Category: Blog News

Last month April I started running again – this time using the start2run podcast series published by een.be, our governement sponsored radio. You can either download them as mp3s to play on your mp3 player, or you can subscribe to the podcast using iTunes.

Start 2 Run is a training programme for beginners that varies the number of minutes you run, each time you run increasing slightly the time you run versus the time you walk.

I’m using my iPod Nano, together with the Nike+iPod connectors to monitor my progress. A sensor attached to one of my running shoes transmits my paces to the iPod, which has a bluetooth connector. Once back home, when I sync the iPod nano with iTunes, it transmits the information to the Nike+ website were it is all shown in gorgeous Flash. Honestly, being the geek that I am, this pushes me to keep on running.

So far, I’m progressing nicely ! Basically the time I’m running is about the same always, between 22 and 25 minutes, but I am running further and faster the more I train and the further the lessons progress.

The podcast series assumes you run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but I can only manage Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Sundays either doing the garden work or swimming. So I’m going a bit slower than normal, but I don’t think this is a bad thing.

I started running April 10, and this is the result :

May 3 was my absolute top run, but I felt great then and on top of the world (I had an absolutely smashing surprise Birthday feast arranged by my wife) !

On the actual website if you mouse over the bars you see the date, the time and distance and even a calculation on how much calories you burned. And if you want, you can draw your run using a mashup of Google Maps.

Hopefully, I’ll have the discipline and stamina to keep on running the whole series and then some more. One thing I mourn is since I started running I’m no longer losing weight; I’m not gaining either, but boy am I hungry ! 🙂

If you have Second Life, then get a First Life!

This post is more for my own benefit (and perhaps theirs, if this blog survives until they are grown up and can read english). So ignore it if you are interested in technical things, I promise I’ll write some more technical posts here the coming months.

Tom is now 5 years old and Sam is nearly 2. Time for a short look at both. They are both considerable alike in many ways, doing some things exactly the same way, looking at something the same way, and yet in other things they are 2 completely different beings.

Tom at 5 years old has changed from a chubby baby to a very lean and tall child. Lots of brown-gold hair and deep-brown big eyes make him a natural attraction for other children. The school teacher told me that everybody wants to sits next to Tom, and it sometimes devolves into an argument.

[This is something in which he differs from me – I wasn’t one from the popular kids, and it concerns me that I won’t be able to help him how to deal with this. How do you explain to your kid that it’s a privilege that children want to sit next to you and that you should treat them correctly ?]

He’s also very sensitive, sometimes too much so. I remember myself as being as sensitive as him, and it makes me afraid for him that he will be picked on, yet I mustn’t think that his experiences will be the same as mine. Tom is also a very bright and intelligent child, who asks lots of questions that we always try to answer honestly. If it is too complex, we’ll tell him so and promise to explain it to him later.

Sam has grown into an inquisitive and precocious child : not yet 2 years old, he emulates the things his brother does as much as possible. Already he no longer wants a bottle; he drinks from a proper (plastic) cup, just like his brother. He dearly, DEARLY loves soup – any soup you give him he will eat. Foodwise he likes to eat his favourite things (chocolate !!) and has a very distinct and round tummy. If he likes what he eats, he gobbles it up, often filling his mouth to capacity instead of taking bites. It isn’t surprising that he weighs more than Tom did at his age !

Because he has a brother, he learns things much faster than Tom did.

Tom is his idol, he adores him and follows him around. We noticed this recently when he went crazy after not seeing Tom for a few days. He can also be a real pest to him, taking his favorite toy and running off with it; Tom usually stands there crying; lately he’s going on active chase behind him (we encourage him to come up for his own rights). We try too intervene not too much, although I have a really hard time seeing them push and pull like that (no blows allowed upon dire punishment by dad or mom).

Sam still wakes up from time to time at night, which is taxing, but at least it is less and less. He is very sensitive to respiratory infection though, during the winter we sat him at the inhalator every evening. Even now he sometimes wakes up coughing…

While Tom is very cautious and will ask us for permission before exploring, Sam loves to explore, to the point where we need to keep an eye on him – he doesn’t care if we are following or not, he’s off to explore as much as he can. He’s also less affected by pain; he falls and gets up without crying most of the time. I hope that Tom and Sam will cross-pollinate : that Tom will learn to explore without fear and that Sam will learn cautioness.

It’s been a wonderful experience so far for both Dolores and me. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that is us that have gotten these 2 delightful children and the privilege to educate them in the way of living…

While Sam is learning words all the time (not very pronounceable, but still, he’s got his own lingo by now), Tom is busy learning to cycle on his superbike. He’s really very persistent and despite multiple falls (cushioned by his helmet, luckely) he continues to advance, and is not nearly so erratic as in the beginning.

When he first started without his training wheels he went everywhere he looked, except that he forgot to look straight ahead where he was going.

Still he has been having a blast, pity that our garden isn’t really suited for bike-riding or he would be riding all over it. As it is, we go around the church or visit the Haller bos where there are no cars.

I’m really proud of him, and his don’t-give-up attitude !

I just noticed that Akismet has blocked 5627 spam comments on my blog.

Phew. Without that plugin, I would have closed up my comments long ago, making this just another static website on the internet, not even giving the illusion that a comment could be made by someone.

Thank you, developers of Akismet !

I keep finding all these great–looking new themes, but then I usually discover that the developers behind it haven’t really finished it, or want to get paid to finish it, or really couldn’t care less about finishing it, or don’t have the time to finish it, or are waiting on the original theme author to finish it so they can adapt it, etcetera.

Okay, okay, so I’m getting fed up looking for a new theme. Preferably 3-column based, widget ready with the possibility to change colors and change headers.

Mind ya, the themes being free I can’t actually really complain about it.

But for just once I would like to find a nice theme that I like that is actually finished, or where someone makes some effort to finish it.

As a theme developer here’s a good rule for you – don’t just throw it out on the internet expecting everyone to use it without getting comments on errors, or on how it could be made better, or questions on how to adapt it. If you decide to release a new theme, either indicate clearly that it’s a beta theme and you want comments (obviously) or that it is finished ‘as is’.

As lots of themes seem to be based on or around the K2 theme, I’ve installed that. It’s been around for a long time, seems to get lots of support, and you can write your own CSS stylesheets. Plus it seems as flexible as a Chinese acrobatic circus performer, allowing you to modify pretty much everything you want.

Maybe with this I can actually create my own adaption to suit my needs. Scratch my itch, so to speak.

In case you are stuck behind a firewall that uses NTLM proxy authentication, and the programs that you want to use don’t know how to deal with that, the following can help you out.

The NTLM authorization proxy server (Sourceforge project) is a local proxy that sits between your program and the NTLM proxy and does the authentication for you. It’s written in Python, so you do need to have that installed (there are quite a few other NTLM authorization servers written in other languages around, though).

Simply configure the server.cfg file with the correct NTLM info (you can leave the password blank so it asks you for it upon started, more secure) and launch it in an open dos window. By default, it disallows other clients connecting to your pc, although it does have that option.

You then launch your other (python or other) program in another dos window, where you do a ‘set HTTP_PROXY=127.0.0.1:5865’ so that it redirects to the ntlm authentication proxy.

Works like a charm !

I just found an interesting link on the Inquierer : a link to a dynamically generated map of Belgium that shows the domains registered to Belgian people, divided up by location.

It shows some very interesting things :

• Using the above link, you can see that per commune more are registered in Flanders then in Wallonie.
• If you change the selection to show per inhabitant of the commune, it shows up even more clearly that there is a difference between Flanders and Wallonie.

I just wish they would also show how many Dutch are holding on to .be names… I know of a few that are holding on to a lot of domain names.

Have you ever visited an ancient uncle or aunt of yours and when you entered their house/nursing home you feel transported back in time, sometimes stifling so ? Nothing has changed, the same clock is still ticking, the same sofa with the floral print that lasts a lifetime, the same smells, heck the same dust covering the ancient oak cabinet ?

They are still physically there, but they don’t innovate anymore, they don’t change. There’s (hopefully) nothing wrong with them, but they’ve stopped living, they’ve become zombies.

Becoming a zombie is not how I want to end life. I hope that if I become old, I’ll be like my grandfather, who died at the age of 103. Far into his nineties, he still managed (admittedly, with help from his daughters) to publish a newsletter, to create drawings, to think and reflect. His mental vision narrowed thereafter, but even then he still managed to think.

A friend of mine once said that people after their thirties settle into the personages they’ve created for themselves – ie they’ve been customising their worldview on how they should react to other people and events, and when they’re happy with what they’ve become, they become opposed to changing that world view and thus themselves.

I tend to agree that people want stability – up to a point. For me, it’s like a balancing act – you need both stability and change, in small or medium doses.

Too much stability and you have trouble accepting change, any change. Too much change too fast, and you just crave stability.

What is funny/sad is that my friend a year or so later totally changed his life – he quit his job, quit his girlfriend and went away to meditate on a mountain top in Spain (you know who you are, mate). I think that in the process he also hurt his girlfriend so much that she can no longer trust people (or perhaps just men, hard to tell since I’m a man). It seems he couldn’t take it anymore and felt it necessary to make those changes, but they not only impacted him alone. A case of too much change too fast.

In case you haven’t read it elsewhere, WP 2.1.1 was compromised by a hacker. He managed to modify at least two files so that they contained easely exploitable php code.

So in case you haven’t upgraded, please do so immediately.

Luckely, I hadn’t bothered to upgrade from 2.1 to 2.1.1, so I wasn’t affected. In the meantime, I’ve upgraded to the latest available version.