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Marriage

This is it, I’m getting married this Saturday !!

Hope all goes well, and we didn’t mess up the invites or forgot anything :s

My next post will be written as a husband :]  – I’ll have to get used to that.

For those of you in the neighbourhoud: the wedding will take place at 11h30 at ‘t Landhuis in Bornem (no church wedding). Feel free to come take a looksie.

CPeX @ Pukemarock 2008 !!!

YES !! Thank you, Lord !
The legendary and totally ass-kicking Clement Peerens Explosition is performing at the Pukemarock festival in Puurs in September. I am so stoked about them getting together again and touring Belgium !

Several years ago, they ruled the rock scene in Flanders with their combination of no-nonsense, hard rock and humour on stage. The music most reminds me of the equally great AC/DC, but combined with a hilarious sense of humour (the front man, Clement Peerens, is actually Hugo Matthysen, and together with the former drummer, “Vettige” Swa De Bock, or Bart Peeters, they have their own crazy radio show “Het Leugenpaleis”, and a TV version “Het Peulengaleis”).

I remember when I was younger and totally loving their performances with CPeX. I simply thought it was genious! You get to rock out ànd crack yourself up with their jokes. Brilliant.

Are you ready veur den Dikke Lu ?

Read about them on Wikipedia (NL) here.
Their official site is of course www.cpex.be.
If you’re on Facebook, become their fan by joining this group.
If you’re on Facebook and attending Pukemarock, join this group.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: cpex, clement peerens explosition, clement peerens, sylvain aertbelien, swa de bock, dave depeuter, pukema, pukemarock

I Like To Move It, Move It

It’s coming to a close.

This Friday we will be moving from our apartment in Antwerp’s city center to our recently bought house in Bornem. It will be a day of heavy lifting, driving between the city and the municipality, accompanied with some healthy stress.
In the same weekend, we will be painting the living room, and a friend of ours will be replacing the ceiling in the bedroom.

This is possible thanks to the huge garage we have, because of the bel-etage (don’t know the english equivalent of it) layout of the building. It means that the garage and hallway comprise the entire ground floor, meaning space for two very large cars, or our entire household

From that weekend on, we will finally be living in our new house (can I have a w00t?).

In the week following, we’ll be changing our residency and painting the bedroom. I also have to fix us up with an Internet connection, and HD satellite TV and radio ASAP. Sure hope the latter doesn’t give me too much troubles…

I’ll miss the conveniency of living close to absolutely everything, but I sure as hell won’t miss the tourists and the lack of parking space

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: moving, house

Scheduling a Meeting Date

Just what the doctor ordered !

I regularly need to set a date for a meeting, in many cases with +10 attendees. What is the best way to do this?
I’m not even considering scheduling the meeting through Outlook (decline – propose new date – decline – propose new date – …). And what if not everybody has Outlook at their disposal…
What I found to be the best solution so far, was to write a simple e-mail message, with potential dates vertically, and attendee names horizontally, where they simply had to edit the days they were absolutely not available. I then selected the closest date on which everybody could attend.

Needless to say, this is a bit messy. And it requires close follow-up on my part. With the added bonus that sometimes people just don’t get this system, causing even more tedious, useless work.

Well, NO MORE !!!88!!!8

Via Lifehacker [ lifehacker.com ], I came across these two (free) web applications: Doodle and When is Good (I totally dig the name of the latter).

The big strength of these solutions is the simplicity and the openness. You don’t need to register (not even the organizer of the meeting), and you can specify certain timeframes per day. They both even have the ability to take timezones into account (super handy for conference calls).

My vote goes to Doodle, because it is more versatile (aside from OK/NOT OK also a “OK if no other way possible”), and you can use it for polls as well (e.g. what business incentive do the colleagues prefer?)

Doodle [ doodle.ch ]
When is Good [ whenisgood.net ]

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: timemanagement, meeting scheduling, meeting date, doodle, when is good

Suggest Friends on Facebook – also for ‘Senior’ Users

If you’re not yet on Facebook, either go register yourself, or stop reading now.

As some of you might know, you can suggest friends to other Facebook users. For instance, when a good friend you know joins Facebook after you invited him/her, Facebook automatically tries to help the new user get more connections. There will be a link under their profile picture saying “Suggest Friends for <friend’s name>”.
But, when you happen to ‘discover’ a friend, that has been on Facebook for some time, and has several friends, Facebook does not offer you this kind of action to perform.

I actually needed this for a friend I found by just searching for his name. He used an e-mail alias when registering for Facebook, so I didn’t find him by importing my webmail contacts. This friend and I have a lot of friends in common, but somehow he never added any of them. So, obviously, I wanted to suggest all those friends to him. I looked around and searched, but was unable to find anything of the kind in all the menus and links on Facebook.
Googled a bit, and found out that indeed, Facebook doesn’t offer the friends suggest option on profiles of people that have been registered for some time (no idea what that timespan is though).

So I did some snooping of my own and found that you can simply use the address of someone’s profile (in the style of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1065010701) and type &suggestfriends directly behind it and press enter. Now the profile will show up again, but with the suggest friends box on top of it.

Suggest friends for Filip Lejon [ facebook.com ]

Update: I don’t know if this option was available earlier, but in any case, you can now suggest friends for anyone, by clicking a small link all the way at the bottom of someone’s profile page. Noticed that after I wrote this post. Makes it just a bit easier

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: facebook, suggest friends, social network

Life is taking its Corners

Sooner than expected/planned, the lives of my girlfriend and me are taking corners pretty fast.

On the 31st of November 2007, I asked her to marry me. Being the lucky bastard that I am, she said yes (otherwise, I wouldn’t be posting anything here, obviously). So good news !

But then a few weeks after, we received word that we had to move out of our appartment in Antwerp by the first of July 2008. We have been searching for a house to buy in the area of Klein-Brabant since then, and currently we’re very close to accomplishing that.

So a busy period for me once again (after the 7 months work at Huntsman), in which I won’t be posting very often. But who knows, once we have moved I might use my blog for posting the progress of garden work. And when children arrive, I’ll certainly have something to talk about!

All you readers (should that even be plural?) take care, enjoy life and prove yourself to the world. [ -> consider that my New Year's message for 2008 ]

Daft Punk – Alive 2007 clip

It’s been awfully quiet on my blog, but that’s because I’m extremely busy at work until the end of the year at least. Probably my Flickr photos site is my busiest publication at the moment (not that it’s busy ).

Anyhoo, I just had to share this track of the legendary Daft Punk. It’s a mash-up of “Around The World” and “Harder Better Faster Stronger” which they played at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, an 18,000-capacity sports arena in Paris, on June 14th, 2007. They asked the public to bring their digital camera, and tape the concert. The result of the recording is now available as Alive 2007 on double compact disc + dvd.

Here is a YouTube clip with the mash-up. Makes me wanna be there !

Sony DSC-H9 Arrived Today

w00t!
I received my H9 this noon. Really looking forward to using this new camera. Still have to work for about an hour until I can try it out though. But the good part is that I had the chance to fully load my battery, otherwise I would be trying to shoot stuff with a battery capacity of 0.01% That would be frustrating!

Once I get used to the camera, I plan to put up seperate web albums containing all sorts of (hopefully) beautiful pictures I have been taking. I’ll be trying to get some serious photography techniques down, so stay tuned.

BTW, we plan to go to Slovenia [ en.wikipedia.org ] for our yearly vacation. This will happen somewhere in early September, so expect some fantastic landscape shots in a few months. We’ll probably start off in Bled [ bled.si ], and make our way through western Slovenia, all the way up to the coast for a visit to Italy’s Trieste. Probably

Update: I activated the Flickr widget, which you see here in the sidebar of my blog. It presents a view of the 5 last photos added to my Flickr account. For complete photo albums, I will still be using Google’s Picasaweb. Too bad WordPress doesn’t seem to be able to handle the RSS feed URL, otherwise I could show you this live feed in the sidebar as well

Technorati Tags: DSC-H9

Lisbon album online & Google Picasa

I just uploaded the web album version of the collection of photos we took during our 3-nights citytrip to Lisbon (from 29th of March ’till the 1st of April). You can find it on my albums page (look at my blog’s header for clues!).

This time I used yet another hosting solution (as opposed to stuff like my webspaces at Telenet or Skynet, or my Live Space): Google’s Picasaweb [ picasaweb.google.com ]. I tried Picasa v1 some months ago, and liked it, but nothing more. But then I came across some blog post mentioning that you can now have 1GB of storage on Picasaweb. Well, that sure sounded interesting, especially since I didn’t know of online albums hosted by Google So redownloaded the latest version of Picasa, and I have to say it. It really is all I was looking for:

• free hosting
• large space (1GB – and counting)
• some social interaction (comments, etc…)
• downloading of whole album at once, or file per file

Picasa 2 is what you use to upload your pictures, which is a big plus compared to all those online tools. And it comes with a bucketload of extra inventive, user-friendly features such as GeoCoding via Google Earth (again, all nicely integrated), generating collages, limited editing, printing to online services, posting to your blog, etc….

One word: bigupyagoogle !

Update: I uploaded some other albums I had scattered over the web to the Picasweb site. Since I have so much spare web space available, I’m likely to upload other pictures as well, which I wouldn’t have uploaded otherwise. I’ll mention it on my blog here when I do so.