This was probably the best concert I’ve seen in my whole damn life.

Ab-so-fucking-lutely awesome.

Interestingly, the school does not file a complaint against the teacher because it wasn’t the teachers intension to show it on the screen. Also, a representative of the school now downplays the stories that initially went around, especially about the girl being a minor.

Of course, these sicko’s will “protect” each-other and they will probably “share” kids between them.

This isn’t the first time this same frigging school has a child-abuse-related incident: a few kids were abused, and even one teacher was screwing with a 16 year old and another once dangled his penis in front of the entire class-room. I heard some other “vague” stories about teachers suddenly being replaced by another teacher due to a “burn-out”.

If that story ever went around your school — that a teacher had a burn-out and had to be replaced — the odds are the teacher was a frigging paedophile that loved children just a tad too much, I’m sure!

I don’t know what comedian said it first, but “anyone who likes to work with children is suspect”..

Friday morning wasn’t the nicest of mornings: I woke up at 7AM as usual, went downstairs to open my laptop and make myself a nice cuppa. The laptop is usually right there on the table… but… where the fuck is it now?! Still having not had my first cuppa coffee I had this crazy insane idea my girlfriend couldn’t sleep and took it upstairs or something…

So I went upstairs, hit the lights of the bedroom and seeing no laptop anywhere, yelled to my girlfriend (who woke up from the lights) “Where the fuck is my laptop?“.

So there we were, 30 seconds later, downstairs realising our place had been hit by one or more needy and greedy folk.

I noticed damage to the door to the garden — which is how he/they got in — which I wanted to take a picture of… but hey… where the fuck is the camera?

Where the fuck are the PS3 controllers? Where the fuck are the PS3 games? Where the fuck are our phones? Well, by now those things are probably sold-off already (although I expect those phone-o-saurusses to have been thrown in the bin already).

Some things left untouched, strangely. The PS3 console itself is still standing there, and our identity-cards and credit-cards and stuff were still in our wallets; the money was stolen from mine, though.

And, as I told the cops as they arrived 20 minutes later — “as you can smell, they didn’t steal our weed, too”.

The reason for the PS3 still being there could be because I did awake at the time of the break-in! (IRC logs tell me exactly when they have opened the laptop to check it out, and when the thing ping timed-out.)

I just thought nothing of it and went to sleep again, that might’ve startled the thief or thieves. Damn, and just for this type of occasion I still have some golf-clubs lying around… a missed opportunity.

Oh well, so the MacBook Pro is stolen, may take a while before I get a new one. The only real drag is that I had some private document locally stored on that thing which I have now lost (password protected though but I no longer have it either which sucks), and no longer having your phone and the numbers in it, and not being able to take a photograph of your pet in a unique situation, well, obviously that is major suckage.

The fact that somebody else was in my house doesn’t at all bother me that much (I hear the same, almost ‘cliche’ from everybody that it must be a frigging ill feeling). Me and the girlfriend are quite sober in that respect; we realise that, in fact, the misguided ones are the ones that are feeling safe in their home when in fact you never really are. You can’t do anything to prevent this, no alarm-system or anything can really guarantee this will not happen too you.

OK, this morning I did wake up earlier than normal and went downstairs partly to check if everything was *still* there but that’s just a phase of slightly increased paranoia I guess…

I was sitting in the train minding my own business, when at a certain station this older guy tried to unfold his foldable bicycle. Tried — because it didn’t work initially. All in all it was relatively amusing because you could hear the guy curse the bike..

Another pair of witnesses to this oh-so-funny event — a guy and his girlfriend — were having fun too. Next thing that I heard this guy say to his girlfriend, while reaching for his camera-phone: “Make a video of this?”…

I’m usually not one of those guys that helps other people with stuff they can figure out by themselves — but the mere fact that the youth nowadays finds it more important to, probably, post some dang video on the internet — than to be able to help another person, pissed me off a bit so I decided to lend a hand…

If there is any balance in the world and universe, I bet those two kids, when they grow up, will get ridiculed too.

That is great, because things were winding down over here — people stopped caring about those fucking wars.

Now again, the media can tell the people on how bad the Taliban is, how good the US is, and how good we are helping them, allowing our own soldiers to get burned in the heat of the fire that was initiated by the goddamn US to begin with. And the people are too stupid too believe that crap too.

The guy is dead — so fucking what?

That basically comes with the territory of “fighting for the state, following orders, regardless of fact or truth”. It is basically like, stepping naked into a dark-room you know is filled with homosexuals, and don’t like the pain in the ass after…

Well… get over it already. Apparently he’s not over it… No instead, he finds it necessary to sue the state. For what? Will this get his brother back? Nope.

Sueing the state ain’t gonna help ANYONE except a few fucking lawyers… Perhaps Mr. Fortuyn will get a lot of money… or maybe the guy is just in desperate need of some attention.

The basis for sueing the god-damn state is the fucking statement by the murderer (since when are we trusting statements of criminals I wonder… only if it’s in someone’s sick advantage methinks). The guy said that, if there were guards surrounding Pim Fortuyn he wouldn’t have shot him.

Then again, if Pim Fortuyn wasn’t having that (seemingly) scripted interview on the radio, this wouldn’t have happened either.

If Marten Fortuyn mother didn’t fuck his father, his brother wouldn’t have been killed either. A well-established member of the medical society could definitely say that, and he would not be lying. Strangely, Mr. Fortuyn thinks the word of a criminal is worth more. (When I was young, I tried to talk my way out of the bad things I’ve done, too, and would’ve tried to shift the blame, saying that I wouldn’t have done it if a certain factor would or wouldn’t have come into play.) Mr. Fortuyn seems to only use this to his advantage for some publicity.

My guess is that he is probably going to publish a book some time soon.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that, you and me, the ordinary citizens, when we get threatened, the police won’t do shit until you get stabbed or robbed. Simply because it is impossible, there is not enough man-power to protect all the citizens.

But politicians need special protection? That’s basically unfair.

All in all it would be real fair if politicians would be succeptible to the same dangers and threats that the rest of the population has to deal with. Then they would really know how they are fucking things up in stead of making decisions from their towers looking down on the rest…. Again, I slightly digress — what I mean to say is that it would be injustice saying that politicians need more protection than the rest of the population — because that boils down to saying that deaths and threats among the population are no priority. And that would make some people more equal than others, know what I’m saying?

Sueing the state, in my humble opinion, really seems futile. If the judge would think Mr. Fortuyn has got a case — a lot of families of the victims of violence could sue the state too basically.

In the end — through taxes, et cetera — it will be us that have to pay the price for all of this. End of rant.

Yeh, well, what can I say — it can run Linux, dude.

These fluids I guess are only available in the Netherlands, as its home page suggests.

The internal stuff, a fluid based on Articum Lappa, Carbo Mineralis, Calendula Officinalis, Viola Tricolor, Rhus Toxicodendron and alcohol, mixed with her food, would ‘fix’ things from the inside out, because a certain chemical imbalance could be a cause for a cruddy chin.

The other stuff we applied on the outside to clean the acne and her skin is based on Calendula, Aloe Vera and Hamamelis. Because this doesn’t have any strong distinctive smell as alcohol does, it’s even relatively easy to apply to her chin as well.

(Incidentally, before we bought this stuff, we already applied some home-brew lip-balm type of stuff that my girlfriend made weeks before, which was also based on Calendula, which is known for its skin-healing properties.)

Anyway, the first week things seemed to get better; then her chin seemed to get a bit worse for a few days, but then it really started to visibly clear up. In the end, disappeared completely and now her hair is slowly growing back on the bald patches.

So it seems to have healed completely! *knocks on wood*

Apparently, after stating that ‘this was his way of life’, the municipal office didn’t see no problem with it, and issued a passport an ID-card.

This is funny as fuck, because they thought of these new rules when you want a passport an ID card, one of the idiot rules is ‘you may not smile and your face has to be visible completely’ and some stupid shit like that. All because the white christian facist assholes in the government wanted the burqa banned…

As I said many times, it’s one thing to think of a new law… but if it’s impossible to enforce it why fucking bother. It would save us all so much money, time and useless effort.

Kudos to this guy for trying this… and succeeding!

When do this idiots get it into their thick heads that they are there to serve the fucking people, and not to attempt to keep up their appearance?

See, over here in the Netherlands, a 16 year old (!!!) girl was arrested and fined (and her jacket was taken) because her jacket displayed the logo of the police, and somebody pissing on it. (You know, like the little kid on the Microsoft logo a while back.)

These fucking cops take her jacket and fine the girl. Some spokesman said `We do have a sense of humour but this is too much.’. Yeah… We too have a sense that the government is there for us… But all that fake terrorism shit is really too much.

To me, this is a serious breach of our FREEDOM TO EXPRESS. If I was that girl, I would make a serious case out of this.

I mean, if they’re acting like this, that’s all the more reason to really piss on those assholes, now isn’t it? Hell, it’s almost enough reason to fucking beat them down. I mean — that’s what they would do if you resisted your arrest.

I’m not condoning violence, oh no, I just hate repressive motherfuckers that are too worried about how other people think about them but really need to invest more time and action into fighting fucking crime for fuck’s sake. And I bet no by-standers complained because they were scared they would be fined as well. Sheeesh.

Now it’s a frigging logo being pissed on — do you really want to really get shot? Because that’s where this is heading to the moment you start taking away our basic rights and shit.

Oh those idiots really piss me of — so…… (paraphrasing Ice Cube)

…and leave our freedom to express alone, you repressive, right-winged motherfuckers.

Oh and please forgive my French, this things kinda get to me. I know it’s only one or two cops that actually did this, and not the whole apparatus, but a system that allows for these foul situations is just straight-up wrong.

Heh, as I type this the lights went again. I hope I still have juice later today.

Oh yeah — and that my internet goes back up.

Update: and it is again. Took some minutes to check out what this storm was doing to the rest of the Netherlands. Again, it’s advised to stay inside. The A2, one of the main traffic arteries is closed because of the storm.

And if you think, hey, I’m not taking the A2, I’m taking the train, you’re out of luck because even the Amsterdam CS train-station got evacuated today causing disruptions to train-schedules. And to top it all of, busses and ferries suffer from the storm too.

I guess some people will be having a hard time getting home. This is one of those days I’m happy that I’m working home.

According to the article, it’s contaminated with a type of modified rice that can survive a certain weed-killer.

The article doesn’t at all mention the name of this weed-killer, but I think I can deduce that that has to be the weed-killer named ‘Round Up‘. Which, really ain’t no weed-killer — it kills everything organic. I saw some pretty nasty shit a couple of years ago — where genetically engineered crops resisted Round Up, whilst all the other crop almost litterally ‘burned’ away.

Some pretty nasty toxic stuff, well, unless you are a genetically engineered crop, of course. It’s like, genetically modifying mankind to sustain nuclear radition and dropping a bomb on the planet.

When I was a kid and I read technological magazines, they would talk about how genetically engineered crops will be able to grow, say, in unhabitable places such as the Sahara desert. That it would cure the world of famine and marketing it as such they probably got a lot of money for the research — but the way this technology now really is used really scares me.

What is even more worrying, the last time I went to some store for some stuff for my garden — I noticed these ordinary shops are pushing that Round Up stuff to the regular consumers now too. I guess it will be just a matter of time before they will start to sell modified grasses and bulbs, so everybody can have that weed and hassle free lawn.

Thinking about how mankind basically ‘genetically engineered’ the killer bee into existance and the impact of that mistake, I really hate to see where this stuff is heading. In my point of view they are, once again, too soon trying to make some quick money of a technology that isn’t fully developed yet.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) states that the long-term effects of genetic modification have not been sufficiently investigated. And they’re right — it could surely be that, in the future, certain hybrids of genetically engineered crops could have a very negative impact on our environment or ourselves. And that can easily happen because pollen travels by wind and insects carry it around and so it can furtilise flowers in far away places.

The EFSA is playing down the danger of this rice contamination though, saying that there is probably nothing to worry about but this is one of the few times that I’m glad I’m a picky eater and don’t eat rice at all.

The LL601 strain of rice is illegal in Europe but as mentioned in this article, recently a shipload of American rice in the Rotterdam harbour was discovered to be contaminated — which implies that the stuff is still getting shipped into Europe.

The producer of the rice denies the alligations saying that they carefully check their rice, but they have only guaranteed their rice to be gentech-free since the 23st of August this year. Rice from before that date were not removed from stores, though.

It seems like a zombie-movie, but what if the genetically engineered crops have already begun infecting the natural crops? It would be as good as impossible to rid the world of it.

That isn’t at all ‘news’ or anything, but I find it most interesting here (in my opinion anyways) that he will be the first guy tried for terrorism in the US since the 9/11 attacks.

Impotent government — they couldn’t even catch one on their own soil.

This ‘treatment’ consists of 7 online chat-sessions with a professional.

Now, I can’t get this image out of my head:

i have a drinking problem
Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
i drink too much
I’m not sure I understand you fully.
i am an alcoholic
Did you come to me because you are an alcoholic?
yes
I understand.
help me
OK… “i are an alcoholic”. Tell me more.

Well — you get the picture.

(BTW the above dialogue was created using this Eliza implementation in Javascript which, as it implies, works from your browser.)

Anyways, so it was shut down, and the municipality was seeking new owners to start a new coffeeshop. New owners it could be friends with, start a completely new relationship.

Well today I found out that since the 26th of September, 2006, a new coffeeshop was opened, and that news of the new coffeeshop left me flabbergasted:

• It is nearer to a school than the previous one was,

• The owners are even shadier.

To me — it smells like the municipality has bended for organised crime, err, business (it’s hard to put a finger on what it exactly is because the Netherlands has this policy of ‘condoning’ weed; but obviously the act is still illegal.)

Especially growing weed, on a large, industrial, scale. And guess what, the new owners of the coffeeshop are doing just that: selling stuff to grow this stuff on a large scale. And now, the municipality is in cahoots with these guys….

Yeah. well.. Erm — now why am I not surprised all this shit was just a power-move to get the two brothers out of their succesful business and has absolutely nothing to do with complaints, and their location near a school and shit…

Coffeeshops, Nogal Wiedus, Enkhuizen

Details remain sketchy, there’s mention of two money-trucks that are parked besides the highway and eye-witnesses saying that anti-terror units are searching the neighbourhood. A serious old-fashioned robbery, or some drill.. ?

Update: OK meanwhile the article speaks of a simple flat tire and anti-terror units ‘guarding’ the cars. Meanwhile, still a blocked highway…

The Netherlands

According to this article (Dutch, of course), only people that have Bluetooth enabled when entering the shop will be targetted, and only after they have confirmed the verification message whether they want to receive the message. That’s the only good thing about it, although I can imagine a lot of people having the thing open for everyone and those will simply receive all the messages? (I don’t know exactly because I haven’t got a Bluetooth device.)

Anyway, now they not only profile you by tracking and tracing all the items you buy with their so-called ‘Bonus-card‘, but now they have a matching device to send messages to. Oh the term that is usually applied to this concept is ‘targetted ads‘ but in my humble point of view its simply ‘legalised spam‘.

A supermarket in my ‘hood also has this ‘customer-card’ scheme which basically is a profiling scheme. This year, big TV screens have been installed, showing advertisements for their products. At some point; when they got RFID stuff in their customer-card, I bet those screen will ‘target’ ads at yo’ ass. They say ‘effeciency‘ but I’m a still call it ‘spam‘ — the things are only in place to help sell more of their crap.

(Thing is those bastards probably bought all this fancy technology from the inflated prices since we got that damned Euro-currency. If I divide what I used to earn then, by the price of a loaf of bread, man, it’s depressing to see how little I could buy now, about half. Governments blame the economy, I blame the damned Euro. )

Spam, Bluetooth, Supermarkets

And it all happened while I was busy coding I didn’t even notice if the gf didn’t call me.

See, I never did trust the guy. During his time in the government, the guy survived a few ‘motions of distrust’, which they call it when a few politicians collectively distrust a colleague and want him out.

I didn’t think the Schiphol-affair would really be the final drop, so to speak.

So — for some it’s a happy day, for me anyways. Time for another guy to have a try at that position.

Justice, Politics, The Netherlands

As VoIP calls are a bit cheaper as well I thought it would be worth taking a shot at. So I registered my first number, one that doesn’t cost me a single dime (I can only get called on that number). Of course, running linux and shit, one has always have to be careful choosing because it could sure as hell be that some thing ain’t supported because vendors don’t produce shit for the sake of the produce, but for the sake of keeping on selling it. But I digress — only slightly.

Now — being able to call out and in would of course be cool.. But it would be even cooler if I set up a little PBX-kind of thing so I can have phone extensions throughout my house (it’s not that big though, mind you). It would be cool if I was able to dial the upstairs desktop by dialing 666, some something.

Having worked in the phone-communications business I knew about Asterisk, the open source PBX software (actually the same that Kevin Mitnick used at one point to spoof his caller-ID), but only a few days ago I read that it could do SIP — the protocol VoIP phones ‘do’ — as well.

So — a couple of days ago I downloaded it and setting it up — without the actual dialing in and out — was actually a breeze.

It took some research — and some patience to finally set it all up though.

Luckily, I could find ‘working’ examples of sip.conf and extensions.conf which ought to do the trick, but I shouldn’t have tinkered with my modems’ port forwarding settings at the same time. I could spoonfeed you and dump my configurations here, but a google search using the queries “xs4all +asterisk +voip” should put you on the right path, my grasshopper.

Decent VoIP/SIP clients for Linux
Well — there aren’t any. There are plenty of applications that claim they are though.

My ISP links to a program called X-Lite; available for Linux as well. It works, but its kinda bloaty and it looks more fancy than it has features.

The X-Lite thing is, well, close, but it’s too much of a Windows program; it makes me feel like I’m back behind Windows 95 with some software whose idiot author just found out that windows don’t have to be rectangular. Also, anything that displays something that seem like pointer addressess, well, I rest my case….

Speaker, Microphone and Ringing device show very weird device names.

Note that there are other programs, some of which look pretty good, but they are simply too big a pain to install. I don’t mind the odd dependency, but dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency … Let’s just say I have my limits…

Just at the moment I almost came to the conclusion that there is no source-libre version of a decent SIP client — I discovered another program, written by another Dutch guy, it seems. *cheers*

The program’s called Twinkle and although it looks pretty basic; it does all that I require. It even has a decent sound configuration screen:

Twinkle’s audio configuration screen.

Concluding; it seems that Twinkle‘l be the thing I’ll use for VoIP communications, at least for the time being.

Asterisk, VoIP, XS4ALL, Netherlands

Now that comes as a surprise… </sarcasm>

FUD, War On Truth, Terror, Fear, Netherlands

Anyways, that particular Monday on the 24th of July was the day I gave my current employer my notice.

I quit that job because, well, I did not like it anymore. I’m a developer and I hate to do more system administration than actually building something and various other reasons beyond the scope of this publicly posted article…

Of course, I already had something else lined up and I’m quite enthusiastic about it, and I’m gonna start there next month. A development-job, of course, because that’s what I do. I cannot go into much specifics, but I might see you there.

T minus 7 days and counting…

Of course they don’t want you to do that because the State will loose money: the national income will be lower in the future if a few people would take their own life.

So — one doesn’t only have the incapability to live the life you want to live, according to ones own standards but also, one is incapable of choosing your own moment of death. It’s either to be a slave to society’s money-machine, or get locked-up in jail so others profit from you anyways.

Choice, Freedom, Suicide, Life

I didn’t give it any mind at all; that kind of stuff happens all the time. At work, a colleague noticed that I had one red eye. So I checked in a mirror that me right eye-ball was indeed more red than usual; looking like a vein that burst or something. Not really unusual either, I thought.

That evening, I told my girlfriend and she noticed my eye-lids were a bit irritated and slightly swollen. “Rats”, I thought, the thing I removed from my eye was a fly, or something, that had stung me, thus causing this irritation.

“It’ll pass — it’ll pass..”…

Well, the weekend passed and I still had that red eye. (The medical term for this is ‘conjunctivitis’, I understand.) The swelling in my eye-lid was gone, however.

Now, I have a history of regularly having headaches, behind this same eye, so I wasn’t sure what to think of the general pain that I felt, behind, or rather ‘in’ my eye: my whole eye-ball seemed to be more sensitive. Also, I had this constant feeling that there was something in my eye.

So, like anybody with a broadband connection, that rather doesn’t go see a doctor, yesterday evening, I started googling for the symptoms I had.

I discovered that there is a myriad of eye afflictions causing the most horrific symptoms. There were a lot that I could eliminate, of course, it wasn’t any of the real ugly stuff. I’m likened to think that it’s most probably a bacterial or virus- infection or an allergy to something (unlikely as I don’t have a real history of allergies).

So, there I was reading up on what it was, recognising the symptoms, reading what could happen and I didn’t know what hit me. I discovered a side of me that I didn’t know was there: I actually ‘freaked out’.

I started sweating and sounds were suddenly seeming to come from far away, muted, just plain weird. I thought I wanted some fresh air to relax, so I stood up and tried to walk to the door to the back-yard. My legs started feeling ‘wiggly’ while I opened the door.

Then, the ‘grand finale‘; I stepped outside, and I remember was that I was thinking “I really gotta get this door closed in case I collapse, otherwise our pets can escape” — priorities, eh.

I managed to close the door while, in the meantime, things were going black before my eyes and I started to loose feeling. I could only hear sounds, still seeming to come from far away. I was fully conscious yet, but it seemed I just lost the ‘connection’ with my body, unable to control my limbs. I really was wondering what the hell was happening to me…. Especially when I heard some metal hitting against metal (there’s a stack of fence material outside to set up in the garden for a rabbit), I was thinking “Now, that isn’t supposed to happen”, sensing my girlfriend was near me, to who I said “What is happening?”.

See, in the meanwhile, she (first unable to get outside, because I had closed the door was making sure it was shut), finally managed to get outside as well and said to me “You are passing out.”.

And I was: my body had collapsed, I couldn’t hear, see or feel anything for a moment.

“I’m back..” I said. “My mind is back, but my body isn’t yet.”.

Slowly, I started my body started to feel ‘normal’ again, vision and sound returned to normal and my mind returned its ‘normal’ state, as I started to go through whatever the hell just happened and realised that I simply panicked. My legs still felt a bit wiggly after this all happened but generally it was over pretty quickly.

A silly anxiety-attack and I just frigging passed-out. “Pussy”, I thought. I really didn’t know I had it in me.

Oh well, a first for everything, I would say, but still a rather freaky experience. My girlfriend thinks otherwise, but I find it amusing how I made sure that I kept the door shut, fearing the cats would escape. I can imagine how she felt though, standing inside, looking outside seeing me crumbling to the floor and not being able to outside because I was keeping the door closed. It surely mustn’t have been a pretty sight for her.

Now, I’m a computer-guy and I can type blindly, but still, I rather still see what I’m doing with both eyes, obviously. 3D vision really comes in handy driving your car as well. It could just be damaged by my fingernail, but if that’s not the case, well, it could be serious.

Also, my girlfriend has been pressuring me, so I’m going to see the doctor this morning just to have somebody to look at it who should know about these things. The warning was pretty clear in anything I read, if a red-eye doesn’t go away within 1 or 2 days you better go see a doctor or risk impairing, or even loosing, your vision.

So, that’s on my schedule for today, “go see the doctorrrrr”.

Interestingly, the second quarter of 2006 only seen a decrease of 400 people. The number of Dutch-born emigrants was doubled, but also reported is an increased amount of immigrants that have left again.

One can only speculate as to why, but I bet that the changing political climate, the increase of fear make them decide to leave.

Interestingly, only a few countries in the European Union suffer from this phenomenon and apparently, the Netherlands is the one with the largest ‘departure surplus‘, as they call it. (Then again, all the other countries suffer from an establishment surplus.)

I wish these people good luck and I hope they find what they are looking for.

Population, The Netherlands, Immigration

Abuse, Donald Duck, The Netherlands