The first pancake that managed to attract my attention was an evil cat.

This pancake also happened to be on the plate while taking a picture of the evil cat one, so I figured I’d demonstrate that I do indeed see something in just about anything.

Note, these are animated SVG images. At the time of writing they only render correctly in Opera and Webkit browsers, whereas Gecko displays a static image. Internet Explorer is served with fallback PNGs.

The SVGs now also render correctly in Firefox 4.

We got out of the car and walked to the entrance of the location hosting the dinosaur exhibition. The large banners showing pictures of artist’s impressions of dinosaurs and pictures of dinosaur skeletons already excited me, so I probably jumped around and said something like “Mom! Dad! Look, pictures of dinosaurs!” The ticket office was as boring as ticket offices patently are, but this didn’t dim my enthusiasm. As I struggled not to embarrass my parents by screaming loudly and enthusiastically about the dinosaur treasures awaiting us, my father finished buying our tickets. I probably still gained free entrance to most museums, exhibitions and the like in those days.

As we entered the exhibition, we didn’t immediately hit on all the bony goodness of fossils. It was merely a fairly boring main hall from which you could go in several directions to actually enjoy skeletal delight. However, there was a fake life-like tyrannosaurus rex at the other end of the hall. Although we’d come there to enjoy vertebrate fossils, I was quite willing to give reconstructions a chance, and besides it was the most real thing we’d seen so far. I asked my mother if I could enjoy the anonymous’ artist’s work, got permission, and sprinted toward the t-rex to gaze at the marvels of reconstruction in what was supposed to be some kind of natural (plastic) environment.

The first thing I noticed, while still running toward it, was that the skin looked surprisingly much like real lizards. I had expected it to look more plasticly, perhaps more similar to my own toy dinosaurs. I slowed down somewhat because the t-rex was starting to tower over me. I doubt it was any more than 1/5th the size of a real t-rex, but I was quite small myself. But before I had slowed down enough to stop the t-rex turned its head toward me. I froze. I thought a thousand things at once in the following less than half a second. Weren’t dinosaurs extinct? But this one looked awful realistic; that would explain a lot. The WNF was always talking about animals that could go extinct, is this – as it lowered its upper body toward me my mind entered a blank. Fight or flight kicked in. You want to fight? I’m here to save your ass from extinction, pal, so you better beha- the t-rex opened its mouth and roared. I doubt I ever ran as fast as I did right then and there. As I sought cover behind my parents the t-rex stopped roaring. “Mommy, daddy, that t-rex-” I said while I pointed at it with a shaking finger. My parents laughed, and both took one of my hands. My mother pointed out that the t-rex hadn’t come after me, and it had stopped moving or making any noise.

I wasn’t as eager to visit the exhibition anymore. That creepy dinosaur was guarding the entrance hall. However, my curiosity got the best of me, so it didn’t take my parents long to convince me to look at the mechanical dinosaur some more. After I carefully positioned myself behind my parents, we walked toward the theropod. When we were close enough, the t-rex repeated his earlier shenanigans in the exact same manner, a clear sign of a machine; unless by some fluke this were an autistic carnivore. After realizing that it was motion-triggered and only had a limited range of motion, I silently gawked at the awesomeness of the creators of the realistic t-rex.

We discovered this issue a couple of weeks ago when my wife’s printer ran out of ink. She’s got an HP PSC 2355 All-in-One Printer, which, while not super expensive, she certainly wasn’t going to leave in the US. At Saturn (where ink is slightly cheaper than at Mediamarkt even though they’re owned by the same corporation) she selected some ink cartridges and we thought that would be the end of the ink shortage. The ink cartridges had the exact printer model in the list of compatible printers on the package, but after inserting the cartridges in the printer it displayed the joyful message that an “Incorrect Print Cartridge” had been inserted.

It’s especially lovely how all of the official HP support pages claim that something has probably inexplicably gone awry with the cartridge itself and, summarized, that it really couldn’t have anything to do with the printer. While keeping the possibility in mind, we didn’t consider this scenario very likely, however.

Alternative search results seemed to point to some obscure error and upon running the patch for this error, the patching software said there was nothing to patch. That was a waste of time and effort.

Somehow that wasted effort did make me realize that perhaps I should try a broader Internet search while including things like “US to Europe” in the search string. This quickly yielded plenty of results. One commenter said that “after 3 phone calls and 4 emails” he “learned that all HP printers sold after 2004 are regionalised.”

So my wife went on the HP support chat and after 45 minutes to 1 hour of exchanging all kinds of codes and diving into hidden configuration screens (something rather silly that reminds more of an easter egg than of a serious feature) the region of the printer was changed. It’s now working properly in Europe. Beware, however, if you’re a business person staying in various continents who wants to take their printer along. Aside from the considerable effort involved, there are only 2 region changes left now.

Whenever my current Epson printer or my wife’s HP printer is ready for replacement I will most certainly try to buy one that doesn’t have such ridiculous anti-features. Therefore I was trying to find out if other printer manufacturers also region-encode their ink cartridges; I couldn’t find anything (though I didn’t search for very long), but I did run into this gem, as a reply to someone asking whether their American Epson printer would work in Japan.

I’ve never heard of region coding for ink cartridges.

Such sweet, blissful innocence.

While HP was already on my avoid list due to their abhorrent tech support regarding the lousy computer they sold to my parents. It turned out that the SATA controller to which the HDD was connected had somehow become defective. Figuring this out took me about 5 minutes; they took several weeks and they still couldn’t find anything wrong with it. But the story behind that is worthy of a separate blog post. Suffice it to say that I will not be buying any computers, printers, scanners or anything else from HP anymore. Lousy support is one thing, but if I wanted to have acts of coitus performed on me if I happen to move outside of some so-called region I’d rather pay money to a hooker.

P.S. By the way, Microsoft, this is why I use Ubuntu now instead of software that does all kinds of ridiculous things that I don’t want it to do. This has already been extensively covered by other people, so I certainly won’t waste my time doing any such thing.

I was going back from the US to Amsterdam, transferring at Heathrow. Customs & security in England took so long that by the time I got anywhere near the A-gates they’d already started boarding, so I hurried to the gate and got on board of the plane as one of the last people. Only later did I discover that Heathrow is the absolute craziest airport in the world that should take a very, very good look at how they do things in a proper airport like O’Hare or Schiphol. They don’t even seem to know anything about their gates until 30 minutes or so before it’s scheduled to leave! Anyway, pretty much as soon as I was in the plane the pilot said something like “it looks like everyone’s on board already, so we’re taking off 30 minutes early, woo!” I remember thinking something like “good thing my luggage didn’t have to go through 1 hour customs & security.”

We landed in Amsterdam, I got off the plane and I waited at the luggage belt, but my baggage never showed up. As I was looking around to figure out where to go to fix this problem, this guy working there came up to me in his cart and was like “can I help you?” So I said, “I just got here with British Airways flight BA217 [or something along those lines anyway]” and he said “that’s the one from London?” and I said “yeah, does it make a difference?” He said “no, actually it doesn’t. Anyway, you have to go to that office right there” while pointing at this place with a huge line in front of it.

I went to that office and waited for 30 freaking minutes until it was finally my turn. Then it turned out that this was the KLM & partners lost luggage claim thing, and the BA lost luggage office was on the other side! I wasn’t the only one misled by the bloke driving around on his cart and like 5 people who had been waiting behind me followed me to the other office where of course all the time no one had been to at all. Turned out my suitcase was still in London and it was scheduled to come toward Amsterdam in about 30 minutes on the next flight. Gee, thanks.

I scheduled a delivery for the next day between 9 and 12. That was all very decent, except for the fact that they actually came at 14. When I called them at 12:30 they said “oh, it’s normal that they might run a little late.” Sigh.

Me

How can I serve you?

Customer

I’ll have fries red white.

Me

Do you mean mayonnaise and ketchup, madam?

Customer

No, I mean those red and white condiments that people always have with fries. This looks sarcastic on paper, but trust me: it wasn’t.

Me

I’m sorry, we don’t have any white condiments other than mayonnaise. Could I get you mayonnaise and curry sauce, perhaps?

Customer

No, not mayonnaise and whatever else you said! Fries red white!

I figured I’d just take a gamble and I gave her fries with mayonnaise and ketchup.

Customer

There, was that so hard?

For the record, no other German customer has ever ordered their fries red, white or in any other color; all other Germans ordered fries with a condiment, such as mayonnaise or ketchup.

At the other side of the ocean, about 8 to 10 hours later, things were less nice. Customs was making a fuss about my lack of a connecting flight ticket. Gee, if you want people to have all their tickets fixed up at customs, how about you stick those airline desks before you have to pass through customs, or otherwise shut your stupid pie-hole about it. I was in luck: I could see the airline desks from customs, so I could point at the NWA desk and be like “well, if you want all ticket issues to be resolved you should put those desks before this checkpoint. I need to go to the NWA one over there.” He grudgingly admitted that my logic was flawless, added a stamp to my passport and stapled this green immigration paper in a way that made it stick out annoyingly. That crooked stapling became a recurring theme during all of my subsequent visits to the US except one.

So then I went to the NWA desk. I told the woman that KLM had messed something up with my reservation and that they should’ve fixed it by now. KLM told me they’d probably fix it in about 1-2 hours, so that presumably would’ve been before the plane even left Amsterdam. She then asked if she could see the boarding pass I’d gotten in Amsterdam and said “you were late, weren’t you?” I said something like “um no, I just told you, KLM messed something up with my reservation because something went wrong with this payment system where my money was transferred but the system didn’t register this correctly.” She replied, “so you were late.” I tried one or two times to explain the situation again, but I met a blank stare and a repetition of the notion that I must’ve been late. I ended up saying something like “sure… could you get me my ticket for the connecting flight please?”

Her NWA computer didn’t have me in it with my KLM e-ticket number (that the KLM woman gave me), so she had to phone a colleague who did have access to KLM’s booking system. Consequently she could type in some code on the NWA computer which finally resulted in my ticket. I still don’t know why she couldn’t have just typed my name, but oh well.

Perhaps to compensate for all of the trouble, the connecting flight to Chicago was executed in the most comfortable plane I’ve ever been in. The seats were wide, there was plenty of leg space. I can tell you that I would’ve preferred the preceding 8 hour flight in that plane.

I call a fuse a stop. Here it is called a zekering, which I almost exclusively associate with playing around with designing electronic circuitry yourself. So while I completely understand the Flemish usage from that perspective, the first time it came up I had no idea how to communicate what I was talking about. I had to use an explanation about washing machines being broken and leaking electricity before the Flemish person was able to tell me they call that a zekering.

I say, Hoe duur is dat? (How expensive is that?) to inquire about the price of something. One Flemish store owner told me I should stop using that because they consider the implication that something has to be expensive rather offensive. In English it sounds similar to me, but in Dutch as it is spoken in the Netherlands it doesn’t imply anything about something being expensive. Instead they exclusively say Hoeveel kost dat? or Hoeveel is dat? (How much does that cost? or How much is that?). Or at least, so that store owner says.

To me, morgen (morning) is roughly from 6 AM to 12 PM (in English morning has different implications), and middag (afternoon) is roughly from 12 PM to 6 PM. When someone was making an appointment for the voormiddag (fore-afternoon) I assumed they meant something like 12 PM – 3 PM. Instead they meant something like 9 AM -12 PM. Middag (midday) equals noon, i.e. 12 PM, and namiddag means afternoon, exactly the same as in English. It makes a lot of sense, but it’s quite different. In my Dutch Dutch the word namiddag does exist, and means something starting around 3 or 4 PM (or possibly around 2 PM in winter), until the end of the afternoon (i.e. 6 PMish, maybe more like 5 PM in winter, although like I said, our definitions are a little more rigid than in other languages). By logical extrapolation voormiddag would mean the period prior to the namiddag, which would be from 12 PM to 3 PM. According to the dictionary it’s even used like that somewhere frequently enough to be mentioned, though where I’m from we’d talk about early in the afternoon. In conclusion, Dutch and Flemish have distinctly different connotations for the words voormiddag, middag, and namiddag. When I think about the actual meaning of the words (fore midday, midday, and after midday), the Flemish meaning makes more sense, but in its own context the Dutch meaning is equally sensible. There’s a reason the concept is called false friends (like German See and Dutch zee).

Speaking of false friends, there is one thing that never confused me, but that does sound funny to me. Over here tas means cup, akin to German Tasse, but to me it sounds like someone wants to drink a bag of coffee (or some such) if the term is used.

Lastly, I still think it’s somewhat amusing each and every time I see things on sale on €x (aan €x) instead of for €x (voor €x).

Me

Hon, I cut myself with a bread knife—um, I mean a butter knife.

My wife

Leave it to you to cut yourself with a butter knife.

Me

What are you talking about, they have sharp teeth and everything!

My wife

It’s got a rounded corner and is not actually sharp. Just because they are slightly serrated doesn’t mean that they’re meant for cutting, or that anybody but you could manage to cut themselves with it.

Me

But–but–but, you could cut steaks with it too!

My wife

That’s what steak knives are for. Sharp knives have sharp points. Why do you think that knives made for stabbing people aren’t serrated?

Me

So you’re saying that all of our kitchen knives are for stabbing people?

My wife

*softly slaps my chest* You’re such a dork!

Frenzie: string_cheese.jpg
They’ve got some weird shit in the US.

Axonn: … heh.
Axonn: You know why it’s like that?
Axonn: I can explain.

Frenzie: It’s like that cuz they pushed it through some shape?

Axonn: You see… the cow… or sheep… or wheverthefuck creature they milk… well… it sees the yank farmer… and has an immediate cheesing of the milk inside it (that is caused by fear of armed retaliation by the Bush government if not cooperating with the Food Obtaining Services For Fat Yanks). So the milk is transformed into cheese internally because the poor animal’s temperature grows. Even so, the terrified creature starts running around the farm with 2 up to 5 Yankers trying to get it. During the process, the creature (now guided by adrenaline and fear) reaches speeds up to 300 KM/h. In this moment, due to friction, it’s shape alters a bit, and liquid/semi-liquid stuff tends to be thrown out by the centrifuge force. In that moment, the creature shits the cheese into the said forms.
Axonn: It is still a mistery how the cheese (former milk) gets from the belly to the ass.

Frenzie: ROFLMAO

Axonn: Perhaps due to the great speed and fear, it can either tear holes through the creature’s belly, or simply travel through the available holes.

Frenzie: Dude, can I post this to my weblog or something, it’s hilarious XD

Axonn: At least that’s my theory to the thing.
Axonn: I might be wrong tho’………..
Axonn: But it’s pretty logical right?

Frenzie: Yeah, indeed it is! =D

Axonn: I mean, sure looks like shitted cheese.
Axonn: Oh, another explanation might be that the creatures refuse to cooperate with fake-capitalist would-be-nazi pigs and they end up in a fight where the Yank shuves his hand up the creature’s ass or mouth and pulls that shit out… hence, the form… like it’s obtained after 2 people fought over it. Or maybe they’re so greedy for that shit they *do* fight over it.
Axonn: Donno…
Axonn: ::- )

Frenzie: rofl

Axonn: Anyway, you have my blessing to post wherever… ::- )

Frenzie: rijpen-kaas.jpg
You mean it looked like this, but then they fought over it resulting in one big… string-thing.
Frenzie: That’s some Dutch cheese btw

Axonn: Bingooooooo.
Axonn: Yes, Romanian cheese looks like that too.
Axonn: You see, we Europeans .. respect food… in a way.
Axonn: They LOVE food.
Axonn: And you know, love can get preeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty passional.
Axonn: We eat and digest our food.
Axonn: They DEVOUR.
Axonn: :;- D

Frenzie: Wait… you mean the shape is also related to other holes than the ass of the cow?

Axonn: Could be, could be.

Frenzie: Perhaps that’s why they’re so afraid of gays
Frenzie: they’re afraid the cheese ass-fuck monopoly will be broken!

Axonn: No no. The problem is that gays don’t give milk. Well, I did hear of a few US semen-cheese specialties *laugh*…
Axonn: That was sick.
Axonn: ::- D

Frenzie: >_>
Frenzie: <_<
Frenzie: >_>

1. 
   
   I had never seen a submarine in the wild before. Only in harbors.

Much later, in a bus, only a few away minutes from my place, I got a phonecall. Instead of the expected four people joining dinner, I would have to cook for eight. My phone was scared to death after hearing that, but luckily giving it an electricity boost when I arrived made its heart beat again.

Our olive oil was all gone, so I did what I’d always do: use butter. However, my dear visitor happened to be a vegan. Mel only managed to stop me from throwing the rest of the vegan stuff in butter just in time, and the neighbors gently lent us some olive oil. Loes (my housemate) just told me that she discovered we also had some vegetable cooking butter. That night we watched Artificial Intelligence, which is not a movie I can recommend. Especially the ending was bad.

1. 
   
   The next day we had to leave early. Too early. Three and a half hours later, when we arrived at Julien’s place (our host for the night), someone didn’t react very friendly to me taking a picture as you can see.
2. 
   
   An interesting table-decoration at Julien’s place was this evil moon thing.
3. 
   
   We arrived at the venue a little while later. The Claws were just arriving around the same time. In the garden of the Botanique there were these guys preparing some kind of tent, probably for an event the next day or week. I found them amusing for some reason.
4. 
   
   This cigarette represents one of my main impressions of Brussels. A damn lot of smokers.
5. 
   
   When we were walking back from the park we ran across a few weird guys looking for Manneken Pis. We didn’t actually encounter the little guy, but we did manage to take a few pictures of the weird guys checking out interesting accessoires.
6. 
   
   A front view should make clear that the weird guys were part of this band which goes by the name of Clawfinger. One minute later I made a movie of him saying tandenborstel, Dutch for toothbrush. Later on he also got us on the guestlist. Thumbs up.
   
7. 
   
   Later that night, after the first band finished playing (featuring the man where we’d spend the night), I decided to take a picture of this sign. It’s funny because it says there’s some kind of non-smoking law since ‘91, but like 90% of the people were smoking inside (remember my earlier impression).
8. 
   
   I also took this picture to prove that I had “BASE” as a mobile phone provider in Belgium, which I thought sounded much more awesome than the Proteus (or something like that)Proximus which Mel had.
9. 
   
   And then some sound reached our ears.
10. 
    
    Check the crazy guy in the background of the picture.
11. 
    
    My camera kicks the ass of yours mate.
12. 
    
    André doing his thing.
13. 
    
    “I’ve got a personal trainer” (from Nothing Going On). Mel made a video of this, although it’s actually of the event right before it, Bård doing the duck walk.
    
14. 
    
    And some more guitar action.
15. 
    
    I thought I’d take a shot of the guys in the background, but the ones I made of Henka managed to fail.
16. Now just for some pictures.
17. 
18. 
19. 

And that’s it for today.

Geachte heren,

U bent met behulp van de data in onze computer geselecteerd als de meest intelligente en getalenteerde mensen in West-Europa. Daarom hebben we besloten U in te lichten over geweldige kansen die Uw leven kunnen veranderen, dit is geen spam!

Dit geweldige aanbod is slechts beperkt geldig en daarom hopen we dat U op onze bijeenkomst komt om de voorlichting bij te wonen. Deze is op donderdag 9 februari, rond de klok van 21 uur. De geheime locatie is Matenweg 6, “Patio Melba”, op de campus. Mocht U niet weten waar dat is, de route vind U op http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11

Mocht iemand U naar inlichtingen hierover vragen, pretendeert U dan dat het een “verjaardagsfeestje van Frans en Ivo” betreft.

Wij verwachten U op 9 februari te zien,

Hoogachtend

Ivo Stammis en Frans de Jonge

Or, in English:

Gentlemen,

With the data in our computer, you have been selected as the most intelligent and talented people in Western-Europe. Therefore we are telling you about great opportunities which can change your life. This is not spam!

This magnificent offer is only valid for a short while and therefore we hope to see you at our meeting. This is at Thursday February the 9th, around the clock of 21 hours. De secret location is Matenweg 6, “Patio Melba”, on the campus. May you not know where this is, you can find the route at http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11

If anybody asks what this is about, pretend it’s the “birthdaypartay of Frans and Ivo”.

Regards,

Ivo Stammis and Frans de Jonge

I open the door, and continue directly with all of my packaging to my room. With my rucksack on my back, sportsbag over the left shoulder and mail in my left hand, I use my right hand to insert the key into the door of my room and open it. While carrying my luggage inside, I switch on the light, grab the remote and turn on the radio. My journey’s done, I stretch and jawn. Then I feel something against my leg. I watch down right away. It’s the rabbits. They must be hungry, otherwise they wouldn’t be like this. The girl who’d feed them during the holidays probably last came here two or three days ago.

So I walk to the shed, turn on the light, reset the flatserver (which had crashed halfway during the holidays) and grab the food. I turn around just in time to see the rabbits moving in at high speed, hiding behind the washing machine. Shaking the bucket so the seeds inside make noise against it I slowly walk out, expecting to be able to lure them with me. After all this is the sound they associate with food. Flokkie, the white rabbit, follows. JW, the brownish one, does not.

So I offer Flokkie some food from my hand. The voracious reaction shocks me a little. I drop a few extra hands of food in front of him and go to the shed again to take care of JW. Luckily he had already left. Shaking the bucket, he comes towards me, anxious. I offer him food from my hand, he takes a quick bite and turns around. I quickly walk backwards while offering him food. He finally comes to eat, I drop a little more and close the door of the shed. I drop plenty of food in their own little home and go to my room and turn on my laptop.

Five minutes later Thomas arrives. After a customary handshake and backknock he takes me into some kind of strangling grasp you’d expect a boa constrictor to perform on his prey. “I needed that,” he explains while releasing me. Later we’ll drink a bit in the kitchen, but first we each go to our room to perform some MSN-ing. The normal flow of life begins again. Or well, almost. I have yet to catch on.

Across the street there is some grassland with a lot of ponies on it. They seemed to be quite calm while the fireworks was only further away. Then some relatively close neighbours started their warfare of extremely loud and bright fireworks. It was a neat sight, but the ponies all started crawling towards each other.

While the fireworks went on, the ponies simply stood there. Too scared to move. So I started walking towards them over the road. The sound of my voice must have broken their shock or whatever it was they had. Practically all at once they looked at me.

Then, within what must have been less than a second, they all started to run. They all ran towards me, which was neccesary to cross the ditch which leads into the next meadow. You couldn’t hear the horses running except when they were very close because of the loud fireworks.

Unable to see them anymore, I walked the road in the other direction. The horses all had assembled behind the barn, thus hearing the least they could of the loud noise as possible.

This afternoon they all seemed very calm and peaceful. Food can cure a lot.

If I had a digital camera, I would post a picture of the ponies celebrating that the fireworks are over. Since I don’t have that I can only give you one thing.

My best wishes, good health to all and a happy new year!

It was around 18:00, so after the conversation where I discovered what I just told you, I took out my lunch package, which I had prepared at my parents place earlier that day. She did the same. It was not a lunch package however. It was half a bread, a knife and a can of peanut butter. She then took a book out of her bag and put it on her bosom. As you can probably imagine she put a slice of bread on it and started to put peanut butter on the slice.

Intrigued I inquired further about this behaviour. Her reply was simple and effective. “I am a student, students do that. For example see that guy at the other side of the train eating pickles from that jar of pickles? He’s a student.” “Interesting, how can you be so sure?” “I know him, he’s in my year.”

I don’t think ever I saw her after that trip, or else I didn’t recognise her. I don’t think I ever thought back at this until yesterday. Last Thursday we went out and came home around 5. I didn’t get to sleep until something like 6. So when I got up around 11:30 I didn’t do much except being lazy and tired. So when I wanted to catch the bus around 13:00, without thinking about it, I put half a bread, liver sausage, a knife and half a carton of grapefruit juice in my bag.

When I got a book out of my bag, put a slice of bread on it and started to use my knife to cut pieces of the liver sausage, suddenly all of this entered my head and I thought: “Aha, I am a student”.