For a specific reason, I needed two photo's taken, and I needed them on a very short notice. So, as usual, I call a guy who usually takes pictures for me if I need them, and set up an appointment to have them taken. Before the appointment was due, it was already very clear that he was going to bail on me, and later on, it proved to be true. So I had to find something else. Since I didn't knew anybody else with a decent camera, and I had the deadline within 24h, I decided I had to buy one myself. Which immediately raised the biggest question: which...

While checking if there was already a new IRL race on UseNet (only 2 more weeks till I have Sport1!), my mouse jumped, just before I made a click. This happens quite often on my Imac, and I know the solution is to buy a mousepad, but I just keep forgetting that. This jump made me click on one of the ads on the side, which happened to be for some webcam site, and of course I was taken straight to there. While being stunned about the amazing high payrate (80 eurocents per minute(!!!)), and wondering if there actually would be people desperate enough to call such a line, something remarkable caught my attention. Although the site clearly says "All models on this site are 18 years or older", the girls on this page were being advertised as being 17. To the best of my knowledge, that's illegal in the whole world, except for maybe some Scandinavian(sp?) countries. One of the 2 is a lie. Either they are advertising a wrong age (which is false marketing, you don't get (to see) what you pay for), or these girls are underage, and it could actually be a crime to watch them on their webcam...

See the (not recommended for work) image after the jump... (Click 'Read More')

~RW

On May 10, 2008, in a little place called Roosendaal (Netherlands), somewhere near the Belgium border, on an extremely sunny day for the time of the year, 10 developers gathered together with a similar goal in mind: improving PHP. Seated in a l low-lit room in a fancy hotel, they booted their laptops to reach their goal. One man had traveled all the way from Germany by train, just to instruct those 10 on how to accomplish their goal. Two people had traveled all the way from Belgium just to take part in accomplishing this goal. And I was there too... Read on...

As announced in my previous post, I went the next day (April 22nd) to PHPSeminar.NL, organized by Ibuidlings (yes Ivo and Skoop, I *can* spell it correctly, I just don't want to :P) and Sogeti. Not everything went as smooth as I wanted, especially with the Public Transport, which caused me to drop in just before the second-last talk ended.

UPDATE (2008-04-22): Photo added.

Tonight I had dinner in Amsterdam, with some of the people I admire most. At the informal 1980-ish restaurant "Moeders", I shared the table with people who need no further introduction: Cal Evans (calevans), Ivo Jansch (oeli), Stefan Koopmanschap (skoop) and Michelangelo van Dam (DragonBe). It was fun, really fun, to say the least. And before we could even start with the spare-ribs, Cal decided to play Santa Claus, and grabbed his goodies-backpack. In there was the set of PHP-collectors cards for me. And, since he only brought one copy with him, later on, back at the hotel, also a personally signed copy of his book "Guide to Programming with Zend Framework". I love such gifts, especially when they're signed. I would've bought the book anyway, but having it signed by Cal himself just makes it invaluable.

Since day 1, I've been using content moderation for any comments posted to this site. This basicly means I have to manually approve a comment, before it will show on the site. I get a nice email as soon as someone leaves a comment, asking me to either approve or deny the comment. It does introduce a delay, but since almost nobody reads this site, and even less people leave a comment, it works for me, and it's a failsafe method to keep the spam away.

While I was hacking godiva again, I was listening to the livestream of Hard.fm. I have no idea which DJ was on, or which record (s)he was playing, but at a certain point, the music came into a 'break' stage. For the less-music-technical people: The 'break' stage in a dance song comes after the 'body' or 'main' stage, and before the 'buildup' stage where the music builds up in strength to reach the 'climax' stage. In other words, the 'break' stage is where the music reduces in intensity, usually drops the bassline or slims it down drasticly, and in a lot of tracks, where the real lyrics are and/or the beautifull musical intermezzos are released. Anyway. Since the music decreased in intensity, there were actually moments of little to no music at all. And in those moments, I heard a really remarkable sound.

It happens to me on a quite frequent basis. I work in a Windows based editor for some time, and press ctrl+s every now and then to save my changes to disk. It turned kinda into a habbit. No big deal, unless... you start working in VI. Everytime, well, until now, when you press ctrl+s, it would hang up your session. Nothing you could do about it. It's the most frustrating thing ever. You are finished with your modifications, want to save them, and instead of :wq, you accidentally, out of a habbit, hit ctrl+s. *Poof*! Gone are all your changes, you have to restart the session, and make your changes again. Well, Not anymore!

With great pleasure and filled with gratefulness, we would like to announce the extension of our family with two new members. We give a warm and friendly welcome to Godiva, who is a healthy Pentium 4 DualCore Asus Server. With a nice coat of CentOS 5, she will serve all development related and other tasks, with her powerfull Gigabit interface. Although we are very happy with this extension, we have yet another extension too! With the same warmth and friendlyness, we would like to welcome Deianeira, who is a powerfull Core 2 Duo T7250 Compaq Notebook. With a fancy coat of Windows Vista Home Premium, she will serve all communication and Windows based Quality Assurance tasks, as well as tagging along on all roadtrips, to serve as a fancy replacement for the pen&paper, with her 17" widescreen glass-look monitor. Both girls are running two cores at 2Gigahertz, and both have 2 Gigabytes of memory installed.

This whole experience has been somewhat surreal but we are struck with the realism of the experience each time one of the newborn girls makes an announcement on our Gigabit switch.

Sincerely,

Katya & Selena
P.S. Detailed stats of our whole family will soon be uploaded to our website, so please check back soon!

After 1 month and 1 day I received a small grey paperboard box. It was supposed to be a christmas present, but due to my own stupidity in mixing up two addresses, it was now almost February. I knew from who it was, but had no idea what to expect. After covering the green import/export label (I hate spoilers!), the box was carefully opened. In the box, I found a small bottle of 'Mountain Dew', which tastes quite good, btw. I can't describe it any better, as I don't know a drink they sell in Holland which you can compare to this. Also, there was a small bag of chips. And there was something blue and furry in the box. My very own Elephpant! That's maybe the best present I've ever had! I still can't believe I could be this happy with a stuffed animal! Thanks Cal! For an explanation, and an image: