This years Xmas was a success. Sunday was spent with family at my parents place. Mood was great, and so was the food. I didn’t have anything planned for Monday (Xmas day itself), except for being lazy and some nice food (various French cheeses). I ended up at Wendy & Arno’s place, were we threw together my cheese and their spareribs, and relaxed and watched some movies. Tuesday we drove to Merel’s place in Apeldoorn, where we spent the rest of the day relaxing with friends and great food.
Thanks guys, it was a blast!

I understand that when there’s more than a certain amount of people in a shop, traffic inside slows to a crawl. That I don’t enjoy but I can live with. What I can’t understand is why those stupid cows park in the middle of an isle without any consideration for other shoppers, stop suddenly, yak for hours with other cows while blocking an isle intersection…. that kind of behaviour really annoys the heck out of me…

For some strange reason I looked up an old SF show I used to like a lot when I was a kid - Captain Power and the soldiers of the Future. Now, if you want to talk about cheesy names… Luckily, the show was miles better than it’s anme. This show had very early CGI effects, and a rather mature and serious storyline.

As it turns out, quite a few episodes were written by people also involved in writing for the more famous shows likes ST:TNG and Dr Who. most famous is of course J. Michael Straczynski, known best for Babylon 5, who wrote the lion’s share of episodes. Apparently, some references to B5 (which was made much later) were made during this series as well.

A gifted gamecard ment I reactivated my WoW account. Found out that I did quite miss the social part of the game. Unfortunately, can’t say that I missed the rest. As it stands my return is just temporary :/

Nice tense episode, crappy (or good :P) cliffhanger.

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Title: Pushing Ice
Author: Alastair Reynolds
ISBN: 0575078154
Genre: SF

Rating: worth reading

As Saturn’s moon Janus suddenly moves off into open space,  the asteroid mining ship Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to investigate. Things go South quickly after that.

Spoilers ahead

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And as the new year approaches, thoughts about where to go on holidays next year start to take form. I’m toying with the idea of an oriental city trip, something like Hong Kong, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Tokyo.

As I was going through my address list to see who to send a Xmas/address change card, I came across the address of an old schoolmate. This guy pretty much used to be my best pal in highschool, but we more or less grew apart, then lost touch. I already knew the address I had on him was no longer valid, and neither was his telephone number. I figured it was time to renew contact, so I did a quick search on the web, but little turned up. A more thorough search reveiled a LinkedIn profile, but without any clues to further identify the profile.

LinkedIn doesnt allow you to contact people unless you know their e-mail address, so that approach ended there. Incidentally, one of LinkedIn’s selling points is ‘getting back in touch with people’… I’m kinda curious how they figure I’d be able to do that without having an e-mail address.

Anyway, I did notice the current employer listed in that profile, which was actually the company I worked for, for most of the past 4 years. Calling in some favours got me a phone number, and a phonecall later I had established that the person in question was indeed the guy I was looking for. As it turns out he had essentially the same issues I had, losing the address, and not quite pushing hard enough to re-establish contact. He’s coming over tomorrow to catch up

Tonight we had the Xmas dinner at the customer I’m currently working for. They hired some place in The Hague. Atmosphere was great, but they had some serious issues with presenting 150-odd people with the buffet. I’m no catering expert, but putting everything in a single buffet in a crowded corner without any possible traffic flow is NOT a good idea. Me and my coworkers basically decided to pass until the crowds were gone. We’re talking 30+ minutes waiting here if we’d chosen to stand in line… On the plus side, the food was good.

As my old apartment needed to be cleaned out when returned to the landlord, we had a look at the carpet. That kinda sucked. It it glued to the floor. That much I knew, but I was under the assumption that A. it was only partially glued, B. the glue was waterbased, and C. that it would come out relatively easy. Part C. was (only verbally, unfortunately) actually asked (and confirmed) when they installed the carpet when I got the apartment…

The landlord charges a measly 570 Euro’s to do it for me… looking into other options, but it’s gonna cost me.