I don’t think you really noticed, but we’ve been in Switzerland since friday 😉 We came by car and had no problems (which is always good), there’s not really a winter condition here yet, snow and ice seem to be reserved for february – march (good again! :))

Yesterday we went to Europa Park (yes, that’s not in Switzerland but in Germany, indeed) with some Swiss family and had a great time. It’s a 2-hour drive from here, but I don’t mind as I like to drive (although it was a bit of an adjustment for me, as I’m used to overtake everyone and everything, and now I had to follow the leader as we didn’t know the way ;-)) Great time, but a bit tiring as well, so we slept quite long 😀

Merry christmas and a happy new year! 

Since this morning I’m free of this white and blue L sticking to our car’s rear window… Permanent driving license yippee!

Saw the animated movie "Cars" yesterday…. Nicely done, very amusing, cool movie. The story itself is ofcourse quite standard, but using cars as the main characters is a cute touch. I especially liked the movies they were watching at the end, such as Monster Trucks Inc. Pixar++, recommended!

A few weeks ago Diana and me went to see "Bharati" in Vorst Nationaal. Turns out Vorst isn’t a cheap place to go, hard to find a parking spot and seats not that well-suited to big people like me 😉 but overall it was okay – the show itself was great! It was very nice and in the end everyone started dancing as well 🙂 When driving home I got my first alcohol check, but I guess I looked innocent (or sober) enough, the first cop said I had to pull over but when I got there the other said I could drive right through ;))

Last week we went to the an Indian fair at the Centre for Fine Arts (Paleis voor schone kunsten / Bozar). Nice atmosphere, but it wasn’t at all as large as we expected it to be. We didn’t check out the exposition itself, as it costed again extra and we were too late to join there anyway — we came there for the advertised Indian market. It was fun to see the performances, but actually it was pretty small. We had fun nonetheless, a nice saturday evening 🙂    

Lots of moving these days… On one hand I’ve moved all my Brussels server and network equipment from InterXion Zaventem to Versatel Nossegem. Only 2km away, but it took a lot of time (about 14 hours!) to get everything removed, packed, moved to new location, built up, tested again… Phew, that was a lot of work. Thanks to Jorne for some help I could surely use. 🙂 Coming home around 4am isn’t that great if you have to get up at 8 again… 😮

On the other hand my employer is moving from one place to another (within Leuven). This takes a lot of planning, and it’s also an opportunity to upgrade some of the infrastructure. Moving day is getting close and so much still needs to be done… It’ll be a few long days to get everything working as planned. Internet, electricity, cabling, furniture, airco, racks, patching… It all takes time, and lots of it. On top of that we’re getting new firewalls, a whole bunch of 48-port managed gigabit ethernet switches, new racks, new UPS, thermometers, a new DS3 internet connection (+4x ISDN backup), a completely new VoIP PBX & phones, etc. Challenge deluxe! Hopefully everything will be in complete working order after D-day weekend 😉 Expect to find me grumpy and stressed starting 11-Jan-2007. 😛

A great article which I’ve been pointed to a while ago was based on something I wanted to do myself for a while already. Everyone keeps seeing movies where the computers do the strangest things (this includes CSI and others) in the strangest ways where anyone working in IT keeps scratching their heads 😉

Be sure to also check out the first 2 links mentioned in the post for more funny top 10’s: What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

In the meanwhile Anshu has been living with us for over a month… she’s happily playing with her toys and exploring new places in the house, still being amazed at how high and far she can jump or walk… or fall. However, on many occasions Claudia Lee is still jealous and tries to pick a fight. Anshu, not to be outdone, starts growling and acts all tough, usually a high speed chase around the living room and lots ouf meowing sound is the outcome. Hopefully their relation will improve in the future, they manage to sleep in the same bed half a meter away from each other already 😉

Why is it that every time you need to restore something you realize there’s something missing to be able to get back in business quickly? One of my virtual servers disappeared after some disk trouble (no idea where to or why?!) and it seems some directories were wrongly excluded from the backups… So a little bit of puzzling was required. Hopefully one day my backup strategy will be perfect! 😉

Since a little over a week (since sunday 22-oct) we have a new little kitten called Anshu (Hindi for “touched by the sunlight”) in the house to play with Claudia-lee. They don’t get too well along yet but hopefully that will improve. Pictures will soon follow I guess… 🙂

We got  her from a shop where there were way too many animals packed into small cages 🙁 Anshu had an infection in her eye and wasn’t treated for anything nor really cared about… I guess a cheap “brandless” kitty in their eyes deserves less support than a 650€ persian cat :s She seems to be doing better, but is quite shy and it’s hard to catch her to give her medicine…. but I’m sure her situation will improve, and hopefully Anshu and CL can play together soon 🙂 🙂

A while ago I bought 2 Samsung TFT’s , which didn’t go without problems.

It’s been a while since I posted, but actually the day after said post, the second TFT turned up a dead pixel as well. So I went to exchange that one for a “kadobon” as well, and went to look for 2 nice new monitors, preferrably not Samsung. Alas, everything in that MediaMarkt ended up 40 EUR more expensive than before 🙁

I drove to another one (St. Pieters Leeuw -> Basilix) closeby and indeed, same pricing as in the other one a week back… but still way more expensive than the voucher I had in my pocket, except for Samtron and Samsung monitors. The Samtron had a Samsung panel and was cheaper (199 EUR/piece), so probably a B-panel … If I’m having problems with dead pixels why go for even less quality, eh? So in a risky move I bought 2 brand spanking new Samsung Syncmaster 920N’s … hoping they’d be OK.

Haha,  fat chance … secondary monitor had a dead pixel.It stayed black and was about 2-3 pixels from the right side… as I didn’t feel like going to MediaMarkt again for that and starting the exchange game all over again I decided to let it rest. In the meanwhile the pixel has come to life again, yay… 2 fully working monitors *knock on wood & fingers crossed*