Friends

Pursue your passion!

Dave Pollard talks about models to find the intersection of your genius, your passion and your purpose. I really like intersection diagram he has made and quite a lot of the models are new to me and will need exploring.

More Skating and the Gazon

Of course this being Belgium it rained for Rollerparade so that was canceled, but on saturday morning the Euro Rollers invited me to skate along to the Atomium. We went by the Chateau Royal and had some nice thrills going down the hill by the japanese tower where someone clocked over 50km/h on their wrist GPS, don’t think I reached that speed but it was scary enough, I learned that the trick when the skates start to wobble is to put more weight on the heel and wiggle your toes.

On Saturday night I fooled part of the gang to come along to the Gazon where Leeroy Thornhill was DJing to crowd of maybe 2000 people.

On sunday morning after a couple of hours sleep it was off again but this time out to the Bois de la Cambre via les Etands d’Ixelles and back again via the Brussels Observatory and some incredibly stupid hills selected by me.

I really enjoyed meeting all the Eurorollers during these couple of days, they are an incredibly warm and welcoming group, furthermore I think they are on to something, it must be one of the best ways to visit cities as you really get a feel for them and not only the tourist parts but also the neighborhoods.

Some more pictures

Grennaskolan 85-2005

I thought I would just put a link to 85ers 20th anniversary prep site just in case I have some old Grennaskolan friends that pop by this site and don’t know we are planning the big get together in May

Xavier on Rails

Xavier structures some thoughts on ruby on rails the web-development framework that is getting all the buzz lately. His enthusiasm for it almost makes me want to program.

Wotan est mort les chiens aussi

Odball news in French

Carl Beeth

Living without Word

Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend about the fact that I must be nuts not to have MS Word installed on my computer. I am probably among the 0.01% of professionals that don't have Word on his computer, I don't even have a substitute like open office. The reason I don't have Word is not because it is a Microsoft product but rather because it's useless to my needs.

I very rarely need to produce paper documents. Most of my reports to clients are published straight to web where they can live a more useful and dynamic life than a paper document. Almost all my correspondence is email. That leaves just a couple of paper documents a month and for those I use indesign an application that produces beautiful document and leaves me in control.

So the only down side of not having word is that people tend to send me word files. Most of those I can safely crap and the few that come from clients I can have converted by friends or colleagues.

Back to active posting

I guess the big news is that I finally quit smoking. This meant that my brain has largely been mush for the past month, I have been crawling up the walls unable to keep my concentration long enough to post a coherent thought.

Also difficult to handle have been my mixed feeling on the war in Iraq. On the one hand, I am still totally against this war but now that it has started can only hope for an American victory. In the US some people are already claiming victory. but the military campaign was always going to be a push-over. Now starts the hard part, creating a stable secular democracy in Iraq. I don't even know it's possible, I sure hope so, because the alternatives are scarier then Sadam.

But my biggest frustration has been the demise of journalistic responsibility. Seems like journalism has been reduced to reporting what others say without ever analyzing it.

The silver lining has been the internet, it looks like it is working as designed and routing around stupidity. I have been amazed by the amount of interesting stuff about the war that has been floating to the surface via the weblog community. In the coming days I will try to catch up by posting some of those links.

At least I have one reader ;-)

Greg comments on my new design.
The only thing I'm missing compared to the previous version is the little picture on the top, which was clearly showing in which category we were...
I was so frustrated that I could not create categories on the fly. It required a trip to PhotoShop each time. By dropping the image I could make it much easier. Irony has it that since the change I have of course not added a single category. But at least I just activated the multi category and it seems to be working. Well anyway, I'm starting to prepare the next lift that will bring back the icons without the trip to PhotoShop and hopefully fix some other annoyances.

Welcome Naomi

Congratulations Elsa and Eric I bet you will make wonderful parents!

Oh and while I am at it congratulations to Xavier for his new baby of a very different kind!

Congratulations Isa and Greg!

Oups! I missed the arrival of the Alice on October 22. I bet Greg will be a fantastic daddy and will spoil Alice like crazy.

Amazon Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Reviews

I can't figure out which of these reviews are genuine and which ones are spoofs but they are very funny nevertheless and the official description does describe the toy as vibrating. via BoingBoing

Netcenari

Sacha, a webdesigner friend of mine just went public with his icogs powered site, the first one not directly connected to the project. The cool thing is that it represents the typical application we hope to see. He had just finished a draft version of the site when he sent it to me for comment. We added a couple of sitems and the cog code and bingo his news is now driven by icogs.

BBQ at JP's

Sitting here enjoying the weather and a great BBQ evening at JP's place. Tomorrow I'll hopefully upload some images.
Update: After nursing a really bad case of hang over all day I finally uploaded a little montage of the evening. I only kept the low flash picture as they gave the best ambience even if they are all fuzzy. Thanks for sending the pictures Kris.