Find

Categories

Archives

This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.

Adopt your own useless
blob!

He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.

Other things at valdyas.org

rss 1.0

Creative Commons License
Everything on these pages is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.

powered by blosxom.

25-Aug-2010

On the edge

My brain needed a rinse, and as everybody else has been away this summer (for work in my other half’s case, but he did get his dose of culture shock) I thought I’d treat myself to a bargain day-ticket for the train. It was about a quarter of the normal price, with some restrictions— only valid on the national network and not on the local networks, which thwarted me on one stretch, and not valid until 9:00, which I didn’t mind much because otherwise I’d have taken the 8:45 at the earliest.

Read more ...

27-Jul-2010

Unsuccessful expedition

So I’m a single parent without any children— other half is in India, Prima and Tertia at camp, and Secunda cat-sitting for friends who don’t want their ancient cats to be alone at night so she only comes to dinner. I expected that I’d be able to do a lot of work that’s otherwise swamped by distraction and domesticity (like migrate the server), but nothing seems to come out of my hands. Apparently I need the distraction!

I’d promised Secunda that we’d visit her godmother, my cousin the nun, who lives in The Hague, and today seemed the day for it so I bought a special-offer day-ticket for two and we hopped on a train. On the train I realised that I hadn’t informed the godmother of our intentions, but my phone battery was flat and Secunda didn’t have her phone with her (“we’re that kind of people”, she said). But being a nun, the probability that she’d be at home was very high so we didn’t worry.

Read more ...

01-Jun-2010

Map confusion

This is what Google Maps made of a walking tour in my home town that took about 50 minutes without stopping at the places meant to stop at:

world map with markers all over the place

Not that the original route survived contact with the enemy me when I actually walked it. I think the current version takes even less time.

This version, on the other hand…

(Note that there’s not a single place marked on this map where I’ve actually been, unless “G” is Halifax, where I landed once on my way to Toronto and eventually Edmonton.)

20-May-2010

Kirchentag - random bits and pieces

I wanted to do a coherent blog post (and in fact I did do a coherent blog post) but I had all this stuff left over that wouldn’t cohere. Ah well.

Read more ...

19-Feb-2010

Odd

keizer karellaan 1-3 t/m 175

I pass this sign practically every day and have always wondered why whoever made it included “3” instead of only “1 t/m 175” or even “1-175”. Until this morning, when it suddenly dawned on me that it’s actually a very elegant way to say “only odd numbers in this building”.

08-Feb-2010

Brussels 2: FOSDEM

Most people will think this is the meat of the story, but I still intend to write a hotel review too.

Read more ...

07-Feb-2010

Brussels 1: Travelling

I’m splitting this into four parts because otherwise it’s too long; parts may still be boring. If you only want to read about FOSDEM, Part 2 and for my hotel review/recommendation, Part 3.

Note: It’s possible that some parts aren’t up yet. In that case, please try again later.

Read more ...

21-Jan-2010

Oh, the joys of city life (2)

Spent about half an hour mending Tertia’s bike tire in front of the house.

Greeted by 2 acquaintances and 5 complete strangers who passed on foot or on bikes.

Talked to 1 neighbour (a nice old lady) when she came back from shopping.

Dragged bike out of the way of 1 delivery lorry.

Accepted mail from 1 postman who was confident that the woman in the road belonged with the open door behind her.

Asked 1 young man not to throw his cigarette end on the ground practically at my feet. Young man’s friend agreed with me and kicked it in a grating.

Declined 2 offers of help, one of them very sexist.

Showed 1 person the way to somewhere just around the corner, but hard to find. Helped 2 pairs of tourists with their maps (we live in a very confusing spot because all the road signs seem to say different things).

Got a screwdriver to fix my own bike light, but of course Tertia went to school on my bike this morning so I couldn’t.

26-Dec-2009

Random railway geekery

While in the shower —this kind of thing always happens in the shower— it suddenly occurred to me that the next major station on the railway line in each of the four directions that trains can go from this town starts either with A or with Z. For people with a railway map of the Netherlands and some diligence, this fact alone is probably enough to figure out which town we live in, but as that’s not a secret and easy enough to find out by other means anyway, I don’t mind.

And when I thought some more about it, I realised that both stations on the east-west line start with A, and both stations on the north-south line with Z.

The smaller stations that not all trains stop at (and some of which are too new to be on the map I linked to) blur this elegance with letters like T, R and H, but that’s not to be helped.

28-May-2009

Oh, the joys of city life

View from our living-room window:

A6 tadpoles

It was even more crowded before I got out the camera. When I took the picture two cyclists and most of the school kids had already gone away, and the blue lorry on the right backed up a bit. On the other hand, the representative of a posh German handbag company (with the black car) had appeared.

Afterthought

Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence, a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on everything to prove its Orthodoxy.

—Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things

Can't see the post?

If you've come here via your RSS feed and all you can see is a page with header, sidebar and footer but no post, you probably suffer from the RSS bug that lops off the extension from the filename. You can get around it by adding ".html" to the URL in your title bar.

I know about this bug (no need to report it), and I intend to fix it, but last time I tried that the blog stopped working completely.