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Stage - XVII: Week 11

Maandag 23 augustus
Rond half acht werd ik wakker. Wat een vreemd geluid hoor ik… Langzaam doe ik mijn ogen open en zie ik iets door de kamer vliegen. HUH?! Bril op en ja hoor: er vliegt een verdwaalde mus (ja, maar wát voor mus?) door de kamer. Tja, wat doe je dan? Deur open in de hoop dat ie via de keuken naar buiten vliegt? Proberen te vangen zodat je hem naar het raam kunt brengen? Gelukkig had het beestje het zelf ook snel door dat hij langs de airco naar buiten kon.
’s Ochtends meteen de HPLC laten “opwarmen” en ondertussen eindelijk even tijd gehad om met KLM te bellen om te vragen wat een ticket omboeken kost. “Honderd euro plus het verschil in ticketprijs”, dat klinkt beter dan “minstens driehonderd dolla...

Internship - III : the first days

Sunday

Apparently I’m still operating on the Dutch rhythm because I woke up at 6 (12 Dutch time). Luckily I could sleep a bit longer till about 9. I didn’t really do much this day besides writing my first blog story and talking with my mother and sister for a while.
I live on the top floor of this house, which is really weirdly designed. The “common room” has two windows, but on the side where there is a house 50 centimeters further. It would have made more se...

Internship - II: The trip

Saturday, 7.30: the last time in a while that my alarm clock goes off in Groningen. Slightly more than an hour later we (my dad, my mom, and my sister) leave for Schiphol. We got there around 11 so well on time since my flight was supposed to leave at 2.
Checking in online was not possible unfortunately, so I had to check in there. It appeared the flight was overbooked so I did not have a seat (yet). Nice! Checking in cost about half an hour eventually, but I had plenty of time. Almost immediately after checking in I had to go through passport checking, which meant I already had to say goodbye to the family! A bit earlier than expected but that's the way it is.
After waiting for a while at the gate I got to have a nice conversation wi...

Internship - I: Preparation

About fifteen years ago I discovered that New York was founded by the Dutch. Since then I knew: I'm going there some day. So when I went looking for an internship position a few months ago, I went looking somewhere in that area. My final choice was Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, located about an hour from New York. But was it possible? Only one mail later proved it was. The professor liked having me so the paperwork could start.
After trouble with money and insurance I could finally schedule my visa interview three weeks ago. Last week Thursday finally was that day!
When I made my appointment (8.25 in the morning!) I was told to be there ten minutes in advance, so 8.15. This meant taking the 5.06 train from Groningen...

Minor adjustments

I've made some adjustments to the blog today:

First of all, there now is a possibility to only show English posts, or only Dutch posts, similar to the categories and the archives.

Second, at the overview of blog posts, the titles now link to the full post. I don't know why I didn't add this sooner, because it makes so much sense.

And finally, again because it just makes sense, when you're viewing a single category or month or language, there now is a link back to the full list, similar to the Back link when watching a single post.


I've got some more things planned, as well as an actual "real" blog post for the first time since August

IMDb Top 250

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has a list of the 250 best films, as rated by users of IMDb.
I've been a member of IMDb for years, and have seen and rated over 1800 films. (Of those 1800, only a few are tv-shows, video games and dvd/tv specials. I do not rate individual tv episodes, except for Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance)

This list is not just any list made up by some magazine editor or something. As said, it's a list that consist of votes by IMDb users. A film needs at least 1300 votes before it appears on the list which means that if it appears on the list, at least 1300 people think it's a good movi...

Atom feed

Just a very short update: this blog now has an Atom (RSS) feed! Click the icon or the link above the categories to see or subscribe to the feed. Have fun!
Some more small updates are coming soon, so if you subscribe to the feed you will know as soon as possible

I have removed the "coming soon" "Keep track". I was planning on making something so you would receive an e-mail whenever there is a new blog. Since there now is an RSS feed, there is no use anymore.
If you do not have an RSS reader, I suggest Opera but there are a bunch of other programs as well. For those using Windows Vista, Windows Live Mail is able to read feeds.

last.fm

On April 17, it's been 5 years since I registered on last.fm (or AudioScrobbler as it was known back then). For those who don't know what it is: last.fm keeps track of all the music you listen to, either using the last.fm player or using a plugin for whatever music player you use (Winamp in my case)
In those five years, I have listened to over 41000 songs. That's 22 songs per day on average.
A few days ago I noticed that my sister, who registered 4 months after me, listened to almost 46000 songs. This got me thinking: did she really play more music than me?
Well, in terms of songs: obviously yes. On the computer that is. I own an mp3 player as well (an awesome Zen Vision:M) that I u...

Offline time

Well, that was fucked up. Last weekend my server went down and the only thing my host could do was re-installing everything. Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL: everything.
They made a backup before doing this and said they restored it after reinstalling. Yeah, that was true for one database (People2People) but not for all the others. Luckily I had a backup for BadFellas which was 2 days old but I couldn't care at that point. I had to get everything online again.
For my brother's website I only had a backup that was months old, for It's a Dutch World I didn't have a backup at all (wh...

Getting a Nintendo DS?

For many, many years, I've been a Nintendo fanboy. It's become a quite negative term the past few years, but I'm just a fan of Nintendo. There, I said it.
It all started at primary school, about 15 years ago. I got an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and loved it. My first game, Low G Man, was awesome. I also got Star Wars which was great fun but pretty damn hard at certain points. I never actually finished it on the NES (but I did a few years ago on an emulator). Of course I also had the three Mario games, all of which were great then and are still great.

After a few years I got the opportunity to buy a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and when I got it I sold my NES. Looking back now, I shouldn't have done...

The End of an Era

On April 25, 2000 I started a new website about a game that my friend Zef Hemel introduced to me a while earlier: Liero. It started out small but became larger and larger and at its peak it was one of the most active Liero websites. Its forum was visited by many players.
With the introduction of the first Service Pack for Windows XP in 2002 playing Liero became less fun because you could only play it without sound. In part because of that, less and less people played Liero. Projects like LOSP (Liero OpenSource Project) and Gusanos brought some new life to the community, but it didn't last till eternity. LOSP was abandoned by its author who joined Gusanos. ...

No spam after two months?

I started this blog almost two months ago. And where the People2People blogs had some problems with spam, mine stayed spam-free. In fact, it stayed completely comment-free.
Yesterday a friend of mine told me why: posting a comment didn't work man, do I feel stupid now!
This blog uses mod_rewrite which, in short, means that /archive/2008-12 or /full/3 aren't really existing folders but are fake folders to give nicer URL's. I don't have much experience with them, and as a result I made a small but rather large mistake. Replying to a blog post is done in reply.php, but when viewing a blog the system "thinks" reply.php is located in the non-existing folder /full. As such, replying didn't work and nobody was able to post any comments.
...

First REAL post

Yeah, what the hell. Even though it's not completely finished I decided to give my blog a proper start.
I've been blogging on Hyves since 2006 but not on what you can call a regular basis. Then a few months ago I started writing programming (less confusing word when you're talking about writing blogs blogging ) a blog for People2People. That inspired me to start my own blog, away from Hyves. This gives me the benefit of writing in both English and Dutch (writing an English blog on a website for Dutch people is just silly), I can change the layout to whatever I like and... and... well, it just gives me more freedom.
And here it is: a blog that originated f...

First post! W00t!

Move along people, nothing to see here (yet)!