Category: Blog News

Les enfants sont comme des pets – tu supporte que ceux que tu fais toi-même…

Recently I was having a family reunion with my two aunts and my mum plus a niece and her husband, and afterwards we went to the local watering hole to have a drink.

There were a few kids playing behind us, playing with the lego in the play-corner, and it surprised me how many times that my family kept watching them and grumbling about the noise, which came as a surprise to me as I hadn’t heard anything excessive. I completely ignored their (happy) noises, they weren’t even fighting, just playing together and all that entales… so all was fine and I tuned it out.

This is actually quite a big change, I remember being incredibly vexed by a baby crying for what seems like hours on the flight to Australia (12 hours Singapore-Sydney with a baby crying at least 4 full hours of them – aaaaaargh!). It was irrational anger, I know, but since then I seemed to be particular sensitive to children making noise. Or so I thought.

I attribute most of the change to Tom and Sam, of course. Having two children yourself, you learn and adapt, you have to.

Still, I’ve changed. This made me think what else has changed, and I think that I’ve become a lot more balanced, less easely perturbed. Perhaps also because my job these last few years involves managing projects and the people working in the project and you learn to deal with all the issues that surround it.

A Mature Me ? Perhaps, but with Tom and Sam around I get plenty of time releasing my ‘inner child’. 🙂

The day before yesterday, 2 October 2006, I plucked my last ripe tomatoes from my garden.

There are still some green tomatoes ripening, as well as some red and green peppers and even some jalapenos, but I’m not hopefull for them. The temperature has dropped 7-10 degrees Celcius overnight !

Incredible really, that begin October I can still pick some ripe tomatoes…

Discovered this site which allows you to have your very own flickr gallery on your wordpress site.
Hmm…. 🙂

Update:  I’ve de-activated the plugin again – seems like it is quite resource-hungry, and in the end what I really want is to show just one single, random, public photo from my Flickr page. Seems there is a smaller, simpler plugin that can do that.

I added a link to the site where you can download UPX for Pocket PC – a way to compress and optimize your exe’s and dll’s so that you can gain more memory.

You don’t need a decompressor, that is added in. It’s like a self-executing zip file, but one written specifically for programs on the ppc.

(for the english readers : the below is a rant on Belgian pedophiles who hunt down all images of children in bathing suits or naked in bath, etc… and the reason why I already removed some images of my sons from my site as I got suspicious of the high page visits to a 1-year old post)

Hier is de reden waarom ik niet veel foto’s van mijn kinderen op mijn website zet.

Bij de aanhouding onlangs van enkele Belgische pedofielen bleek dat ze niet op kindpornosites zaten, maar andere zaken zochten….

Hun internetgebruik zag er op het eerste zicht heel normaal uit. En het was niet op het internet dat ze hun kinderporno zochten en vonden.

Nee, op het internet waren ze voortdurend op zoek naar foto’s van kinderen in bad, onschuldig naakt of in badpakken. Deze vonden ze in familie-albums online, vakantiefoto’s en websites van o.a. scouts en sportclubs.

Voor de ouders is het dus belangrijk om dergelijke foto’s van uw kinderen af te schermen met een paswoord.

Als ik de traffiek vergeleek naar de enkele foto’s van Sam en Tom met de rest van de site, had ik al snel een paranoisch vermoeden dat hier iets niet klopte, dus heb ik er al een paar verwijderd.

Klojo’s ! Dat ze met hun pollen van mijn kinderen afblijven !

Update:  Ik zou iedereen die Flickr gebruikt aanraden om de foto’s van hun kinderen in badpak of adam-en-eva tenu op ‘privé’ te zetten. Voor een pedo moet dat een paradijs zijn…

Hold on to your eyes, ladies and gentlemen – I am trying out a new theme called Anaconda, and it rocks !! Loads of things to muck about with.

For the next few days, ouch ! Although soonish I’ll be settling back down to normal, don’t ya worry.

The installation of the theme went surprisingly easy – just unzip the file under your WordPress theme directory and you’re good to go. If you want to have some widget fun, install that one too (the unzipped directory goes into the WordPress plugins directory).

Update :
This is a really flexible theme – I just activated the plugin section, and I have succesfully configured my new left-sidebar just the way I like it. Anaconda is still in beta, currently at version 0.7 but it seems stable enough. A bit slower on loading the page though.
I think I am going to keep this theme, although I might need to do some tinkering, but I have to say it is the best theme I’ve come across so far !

What I am currently missing is a simple way to change the color of the theme’s titles and put my custom picture on top…

Recently, I’ve done a small experiment : I started wearing a tie to work again.

I don’t have to wear ties or jackets to work, as I don’t meet a lot of customers. However quite a few people here do ties and jackets and suits – and the higher you are in hierachy, the more it is expected.

Here, it seems that if you are really serious about your career, then you wear a suit to work every day.

I’ve always had my doubts about the efficacy of this, certainly after wearing a suit to work for the first 7 years or so of my working life. Having to mandatorely put a suit on really made me dislike wearing them. Plus, in my previous work everybody wore a suit, so the effect seemed nullified.

Now that I am in a company where it is by choice, I actually want to wear one from time to time. So the impact should be greater. So after many years of going tie-less, once more I am wearing a tie and occasionally a jacket.

The results are in : after a week, the difference is surprising. The tie and jacket do make a difference in the way people regard you, I even get nods from people who normally pass me by. It’s not like I am doing different work, but you definitely get more respect.
So there is definitely truth in the saying “The Clothes Make the Man”… or at least, they do in the eye of the beholder.