2008-12-22 21:32:00
Oh dear. Exasperated by the electrical wiring I'd been trying to fix for half an hour and by the tools that I didn't fully understand I muttered under my breath: My soul for a house where these things just fscking work!. Immediately things snapped into place and I got the wiring done.
Should you suddenly find me gone in a puff of smoke and sulphur, you'll at least know what happened =_=;
kilala.nl tags: not good, house, weird,
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2008-12-01 19:18:00
For the past two years I've been staring at the holes in our ceiling and the electrical wiring hanging out of them. We had to hang the lamps and the ceiling fan off-center and thus the original connection points were left unused. Now that we're trying to sell our apartment we need to finally fix these things as they don't really look nice on the realtor's photograps ^_^;
Isn't it ironic how work left undone for two years can be done in two hours and only set me back about thirty euros? *le sigh* It actually even looks pretty okay.
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2008-10-15 08:44:00
Overheard at the office yesterday:
Colleague: You have a pretty good British accent on you! Mind you, that's not much of a compliment coming from a Scotsman.
Me: ... Thanks! ^_^
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2008-10-12 20:53:00
I spotted this nugget of wisdom on our jar of peanutbutter:
May contain trace amounts of nuts.
Fascinating!
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2008-10-01 21:14:00
Guest: Mmm, smells nice! Cooking a pot roast?
Me: ... Actually, I'm baking a cake.
kilala.nl tags: weird, cooking,
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2008-08-20 18:21:00
While reading through the WikiTravel entry for Akihabara I stumbled upon a phenomenon I'd never heard of before: cat cafes, specifically Neko Jalala.
This is not a cafe where cats can go for milk and catnip, but where people can go to play with cats. Now I know that maid cafes were all the rage in 2005-2007, so I guess someone is trying to come up with something new. I have to admit though, as a cat lover, that they're on to something :)
The cover charge for the cafe is pretty high, just like at the cosplay cafes. Looking at the pictures from the photo reports (below) I'd have to say that I'd be willing to pay it anyway. The place just looks too nice :) If I ever go back to Akiba, I'll damn well go to Neko Jalala for some coffee.
EDIT:
It seems that there's more cat cafes in Akiba :) Greedy Catz
kilala.nl tags: japan, weird, cat,
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2008-08-18 10:35:00
Ever since my trip to Japan last December I've been recognizing more and more things in the anime, manga and movies I consume. A building here, a subway line there, a part of the Tokyo skyline and so on. The same thing also happened when I was reading the Marmelade Boy manga (as mentioned below).
In volume 7, Meiko goes to Hiroshima to confront Namura about their relationship. I guess the Peace Park and a few of Hiroshima's other sights weren't romantic enough, so the meeting took place on Miyajima island right off the coast. Of course the island provides both comedy (the deer that harass you for food) and romance (temples, the sea and the Tori in the sea).
Lo and behold, in the background of their meeting I spot something that had bewildered me when Nick and I were on the ferry to Miyajima. On the hillside overlooking the sea, there's this huge, weird, white building with golden statues. It looked like a gaudy hotel, or some weird church/temple dealy. I even managed to find the building on Google maps.
Well, thanks to fellow Arsian and all-round cool guy Durf I now know what the building is ^_^ To quote Durf:
The place looks like it's called the "Umi no Mieru Mori Bijutsukan", "the Mori Museum with a View of the Sea". The website is here: http://www.umam.jp/.
The whole thing (including all the buildings to the south in the complex you can see on the map) belongs to the "Byodo Daiekai", a Buddhist splinter group that broke off from the Nichiren group some decades ago. There are lots of these "new Buddhist" organizations, with the most famous (and powerful) being the Soka Gakkai.
Anyway, I can't find a lot of information about the group online, but there are lots of bloggers who write about how upset they are with this white monstrosity wrecking the hillside view from Miyajima.
So... It -is- some kind of religious building and not a hotel for the rich and stupid :) The funny thing is that my father and his girlfriend had spotted another huge-weird-white-with-gold building on their last trip to the USA and that one turned out to be a religious building as well. Mormons, in this case. What is it with modern, splinter-group religions?
kilala.nl tags: japan, japan 2007, weird,
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2008-06-08 13:51:00
Late last night, after our round of detective series had finished we ran into Ken Russel's Gothic (1986) on the MGM Movie Channel. The hacked movie poster on the left says it all: this must be what an acid trip could be like. o_O
Whimsical WTF-city Batman!
The idea behind the movie is quite interesting though. We all know Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein book, right? What a lot of people don't know is that this book was written after a weird night of ghost stories with Lord Byron, Shelley's husband and a few others. What Gothic does, is take this night, turn it into a movie and twist it into a weird-ass hallucination with conjuring, blasphemy and women with eyeballs for nipples... >_< Yes, it's -that- weird...
I won't be buying this flick on DVD because it really wasn't that good. However, if you're ever looking for a WTF-filled night, this is the movie to turn to. :)
kilala.nl tags: weird, movies,
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2008-05-23 11:18:00
Due to a few administrative bork-ups at a higher level, it's been decided that my team at the office needs to move to another building. That's a real shame, because the building we've been in for years is absolutely wonderful. Not only in an architectural and culinary sense, but also in the sense that there's a lot of cool people over there.
Due to some more bork-ups in the delivery of the new/old building we were asked to temporarily move to yet another building. After a lot of hassle and moaning and groaning today's finally the day. We moved to a lovely art deco building in The Hague, whose interior faintly reminds me of my dad's office buildings from the early eighties :)
There's been some griping among the veterans who really, really wanted to stay at the old building. I understand where they're coming from, but personally I don't really mind. I go where the customer wants me to; that's what they pay me for anyway. And $DEITY knows where I'll be in a month or two ^_^
My new desk + chair suck though ;_; They're decrepit and falling apart.
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2008-05-12 15:27:00
We still had a small bag of candy left from our visit to the cinema on Saturday evening. This bag was left on the backseat of our car, while we were visiting Marli's mom'n'stepdad on Sunday. Upon arriving home last night, the above is what we found ^_^
That's what you get when you leave a bag of candy frogs, candy cherries and jellybeans in a hot car :D It looks fscked up, but it's actually quite tasty! Yes, of course we tried some!
Here's another view of the contraption.
I've learnt one thing from all of this! No matter how candy frogs are aligned in a bag, when they melt all the white stuff floats to the top and the green stuff floats to the bottom. Now -that- is science! /o/
kilala.nl tags: art, cooking, weird, photos,
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2008-04-29 21:56:00
My dear wife, the service trainee at dutch railways, just regaled me with a few stories of her evening at work. Her shift started around two and lasted till ten and apparently the station's a certifiable nuthouse tonight ^_^;
Apparently there's a waiting period of about 80 minutes for the international tickets desk, even at ten o'clock at night. Something about people going on holidays and all kinds of foreigners coming to Amsterdam for tomorrow's Queen's Day celebrations. Apparently a lot of travellers cannot grasp the notion that the NS stop handing out queue numbers around ten, when the desk closes at 2300. Which part of "an 80 minute waiting period" do they not understand?
Anywho... Marli's not looking forward to tomorrow's shift. It's Queen's Day, in Amsterdam and her shift's from 1630 till 0030. Oh dear. Her crew are going to take the brunt of all the drunks and nuts returning to home after a long day of partying and drinking. No wonder she'll be travelling undercover, with her uniform in her backpack. O_o
EDIT:
By the by... In no way do I mean to say that Marli doesn't like her job! On the contrary, she's loving every single day! And she's pretty damn good at her work too, from what I gather. It's just that this week is home to one or two shifts from Hell ^_^;
kilala.nl tags: work, ns, weird,
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2008-03-10 11:58:00
A few weeks ago I complained at the Wacom helpdesk, that my stylus was not living up to my expectations. While the pen itself was still fine, the rubber grip had started falling apart within six months. Luckily they assured me that this was covered by warrantee, so I wouldn't have to pay thirty bucks for a new one.
Well today the new stylus arrived, or should I say "a big box of air". Wacom shunned no expense in making sure my stylus reached me in one piece. *sigh* Talk about waste! A box, fifty times the size of my stylus, a big wad of plastic bubblewrap and then the small box the stylii usually come in. What, an envelope wasn't good enoug?
I'm still happy with my shiny, new stylus though ^_^;
kilala.nl tags: other tech, weird,
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2008-02-25 10:10:00
This weekend I received Snow's newsletter in the mail, which is a good thing: it keeps me in touch with the goings-on in the company, while I'm away at college. Most of the time the articles are a bit boring or they're just important stuff everyone needs to know. It's not often that an article has me outraged, but this time they managed to do it.
The following was translated from Dutch:
Starting from April, Snow will be the first company in our country to employ high-tech scanners for access control to the building and our workstations. These scanners work with RFID tags. To test the access control modules and to search for any bugs in the system, we would like to implant Verichip tags at the next company get-together. This is on a strictly voluntary basis.
To sum things up, there's a few guys at Snow who're completely in love with RFID and the applications thereof. In our new building, they would like to set up access control to doors and workstations, using RFID scanners. These scanners would use tags that are implanted in our colleagues' forearms (the small device you see on the left, or as I've come to call it the glass maggot).
Now, I've been assured by my field manager that all of this is still up in the air, since the ondernemingsraad (some council meant to approve of management decisions involving the whole company) still hasn't agreed with this. But even if it were to come to this, I'd still refuse to have that maggot under my skin. Let me them provide me with a keychaintag, dongle or badge for all I care, but they sure as hell aren't sticking anything in my body.
If this were the European .gov asking its citizens to switch to RFID passports, which would include their social security and their health insurance, then MAYBE I'd consider it. Because in that case it's something I'd be using for over ten years at a time. But even then I'd still have my doubts, especially due to the security issues involved with RFID.
But in this case, it's just an employer trying to be hip with new tech. Lord knows what they'll be doing with the info gained through the RFID chips movement through the building. Besides, I'm bound to leave them in one to two years, so why the hell would I get an implant that will not see ANY use after that time? Would that mean that future employers would have to add their own implants to my arm? That'd be nice, a whole family of maggots under my skin D:
NO WAI!
kilala.nl tags: work, geeky, weird, fun, other tech,
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2008-02-23 15:48:00
This afternoon Blackie had been asking me to play a lot, but 'cause I'm busy with my homework I couldn't oblige. So to entertain her I propped open one of my filing cabinet's drawers. Yes, the one she'd been digging in earlier.
After hooking her front paws over the edge, giving a big *huff!* and lifting herself into the drawer she actually seemed pretty content. Just sitting there in the dark on my school books seemed pretty comfy. But then after a few minutes I heard a strange noise and she'd disappeared! o_O
Uhm, no... She was sitting on a box in the drawer below it, -behind- the first drawer :D I just love that cat!
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2008-02-03 23:20:00
You may remember that Blackie likes sitting/lying/digging in drawers. I have no clue what she's up to in there, but fine. Well, it seems she's take a shine to my new secretaire desk as well ^_^
I'm thinking of sending this in to I Can Has Cheezburger?.
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2008-02-02 08:41:00
Or apparently that's what prof. DeTurck of Penssylvania-U thinks.
DeTurck does not want to abolish the teaching of fractions and long division altogether. He believes fractions are important for high-level mathematics and scientific research. But it could be that the study of fractions should be delayed until it can be understood, perhaps after a student learns calculus, he said. Long division has its uses, too, but maybe it doesn't need to be taught as intensely.
From:
and
Of course, like many others I believe this notion to be nuts. Decimals have no meaning unless you know what fractions are. It'll be like handing a bunch of powertools to a carpenters apprentice and asking him to build a house. Oh, you don't need to know what everything does, just get to work...
As a future maths teacher I'm scared by this idea. And it's not just limited to the US. A dutch prof by the name of Kees Hoogland shares DeTurck's opinion that kids should be learning less longhand maths and should instead be focusing on using the calculator. Why? Because they'd be stupid not to use the modern materials at their disposal. *sigh*
I've started a forum discussion about this, over at Ars. Obviously, it's gotten some pissed off responses ^_^
EDIT:
In response to my thread over at Ars, GwT has started a new thread asking how important math is in general.
kilala.nl tags: school, studying, weird, maths,
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2008-01-23 10:01:00
I'm not going to say much about it, but this morning I ran into something that put me right back to my teenage days. Back then, I was working on the side at a local sauna. It wasn't the cleanest of work environments. And now I run into something similar in the server room... o_O WTF?
Cleaning buckets: apparently handy, when you're in a tight spot. >_<
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2008-01-14 08:52:00
Well, this is creeping me out... Kinda...
I have my Powermac booted in Firewire Target Disk Mode, meaning that it acts as if it were a dumb firewire disk. I've done this to copy over a few gigs of photos from my Macbook, since doing that over Wifi will take ages.
Well, the fans on my Powermac started out at a low hum, but over the course of two to three minutes their pace has been steadily rising. It's kind of creepy to hear their pitch go up for more than a minute. It makes me wonder how far they can go before breaking ^_^;
So now there's a -very- noisy hairdryer sitting beneath my desk, while I'm waiting for the copy to finish. I'm still waiting for a *SNAP!*, followed by an awful racket from one of the broken fans bouncing around the case. >_>
kilala.nl tags: apple, powermac, weird,
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2007-12-27 09:05:00
Oh dear lord... I'm 28 years old and still fretting about going out into the great unknown by myself.
/me kicks himself out the door and in the direction of Kobe
kilala.nl tags: weird, japan 2007,
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2007-11-17 07:41:00
I don't know why, I don't know how, but for the past two weeks Blackie's been very interested in one of the drawers of my filing cabinet. Specifically, the drawer containing my school books and papers. When it's open, she crawls into it from my desk. When it's not she'll start scratching the drawer and meowing. So it's obvious that she wants in there.
I just don't have a clue what she's doing in there! Most of the times it's a quick in-n-out, but sometimes she'll be in there scratching at things. Like she's digging. And now, as I'm typing this, she's sitting there very, comfortably waiting for me to pet her. Weird.
I've already checked the drawer for crap or puke, so she's not using it like a second bathroom or anything. I guess she just gets a little weirder every year :)
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2007-09-12 22:40:00
Recently I've been doubting Jonathan Schwartz's leadership of Sun Microsystems. (Sun is the manufacturer of my favourite Unix hardware.) I mean, John seems like a nice guy and all, but some of the ideas implemented under his leadership freak me out.
A few weeks back Sun proudly announced that they would change their stock ticker index symbol from "SUNW" to "JAVA". They apparently felt that the name of their most well-known product is more representative than their own company name. Something about the name "Java" being known to everyone on the web.
Sure, you're right about that. Everyone on the web knows "Java" and thinks "slow" and "crappy" when they hear that name. When I think about Sun I want to think of their wonderful operating system Solaris. I want to think about the cool hardware they put together and the shiny new tech they come up with. I DO NOT want to be reminded of that language that was used to create bog-slow applications.
And then there's today's announcement.
Sun Microsystems is becoming a Microsoft Windows OEM partner.
Sweet Jeebus, is that the Doomsday Bell I hear ringing? To them it might be a survival strategy. To me it looks like rolling over and playing submissive to Microsoft.
I want Scott McNealy back! That was a guy I could put my faith in.
kilala.nl tags: unix, weird, work, sysadmin,
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2007-09-11 12:49:00
Well, that was a surprise! I was dicking around in Osiris, the online student management toolset at HU. Enrolling in a few classes, signing up for tests and term papers, just generally looking around and exploring.
After clicking the Results button I was greeted with a big list. But how is it possible that I already have grades?! I just started school a week ago!
Then I took a closer look at the dates. Apparently my student number isn't the only thing that carried over to my new college enrollment ^_^
kilala.nl tags: school, weird,
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2007-08-19 21:00:00
I've been using Bits on wheels as my OS X torrent client for a while now. So far it's suited all my needs, even though development was ceased almost two years ago. I've never had problems leeching or seeding data and usually get rather high speeds.
That is, until this weekend, when I was stimmied by one particular torrent. The whole weekend it would leech at speeds between 0.1 kBps and 5 kBps. Atrocious, to say the least. While that was loading I was also seeding five other torrents through the same tracker host. I tried twiddling some of the up- and download settings but to no avail. I did finally manage to get better performance, I just don't understand why ^_^
1 leech, 5 seed, upload capped @10kBps -> download speed sucks.
1 leech, 5 seed, upload capped @25kBps -> download speed sucks.
1 leech, 3 seed, upload capped @25kBps -> download speed got better.
So even though I'm still uploading the same amount of data, I -am- getting better performance. How odd is that? I'd be grateful if anyone would care to explain. :)
kilala.nl tags: internet, other tech, weird,
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2007-07-10 22:52:00
I have absolutely no fscking clue what's going on here, but Boy! if this trailer doesn't get me interested?!
Some horror, science fiction, monster flick? I don't know, but I know I want to see it already! Shame that it's not about Gojira or something like that... The guy directing the flick (J.J. Abrams) was also responsible for Lost, so it's bound to have at least some mind fscks. Wikipedia has already gathered some info.
Thanks to Daring Fireball for the heads-up.
kilala.nl tags: weird, awesome, movies,
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2007-07-07 07:04:00
Wow... T-Mobile sure makes it easy to be dishones, or even a thief.
By accident they sent my wife a second Samsung U600 (lovely phone by the way!), due to some administrative muck-up. Naturally we called their customer support line to tell them about their mistake and to ask whether they could come and pick it up.
The lady on the other side was very impressed by our honesty and promised us two things:
1. As a reward for our honesty we were allowed to keep the Bluetooth earpiece that came with the phone.
2. She'd make arrangements for the phone to be picked up. We would be called back later to make an appointment.
That phone call was two weeks ago ^_^;
kilala.nl tags: awesome, weird,
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2007-07-04 14:01:00
Man! The weather has been el mucho loco here for the past week. I've no clue what's going on, but it's freaking me out.
Hot. Cold. Warm. Freezing. Drizzle. Sun. Downpour. Bright sunshine. And all of that in the course of a few hours. It's been quite common for us to walk in a nice, warm sun when going from one office building to another only to see a huge torrent when we reach our desk. Really, really weird...
And then there's the thunder! I rarely notice any thunder over here in the NL, but it's been noisy almost every evening this week. Incredible!
I'm thinking that God's fallen asleep on the keyboard of his weather machine...
kilala.nl tags: weird,
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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.
