Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, evaluate how you were happy in 2007 and what you’re up to for 2008:

1. Have you been healthy in 2007? Are there major illnesses preparing for 2008?
2. Have you had sex in 2007? How do you plan to have sex in 2008?
3. Have …

Quote:

Only inertia and prejudice, not economics nor the lack of good educational ideas, stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kind of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpse.

Seymour Papert (also on wikipedia) & Cynthia Solomon, Twenty things to …

In America, people buy stuff in “stores.” Over here, they buy stuff in “shops.”

In America, people find the word “shop” old fashioned. They expect it to designate a small and cramped place where goods are not on display in large quantities.

Now, if we look at three hundred years …

The wagon was nearly full. As my head was crossing the door to the cabin, I could see complete columns of heads stretching from the first row of seats to the next door on the other side. Only a few seats were unoccupied, and I glanced from side to side …

Leaving for a land so close and yet so remote is an exciting prospect.

The idea came a few days ago from a pair of friends, who intend to visit several cities as part of a small scale version of Flickr’s Jumping Project; besides the pictures, they intend to …

Today I use this page as a public notepad:

• the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn as modern versions of Russel’s teapot - refuting the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religions
• to read: A Devil’s Chaplain by …

Today the read box from irrepressible.info was quoting a paragraph from the Iranian Gay & Lesbian Healthcare Providers Association; this prompted me to discover more about this group, and I read some of their articles.

In one of them the following sentence rung a bell:

My family, like most Iranian …

Quote:

Alleen in de logica, in de wiskunde en in de natuurwetenschappen is de waarheid anoniem, dat wil zeggen objektief geldig; gaat het over mensen en hun meningen, dan kan zoiets als waarheid alleen geboren worden wanneer men het gezicht en het stemgeluid van de spreker er bij geleverd krijgt …

Quote:

Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the …

Too late to catch the train which would take me on time. Yet too early to take the next.

A few minutes later, seating in the wagon and waiting for the departure, I was considering the good time I spent yesterday evening playing Dance Dance Revolution in Delft with two …

For sure, as I was waiting for my bus last Sunday, in that creepy underground international bus station at the east of Paris, a beautiful sight caught my eye:

Two goth lovers, young
Leave tonight for Germany
Alone in the crowd.

They literally caught my eye, glancing in my direction …

In decreasing frequency order:

vodka pomme de discorde

that’s not what the drink is for!

vodka bad dream nightmare

drink water before sleep, it makes it go down more easily.

vodka comment en faire ?

I wish I’d knew!

manipulations psychologiques milieu professionnel

all managers are doing it.

colocation …

Definition:

A kōan (公案) is a story, dialogue, question, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to intuition.

Sometimes kōans appear out of nowhere, and I was today witness to a beautiful one:

(20:32) <@kena> sylvain_: c'est quoi l'art pour toi …

And as discussed today on IRC, this context is often a function of the interest shown by other people.

Mixed feelings and confused thoughts - I found it easier drawn than explained, in the style of Indexed.

(Not entirely satisfying though: not sure whether tolerance really increases in the stereotypical USA …

Yesterday evening I had a lively discussion with two colleague from work, about the cultural differences between the Netherlands and North America. It boils down to two ideas:

• the perceived freedom in the Netherlands is merely a superficial by-product of the blissful indifference of the average Dutch citizen towards other …

A few weeks ago Timothy Ferris’ The Four Hour Workweek entered my reading agenda. The book certainly looks nice - hardcover, golden borders, and the inside is refreshingly sparse, spaced, easy to read.

The rationale for this book is appealing: most people seek a life of achievements outside work, but do …

“Relax, don’t do it, when you want to suck it to it, Relax don’t do it, when you want to come.”

That was the catchy line from this tube from the UK band Frankie Goes To Hollywood. They were successful, they were controversial, and their most popular song …

A while ago I acquired a Brother laser printer, model HL-2030. This is a cheap printer with excellent printing quality (up to 1200dpi) and power saving features. Moreover, it supports the standard printer language PCL-5 which makes it “polite” to free and open operating systems — such as, GNU …

Today, I learn that the USA opposes G8 climate proposal. I’m not surprised, although I’m interested to learn that they are now “isolated on the issue among G8 members.”

They are one of several global enemies when it comes to environment issues.

In other news, Irak gets bombed …

I really like map generators…

Create your own visited countries map!

This short presentation is meant to be funny; and there’s a degree of truth to what makes it funny.

However, its being common does not make it acceptable as a fact of life — at least not when taken literally.

Today, let’s try to reformulate the idea in a broader sense, to capture the abstract idea behind: individuals who chose to not contribute to society but benefit from it …

Quote of the day:

Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman’s compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices …

Last week my company sold old hardware for a bargain price. I got one, a dull Dell machine self-named “Optiplex GX 260”. It gained a place in my home next to Albert — my plant — and also a new name: “fungus”.

Fungus was the occasion to refresh my experience with FreeBSD …

For three weeks already I am struggling with this basic requirement: overload the arithmetic operators of Python without using class methods.

Or, more specifically, delegate the implementation of an infix operator to a third-party object in a specific context. For example, I would like something like the following code to …

The following quote summarizes roughly a number of ideas I have a lot of troubles explaining. However, I feel that many people emigrate for the wrong reasons, one of them being simply unsatisfied with living in the previous place. Here it goes:

[…] Emigration is no small business. In addition to …

In a recent study made by the NBER (National Bureau of Echonomic Research) and commented recently on Slate, it is shown that

there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day — the sum of work for pay and work …

Last wednesday evening, during my Dutch class, I nearly got lynched by the 5 girls who compose the rest of my group.

My biggest mistake was to start describing my pet peeve without starting with the obvious. The obvious being:

• yes, there is a terrifyingly large number of women who …

It’s not going to happen.

1. the cursus is not really challenging. Been there, done that already.
2. less than 6 students in the Master.
3. narrow-minded people.

I’ll be looking elsewhere.

The lastest project I’m involved into is trying to get into additional studies. The initial idea was to build a network of fellow Dutch students to 1) get some kind of educational “legitimacy” in the country and 2) hang out with the natives. Of course, I could use some …

Having a meaning related to well-being, the swastika is widely-used sacred symbol in Dharmic religions. As such, it gained adoption by the Unicode standard and has several computer-recognized Unicode encodings: the Han characters 卍 (code 0x534D) and 卐 (code 0x5350), and the Tibetan character ࿌ (code 0xFCC).

On the Windows platform …

Gisteren ben ik naar Off_corso geweest. Dit is een nachtclub in Rotterdam, en ik was er nog nooit gegaan - het typisch avondthema is 80’s and 90’s, en daar heb ik gewoon geen zin in.

Maar gisteren was het thema erg anders. Villa achterwerk is een nieuwe party die …

The following is a quote from a semi-official Usenet newsgroup for the French institution EPITECH where current and soon-to-be students can meet and discuss their past and future education in computer science:

moi chui pa un intelektuel mer g ete pri fo just avoir la motiv couz. moi jveu savoir …

Tomorrow evening I will be in a train to Paris, France, as a stopover to the French alps. A week of vacation and sports should follow. Assuming enough snow, I will be riding a snowboard for the first time in the 3 vallées.

Leaving for vacation is, by all means …

Néo (Matrix) : 76%

James Bond : 74%

Hannibal Lecter : 74%

Indiana Jones : 72%

Batman / Bruce Wayne : 72%

Jim Levenstein (American Pie) : 71%

Yoda (Star Wars) : 70%

Eric Draven (The Crow) : 70%

Maximus (Gladiator) : 70%

Forrest Gump : 68%

Tony Montana (Scarface) : 67%

Schrek : 62%

Quel héros de film es-tu ?

Usually the end of FOSDEM is the occasion for newcomers to observe RMS in person and maybe get a true sample of a beautiful troll about Vi and GNU Emacs.

Hopefully, it did not happen this time. Instead, we got a talk from Georg Greve, president of the Free Software …

Quote from ArticlesBase :

Bucket-wheel excavators are heavy equipment used in surface mining and civil engineering. The excavation component itself is a large rotating wheel mounted on an arm or boom. On the outer edge of the wheel is a series of scoops or buckets. As the wheel turns, the buckets …

During the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials, the psychologist Gustave Gilbert visited Hermann Göring in his cell. He later reports the conversation in his book Nuremberg Diary published in 1947:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not …

Theory: command officers on a war ship often operate from their desk with no visibility on the outside of the ship.

I believe this theory is true. Otherwise I could not explain this:

Theory: people without education are perfect material for dictatorship.

Proof:

`Wacquant <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xe7ui_wacquant>`__ envoyé par `jeanbeatles <http://www.dailymotion.com/jeanbeatles>`__

This video was set as a decoration on the sidebar of a weblog I read every now and then: essaisconcepts. For the non-French-literate, the speaker on the video explains that some random idea …

It is taking more than fifteen hours to my ears to recover from the trauma they experienced yesterday evening. That is already eight hours more than usual, although I stayed there for only three hours. I spent the whole morning brooding over whether I should attend Trance Energy next month …

Yesterday evening was a happy evening, because I realized that it has been one year since I arrived in Rotterdam and it feels like it happened last week.

Today the occasion was duly celebrated with pastries and champagne; tonight I added the luxury of spending a few hours at a …

As usually, a long time elapsed between the moment I discovered the tune of Feel and the day I learned that Robbie Williams was singing it. In between, I also discovered Angels and Supreme, and not until this day did I know the relationship between those three.

The non-obvious relationship …

Jabber servers are a bit like babies. Except that:

• they don’t cry.
• they do not pee and poo everywhere.
• they are neither male nor female.
• they do not need both a father and a mother to appear.

But you still have to take care of them or they may …

Hopefully I did not expect to have a great time. I didn’t.

Usually, receiving friends at home and synchronizing our lives during a midnight conversation is the kind of stuff that makes me shine. I love it.

Especially when it happens earlier than 2am, not after a week full …

Now that this new website has been running for a little while, it becomes interesting to see what people enter in search engines to come by…

• The all-time favorites: autotools · passphrase generator · vodka-pomme.net · moria · atchoune
• The expected but not so common: elvish writing · lojban tengwar · villa keops
• The unexpected …

What I saw in Shortbus is that it is all about being human. This movie deals with feelings, hardships, love, sex, relationships, and struggles to find a balance between those.

It strikes me a bit after some searches on the web that many people consider this movie as unusual, off-limits …

Working for a software publisher in the licensing business is like working in a retirement house with the elderly.

They will die soon.

I would take care of them, make sure that they are happy and enjoy the most out of their remaining days, and they will die soon.

I …

The praying mantis is a small animal with an elegant body.

She stands still, beautiful and fertile; she waits for a mate with courage and strength to approach her. Then she chooses, they mate, and she bites his head off. He dies.

She may feel sad or guilty for a …

Cyril is the hurricane that hit the Old Continent yesterday. Plenty of news reports already picture the general situation.

For a deadly hurricane, it was not as serious as what happened in New Orleans. Of course, there were some dead people; but I did not see cars or trees flying …

• go to a gay bar, dance like crazy, hook into a random guy’s eyes, exchange two times two stupid^Wsimple conversation lines, kiss, fondle and dance together, play tongue catch with an ice cube, and then leave the place with no real intent to see him again-

check.

Well …

…

I was very interested to read today a number of facts about the C programming languages that tend to escape “common knowledge” over time. For example, did you know that:

• some processors (especially Digital Signal Processors) cannot efficiently access memory in smaller pieces than the processor’s word size. There …

…

Take for example this summary of a study in the Netherlands:

Holland counts 4 million registered MSN users out of an internet population of 11 million. With 26 million MSN users for Europe all together this puts Holland far ahead of other countries.

55% of the dutch MSN population is …

At 6 this morning I woke up panting and sweating from a terrifying nightmare.

It all started with a quite long dream with an intricate story. The dream was about me being on a road trip to reconnect with old friends, and I was on my way back with the …

Via Chojin.

Your results: You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. Click here to take …

Of course, the title is a misread of a series of recent articles that can be summarized as follows: “researchers already started allowing parents to choose (not) to have children depending on their genes. Like the third movie X-Men, a new study on sheep sheds light on the biological roots …

…