68 Days

We all know the number 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. However this has to do with the amount of days which it took to drive 5000 kilometers. So with only 131 days to go until the end of the year I’m not going to make the 300000 this year. If calculations are correct and I will not be travelling abroad the odometer should get stuck somewhere on the 295000 kilometers this year.

MX5 in Parking GarageThe spares mentioned the last post did their work flawlessly, however new items need replacement. Get the idea the exhaust manifold most likely has a leak, and the catalytic converter is getting noisy and besides that doesn’t work anymore so it needs replacement anyway. Again not something really surprising judging age and mileage. It is the first catalytic converter being replaced so this one is 15 years old and the current exhaust manifold is already 7 years old since the last one got replaced. And yet it might be repaired by just welding the leak, so it will last another year or so before it has to be replaced completely.

And what do 42 and 68 have in common? Nothing really but 4+2=6 and 4×2=8 maybe! Nor do I know if I run the highest mileage MX-5 in the country. Although it’s not a car that will be used as a daily driver throughout it’s life there must be some 300000+ km cars around. I’m pretty sure there are, however all cars I’ve seen for sale are below 250000km.

阿姆斯特丹

AmsterdamOr simply Amsterdam in English or Dutch. My girlfriend already asked a couple of times to see downtown Amsterdam. Finally I’ve buckled against the amount of stress caused by her to go there and so we did. Just criss-crossed around the city so she could look around at the Dam, along the concentric canals, the red-light district and of course China town. We also had a look at several famous buildings from our history. In a future visit she can make up her mind on which of those she wants to visit……

The last three weeks

….. nothing much got updated. Well they where quite uneventful anyway so I didn’t see any reason to post anything either. I’ve helped out a friend of my girlfriend who had some computer problems. It was a mild case of malware which caused certain problems but overal just acted up within internet explorer causing blank windows to open and some overall slowness. Took a bit of time to get rid off though but in the end the system decided to listen to me. Played my second round of Twilight Imperium, a Sci Fi based board game. A while ago I bought some GameCube games and I’ve been playing around with ‘Beyond Good & Evil’ for a while. Of course I’ve been reading, I’m just about halfway through ‘Treasure of Khan’ by now. Last weekend I also continued with our bathroom, hopefully I can finish it up in the coming weekend or two. That would be great, after that a new DIY project can start.

Britain invaded by the Rubber Duckies

No, not something about a weird 1950’s era movie, but sometimes you read funny or remarkable things in the newspaper or in this case a website (nu.nl). The UK will get invaded by thousands of bathtub toys on it’s Southwestern beaches according to the article. Those toys are swept overboard during a storm in 1992 and have been floating ever since (at least most of them). This took place on the Pacific Ocean and the toys where being shipped from Hong Kong to the United States. Depending on ocean currents they have been found in Alaska, Australia, Indonesia, Peru and the Westcoast of North America (after being stuck in the Arctic ice for three years). This fact have made the Friendly Floatees famous as they have been used to model ocean currents.

Back in time

As my girlfriend wanted to see something this weekend, I thought it would be nice to visit ‘Archeon‘. This is a themepark about the past of Holland. It contains dozens of buildings from the prehistoric, roman and medieval periods. Most buildings are based on archeological finds within the Netherlands. I’ve never been there so it’s also interesting to me, and I have to admit it is, you can visit the link above to find out more, it also contains an English section. Now I have to think about another destination for the next week or the week after that. After those two weeks it’s not interesting anymore as the holiday season kicked in full gear and it becomes to busy in most cases. She’ll have to wait until September then. Pictures will be published in the photo album.

I’m tired…

She loved it….. too much. I’m tired, I can feel my feet hurt a bit which hopefully will be gone tomorrow. Need some exercise…. buy this. But now I’m being forced to compete against her again this evening. Phew, never knew she could be this demanding. These games win if it comes to exercise compared to Wii Sports, at least that’s my opinion. Got no problem playing tennis for three hours, but I will not survive this for the same amount of time, that’s for sure. And yes, I’m referring to yesterdays post.

You should be dancing

Since today we are the owners of two dancemats for the Nintendo GameCube (previous console from Nintendo, the Wii is 100% GC compatible, as such also these mats will work normally). Including two games which belong to those mats. Dance Dance Revolutions Mario Mix and Mc Groovz Dance Craze. Sunny claimed to have had something similar when she was still in China. She has not tested them yet as she was not there, maybe tomorrow. However I tried Mario Mix on easy mode but that was actually a bit too easy for my taste. Might be nice for my 5 y/o nice or the daughter of a friend of mine. Still have to try the other settings, maybe they can make me tired.

Ai ai ai, killed the website (for 15 minutes)…..

While fooling around with so called master pages I uploaded a corrupt one as such bringing down the homepage yesterday, only the blogs where accessible if you knew the URL directly. As there is was no way I could access it as well I had to restore the backup I’ve made. If you’ve noticed it (guess not) this is what we mean with ‘we will be playing around with it’ on the mainpage. 15 Minutes is not the record, that stands on roughly three weeks due to a local telco cutting the wrong line while I was on a business trip and had no idea what went wrong, only that something did. The three weeks can be divided into two weeks while I was not in, and one week for the telco and service provider to find out what the problem was and to solve it. If this site has maintenance or goes off the air for reasons I know before hand those are put on the homepage announcements as they should for a couple of days, and after that date it will be replaced with the result if necessary.

粽子 Today

Well happy 端午节 to all the Chinese here…. For those of you wondering what that is, you can look up ‘Dragon Boat Festival‘ on Wikipedia. That will give a nice and clear description of what it is, and you will see that Dragon Boats are just part of the story.

It was not my girlfriend who triggered this, it was a colleague of mine who suddenly dropped by with zong zi (that’s what the Chinese in the title of this posts means) today. It is a kind of Chinese dumpling usually eaten at this particular festival. We’ve eaten them with a little suger and maple sirup added to them…. Yummy.

For those that wonder why I’m not married

I’m just being careful……… As last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 4.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing the Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as GameNite 6.3 , Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 5.0 are no longer able to run on the system at all, causing the system to lockup when launched (even though the apps worked fine before).

Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and the Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable unless you run the Chinese version on a foreign system. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:
– A “don’t remind me again” button.
– Minimize button.
– Ability to delete the “headache” file.
– An install feature that provides an option to uninstall 2.0 version without loss loss of other system resources.
– An option to run the network driver in “promiscuous mode” allowing the the system’s Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful/effective.

He wished he had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0 Even here, however, he has found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 4.0 on top of girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other friends have told me that this is a long-standing problem that he should have been aware of. Guess that explains what happened to his version 1 and 2.

To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 3.0 doesn’t work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another identified problem is that all versions of Girlfriend have annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0!

My friend also was troubled with the following bug:

All users should be aware that Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Once that happens, Mistress 1.1 won’t install and you will get an “insufficient resources” error message. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and make sure that those systems never share any data over the network. It’s best to install Mistress 1.1 on a completely stand alone system.

@dullaard.nl