com informed us after-the-fact that they'd moved all of our mail boxes and activities to another server.
Their email also forgot to mention one very important aspect. While bringing to light that people with their own DNS servers would need to update their MX records, they forget to mention that the A record for mail.$DOMAIN has also changed. Great!
Right now we're in limbo insofar that the new server hasn't started accepted logins yet and the old server still appears to be receiving email. *grr* This sucks.
When I moved everything to Dreamhost I knew what I was getting into. I was forewarned that they're fast, that they provide a lot of value for your money but also that outages with Dreamhost come hard and unexpected. In our case the MTBF appears to a somewhere around 1.5 years, seeing how our last 24 hour outage was back in April of '09.
For the next 48 hours we'll probably lose all incoming mail. Thank $DEITY we're not running any commercial websites on there!
kilala.nl tags: website,
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2010-09-12 10:58:00
As the title of this entry suggests: we are "back in the saddle" as volunteer staff members of the Anime 200x convention. 2008 was the last time that we partook in the preparations, with us only gophering in 2009/2010. From this year on, Marli and I will be returning as the dealer room coordinators. Aside from that we'll also retain our previous tasks, like helping out with the annual quiz and with the coordination of Thursday's buildup.
It's nice to be back!
kilala.nl tags: anime 200x, anime 2011,
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2010-09-10 23:03:00
The above snippet is taken from the newly released first paperback volume of the Mathematics Girls manga. The manga combines maths with stories of the daily lives of four female maths students.
I immediately recognized the algebra described in the page above as stuff that I'd learned in college over ten years ago. Sometimes I really miss being able to do stuff like that, though I don't even have any practical application for it these days. *sigh*
kilala.nl tags: life, japan, manga,
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2010-09-10 22:43:00
You may recall that I started studying for my CISSP certification sometime in June. Since then I spent two months reading the 1200 page course book cover-to-cover, learning a lot of new things about the field of IT security. It was a chore getting through the book, but it's been very educational!
Last week I finally finished the last chapter, just in time for this week's "boot camp" week. Instead of using the five days of class learning things from scratch, I came prepared and only used the class to pinpoint any weak points in my knowledge and experience. Five days, forty hours of dry theory and many discussions later I now have a list of roughly 50 "TODO" items to tend to before my examination.
The exam is slated for the 13th of November and will take all of six hours. I'm actually a bit afraid that the remaining two months will be too long for me. I'll need a few weeks to kill all the "TODO" items, which will then leave me with a few more weeks before the exam. I could keep on cramming, I could get started on my next certs/studies, I could get some programming done, or I could simply unwind. I don't know... I'm afraid of letting all the info I've gathered slip from my head either way.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, work,
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2010-09-10 22:41:00
This morning we received -THE- phone call from the hospital: Marli's operation day has been set and it is almost exactly four weeks from now. Everything feels set in stone now. Exciting and a bit scary!
kilala.nl tags: family, health, body,
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2010-09-07 19:58:00
Squeee! This is just too cute ^_^
Me and Dana are waiting for her bath to fill up. I'm doing some email on my laptop, while she's leafing through her Astrid Lindgren story book. All of a sudden she closes the book, gets up, walks over to her music box, pulls the string, walks back and goes back to reading. <3
Might not be much, but it was damn cute! I guess you had to be there :)
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2010-09-05 20:58:00
Busy, busy, busy!
Saturday we were very busy around the house: shopping, cleaning, gardening, playing with Dana and Marli folded no less than five baskets of laundry (around eight loads). Very productive!
Then today we'd decided to go to Ouwehands Dierenpark zoo in Rhenen. On the way there we picked up my father and had coffee with him and his SO. While Dana didn't pay much attention to the animals themselves, she still had a blast and was worn out at the end of the day. I have to say though that Ouwehands really is a great zoo: looks lovely, roomy areas for the animals and plenty, plenty of playing areas for kids. Really great!
Afterwards we had lunch at the hotel that used to be ran by my best friend Menno's family. It was fifteen years ago since I last walked into the place and I have to say that it's turned very nice since then. Food was great too! :)
A good, good weekend!
kilala.nl tags: baby, family, life,
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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.