Synchronicity in goat dragging

December 07, 2004 • Blog

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World » Germany » Hamburg » Afghanistan museum

Of course, I had no choice but to visit the Afghanistan museum in Hamburg. Not that I would have if I wouldn’t be going there next year. Exactly as I expected, the museum was a small collection of only mildly interesting objects: faded pictures from the early part of the last century, a tourist guide from the 1970s, some clothing and jewellery and some wax-puppet displays. Some texts were translated in English, some in French.

The museum claims to have had no less then 120.000 visitors in 2003. This works out to about 300 visitors per day. I stayed for over an hour, lavishly drinking the free tea on offer, but only two visitors came in after me. Two older ladies who seemed to be lost.

But still, the museum does have potential. With Herat being conquered by Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan and Tamarlane, it’s intriguing to discover the parallels between Mongolian and Afghani clothing and jewellery, as well as the most interesting game of buskashi, goat dragging, which appears to be a mixture of two of the three Mongolian manly sports, wrestling and horse riding. Playing buskashi, dozens of men on horses try to drag a dead goat to a goal post.
And the museum had a ger! Now, if there’s anything that’s MORE Mongolian, I’ll eat my shoes.

Short trip to Germany

December 06, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Utrecht » Eurolines bus station

Part of my family is living in Germany. Another part in Iran (and, yes, yet another part in the Netherlands). One of my aunts from Iran visited one of my aunts in Germany. I realized it might be helpful if she (the Iranian one) could help me in obtaining my Iranian ID-card. She would be able to give her opinion on the matter and, hopefully, supply the three addresses in Iran I need for the application.

Because I’m pretty much a pauper at the moment, I had no choice but to take the bus to Hamburg (where my German/Iranian aunt lives). At 62 euros for a round trip, a far better deal than the 126 euros I would have had to pay for a train ticket.
I did feel a bit annoyed that, seven years after I got my M.Sc. I can’t even cough up the money for a decent ticket to Germany. Maybe I should get a decent job.

The cheaper bus tickets were also reflected in its travellers. No one on the bus (except me) seemed to speak Dutch. On the bus, in front of me, an Iranian grandmother. Behind me, two Mongolian girls. Next to me, across the isle, two Indians with a crying baby.

As I noticed years ago, it’s possible to travel for free to Amsterdam, using the Eurolines buses. You get on the bus in Rotterdam or The Hague, but check in is in Amsterdam, and they don’t check your tickets before.

I was hoping for there to be enough room on the bus for me to take a nap during the night-long ride from The Hague to Hamburg. But in Utrecht, all two-seaters were already occupied, with several people sharing.
I had to succumb to the same fate in Bremen, where a younger girl decided to sit next to me. Luckily, she was soft and small, leaving enough room for me to loll my head around, feverishly dreaming of XML constructs and waking up every time I encountered an empty tag. I know, this is sick.

Just a round-up

December 05, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Home

No, I don’t have anything spectacular to tell you. Just a round-up of the week, which I’m writing down more for my my benefit than you, dear reader.

On Tuesday, Betsy and I had our last Farsi lesson at the Azami residence. It’s been really helpful, so now it’s up to me and me alone, to learn the language. Betsy will probably resign, since she was starting to get less and less interested as the weeks passed by.
On Thursday, we celebrated the end of our course with a fantastic dinner mrs Azami cooked for us.

I’ve been very busy with work, over the past two weeks. ENG-nl.com still isn’t finished, Eye on Development is taking a lot of time, trying to understand the inner workings of eZ publish, which we use as the cms for that site, and I’ve started work on Chaletplaza.nl.
That last one has been bugging me a lot: I’m supposed to import xml files and read data from these files. Not really a challenge. BUT, I have to deal with 7 files, four of which are about 20MB big, one of which is a humongous 150MB. After experimenting for a couple of days, I still have no clue how to tackle this.

This night, Betsy and I had dinner with my parents at ‘De Gouden Wok’, an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant. The food’s very reasonable, and so is the price, but although we’ve been here before, tonight the restaurant really felt like a Food Factory, aimed at the common man, with live music playing loudly from the speakers I wouldnt’ want to get caught dead in and children running around constantly.

Tomorrow night I’ll be leaving for a short trip to Hamburg. An aunt of mine, from Iran, is staying with another aunt of mine, and I want to talk my obtaining an Iranian passport with her.
I’m taking the bus. Not funny. But I don’t really have a choice; it’s the cheapest option and I’m still a pauper.

A busy Saturday with extreme lefts and rights

November 27, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Rotterdam » On the Smaragd II

While waiting for a book to arrive in the mail, I created The dead celebrity xmas card generator. It hasn’t been a real success yet, but I already did notice that people do tend to create their own card, but decline to send it to friends. Maybe you should try it for yourself.

Also, I finally made it to the Dutch edition of Wikipedia, here. A sure sign I truly exist.

And yesterday, I had a drink with Michiel Roesink, a friend I hadn’t seen for months, if not years. He’s now working for the Dutch company ICET, but travels quite a bit. Recently, he had to visit Turkey and coming Tuesday, he’ll be flying to India. The bastard. If only he’ll cough up the money to repay the debts he has, both with Veto and Joost.

A tale of two extremities

Saturday saw us (Betsy and myself) visiting gatherings at two opposite ends of the Dutch political spectrum. During the day, we visited the NSF, the Netherlands Social Forum, something of a huge leftist get together with workshops, seminars and gatherings on subjects such as the anti-war movement in France, alternatives to the European agriculture policies and the problems surrounding the farming of the tropical shrimp.
We visited a workshop on the issues surrounding Iran’s possible nuclear build-up. The workshop was organized by Just act and had two speakers, one of which represented the Dutch organization Iran Future.
The workshop was a bit too long (over 90 minutes), but reasonably interesting, although the crowd was tiny: only 8 spectators, of which half knew the two speakers on a first-name basis.
The workshop we bumped into when leaving the building was more interesting, dealing with anti-fascism, with several people caught up in some very heated debates.
X-Y (with whom I’m working on ‘Eye on Development’) and ICCO (which is sending me to Afghanistan) both had a stand inside the main hall (the happening was held in the Beurs van Berlage) and we had our picture taken by YAPR (Yet Another Portreat.com Ripoff), this one being organized by NOVIB, a Dutch development aid organization. The pictures are supposed to show up here, but I haven’t seen them yet.

For the evening, we were invited by Betsy’s hairdresser (no kidding), Vinny to a ‘big’ party, on a boat, on the river Maas (Meuse) within the city boundaries of Rotterdam, chugging slowly through the world’s largest port.
Well, invited? That is, we had to pay for the tickets and drinks. And I can’t help but classifying the crowd as a good representation of the Dutch folks that voted LPF in the last two elections and are now ready to vote for the idiot that’s Geert Wilders (what is wrong with his hair?). In short, some people would classify these people as sad bastards (and generally racially biased).
Although there was one person on board who clearly originally came from South East Asia, it’s not impossible that I was the only ‘allochtoon‘ (try translating that!) on board. In a crowd of some 300 people, that’s quite something.

The food, on board the Smaragd II was reasonable, but with very little diversity, where vegetarians were not considered to exist. A very decent cover band played most of the night, mostly performing popular blues/country/rock songs from the 60s and 70s, while the boat was slowly chugging through the port of Rotterdam, sliding underneath Rotterdam’s 1 2 3 main bridges.
Later in the evening, Vinny did her Tina Turner impersonation act (which was reasonable, helped by her recent boob job) and another guest, resembling the Zangeres Zonder Naam, did her folksy act. I nearly was overcome by replacement shame after ‘enjoying’ her lion act. With stuffed lions.

More Iran

And you’re probably asking yourself what all these graffity pictures with the work ‘Iran’ are here for. Well, waiting at Rijswijk’s train station, for our train to Amsterdam, we noticed that all over one of the walls, someone had made a point of spraying the name all over the place.

The Afghanistan diaries, starting soon

November 21, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Home

Surprised? Well, if you know me only a little bit, you shouldn’t be. If you don’t, well, alright then, I’ll let this one pass, for now.

Late January, I will be leaving for Afghanistan. It’s going to be a two month project, which might be followed by a two month extension, somewhat later on. I will be based in Kabul and don’t plan to get enlisted for training in any fundamentalist training camp.
Nevertheless, I do expect to be under surveillance of the AIVD, the Dutch FBI (what a crappy site!). This because of the current tense situation regarding Muslims in the Netherlands. Not that I am one, of course, God willing, but, you know.

The possibility of me going to Afghanistan was mentioned while Betsy and I were still in Zimbabwe earlier this year, when it became clear that project was going to be canceled early. Only in the last two weeks did this project finally pan out.

So what’s going to happen? Glad you asked.
I will be working as an IT consultant, adviser, to DACAAR, a Danish organization repatriating Afghan refugees into Afghanistan. They’ve been operating for some 20 years and have about 1200 employees, of which over 95% are Afghans.
It is their philosophy to only enlist non-Afghans when the expertise needed is not available locally. And that’s where I come in.
As an IT-guru (got something against that?), I will be advising them on the future of their IT setup and IT-related decision making.
DACAAR currently operates in most of the 34 Afghan provinces, which probably means I will have to travel quite a bit, to investigate the setup of the offices in the field.
If all goes well, after the initial two months, after which I’ll be giving a recommendation on DACAAR’s immediate IT-needs and decisions. Then, if all goes well, there’s a chance I’ll return some months later to help with the implementation of the strategy I’ll propose.

As with my last major project in Zimbabwe, I got this project through ICCO, a Dutch development organization.

This time, Betsy is not joining me. The reason should be obvious. Although security risks are projected to be low, it will not be a pick nick. But then again, there IS a Kabul hash, so I guess it WILL be a pick nick. Or something close to it.

Hind, belly dancers, nargileh and a possible career change

November 19, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Rotterdam » Holland Casino

We spent the evening at the Holland Casino in Rotterdam. Almost exactly a year ago, we visited the same place to enjoy a kickass concert by Boney M.
This time, we wanted to visit the casino for it being an interesting theme night. The theme? Eid ul-Fitr, the muslim celebration at the end of Ramadan. Also, the Dutch Idol Hind was going to perform, as were several belly dancers.

Hind wasn’t much of a show, but the belly dancers were nice. But the free snacks and nargileh (water pipe) were what made our evening.
Also, we ended up talking to Rogier and Patrick and discussed what might become a significant career change of mine. Don’t worry, you’ll read about it here first.

Megapixels

The Technical University Delft made it onto the BBC news website, by creating the largest digital image ever.
Not so long ago, I had already seen what was the largest digital image before the TU Delft did their thing, here.
Max Lyons, the guy responsible for what is considered to be the first gigapixels image has created some very beautiful panoramic images.

So I was expecting quite something from ‘my’ university, here. But I was quite disappointed. Not only is the image rather uninteresting (a view of the university campus from the university’s tallest building), but it’s full of artefacts any decent panorama photographer would take pains to remove: floating torsos, half cars and more. The stuff that creeps into your stitched panoramas when an object resides on the border of two adjacent pictures.

The coolest commercial ever

November 16, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Home

Transformers are back, and they’re French cars. Check out the coolest commercial ever. Well, at least this year’s coolest commercial.

Statues

Yes, those statues are still around here somewhere. Well, in fact, they’re occupying most of our living room, but who’s counting.
Today, I made my first sell through the Internet. GRAIN, a Dutch graphical design agency needed some statues that are going to be handed out as trophees and they wanted the trophees to be ‘different’. They ended up buying eight statues. Very good indeed.
What’s funny is that the trophees are going to be presented to companies in South Africa, who’ve generated over $500.000 in revenue over a set time. Most probably, the people working at these companies can buy these statues just around the corner, for a fraction of the cost they’re now sold at. Just the double shipping (from Zimbabwe to Holland to South Africa) is quite hilarious.

PC fixed – finally!

November 14, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Home

It took quite a while, but my second PC finally got fixed. Goris located the problem some weeks ago: the processor cache was faulty. However, getting a replacement was quite an issue. The mobo only takes older AMD processors and Goris didn’t stock them any more.

I had to track down a store that sold the right processors at the right price. And I needed one that would fit. The list of valid processors is long, but finding one that’s priced correctly, reasonably fast and available was quite a hassle.
I finally did that last Thursday, in Rotterdam. On Friday, I went back to Goris and yesterday, I picked up this fine machine of mine. And these lovely folks at Goris didn’t even charge me for the effor they themselves put in!

Pain

November 09, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » DSB

Tonight was a good night. The morning after, however, was pretty bad.

This week and next is my student organization‘s birthday celebration. I was asked to be a juror in a debating contest, together with a politician from the local student party, STIP and a member of the Erasmus debating society.

The level of the debates was quite reasonable although it was quite scary that part of the team that won was one guy whom I myself directed in a freshman play when I was still studying. But it has to be said, his time easily beat all the others on style.

The guy serving drinks wanted to close early, around 1am, I think, but we convinced him to stay open on the condition we would finish off a bottle of Famous Grouse. This is where things went wrong.

I got home at six in the morning, feeling good. I was woken up by my phone ringing at 11am with a headache I wouldn’t even wish upon my worst enemies.

One more day at the market

November 06, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Shopping mall ‘De Hoven’

Today was our last day at the market. Again, we did marginally better then yesterday, but really nothing to write home about.

Clearly, selling our statues on a market is not the way to go. We actually did get quite a couple of sales today, but people are really only bying small stuff.
Even if we would attend a market in a busier (and richer) neighbourhood, I don’t think we would be able to make that much of a turnover. People just don’t buy, on impulse, something that’s worth hundreds of euros.

It’s a bit of a pain that we had to pack, unpack, pack, log around, unpack all our goods for three consecutive days. I was hoping we would be able to sell maybe a box of statues a day. This would have helped us on the packing side.
So I suppose it means I have to come up with an alternative way of getting rid of our statues.

Another bad market day

November 05, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Shopping mall ‘De Hoven’

Today marked the second day of our three day try-out at a local market, trying to sell our Zimbabwean statues at real give-away prices (so if you’re in the neighbourhood…).

We *almost* sold less than yesterday, but right when we were already packing our stuff up, a lady bought one small statue, resulting in our turnover being only slightly higher as compared to yesterday.

I’m happy I was able to read two newspapers and finish a book. Otherwise, it just would have been too boring.
Our neighbour said that at the fair his wife was having a stand, she was selling so much that, if he were to replicate those sales, he would have to stay at this market for a total of twelve weeks, continuously.

Crap day at the market

November 04, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Shopping mall ‘De Hoven’

Today marked our first day of selling our Zimbabwean statues at a real market. And it sucked. We just made enough to NOT recoup the costs incurred for being allowed to have a stand on the market.
So counting our labour, food, drinks, gas and the acutal costs of the statues, we lost by a long shot.

Then again, talking to our neighbours, we learned that not only this particular market is one of the worse ones and that they had experienced much worse on several occasions. Pfff.

We still have two more days to go. Apparently, Saturday should be the big day. I really hope so. I would like to have dinner this weekend too.

Meanwhile, Betsy recieved a message from a friend of ours we met in Harare. She said that close to where she lives (in Canada), a Shona art gallery is selling statues for up to 15000 Canadian dollars…

Death in Amsterdam

November 02, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Amsterdam » X-Y office

When Slashdot features something, you know it’s hot. Or more to the point: if it’s in the realm of popular culture, it’s more likely that it’ll be hot in the near future.
At this very moment, the site has an article about photoblogs and photoblog software that allows you to put up a photo a day. The two sites they mention are Chromogenic and Slower (and one of them was slashdotted when I checked them out).
Indeed, if you’ve been on this site any time during the last 14 months or so, you are excused to not see the newsworthiness in Slashdot’s story. This site has been a photoblog for over a year now.

Also, I stumbled upon this site, which does something very similar to what I tried with 30yp.com.

Work

Today was a busy day. I started by going to Amsterdam, where I talked with Sander from X-Y and the technical guy behind Boekenmijn. I’m helping Sander setting up a portal which aims to supply reviews of publications in the field of development aid and we’re looking at off the shelf packages that could help us.
We’ve now reviewed several packages but haven’t found one that would work for us, yet. Currently, I’ve installed EZ publish which does look nice, but I still have to take it for a good spin. The Boekenmijn guy uses an adapted version of Geeklog, which is nice, but doesn’t appear to handle the multilingual aspect the way we want it to.

After that, I had to travel to Utrecht, where I talked to three guys from ICCO, to discuss a possible three month project in Afghanistan. The objective is to asses the current technical capacity and future requirements of a Danish organization that has been helping Afghani refugees return to their home country. The organisation is called DACAAR and has been working there for 20 years.
The interview went well, so I might have a ‘live’ one here.

Then, I had to rush to Utrecht central station, where I talked to Jeroen from Urbanet. I did some work with them somewhere last year, but now, Jeroen is looking for a technical guy to help him out with some inventive projects related to one of his passions: skiing.
This also went pretty well, and I might have landed myself two not to big but nice projects.

And while I was talking to Jeroen, I got a very strange call on my cellphone. The phone number which my phone displayed was a foreign one, but when I took the call, it turned out to come from within Utrecht.
It was a lady from VSO, saying they wanted me to do an assessment in preparation for a two year placement they though I would be suitable for.
This is very good news.

Death

Shortly before I arrived this morning, Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed, in Amsterdam. Killed by a Dutch guy of Moroccan decent. Needless to say, this is bad.
During the day and much more so in the evening, I was surprised to see (on TV) so much aggression against Moroccans in general and so many people saying van Gogh was a great man.

Theo van Gogh was an asshole. a dick, a bastard.

He has been making films for some twenty years and it was only during the last two years or so that, very slowly, the majority of the Dutch population would NOT get irritated when he only would show his fat face on television. Before that, the man had very few friends and even less admirers, the only reason his films were mildly successful being the shock-factor they carried.

But, of course, killing the man is completely absurd.

Recently, in an interview, van Gogh said he didn’t believe he could get shot (like the man he admired, the politician Pim Fortuyn, who got shot in the Netherlands 911(!) days ago) because he believed people saw him as looney, crazy, a mad man, like a court jester.
This makes sense, and I believe he was quite right. But ever so often, even a court jester gets the boot.

work / no work

October 31, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Pijnacker » Pijnacker’s main square

Betsy had her birthday on Friday, but didn’t really have a party. As a result, both my parents and Betsy’s friend Miek decided that would be the perfect opportunity to stop by. No reason not to play Dancing Stage and Miek was hooked.
Because I’m a bit of a pauper at the moment, I couldn’t get Betsy a big present for her birthday, so I had to be creative: Breakfast in bed, lunch brought to her office, dinner, dishes, cleaning up, taking care of the guests and a promise of an extensive health spa treatment as soon as I can afford it.

On Saturday, we drove to Amsterdam to check out a job fair organized by the CWI, the combined unemployment agencies of the Netherlands. The theme was ‘working in Europe’, but the whole thing was a bit of a farce. Agencies were typically offering tourism jobs on the Mediterranean, at 120 euros per week.
The site was nice, however: the passenger terminal, the place where cruise ships dock when stopping in Amsterdam.
Afterwards, we went down to the RAI, something of an exhibition centre, also in Amsterdam. Here, too, we visited a jobfair, but it was only marginally better then the one from before. Supposedly the ‘biggest job fair for professionals with a minimum of two years experience’, almost no job seekers had taken the time to stop by the few businesses who had and were lined up inside one of the smaller halls of the RAI. Nevertheless, we did get free icecream, pens and mints. And Betsy started considering a career in law enforcement.

And on Wednesday, I had a meeting with the guys from NIROV. It seems they do have quite a bit of work in the web development department, but they seem a bit reluctant to work with a freelancer.
A good thing I’ll be talking about that upcoming project in Afghanistan on Tuesday. As with Zimbabwe, it’s been in the pipeline for months. Let’s hope it’ll work out well.

Julia and a secret mission

October 25, 2004 • Blog

World » Germany » Bochum » Some downtown Kneipe

Julia stopped by for dinner today, almost making me green with envy by telling about her recent trip through central Asia. I was slightly worried by her looking like she could slither through the crack of a closed door (except for her breasts, of course), but in the end decided I more liked it then disliked it.

During the day, Jim and I went on a secret mission to Bochum (sounds a bit like ‘Gollum’), where we inspected the possibilities of increasing the quality of the world’s green fingers. Sounds intriguing, no? But… what does it mean?

Taking a break, we had one-euro beers at a local Kneipe. Elders were comparing flights from Amsterdam to Sidney to flights from Hannover to Oman in slurred local dialect over pints that kept on coming. Clearly, major deals were being settled here.

Work, Golf, Mongolia, PC, Nazar, birthday and dancing stage

October 24, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Leeuwarden » Friesch Museum

Thanks to the lovely folks at Comprise.com, I landed a new client on Thursday. It’s a local cooperative of medical doctors who need an online brochure to represent themselves. Nothing fancy, but at least it’s a bit more work.
Meanwhile, it seems there’s an off-chance that the people at NIROV.nl might ask me back for a major overhaul of their web presence. This could be really big.

Birthdays and Arabians

Yes, what do they have in common? Well, this weekend, Betsy and I spent abroad, I mean, in Friesland again. This time, because Betsy her brother had his birthday on Saturday (and, on a side note, Betsy has her birthday this Friday where she will reach the eternal age of 29, again).
After Betsy, her mum and myself went on an obligatory shopping trip to find the birthday present her mum wanted to give her (a pair of trousers), we went up to Leeuwarden to celebrate Anton his birthday.
The food was great. Grilled fish, Greek salad, stuffed peppers, tzatziki and more. The company was, well, interesting.

The next day, we had the chance to finish our tour of the Noorderlicht photo exhibition in Leeuwarden. We had started our tour some weeks before, but had to miss out on the section where pictures by Arabians of the Arabian countries were shown. Compared to the ‘old’ pictures from the Arabian countries and pictures of the Arabian countries by ‘western’ artists, this easily was the most interesting of the three exhibitions, part of this year’s Noorderlicht exhibition, called Nazar.

On our way back, Sunday evening, we stopped at Dooworld in Almere, where one of the only five Dancing Stage machines in the Netherlands are located. We did well. So well that on Monday night, I figured I could try and outwit the game even more in our own version of the game. I kicked ass, finishing Normal-1.

Golfing in Mongolia

Back in Mongolia, last year, I met Andre Tolme. A nice guy, he was playing golf in Mongolia Although that, on its own shouldn’t sound that harmful (however, there -is- only one golf club in that country), it was different in respect to it being golf -everywhere- in Mongolia. Early in the year, he had divided the length of Mongolia into 18 more-or-less equal stretches, holes, and he had simply started on the eastern end, playing his way to the western end of the country.
Andre had hoped to finish the ‘course’ in the same summer, but he wasn’t able to and returned this year, playing the second half of his 18 hole course. All nice and funny, I noticed this week that the guy had made an appearance on, no shit, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CNN and four more American TV shows. In addition, the guy is now writing a book.
Besides the cool fact that Jay Leno is now only two degrees away (if he wasn’t already), I’m stunned that it took so long for all these people to only notice Andre now, after he finished. I would think that what he did, last year and this year, was interesting, already when he was doing it. Not specifically because he also finished his tour, but because he had the idea and acted on it.
Then again, it’s probably one of the many parts of the American psyche I do not fully understand.
If you’re interested, you can check out Andre’s website at golfmongolia.com.

More Mongolia

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but everyone’s favourite British chick, Jess Howland, is pregnant and getting married down under. Or wait, was it that sheepshagging nation next to it?
I know Jess from my time in Mongolia, where she befriended a supposedly friendly sheepshagger. They moved to NZ and very recently, the news was put out that Jess is pregnant and that they’re getting married. I tried talking Jess into marrying in Mongolia (doesn’t that make sense), but I don’t think she’s listening.
On a very similar note, everyone’s favourite Canadian, Pat (his website only survived for a couple of weeks) really got along well with Josie and he followed everyone’s favourite knee-fixer down to Oz, to get married earlier this year.
You see, Mongolia -does- do something to you.

PC problems

Goris finally figured out what’s wrong with my second PC. Some of the processor cache is corrupt. Since the motherboard is a bit dated, it’s no longer possible to simply order a replacement processor. This means I have to track down a suitable processor from somewhere, anywhere, before I can start using that PC again. Great. Not only will it cost me money, more importantly, it will cost me time.

CityTour, but different

My tour of Delft has been done in a style I actually had in mind for Delft. Not for Delft, but for Venice. And of course, I wasn’t part of it. If I remember correctly, and somehow I hope I don’t, the system was called ‘pully‘.

No more GeoURL

And I decided to take out the GeoURL links from this very site. It was a very cool feature, but the GeoURL site has been offline for several months now and it doesn’t seem it’ll come back any time soon. That is, unless someone big has bought it up and is rethinking it to make major bucks from it.

101 years in 101 words

October 19, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Home

Lest I forget. The BBC has a Lovely article listing new words that became hot over the past 100 years. They’re challenging readers to use those 101 words in a story, using at maximum 150 words total. I made it and submitted my entry.

I contracted phrases that were considered one word in the BBC competition (generation X became generationX, etc).

Here it is:

Peacenik brainwashed axisofevils hotdesked awesomely sexy dotcommers in virtualreality miniskirts (no hemline) while adlibbing GenerationX bossanova racism from psychedelic BigBrother textmessages (bytes on their mobilephones) with dumbeddown avantgarde cyborg gangstas from the pissedoff beatnik lumpenproletariat. OKyah?

Meanwhile, fabulous kitsch pop celeb DNA genes were havingitlarge, powerdressing in punk acid toyboy Wonderbras, sexedup mobile kittenheels and cool ghetto trainers. A snafu.

Responding, hip dunk wizards karaoked tiddlyompompom with whizzo egghead MickeyMouse, a beatbox, on Botox in detox: “cheerio bagel, latte, spliff.”

Molotovcocktail Blitzkriegs, cruisemissiles and hiphop boogie lovein on 9/11 resulted in the hippy drivein, fastfood nonU hypermarket blues on civvystreet and demobbed U-boat. The chav?

To doubleclick the green realpolitik from a Trekkie Watergate into a sacredcow naffall, Google, with It-girl, tailspinned the suddendeath pesticide into a blingbling ceasefire. The sex buzz URL gone, the microchip applet neutralised, only the megabucks cheeseburger saved the BigApple teddybear from saying the Fword.

The Persian connection

October 17, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Vahid and Karin residence

I’m actually getting closer to making money with Beeldenstad.net and CityTour, through several contacts at the local Delft government. Nothing certain yet, and considering this still is a government I have to deal with it will take time, but who knows.

Yesterday, Betsy and I had dinner at Vahid and Karin’s. I know Vahid through applying for a new birth certificate at the Iranian embassy in The Hague. He’s studying at the TU Delft, so that alone already makes him a good guy. Karin is from Norway and is working at Heerema.
Although Vahid is not REALLY religous, he does ‘do’ Ramadan, so we had to wait with dinner, when we arrived a bit on the early side.

Betsy had a hard time this morning, after she had drunken a tad too much yesterday evening. We got out of bed around 1 in the afternoon.

BabakFakhamzadeh.com

Over the past week, I took the time to redo my private/business website BabakFakhamzadeh.com. Nothing much has changed on the front end, it’s mostly the back end which I cleaned up. I also more strongely integrated this site with it, but only from that end. Next is doing the same on this end, but that’ll happen at another time.
The nicest changes are the inclusion of inZIM and 30yp articles on the front page.

The man they call Kleijer

While working out at my local fitness club, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for years. Dillingh, back at school, used to be a hardrock adept, walking around in leather and with chains and things. Funnily enough, he’s now working for the police.
We started talking, amonth other things about Ronald Kleijer, someone who was my best friend for several years, some 15 years ago. Dillingh claimed he had married an Ugandan lady and had moved there several years ago.
I couldn’t resist the temptation and Googled the guy. Turns out Kleijer is not living in Uganda, but in Uzbekistan. Minor difference. I was able to track down his email address and we’re now mailing again. Very funny.
He’s doing well, apparently. He’s an artist, married, with one child and hosts a weekly radio show called ‘The Flying Dutchman’.

PC problems

Goris still haven’t decided to contact me on my broken down PC. Although I can get by well enough with only one PC, it’s still a bit of a hassle. And hey, how difficult can it be to track down a hardware failure?

Shona statues

Also, all Shona artwork we brought from Zimbabwe are finally online at ShonaBeelden.nl. Sales aren’t really overwhelming, yet, although we’ve been able to get rid of some of the goods.
Early next month, we’ll be trying to sell the stuff at a local arts and crafts market.

Ups and downs

October 10, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Stellendam » Harbour

It hasn’t been the best of weeks, although it did end on a bit of a high note.

It started off with one of my PCs dying on me. The major problem being that it was the one where I store all my important files. Luckily, it’s a Linux machine, and both the /home folder and all the important documents are stored on the second hard disk. Technically being able to retrieve the files is a breeze.
Still, although Goris is now trying to figure out what’s wrong with the machine and I was able to access the drive from my other PC, although the hard drive is EXT3 and Windows doesn’t really support that (sorry for the geeky comments here), I still wasn’t really happy with fifty percent of my processor power disappearing from one second to the next. Not even talking about the pecunia this will cost me.

Early in the week, we discovered there had been a leakage down in the common basement. Nothing really serious, although some of the water had trickled into our own basement.
Later in the week, the problem appeared to have been solved, until I got back from fitness on Friday and found the stacks of boxes, stored in our basement, to have fallen over because of the bottom ones being soaked.
Of the five boxes that had been soaked, three didn’t contain any really damageable goods. Most of it was just clothes. The two remaining boxes however contained books, one of them being stuffed with comics. Many Heavy Metal and 2000AD comics now have morphed from valuable collectibles into worthless mushy paper. Very annoying.

The weekend was better. Saturday afternoon, I talked to several people working for the local Delft government and I might be able to do something more structured, and sponsored, with both Beeldenstad.net and the newly created CityTour. The future will tell.

Saturday night, Betsy and I enjoyed a ballet. ‘Coppelia’. Funnily enough, although we don’t ‘do’ many ballets, we had ‘done’ this one, back in Mongolia, last year, of all things. The show was pretty good, performed by the Budapest ballet company with the music by the Hungarian national orchestra (or was it the other way around?). We liked it, but most of the audience went wild.

On Sunday, today, I went sailing with Jim. Well, that is, we toured the ‘Haringvliet’ with a sailing boat, but we did most of it using the motor, not the sail. The weather was nice, lots of sun, but the wind made ita bit fresh.

Sixty years of Irene Boender

October 03, 2004 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Scheveningen » Boulevard

My mom had her birthday today, her 60th, which meant we had a rather big party yesterday evening. Not at home, but down at ‘the club’. That is, where she and Nico play tennis. It meant they didn’t serve spirits, only wine, beer and sodas. Still, by the time we got home, I felt knackered. The end result was that I came out of bed around 12.
Betsy’s mom (her parents were staying at our place, since they also came to the party but live in Friesland, which is like the other side of the world, if you’re wondering) slept until even later.
In the afternoon, we headed out to the beach of Scheveningen. To enjoy the reasonable autumn weather, have some fish, and check if the arcades had a version of ‘Dancing Stage megamix’. They didn’t.
At Beelden aan zee (what a crappy website), we stumbled upon a fantastic collection of statues by Tom Otterness.

Statues

Earlier in the week, I recieved a call from UTi, saying they had located my missing crate with statues I sent from Zimbabwe. A good thing, although I was surprised the guy didn’t even apologise for the delay and the fact that, at first, they wouldn’t even acknowledge the loss of one crate.
So, after having handed UTi the goods in early June, it took them close to four months to ship the stuff from Harare to Rotterdam. They claimed it would take 51 days. An other shipping company, Kuehne & Nagel, say they can do it in 21 days. Makes me rather sceptical.

The crate was way too big to get into the car I was driving. As previously, I had borrowed Hoogstraten’s car, since he only has two seats and a flat loading area in the back. Still, the crate, about half a cubic metre, wouldn’t possibly fit.
So while I was loading the goods from the crate in the car, a guy from customs walked over and started chatting with me, continuously checking what I had shipped from Zimbabwe.

Many of the goods we now have can be found at ShonaBeelden.nl.

Demonstrations

I considered going to Amsterdam on Saturday and join the demonstrations against the Dutch government. The demonstrations were organized by the three major Dutch worker’s unions.
Not that I agree with them or disagree that much with the government, the problems the government currently are facing are too complex and I simply don’t know enough to be able to form a clear opinion on the situation. But I thought of taking pictures for Portreat.com.
The service now running on the site which allows for visitors to have pictures sent directly to their mobile phone has actually allready earned me some money, although it only went live a week or so after the last event I took picture at.

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