|
Jasper Janssen
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Jasper Janssen" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
10:25 pm
[Link] |
Holy crap, I may have gone a little overboard.
I was watching a DVD this afternoon (_I am Legend_, following up on _Bolt_ in the morning), and it force-showed me a trailer for Sweeney Todd. Being the mindless consumer-slave I am, I immediately thought "Oh yeah. I meant to order that.", and hied myself to my favourite website for mindless media consumerism, and while there, I think I got a little carried away:
( The exact extent is behind a cut, because, it's a slightly large image. )
|
|
09:37 pm
[Link] |
DVDses
I accidentally managed to find myself at a local video rental place, and naturally, I was going through the ex-rental bin. Scored from the 4-for-7,50 bin:
- Driven
- Extraordinary Rendition
- Hot Fuzz
- Blazing Saddles (in a rather old and worn copy).
These 4 discs appeared to be the absolute highlight of said bin. Also scored for slightly larger sums os filthy lucre:
- Jumper
- The Incredible Hulk
- Stargate Continuum
- Night at the Museum
Yeah, okay. Not exactly high culture. I just can't resist those shiny discs...
|
|
12:05 am
[Link] |
Got fired the other day
That is, they won't be renewing my contract.
Seems the recruitment agency (my employer-of-record) and the people actually giving me work to do had a bit of a spat: They're not extending temporary contracts through that agency any more. Now, the recruitment agency apparently has a deal where their client (ie, the people I'm working for) has to let you work at least 1000 hours through them before you can go work directly for 'em. So far so reasonable. But apparently the buyout fee for that is large enough that the people I mwork for have decided as a matter of policy not to do that.
Time to update the ol' CV and find myself something better than first-line techsupport.
On the plus side, they'd already approved my request for a week's vacation time (this week), which I desperately needed. Even at 24 hrs/wk, going for very nearly a year without anything more than a long weekend (and that usually in the middle of a week, since I mostly work weekends & evenings) was starting to get to me.
With the vacation time owed me (another 2-3 weeks worth) and the 1000-euro bonus for getting out of the welfare system, I should be able to get some extra quals/certs that might help with finding a better job, too.
|
|
11:40 pm
[Link] |
War stuff
I don't know if y'all heard.. last week the Dutch Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Dick Berlijn, retired from the top slot. Two days after the festive and formal transfer of command authority to Peter van Uhm, General Uhm's son Dennis was one of two Dutch soldiers killed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan.
Ouch.
Just out of curiosity (and to make cheap political hay out of a personal tragedy[1]).. how many of the Joint Chiefs have children in harm's way?
[1] I'm not a politician, so maybe I'm allowed.
|
|
05:59 pm
[Link] |
Sorry 'bout the angst.
Yup.. they monitor call times. Argh. And they need to be under 7 minutes, and I've got serious trouble maintaining that. I am so not getting my contract renewed in April.
|
|
09:15 pm
[Link] |
By the way...
You might have thought that in a techsupport job for an ISP (after all, the service is only useful to those with at least minimal computer skills) it would take longer than a couple of days to get the first call where you utter the words "It's that long horizontal key on the bottom of your keyboard".
You'd have been wrong.
|
|
05:48 pm
[Link] |
Gots me a job, these days.
Hi Guys (however many of you still happen to have me on Friends despite long, long inactivity). Long time no see, I know.
I've been feeling enough better over the past year or so that I've finally managed to hold down a regular job. It's only 4 hours a day, but that appears to be doable right now, without a major systems crash from my body. The job is, predictably, not exactly the Best Ever -- people tend to be a bit leery of hiring people with no formal qualifications *and* no experience *and* bad medical history. But it doesn't really matter -- by the summer at least the latter two will be mostly fixed, and when I have some more spare energy, I can make a start on rectifying the first.
So, if you happen to have an ADSL line with Tiscali/Telfort NL and you have technical problems, you might well end up talking to me. At great expense (it's not quite porn rates, but still) and after waiting for 10-15 minutes in a queue, of course, but that's all part of the fun.
|
|
01:32 pm
[Link] |
Explosion at Scaled Composites test site kills 3, injures 3 more
They're taken over by Northrop and what happens less than a week later?
Sad day for privately funded space thingies.
|
01:05 pm
[Link] |
OOtP, Shrek 3, and other stuff.
I wanted to get out of the house yesterday, and I ended up at the local[1] Imax, showing the new Order of the Phoenix movie. Some notes:
- That IMAX theatre isn't nearly as spectacularly gigantic as the one in DC.
- the 3D effect was both unnecessary and made my head hurt.
- They made Cho be the one who revealed the DA to Umbridge (albeit under Veritaserum), and Harry disapproves. Strongly. Well, that's one way of tying up the romantic subplot.
- Speaking of romantic subplots -- for my money there was an awful lot of "Ginny shoots jealous pining look in Harry's direction" around.
- Anticlimactic: Forge and Gred leaving. Not nearly as cool as it could have been.
- I had some others, but I didn't bother to bring a notepad so I've forgotten them.
Shrek the third: Very meh. Had its moments, but not that many.
I went to the megastore nextdoor to the Imax and handled a Canon Ixus 850IS (that's a Canon 800IS Digital Elph to the americans, I believe) to see if it'd be a good replacement for my clearance-in-May-2000 digicam. Thing's positively *tiny*. Also went ahead and glanced at a Samsung 215TW which I'd thought would be a good one for my mother. No obvious flaws with that thing, either.
[1] For "3 cities over" values of local.
|
|
10:07 pm
[Link] |
Yeah, *That* book.
My copy of which is now being read by someone else, so I decided I'd try and get an electronic reference copy. I do believe I am now in possession of two completely separate and different fanfic versions of the book, both of them in the same order of magnitude of length as the real thing.
What the *hell*, people.
|
|
08:13 pm
[Link] |
Yup, it was a book.
I'm guessing the series of pipes that is the internets will be ablaze in another couple of hours -- it's already starting.
|
|
01:00 am
[Link] |
Surprisingly still not dead.
Hi Guys.
I've been compeltely away from LJ for a couple of months now. I won't be attempting a full catchup, cause that just ain't gonna happen, and I suspect I may need to trim the read list down a bit if I don't want to get that sinking "oh my god I'll never catch up" feeling (which leads to staying away as a non-solution to the problem) too often. If I missed anything that you remember wanting me to see, feel free to drop me a line/comment.
Update on me: Not that much. I joined Distributed Proofreaders, which I think a fair few of you might enjoy. I recently decided enough was enough and bought a replacement for my now over a decade old 17" CRT from Iiyama (they obviously made sturdy stuff in those days..), and as of today I'm now looking at a 20" TFT made by Samsung which has 1600x1200 pixels in it. It's Big. At least for now, now I'm not yet used to it.
Also, my 3.5 year old computer is getting a major overhaul -- everything but the case and the hard drives is getting swapped out. The new one (for those who care) features, alongside the supershiny TFT:
- Asus P5B-E Plus
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
- Scythe Ninja Rev B
- Crucial Ballistix PC2-5300/C3 2x1GB kit
- Asus 8500GT Silent 256M
- Corsair 520HX modular power supply
- NEC AD-7173S DVDRW, SATA
The bits are in a temporary case, I get to find out if it boots tomorrow (because I'm just not up to it today). With a little bit of luck, with a littl' bit o' luck, it'll play nicely at higher-than-rated frequencies to give a speedy little machine.
Also today, one of the dividing fences between our yard and a neighbour's (6 foot high roughly, real dividers) has been torn down, and monday will bring a shiny new hardwood pretty one, instead of the old bodge job of half-demolished little walls and planters and rotting wood and.. blergh.
|
|
07:22 pm
[Link] |
Army doesn't like spousebeaters, they usually claim..
But check out one of the latest recruitment commercials for the dutch land army:
KL-EHBO (2.8 megs video in flash container)
Translations:
"Does this hurt?"
"Yes"
"I fell."
[x] Suitable
[ ] unsuitable.
If the gender roles had been reversed, I don't think a TV station on earth would've aired them.
Current Mood: baffled
|
|
01:04 am
[Link] |
Surprisingly not dead yet
I have been *shamefully* neglecting y'all. Sorry about that. I probably won't manage to catch up, but I'll do my best.
Winter appears to a) have never arrived and b) be gone already, so no snow this year, looks like. Dammit.
My back is more or less back to normal, from something approaching near full blwon hernia status at some point a few weeks ago. No pain or loss of function in my legs, so presumably not a disc pressing on the spinal cord (thank god), but there sure was *something* seriously wrong, and it didn't feel like just regular backpain. This was "lie in your bed for a week with occasional pee- and eat-breaks" backpain. Even after that phase was over, sitting behind the computer wasn't really very doable for a while. Anyway. Glad that's over with.
I'll try and catch up on how y'all have been doing for the past couple of months later.
|
|
03:22 pm
[Link] |
Boring booklog post #3
Books 1-9
Books 10-20
Film2. The Goblet Of Fire
21. The Rats, The Bats and the Ugly, Eric Flint & Dave Freer, 2004.
22. 1635: Cannon Law, Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis, 2006.
23. Vrijgevochten, Thea Beckman, 1998.
24. De Cock en de dood in antiek, Baantjer, 1999.
25. Thraxas Under Siege, Martin Scott, 2005.
( Booooooring )
Tags: 100books, booklog, medialog
|
|
02:21 am
[Link] |
Boring booklog post #3
Books 1-9
10. Rocheworld, Dr Robert L. Forward, 1990.
11. Return to Rocheworld, Dr Robert L. Forward & Julie Forward Fuller, 1998.
12. Rogue Berserker, Fred Saberhagen, 2005.
Imperium, consisting of:
13. Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer, 1961.
14. The Other Side Of Time, Keith Laumer, 1965.
15. Assignment In Nowhere, Keith Laumer, 1968.
16. From Dream To Dream, Arlene Golds, 2006.
17. Outlaw Of Gor, John Norman, 1967.
The Stardance Trilogy, consisting of:
18. Stardance, Spider & Jeanne Robinson, 1977/8/9.
19. Starseed, Spider & Jeanne Robinson, 1991.
20. Starmind, Spider & Jeanne Robinson, 1994.
( Yet more boring booklog stuff under here )
Tags: 100books, booklog, medialog
|
01:27 am
[Link] |
Boring booklog post #2
Books 1-9
10. Rocheworld, Dr Robert L. Forward, 1990.
11. Return to Rocheworld, Dr Robert L. Forward & Julie Forward Fuller, 1998.
12. Rogue Berserker, Fred Saberhagen, 2005.
Imperium, consisting of:
13. Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer, 1961.
14. The Other Side Of Time, Keith Laumer, 1965.
15. Assignment In Nowhere, Keith Laumer, 1968.
( More Boring booklog stuff under here )
Tags: 100books, booklog
|
01:03 am
[Link] |
Boring booklog post #1
1. The multiplex man, James P Hogan.
2. The Reality Matrix, John Dalmas, 1986.
The Cobra Trilogy, consisting of:
3. Cobra, Timothy Zahn, 1985.
4. Cobra Strike, Timothy Zahn, 1986.
5. Cobra Bargain, Timothy Zahn, 1988.
6. Enchanter Completed, ed. Harry Turtledove, 2005.
7. Other Times Than Peace, David Drake, 1976-2006.
8. The Integral Trees, Larry Niven, 1983.
Film1: 9/11, 2002.
9. Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005.
( Boring booklog stuff under here )
Tags: 100books, booklog
|
|
08:59 pm
[Link] | Okay, so this is harder than it looks. And it doesn't look particularly easy, does it?.
Jonathan Gough's version
Assembling the first two tetrahedra is trivial. The third is easy. The fourth is hard, and I'm expecting the fifth to be harder still.
Still, it already looks like one cool-ass math-origami sculpture even with just 4/5ths completed.
Edit: Well, actually, the fifth is back to easy. Once you get the first couple ribs in, the pattern is obvious. Each of the 30 ribs passes underneath two pyramid tops, and over two crossing ribs.
|
|
03:17 pm
[Link] |
Yet more books
Index Post
1. The Multiplex Man, James P Hogan.
2. The Reality Matrix, John Dalmas, 1986.
The Cobra Trilogy, consisting of:
3. Cobra, Timothy Zahn, 1985.
4. Cobra Strike, Timothy Zahn, 1986.
5. Cobra Bargain, Timothy Zahn, 1988.
6. Enchanter Completed, ed. Harry Turtledove, 2005.
7. Other Times Than Peace, David Drake, 1976-2006.
8. The Integral Trees, Larry Niven, 1983.
I had at some point read the (a?) sequel to this, or possibly an excerpt, but never the original novel. It's not Larry Niven at his best, the actual story isn't all that exciting (at least not compared to the next book), but the setting is very interesting: a neutron star orbiting a regular sun in roughly the place of a gas giant, with an actual gas giant orbiting it, which manages to produce a gravitational regime which can maintain a gas torus around the orbit of the gas giant. In the gas torus, life. Lots of it. Including a buncha humans.
Film1: 9/11, 2002.
This film was the result of two french brothers who were shooting a documentary about a rookie fireman from the academy through to his 9 month probationary period, stationed at Firehouse 1 in NYC, from the summer of 2001 onwards. The station was a couple of streets from the World Trade Center, when some bastards flew the planes into them. The brothers were filming inside Tower 1 when Tower 2 collapsed. It took me a few fits and starts to watch this one through. It's a remarkable document.
9. Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005.
If you haven't read this book by now, why on earth not? It's available for free as Creative Commons data on accelerando.org, and meatspace equivalents have been in shops for a while now. The book follows several generations through the Vinge Singularity and way beyond, high-caliber SF. No spaceships using sliderules for navigation here.
Tags: 100books, booklog, medialog
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |