januari 12, 2007
iphone = clone?
Originaliteit is best lastig tegenwoordig.
december 30, 2006
Het is me gelukt!
Niets zo erg als vage klachten.
Mijn internetverbinding vloog er op willekeurige momenten uit. Wel dsl-signaal, wel een netwerkverbinding, geen internet. Na alle menu’s van mijn modem grondig 25 keer bekeken te hebben en net zo vaak alle instellingen veranderd te hebben weet ik waar het aan lag: Mijn netwerkkabel was te oud en te lang. ARGH.
Algehele score is nog niet slecht, ik heb nu een speedlinq-abo voor weinig geld. En in tegenstelling tot andere verhalen heb ik geen enkele euro besteed aan hun helpdesk. Die dan ook gewoon 70 cent p/m kost en waar je vervolgens rustig 15 minuten in de wacht wordt gezet…
Alles werkt! Joepie! Na 3 jaar ben ik weer online!
december 29, 2006
This one is a few years old…
I used an oldfashioned pencil for this one. Then I scanned it and photoshopped the colours. It came out pretty psychedelic, but i guess that’s the main idea behind it.
april 20, 2006
Static
I have no channels. I’ve got a TV, yet I can’t receive any broadcasts. Ever since the satellite company decided to change their setup, my channels are gone. They did it because a lot of people were watching illegally at the time. I guess they had a point, at least in my case. It has been almost two years now without television for me.
They did warn me though. By the time the first two channels disappeared I got suspicious. I finally took the time to examine the flashing green light on my satellite-receiver. It was flashing for a week or two now, but everything still worked so I never took notice. Until now. The flashing green light turned out to be a message saying I had to upgrade or else I wouldn’t be able to watch anymore.
Now upgrading costs money and I had no job. This meant no money, which came down to static on my TV.
The hardest thing about having no channels is that you have nothing to zap between. This might sound weird, but it’s what I miss the most. Just laying down on my couch in lazy-mode, zapping through the channels. I’d travel from nifty Tell-Sell products to call-game gals whose sheer intellect made me move on to talk shows and reality-TV. Know what I mean? I’m talking about the feeling you get when you realize everything you zap to is even worse than where you zapped from. I miss that feeling. It made me feel superior.
“Order NOW! You won’t regret it, this is the only stuff you’ll ever need! Order NOW and you will also receive…”, ZAP!
“Call NOW! This money could be yours! But you have to call NOW! Just…”, ZAP!
“So how was it to enter that clubhouse, being the first black member of the ku klu klan?”, ZAP!
“Keep on watching Anal Island! After the break Betty gets her first double enema and George discovers his g-sp..”, ZAPZAPZAP!
It’s good to be king.
But now I’m a king without a country. The only thing I zap through at the moment is static and my underwear. Sometimes I even zap static through my underwear, but that’s a very different story. A funnier one too, probably…
There are also benefits. I now have the time to do other, more constructive things with my life. For example, I became a level 56 darkelf thief in the computer game ‘Morrowind’. I also saved the country from vampires. I also re-invented the nap.
However, I do get something out of it. I’m no longer being brainwashed and irritated by commercials and how they interrupt films in TV-land. This is what it boils down to folks. I’m not a slave to the media anymore. I have a friend who found this out years ago, he doesn’t watch commercials out of principle. Now I understand.
But it also means that I can’t have ‘normal’ conversations with some of my colleagues anymore: “Hey, you know that commercial with that silly dog? Then that guy wipes his nose with the thing and then…” - “I can’t receive any channels on my TV at home, so…”
(insert very questionable look on person’s face here)
By now this person usually turns around if anyone else has seen it. Someone always has. Then they share the joy of reminiscing the funny thing they both saw, which effectively ends the conversation for me. This is when I look around with the standard face-expression of a domestic cow emptying its bowels while chewing grass.
I’m not into sports, so no harm done there. Some of my friends would need adrenaline-shots to get out of bed every morning if they couldn’t watch sports. I’m not kidding, they are really into it. One of them once threw a pair of scissors towards his television when his favorite team was losing. We had to watch TV with a hole in the screen for years.
Another friend has a LCD-screen in his kitchen. He has too much money.
But now I make enough money, I could go to the satellite-shop this very day, and buy hundreds of channels at a reasonable price. I just don’t do it. I’m afraid of losing my television-independency again. Never watching anything means I can’t miss anything. Freedom is what counts.
And it’s always fun to freak people out with the fact that you didn’t see the last Idols episode because you can’t receive any channels at home. You can actually hear their brain cells trying to make new connections to cope.
Zap zap zap…
april 12, 2006
Les Ardennes - First blood
About 10 years ago, my friend Arjen had an idea: “What if we would pack our backpacks and wandered around in the Belgian jungle for 5 days straight?”.
To me this sounded like a truly enriching experience. Especially because at the time I was really into ‘The Celestine Prophecy’, a book by James Redfield. Now this book will make things like that sound like the ‘Pshhh’ a beer can produces when opened on a hot summer day; a really good idea. I accepted the mission.
We were both students at the time. Arjen was always the one who went for the best grades in everything. I was the one who was just as satisfied with ‘just passed’ as ‘cum laude’. Our organizational skills were more or less equal it turned out the last day of our mission.
Arjen had the car, and I had the map he bought. Now I’m an excellent map reader, so reaching Belgium presented no significant problems. And the closer we got to our destination the more we thought about where that would be excactly. And so we picked Spa, which is the place where the Perrier from Holland is made. We picked Spa because it sounded familiar.
When we entered Spa we were amazed by the sheer smallness of it. In Holland, Spa is big. It’s everywhere. But here we couldn’t even find it on a billboard. This town was small, or so it seemed. Because when we returned after 5 days Spa was suddenly a LOT bigger. And this is where our organizational skills took a deep dive.
“What was the name of the street we parked the car again?”
“I thought YOU remembered that.”
“Right back at ya, pal.”
Normally when we go somewhere with friends, us two don’t have to remember these things. We have other friends who always do. This miscalculation resulted in a field search up and down the streets of Spa. Here we discovered that Spa has got more than just water, it’s got some excellent beers too.
This last fact really didn’t help the search though. It took us two hours before we recognized something, and another half our before we found the car.
But at the moment we were in Belgium, elevated by mountains. We found a parking spot in front of a trustworthy house and informed nobody this car would be here for 5 days. We packed, looked around for the closest bit of forest and took off on our journey. It started uphill. Not steep, but still very physically present. I bet the 30 degrees Celsius sun had something to do with it, in combination with me smoking different kinds of stuff along the way. I’m like that.
When I reached the top of the hill, I collapsed on some bench that was conveniently positioned in a little shed next to a big sign that was put up for travelers just like us. When I could breathe without whistling, I got up and went in for a closer examination. It was the proclamation of our nemesis. It clearly stated that we were NOT allowed to sleep in the woods, and that prosecutors would be fined. Now, we were students. We had no money. I had even more no money than Arjen, which means my bank account reached that point where banks don’t trust you with any more of their money. But no fear, for I was once a scout and am familiar with the art of camouflage. They would never find us.
After several kilometers and some refreshing breaks we came upon a nice little river that occupied the lowest region of the huge mountain before it. We took pictures, because it was a nice mountain to take pictures of. Not to climb it. So when I was asking Arjen if the spot between the trees next to the river would be a nice place to set camp, there was no Arjen.
“Arjen!”
“Here!”
“Where?”
“Up here!”
“You got to be kidding me.”
“Top of the hill, no people!”
And that was that. Arjen was already halfway up this mountain that was so steep bats could have slept on it. By the time he was all the way up I just finished my first break after climbing 20 meters. By the time I arrived at the summit he already picked a spot to set camp. And so we did.
We always made sure to camp in the vicinity of some sort of running water. ‘Sort of’ because sometimes it seemed more like it was crawling. I figured as long as it was at least moving, we wouldn’t have too much mosquito’s. I figured wrong. And one of the major drawbacks of camping in the woods with a home-made plastic tent without any zippers is that it can NOT be closed completely. And believe me, I’ve tried. And the fact that we didn’t shower only attracted them more. We concluded that the best way to get rid of our flying friends was to smoke the bastards out. Luckily we had lots of incense and other smelly smoking things with us. Nature found its way.
Making water was a sacred occupation. And by far the most constructive thing to do when you’re not walking through the woods, because you ARE going to need it when you will. Did I mention it was about 45 degrees Celsius in the shade?
Making water went like this: boiling water, letting it cool down, pouring it through the carbon-filter Arjen bought and 2 hours later you would have enough to fill a glass. Actually a little more, but all this water making takes it out of you and hot river water has a surprisingly pleasant and different taste compared to the cold version. It’s the little differences that make life interesting.
When I came back from water making duty I discovered something on my left lower arm, topside right in the middle of it. A little black dot that seemed like another bit of forest shrapnel. But no matter how I rubbed it, it wouldn’t come off. Then the eye gets closer and discovers tiny crawling legs. Gulp.
Never had my blood sucked by a tick before. But I’ve read about them (I didn’t go entirely unprepared) and about Lyme’s disease. Now this sounds like a disease where lemons are coming out of certain body cavities at unfortunate moments, but the truth is much worse.
Things can get paralyzed.
I’m not kidding.
Some say you have to twist it left, some say right. Twisting the body of a tick while its head is plunged in my skin didn’t really seem like a good idea to me. If I would twist it the wrong way its head could get stuck in my skin and there were several sources that told me this was a bad thing. Here they are:
Source #1: leaflets about ticks I’ve read about during the last months
Source #2: common sense
So I didn’t twist it, but while pulling it out between my thumb and index finger I tried to keep contact with every part of the bug that revealed itself during the process. And it worked. I got it out in one piece and then discovered how tough these little puckers are. For example, you can’t kill them by squeezing them between your fingers. It’s whole design is flat, so your fingertips would probably feel like a home or very large mate or something to them. Instead use your nails. Two of them, together. With the little fellow in between. Just be sure.
The thing about ticks is their size. They’re so small they can get on your body at any given time and you wouldn’t know jack’s hit. You can hear mosquito’s when they’re near you, but you can’t hear a pin point sized animal walk. They get on your clothes while you walk through some high bushes. Then they look for a warm and preferably moist piece of skin to penetrate. A year later I got one between my legs, much too close to my most personal area. I did NOT care for that.
But Arjen had something to heal my horror. He didn’t take much real food with him, about a third of his backpack consisted of calorie rich snacks. And he shared, but it was already too late. I was scarred for life. I still suspect this first tick of inserting some biochemical tracking device in me that sends out a signal to all the other ticks.
The following years I would serve as a tick shield for Arjen. He never had one, where I had lots. Now I have tick-phobia. Every itch, I have to thoroughly examine and every single little black thing I discover gets properly nail-crushed and examined for twitching little legs. Even when it has wings I’m not sure anymore.
They could have mutated, you know.
