News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
I just upgraded WordPress to the latest version, 2.3. As usual, the upgrade went smoothly. It’s almost a rule, you take a backup of everything, and then the upgrade goes fine.
You don’t take the backup, and everything goes tits-up.
One thing that I really like is that it seems more responsive, quicker somehow. Plus the plugins tell you themselves (well, most of them do) when a new version is available. Cool !
And of course, finally, FINALLY, we have built-in tagging. Woot!
Not as good as Michel Vuijlsteke, but not bad either!!!
Can you do better than me ? Click the above link to try…
This site shows you what is most looked at by people using VirtualEarth. Interesting, seems like a lot of vacation spots are targeted, as well as large city centres.
Me, I always use Google Maps. If you end it with the country suffix it will immediately show you the countries map. For example . be shows you Belgium, .ie shows you Ireland. Neat.
Drat ! Seems like we’re going to get some unwelcome visitors…
Mosquito virus arrives in Europe
A debilitating tropical virus carried by mosquitoes has become established in Europe for the first time.
The Ministry of Health in Italy has confirmed about 160 cases of chikungunya in the Ravenna region in northern Italy.Travellers have been advised to protect themselves against mosquito bites.The European Centre for Disease Control urged pregnant women and those with chronic illnesses to seek medical advice before visiting the area.The villages of Castiglione di Ravenna and Castiglione di Cervia have reported most of the cases.The main symptoms of the patients were high fever and joint pain, as well as headache, muscle pain, rash and less frequently gastrointestinal symptoms.One death was reported in a 83-year old individual with underlying medical conditions.World first
Professor Antoine Flahault, who coordinates French research on chikungunya, said the Italian outbreak was a “world first” outside the tropics.Writing in the Quotidien du Medecin journal, he said the extension of the virus beyond its Indian Ocean origins was “worrying without being alarming”.He suggested that the very high density of mosquitoes in and around Ravenna had fuelled the outbreak.”The mosquito vectors (carriers) of this disease have been in Italy for several years. All we know is that increased temperatures and humidity make the climate more tropical and favour the proliferation of mosquitoes,” he said. The virologist said the situation in Ravenna was under control and measures had been taken to reduce the number of mosquitoes. Chikungunya gets its name from a Swahili word meaning “that which bends up” because of the arthritic-type symptoms that leave victims stooped. Symptoms usually appear between four to seven days after being bitten and can persist for several weeks.There is no vaccine against chikungunya.
Heel vreemd, mijn laatste post is niet te zien.
Testje dan maar, ineens in het nederlands.
Ho ! Nu wel – blijkbaar moet er iets mis zijn met mijn categories, als ik er eentje te veel aanklik valt ie weg.
I’ve just stopped playing Bioshock – it’s very entertaining, and very well thought out. I’m still in the Medical Pavilion, so not exactly very far into the game, but it’s good stuff. You get surprises all over the place, ranging from splicers hiding behind corners jumping you when you pass to collecting stuff and suddenly realizing that you can hear someone else !
That is the most deranging part of it – you see, in any other game I played when a new enemy appeared, he was either silent or bellowing. Here you hear those mad splicers muttering things, sane things that are so out of scene that they become totally weird, and they wander around, not necessarily looking for you.
The most scary part so far was when in the morgue, in a dark passage to a well lit place I saw a shadow of a man working on ‘something’. Stepping back, admiring his work… ignorant of you. So you rush up out of the water and just at that moment… the light goes out(select the white text on the left if you want to know).
Hooboy.
The community around Bioshock is in an uproar over several issues (SecuRom, Field of View, broken figurines), and I am starting to get annoyed as well. I stayed up just last night to get the game installed, and it takes a looooong time. Easely lost 20 to 30 minutes just seeing the progress bar inch forward while it consumes about 8 Gigabytes on your disk or so.
Then, after that very long wait time, you get a message that it will update the game by downloading the latest patch. Which takes a slightly less long time by itself. And then it says the downloaded patch is corrupt. Try Again ? Same result.
After four times with the same result and meanwhile long past midnight, I gave up. And guess what ? It automatically deinstalls the game so you have to go through the install process again. Grrrr.
I found a reference to it on the 2kgames forums, but no solution. I’ve asked an official question on the Take 2 Games site, so far unresolved.
Update : This morning I tried again, and surprise, surprise it worked. Let’s see if I can finally play this game!
I’ve just done a number of much needed upgrades to my blog :
There. Not bad, eh ? Now all it needs is some decent writing, heh.
Update : seems that I managed to kill the direct link of the posts. Hmmm. An update of the permalink structure via my wp-admin pages fixed that right quick.
Update 2 : Weathericon does not display an icon, hmf. This might be a problem because of the theme, I’ll need to check. Update 2 update : in windows xp it shows. Funny.
Update 3 : I can upload my logo on there, but it’s not exactly whipped up juuuuust right.
As I wrote before, Tom had broken his right arm early in July, and yesterday (Thursday august 23) he went into day surgery to remove the pins that were holding the broken bones together.
Everything went well and he was back home when I came back from work. Dolores told me he was a very, very brave boy and that he hadn’t cried at all.
His arm is still stiff though, but Sunday we can remove the wound dressings and then he has one week before needing to go back to the clinic (to see if he needs kine or not).
Djeez ! I haven’t written in a looong long time. Well, lemmesee :
Internet and the computer are sorta last place for now…
I’ll get back up to speed in september, I’ll be detailing our upcoming Barcelona trip !