Henrik Lantz

Wise men say
Only fools rush in

… but when was the last time you heard about a so-called Wise Man getting laid?

(Lovelace from Happy Feet doesn’t count, because he is a) a penguin, and b) animated.)

I had a visit from the Helpdesk this afternoon; coming to help me install a new version of the client for our ticketing system (he’s the third one that has tried and failed after I repeatedly tried and failed myself [and I consider myself to be pretty good around computers]) and to sort out my Outlook reminder problems.

He tried the Remedy client four or five times before he gave up and said he’d have to come back on that one after researching the odd error message I got displayed. The Outlook reminders he actually made more progress on than the previous people; by creating a new profile for me and synching in all the old information he managed to pop up about 150 old reminders before he got back to the same error message again, and then we were back to square one. He resigned to asking Microsoft on that one and restored everything to the original state, before he left. The comments he scribbled down on his ticket printouts were pretty fitting - after 45 minutes with the Helpdesk engineer I was left with a “?” and an “X".

(As he had left the room, I had a stroke of genius and simply googled for installshield error 6001 and guess what? It turns out I only have to delete or rename the folder C:Program FilesCommon FilesInstallShieldProfessionalRuntime701 and suddenly it will all magically work.)

• After being severely hung over for more or less two days, without eating properly this morning, heading to the gym for the Long Workout Program. (I lasted about 30 minutes before admitting defeat.)
• Putting on a pair of contacts for the first time in six months and sitting down in front of the computer to typeset a 64 page poetry collection. (Oh, the strain on the eyes!)
• Figuring that I’ll have time to put on another round of laundry whilst frying chicken and peppers for the dinner salad. (At least I know my smoke alarm works. I was wondering about that.)

Friends and former flatmates Ulrica and Paul gave birth to their first child at 22.45 last night (actually, I think Ulrica probably did most of the work); a 4.2 kg ginger boy by the name of Sid Morris. Congratulations to all three of you, looking forward to see you all again soon!

• Dublin, Republic of Ireland
• Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Mexico City, Mexico

The Snooker World Championships is on at the moment (John Higgins knocked out in the first round, where is the world coming to?), and I can’t but help to think that all the top players have all very similar names; I wonder if that has some significance? I mean, we have the Johnnies - John Virgo (former world champion), John Parrot, John Higgins, an easy link to Sean Murphy, who shares initials with Stephen Maguire and looks an awful lot like Stephen Lee, then there’s the Stephen Hendry and Steve Davis. The second group is the Marks - Mark King, Mark Selby, Mark Williams, Marco Fu and the honorary member Matthew Stevens, with Alan McManus as a hangaround in that group.

The only really serious exception to this rule is Ronnie O’Sullivan. But then, which rule is that man NOT an exception to?

Good Friday (yesterday) was a day off for the lucky, lucky people that work for UPC. I spent a lot of it sleeping and watching TV, but I did manage a short shopping spree for good measure. All at Kijkshop, I bought myself an electrical toothbrush (Carla’s orders!), some blank CD’s, a water boiler and a Senseo coffee maker. Now I have empty boxes all over the place again.

An incredibly productive couple of days here in Manchester, I must say - my expectations have not only been met; they’ve even been exceeded in some cases. So what have we accomplished?

Well, after the moderately mild Tesco spree and a walk through Manchester city center (including a couple of lagers and a delicious steak and ale pie), we did see the Depeche Mode concert on Thursday night. The gig was even better than the one in Munich, and I think I got some good pictures from it. Can’t wait to hit them with Photoshop when I get home. We then walked to the night club 42nd Street where we queued for an hour before being let in. When leaving an hour and a half later, the full effects of the day kicked in and I decided to pass out. (Mental note: add to CV - “March 2006: was carried out of a Manchester night club by two security guards.".)

Friday was quiet. Norm and I went for Irish pub brunch in Didsbury (nearby town) and then back to the flat for a couple of hours. We headed back to Didsbury later in the evening and spent a couple of hours in Hog’s Head with “the gang” (Apparently I have been raised to Accepted status now.) before rounding the evening up with a curry on the way home. One episode of Family Guy (need to watch more at some point) and then off to bed.

Saturday is promising to be quiet. We’re heading out for breakfast in a bit. My flight leaves in just over seven hours, so I don’t expect too much activity before then, which suits me fine. This has, for all the exertion on Friday, been a thoroughly relaxing and enjoyable weekend.a

My friend Norman, whom I am visiting in Manchester, asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to do when I was there, apart from the gig. I said that the only thing I’d really like to do was to stop off at a supermarket to stock up on some English foodstuffs (pretty much all of the stuff I bought over Christmas is gone, I have a steak&ale pie and some pork sausages left) and his response came back, vintage Norm:

There’s a massive Tesco across the road from me flat.
I always get stuff I don’t mean to.
Like the last time I went in was for fabric softener, but I bought a whole chicken.

Today was my last appointment at the dentist; or rather at the hygienist. Claudia spent 45 minutes hacking, scraping and generally causing me pain; but overall she seemed like a nice person. The end result is at least that I am now done for this round. My mouth is whole and sparkling clean. Feels nice.

Grocery store chain Albert Heijn are running a campaign over three weeks where every household is given three Joker stickers per week - these Jokers you can stick on any product in their stores and you instantly get 10% off the current price - even if the product is already discounted. I’ve used up my three Jokers for this week today, and I was reading in AllerHande, their in-store magazine, about the whole things; they’d also interviewed a number of people and asked them what they would use their Jokers for. Most of them said “I eat a lot of bread, so that’s probably what I’ll use it for” or “the kids really love bitterkoekpudding so I’ll use it for that” or “I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years, so some corn burgers probably".

I mean, hang on for a second. These Jokers give you 10% off anything. Is it really so hard to figure out what products you’ll use them for? The answer is easy: “Whatever is the most expensive in your basket". The “money-concious” Dutch people, however, seem not to have caught on to this fact yet - or perhaps they just don’t know how to do percentages.

(For the record, I used mine for dishwasher tablets and two packs of laundry detergent tablets.)

On Friday night, I was walking through the Red Light District when one of the girls in the rooms on one side of the narrow alley stuck a riding crop under my chin and said “Hey baby, come here, let’s play.” I walked on, but turned to her and said “I don’t think so.” and she instantly responded “Well, I think so!” and shortly afterwards added “Actually, I think we shouldn’t think so much, I think we should just do it!". Now THAT is clever marketing. (If I can over-analyze a bit here, I think it’s nice to see that the girls can also use their brains to “market themselves” in the extremely physical world that is the District.)

So, after Friday’s alcoholic adventures (actually not too adventurous; just a few beers at the Tara, some window shopping in the District and then another bar where there was some karaoke going on) and yesterday’s orgy in doing nothing, I had to kickstart myself again. Thus, I went to the gym to meet with my trainer and re-jig my workout schedule, so I now have two different programmes, one shorter (56 minutes) and one longer (74 minutes). Apart from running through the longer programme, I also did another fitness test - needless to say, I was pretty pooped when I got back home. Next week will be challenging as both my gym buddies, Bart and Andreas, are off to Frankfurt for the week. I hope I have enough willpower to keep it up anyway.

After getting back home, though, I didn’t stop there - I went to the shops and bought all the stuff I need for dinner (and lunch) for the coming week. I’ve now cooked and eaten, plus I’m just going to load up the second load in the washing machine. With that, I think I’ve done my bit for today.

Occasionally, there are days that really shouldn’t count - days that you should be able to fill out a form and claim it back from the higher powers. This could be days when you have really long unproductive meetings, days when you are stuck at airports because your flights are delayed for hours on end and, definitely, days when you’re hung over.

We were going out for an after-work beer on Friday night, but for various reasons only one of my colleagues joined me. I don’t know about you, but if I go out with a group, I normally stay out for a beer or two and then the group dissolves when people want to move on to the next bar and you sneak home. When there’s just the two of you, though, things tend to go on for a bit longer; so I was home some time around 1.00 on Saturday morning; needless to say - not quite sober.

In any case; Saturday I woke up fairly early anyway (I normally do after drinking) and decided that my bedroom wasn’t the place to be (for some reason), so I brought my pillows and duvet upstairs to the living room, turned on the BBC breakfast show and dozed on and off. I probably moved from the sofa perhaps three or four times yesterday; going to the bathroom, getting some food, etc. Some time between the cooking programmes and the rugby, I was starting to feel a little bit better, so from around midday I can’t blame the hangover anymore; after then it was just sheer tiredness that kept me there. I napped on and off throughout the day and sometime by midnight I went downstairs to get some proper sleep again.

In summary, I did absolutely zip yesterday. So. Where do I send the form?

I went to the dentist again today to fix my two cavities I mentioned the other day. It was in an awkward place; I had to lie down with my head at a strange angle, and my jaw hurts from keeping my mouth open for so long. My teeth are fine, though, and that’s I guess the main goal.

Heading off to bed now, and even though I started a fresh new book last night (Robert Jordan’s Crossroads of Twilight), it’s gonna have to wait as I received the latest copy of Layers Magazine, the world’s second most interesting magazine, in the mail today. Layers is about all the Adobe applications and, although Photoshop is my main interest here, I like to keep tabs on the other products in the Creative Suite as well. Who knows when you might need any of the other?

(I said the second most interesting magazine; the most interesting one is of course Photoshop User Magazine that you get as a NAPP member.)

I went to the dentist this afternoon. My dentist is a very nice man, extremely light hands and very good at talking you through what he’s doing. I was his last patient of the day, so he invited me to stay behind to wait for my X-rays to come out. It appears I have two cavities in teeth next to each other in the right half of the upper jaw. Luckily, he just got a cancellation as I was in the chair, so I can go back on Thursday and have it all sorted in one go. (Last time I went there, it took me - to the day - a year to finish off everything, so this time it’ll be a lot quicker.)

Then I need to see his dental hygienist to clean off some plack later on this month, and that is NOT something I am looking forward to, that’s for sure. Plack removal must be the most painful thing a person can do (although I hear teeth whitening isn’t too comfortable either). My father, who is always a very special man, normally falls asleep when they clean his teeth. (But then, this is the man who, when he was in hospital after a small myocardial infarction two weeks ago, not only followed the endoscopy procedure live on a TV monitor ("It was really interesting!") but also watched a recording of it later. He claims he’s healthy - judging by this story, though, I believe he is still a very sick man.)

I woke up from odd dreams about SMS:es (don’t ask) and sat myself down by my computer and wrote a new SMS feature for Fallfrukt, a site that Freddie and I run. After that I went upstairs and sat on the sofa for a while, watching two episodes of ‘Allo ‘Allo, when Andreas got in touch and asked if it wasn’t time to go to the gym. Sure enough, after about two hours we came back home and prepared dinner (see next post); Andreas even brought some cake for dessert, and now I have no other plans than to watch a silly BBC gameshow and then go to bed.

• A plastic Depeche Mode beer mug.
• Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.
• A big bottle of Soda Stream Coca Cola Light syrup.

When I was back home in Stockholm last weekend, I was going through an old box of stuff. At the very top of the box was my old high school yearbook as well as the photo catalogues from the last two years. After I’d carried the box down to the basement, it dawned on me that I hadn’t even opened the covers of either, I’d just simply put them back in and closed the box.

It makes me think of one of the few Depeche Mode songs not written by Martin L. Gore; “Place it in your memory / Leave it in your past / But don’t forget”. ("In your Memory", Alan Wilder, 1984.)

• Internet take-away places where you can pay with a credit card and that send you an email when your order is sent from the restaurant AND deliver in half the communicated time.
• Knowing that I will sleep like a baby the second my head hits the pillow.
• Depeche Mode’s coming single, “Precious". Their best in ten years?

• Wacom board (Graphire4 Studio XL)
• 14″ TV/DVD combo (for the kitchen)
• Carrying case with poker chips

• bath tub
• breakfast buffet spread
• good pack of information material

• Garlic
• Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• Crème Fraiche

The heading [Three…] will be used from now on to list triplets of varying types and interest. It’s not intented to be an exhaustive list or an indication of any order of preference. All is based on my own personal taste right that minute, and it’s all a bit of fun, remember.

Sometimes people around you say the weirdest things (Overheard in New York and Overheard in the office prove that!). Most of the time it’s information that will pass in through one ear and out through the other, but occasionally you stumble on real conversational gems - such as this sentence, uttered by one of my colleagues over lunch yesterday:

“I don’t want to generalize about the crap that I don’t like.”

Taste that one.

During my modest shopping walk yesterday (only DVD player, a printer cable and a can of compressed air [a nerd has to have one]) I saw that the new Coca Cola Lime, according to the fine print on a huge ad poster, does in fact not contain lime juice. Scary that.

Since the question has been raised by some people: Since I, like a lot of WordPress users all over the world, started receiving large amounts of comment spam (people posting poker ads in my comments) I had to take some counter measures.

The technique I opted for uses comment moderation; meaning that when someone posts a comment, an email is sent to the poster and to myself, requesting the comment to be approved before it becomes visible to all users. Since the Evil Spammers hardly ever use real email addresses, they will not be approved by them, and I will delete them as soon as I see them. This is to keep the blog clean and ad-free (at least free of any ads that I didn’t put there!), and generally make the Internet a nicer place to be.

Today, I’ve made my first court appearance, under oath and everything. One morning in August 2002, I was in the bus as usual on the way to the office when we had an accident due to other people’s bad driving. Now, two and a half years later, there is still an unsettled insurance claim regarding this - and so they called in the people brave enough to hand in a written eye-witness report at the time.

The whole thing was very undramatic; it was a small room with the judge and his bailiff behind one desk, me and the interpreter facing them, with the two attorneys on either side in their slightly silly black frocks with white fringe ties - to be honest I am not even sure who was the prosecution and who was the defense, but who cares? A decanter of water and a few plastic cups on each table, and four rows of chairs for spectators in the back of the room. No-one sat there.

After a short introduction, I had to give the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God - but it’s not at all like in the movies. You are actually even given a choice in this multicultural country, if you want to swear on the Bible or not. Since I am not a very religious person, I decided not to, so all I had to do was to say “Dat beloof ik.” ("That, I promise.") and that was it. I was then told the legal difference between the responses “No.", “I don’t think so.” and “I can’t remember.” to questions like “Do you remember if he then hit the other guy” - if you don’t remember for sure, you must always answer explicitly; “I can’t remember".

Then I had to recount what had happened that chilly August morning, where and when it was. I drew a sketch of the situation and explained how I remembered it, and the judge asked questions while taking notes. Then the attorney that had called me as a witness asked a few questions, and after him it was the other guy’s turn. No wild cross-examination or badgering of the witness here, everything was very civilized (apart possibly from those ties).

We were asked to step out for 20 minutes while the judge and the bailiff prepared a written version of the statement to file with the case. Outside the room, we met the bus driver who was also called as a witness, and due to testify directly after I was done. It was nice to see her again - the incident doesn’t seem to have affected her at all, but I guess she’s used to it. She told us that she drives all over Europe, and that she sees the same kind of situations everywhere.

After a short while, we got to enter the room again, and I got to read through my statement - or rather, the interpreter translated it for me. (Probably that wouldn’t have been necessary, but I’d rather follow the letter of the law.) The few minor adjustments I had (just clarifications) were added; I signed the statement and the sketch I’d done earlier and that was it. We all shook hands and it was back to normal life again, one experience richer.

And the judge didn’t even have a gavel or a name sign on his desk. Pah.

Minor annoyance: My borrowed-while-waiting-for-a-replacement laptop attempts to automatically combine any apostrophes and quote marks with the following keystroke, if it’s a vowel. This means that when I hit the quote key it prints nothing, but when I then hit the, for example, f key, it prints “f in one go. This is not such a big problem; except for when you do hit a vowel. The combination “a will simply become ä - “i becomes ï, etcetera. Apostrophes do the same; ‘a becomes á, and so on. This is a minor annoyance normally, but when you’re coding PHP it’s a real nuisance. The amount of times I’ve tried running ÏNSERT INTO and ÜPDATE commands for MySQL is beyond counting.

——

Funniest MSN received yesterday on a tedious half-an-hour-too-long conference call:
XXXXX says:
Tell you what, for a bit of fun…
XXXXX says:
I’ll give you 10 euros if you use the word “testicles” in this call.

I didn’t dare, even though we were discussing tests - it would have been soooo easy to slip in. My philosophy, though, is that if you don’t open your mouth more than absolutely necessary during a conference call, the risk that you’ll be leaving with extra action points is minimal.

——

Yesterday, it was to the day 50 years since Albert Einstein died. One of the greatest minds of our time, sadly so obsessed with perfecting his own formulas that he probably didn’t have the time to see what they meant to the world around him.

——

I’ve started trying out Bloglines to keep track of my favourite blogs. So far, it seems to be a handy tool - all web based, but with an optional Notifier component that keeps polling your feeds with configurable intervals. If you’re a Bloglines user, use the link in the menu to add this blog to your feeds.

——

I guess that pretty much covers my lunch break, which has been spent working and blogging in parallel over a sandwich at my desk. It’s one of those days again - but hey, only two more meetings to go - plus the one from 10.00 that hasn’t quite started yet. Ah well.

- Doctor, Doctor!
- Who’s there?
- Ike.
- Ike who?
- I keep thinking I’m Moses!
- Well, you’d better take these tablets!

A variation of the classic Knock knock-jokes, courtesy of the Look Around You DVD.

Some people say that the easiest way to make contact with strangers in the Netherlands is to sit on a tram or train and read something. It doesn’t matter if it’s a magazine, a newspaper, a book, a packing slip for Nurofen or whatever - people will be very interested in what it is you read and desperately try to read it over your shoulder so that they don’t miss out on anything important (that’s also free). I swear to you - I have even seen a passenger grunt, frown and mutter at someone who turned a page in his Volkskrant before he’d finished the story.

Let me tell you this: There is an even better way. Try watching a movie on your laptop while on a KLM flight. If you really, REALLY want to upset your fellow travellers, make sure it’s got no subtitles and that you use headphones. Speaking from experience here. 14B and C were both very interested in the silent version of A Beautiful Mind.

This place has been quiet for a while, I know. I’ve been really busy/travelling/ill/broken PC/and all that, but that hasn’t stopped me from doing a few things on the side. Feel free to have a look at:

• Photo Album - If you have a Nikon D70 you should put it to use, don’t you think?
• Cooking - Recipes with pictures. Off to the kitchen!

I may be quiet, but I am not dead.

I decided to spice this page up a bit - the way too generic WordPress template was getting on my nerves. Now, at least, there’s some colour going on here, which livens things up, at least a small amount.

Some mixed notes from today:

A 43-year-old woman was robbed last night in Amsterdam. She was in her car when two youngsters pulled up next to her on a scooter, opened the back door, grabbed her purse and drove off. She was so upset she followed them and rammed them with her car, killing one of them. Bizarre view on justice, that.

My ex-colleague Kim is becoming a father - CONGRATULATIONS!

CSSes are extremely powerful, but can also be very confusing and daunting. I need a clear head before I do anything more.

On Tuesday and Friday, the council people pick up the trash in the neighbourhood. We basically put everything in bags or sacks and dump them on the street outside and it’s gone early morning. Sometimes they arrive a bit later in the day (today must have been such a day) because someone has dumped a ton of building material on the neat pile that was there when I left this morning; old flooring, bits of wood - all sorts. Two fears are in my mind right now; 1) that some of the debris is going to blow into and break a window (it’s quite windy tonight) and 2) that we’re going to get another bollocking from the Garbage Constables (yes, they have police officers for trash - it’s true) for leaving stuff out. We’ve been fined once before when the council skipped one day, I’d rather not have to go through all that again.

I’m halfway through season 2 of Sopranos on DVD now. It’s a strangely addictive series, not really much better than any other series, but it’s compulsive viewing. Tony Soprano is a full-scale, no holds barred, absolute bastard; he’s a liar, a mobster, a killer, an adulterer - yet somehow he is likeable at the same time. It doesn’t compute, but as long as my colleagues keep lending me the DVDs, I’ll watch it.

I’m off to Brussels for a training course next week, then I’m back in Amsterdam the week after, and the week after that I’ll be in Stockholm. I do get around these days.

I’ve lost my scarf. Dang.

This weekend, I replaced the bedroom curtains for opaque plastic foil. It made the room a bit bigger (or so it feels because it lets in more light) and took some of the yellowishness away. It wasn’t too complicated either; first you cut the foil roughly to size (having square windows would have made it easier - ours are domed), then clean the window and moisten it with water. Peel off the protective foil on the plastic and place it on the window, using some masking tape to prevent it from falling off from its own weight. Thoroughly moisten the outside of the plastic and use a squeegee to smooth it out and remove any air bubbles. Use a sharp knife at this moment to trim off the excess edges until it fits perfectly. No glue, no sticky stuff; just water and some friction. (It reminded me of these Christmas stickers I used to have as a kid, the ones you stuck on fridges and windows.)

Well, I think that’s about it for today. Oh, wait, it’s David’s birthday today (for another 45 minutes) - Happy Birthday, David!