In

Smoking that is. “Luckies, adieu.”

And I’ll also probably have to cut down on drinking too. “My good friends Hein and Ken, fare thee well.”

But the ganja… aw… the ganja… “How will I fare without thou?”

Or, how to become a (hopefully) better guy just by reading a lucky English post on an otherwise mostly incomprehensible blog. Even if my chances are nil (which is most likely).

Hey, I need some dating potential here and am apparently willing to endure everything. Even if it means a lot of agony and weight bloat. Thank God I inherited my dad’s metabolism regime. Continue reading “In”

Whenever

Thanks Shakira, due to your excellent singing, backup choir and steady pace I was able to fabricate a reasonable remix using an acapella version of Whenever Wherever in just a few hours. I have seen a few (supposedly) acapella tracks but yours was definitely the easiest one to work with.

For the uninitiated, here’s a quick overview to basic remixing:

  1. Download acapella
  2. Find beat (use tapping)
  3. Import in host
  4. Find triads on vocals
  5. Cut vocals in usable pieces
  6. Go crazy with melody and fx (reverb, delay, filters)
  7. Render and release

Stay tuned for the release of the remix. It will be completely illegal and I will release a host of other somewhat-done productions that have been lying around for ages at the same time. I just hope sectionz will be able to cope because it seems to be down an awfully lot the last few weeks. Continue reading “Whenever”

Getting

Normally when I get slaughtered during a night of Magic I just grab either my trusty White Angel Command deck to spread some justice in the lands or if that fails then I just resort to my Black Shadow Force to end things quickly.

As it seems though neither one is really up to competing for a total victory in four player magic. I do a lot of direct dueling and my decks are heavily tuned for just that. Also, there was a new player involved with a lot of cards not often seen at our table and the green powerhouse deck he brought was a thing of beauty indeed.

Magic: The Gathering

It is the text book example of how to build an all-round good green deck: Elven powered mana acceleration in abundance thanks to a lot of cheap creatures. Worms of course. A host of Elvish Pipers to bring those puppies into play cheaply. Powerful growth spells and some creature fetching to top things off.

The next time though I think there will be a lot less of four player games because with four players it just seems a lot more interesting to do micro tournaments instead. Continue reading “Getting”

WordPress

Yet another quick upgrade session and we are now happily running WordPress 2.1.1. Same steps as before but this time I ran into a small problem because apparently my user account is lacking the proper privileges to alter tables. And although I have been granted the right to change my privileges I seem to lack the required privilege to flush them.

So even though the upgrade script seemed to run fine it did not manage to update the categories table and now the categories box in the admin is telling me the link_count column is missing. I could easily add it but I also seem to be missing the alter table privilege and until root comes on-line to flush the new settings for me there is nothing much I can do about it.

Fortunately though WordPress seems pretty robust and I did not spot any other problems although I have yet to inspect the upgrade script to determine all the other missing columns. There are bound to be other things that have failed.

Also got a new theme. Did not really like the old one anymore and besides, it lost most of its glory since I had to remove the spam counter after the previous upgrade. The blog is now using the Pool theme by Borja Fernandez although I changed the header logo and added some left padding on the numbered lists. I also had to change the background color of the static pages layer just below the header to better fit with the palette of the new image.

UPDATE 13:37 – My good friend and FreeGW admin Sven just came on-line and was kind enough to flush the privileges for me. I managed to fix the link_count error and also stumbled upon a few more missing columns. However, adding them was a piece of cake using the upgrade-schema.php file as a reference. Continue reading “WordPress”

eMule

A long time ago there was this magical software called Nabster. Unfortunately though, it went out of the picture a few years ago thanks to its own success. I was pretty much a broken person at the time because I had become pretty much addicted to downloading music.

Fortunately though, file sharing is not over (yet) and currently I am once again living in a world full of downloading bliss thanks to eMule Plus. My weapon of choice. I know, I know – it’s not very fast and usually you’ll have to wait a day or two before your download arrives. Torrents are a lot faster of course but I must be a complete moron because I cannot seem to find reliable torrent sources and even when I do most of the stuff that’s available isn’t even my taste anyway (too popular).

So even though the rest of the world seems to have moved on to bigger, better download rates, I am still using good old-school file sharing.

Looks like the good old days are still here Continue reading “eMule”

The

First let me clearly explain what I mean by “formal functional design”. A formal functional design by my standards is a (often pretty hefty) document that is usually conjured up with a combined effort of customer and (IT) management.

After a few exploratory meetings some notes are taken and some worker is assigned the task of coming up with a first draft of the formal functional design to be. Unfortunately, this worker is often some customer’s manager’s manager’s minion. Sometimes one or more developers may be briefly consulted to give a quick estimate but if it is not within expectations of management it is often ignored.

After a few cycles up and down the hierarchy the document is eventually finalized and it is supposed to describe the functional behavior (the way it will interact with users and other systems) that is to be built.

It is precisely after the document is finalized that it shows its evil side. What happens? Both the customer and management agree on some kind of deadline to “build the functional design”.

Management sometimes tries to involve developers into planning these deadlines. Some developers may recognize long arduous sessions which involve discussing and estimating endless lists of use cases. At the end, all the estimates will be summed up, divided by the number of resources available and multiplied by the current slack factor (1.5/2.0) to make up for some kind of deadline target.

Usually, the first estimates with slack would be to royal for management but after another bidding round or two some kind of reasonable total estimate would finally come out and then things could get rolling.

A few weeks before the start of the project each participant is presented with the deadline and a paper vehicle of truth that I call formal functional design and then goes off to his or her thing.

Often, a few weeks later another (sometimes slightly updated) version is distributed. This one is usually neatly bound up and often features full color diagrams to hide the lack of content and impress the unfortunate reader. Continue reading “The”

The

This is probably what the guys and girl at my floor at the office will hear some time during 9 and 5. The play list here is for the guys and girls over at my brother’s where another copy will also be circulated.

The Office 3 – Part II

  1. Melissa Ethridge – Like the Way I Do
  2. Morning Musume – Do It Now
  3. Princess Superstar – Bad Babysitter
  4. Rose Royce – Car Wash
  5. Salt ‘n Peppa – R U ready
  6. Sailor Moon (?) – Omoi Omoi (obscure)
  7. Rosie Gaines – I Want You (Bump & Flex Remix)
  8. Rikki – Suteki Da Ne (lyrics inc. kanji lyrics)
  9. Sandra Kim – J’aime la Vie
  10. Sabrina – Boys Boys Boys
  11. The Streets – The Irony Of It All
  12. Vanity – 7th Heaven
  13. Sarit Hadad – Hakol Sagour
  14. Het Goede Doel – Ik Dans, Dus Ik Besta
  15. Ayumi Hamasaki – End of the World
  16. Papa Wemba – O’Koningana

Continue reading “The”

When

When I told my collegue this song described my feelings so accurately he commented that it would probably describe the feelings of all males so it seems somewhat important to repeat it. It is in Dutch and I will try to translate it but unfortunately a lot of the poetics is gone in a reasonable accurate English translation:

Tien tegen één
Dat ik mijn mond hou
Als ik je weer zie
Ik ken mezelf onderhand
Een prater ben ik niet
“Hoe was het hier”
Zal je vragen
En ik zal zeggen “goed”
En ik zeg je niet
Wat ik nu denk
Dat ik je eigenlijk zeggen moet

Roughly, it translates to something like this:

Ten to one
That I won’t say a thing
When I see you again
I know myself by now
I’m not a talker
“How were things here”
You will ask
And I will say “fine”
And I don’t say to you
That what I know think
I should say to you

“Als ze er niet is” bij “De Dijk”. Pure genious.

A man knows not what he’s missing until she’s gone.

It’s true. Continue reading “When”