JRRZZ Blog

My holiday season is coming to an end. Hell, this one must have been my worst ever. I really didn’t do the things I wanted to do. Well, maybe, the things I wanted to do were kind of impossible to do in such a short notice. I wanted to visit Japan and actually saved quite some money for the trip. There were several reasons why I wanted to visit Japan. First of all it’s a really nice country. The people still know what respect means and are known for their hospitality. Second, well, you might have read in my previous post I like certain people in Japan not just because they smell nice. During a conversation with a Japan-crazy girl I met just by coincidence she convinced me the money I had would buy me a ticket to Tokyo and back, but that would be it. Why did I friggin choose the most expensive country in the whole world to visit? I mean just an average hotel room can cost up to sixty euros a night. Man, I’d like some food too! And I had kind of planned to stay for two weeks. Crap, I’m not the poorest in the world, but this is rediculous. Now I’m looking for a family with some room to stay for two weeks. You know, for next year. If you happen to be from Tokyo, Japan please mail me if you have a room for hire. I tried to get in contact with the Japanese youth. Well, they have their own chat network, not supporting ASCII, their own way of talking about things and a shit load of anime heroes. Communication wasn’t really a success. I do know a lot of Japanese do want to visit our little mud filled stinky politically incorrect below sea level country. So maybe I can arrange a student swap with some kind of IT college over there. Who knows. Or maybe just an exchange during the holidays. Oh well, I really don’t have the slightest idea.
This is my last week before I can meet my new palls at college. In the meanwhile I’m eating Katjang Pedis with beer. Really good stuff. Katjang Pedis means ‘Hot Peanut’ translated from Indonesian. I just thought you should know.

Crap.
I’ve been visiting some towns across the Netherlands. I thought it would be fun.
First off I went to see Sneek. Me and my brother agreed on eating some ice cream in Sneek. I really don’t know where this stupid idea came from, but what the hell. We went off to visit Sneek. After a fucking long time sitting in the train staring at the open Dutch countryside we finally set foot on Sneek’s soil. Damn. It sure was hot that day. From the moment we got out of that train I didn’t really feel at home. Well duh, it’s 200km from home you dumbass. Anyway, the square in front of the train station was completely desolated. The only sign of life was a agricultural vehicle passing by. There we were. In the middle of the middle of the center of nowhere. We decided to take a walk to the nearest shopping mall. There were no signes or directions what so ever. We just started walking. After a while we finally reached the civilized world. Well, not exactly, but there were shops and people walking all over the place. We bought our ice cream and went on with doing what we usually do. Hanging around. Slowly it became clear why I didn’t like the town. I’m male. There are certain things I notice. The most important thing I noticed that day was that all women in Sneek were tall, blonde, skinny and dressed in white. I kind of stood out with my black outfit. They all seemed to have tunnel vision. They all looked straight ahead while walking by. They looked away after a friendly ‘good morning’ I threw at them. I don’t know, but it seems the entire female population in Sneek is a) lesbian or b) dead. The first option would be entertaining, but you do know Murphy’s law. After 2 hours spent in Sneek we almost ran back to the train station. I was fucking terrified back there. While waiting for our train some girls came by. They weren’t tall and blonde. They were the opposite. Real street whores. Normally I don’t like seeing those creatures. But after seeing a shit load of tall skinny blonde dead white girls it was a welcome sight. I never thought I could enjoy seeing a street whore. As all street whores do they followed us around from a distance and giggled a bit. We decided to go to Eindhoven. It’s almost the only place on this globe I can actually have fun. We got some french fries (I sure love those things) and watched the amithyville horror. All the people in Eindhoven are so friendly compared to the zombies in Sneek. Even the Hell’s Angels stopped for us at the crossing. All the people I greeted actually returned a greeting with at least a smile. It was good to be home again.
Ok, this time we didn’t want to screw up so we went to Amsterdam. Our main capital. I really hadn’t been there for a while so it sounded like a great idea. Amsterdam. The city of freedom, the center of the multi cultural modern world. The place where you can… Enough of the blah, let’s go on with the story shall we? Right, the first thing I noticed was the fact I’m Dutch. Whow. The Dutch are known for their tallness. I’m not that tall, but I could still easily look over the heads of all the people walking in front of me. It was a bizarre feeling being the tallest dude walking around. The people from Japan aren’t really known for their tallness. Since 90% of all people walking around in Amsterdam are from Japan I stood out for the second time. Next to the Japanese we met some Germans an some friendly blokes from Australia. As all tourists do we went sight seeing but skipped the red light district. That particular part of town is really popular with the Japanese. I guess if I did go there they would keep me there because sometimes size does matter if you know what I mean. After 99 little Japanese tool sets they can all use some real Dutch erm.. Cheese behind that glass. So we skipped it. I’m not really fond of riding old bikes anyway. Just before we left a British guy asked for our help. He had this story about this hostel and friends and so on. The bottom line was he needed money. We liked his story so we gave him some money. Surprisingly the amount of money he claimed to need was exactly the price of a joint at the coffee shop nearby. Let him have his high. I didn’t care. Oh yeah, before I forget. The average impression of the women in Amsterdam is pretty poor. There were several pretty, I mean, really pretty Japanese girls. But when they approach you the only thing they want is you to make a picture of them torturing a pigeon. Lucky pigeons… Anyway, we decided it was time to get back to Eindhoven to have some fun. After a few hours of ‘having fun’ in Eindhoven we needed to go home. Usually we take a bus home. Nothing special. This time was however. We were waiting for the bus together with two girls, fifteen, maybe sixteen years of age. Nothing special. It turned out they didn’t have a ticket and no money with them. It also happened the bus driver was a pedophile. Ow great, a pedophile bus driver. So we sat there, in the bus, listening to this weird conversation between a pedophile and two broke fifteen year olds. I don’t know what those two agreed with the bus driver, but they were allowed to drive along for free.
We got home and grabbed a beer just trying not to think about the two little broke girls and the sick bus driver.

As you might have noticed, I’m Dutch. We’ve got some radio stations around, three of them sponsored by the government. Simply called radio 1, 2 and 3. I’ve been at work all week. Guess what radio station I had to listen to all day? Exactly, radio 2. Ok, let me summarize what I had to listen to all day; Abba, 80s disco, Dutch schlager, “Rop de Nijs” (at least five times a day) and some other crap I don’t want to know where it came from in the first place. Especially this “Rop de Nijs” guy had this one song extremely identical to a ringtone. I think he thought all the kids would like to have his crap on their phones. No way…
So when I come home I plug in my laptop and blast my speakers with some nice music, just to get rid of this “Rop de Nijs” ringtone. Chronix Agression has saved my life this week. I’m really grateful for that.

I’ll be off visiting relatives the next few days, after that I’m going to have fun in the Dutch capitals. I’ll blog what I’ve done there for you to enjoy. (the taste of vomit :)

I’m going to try a new distro. I’m really fond of Debian GNU/Linux but it has it’s disadvantages. There are some huge problems in the package tree and several key pieces of software are missing or bugged. I have seen the speed of a tweaked Gentoo system and got jealous. I mean, it booted twice as fast as my Debian machines and compiled, ran and did stuff much faster.
As you can see the apps server is down. The good ol’ athlon xp is going to be my first Gentoo box. It will be up again, running Gentoo (I hope). I’m currently running a new bootstrap to get the last bit of performance this athlon can give me.
If this machine is going to outperform my laptop, and if it’s usable, I’m going to run Gentoo on my workstations. The servers will remain Debian-based. Gentoo isn’t the OS I’d like to see running on my servers. Sure, they will be fast, but I don’t have the time to get that all working.
Maybe, one day, when I get my Gentoo skills polished up I’ll try to build a Gentoo server. I can’t decide right now. It’s the first time I’m trying Gentoo, so, let’s hope.
I already like the amount of control Gentoo has given me during the install.

This headache is haunting me for several days now. I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t consume large amounts of booze, didn’t do no drugs (ooh: double negative!), I didn’t even jump of a cliff face down without a parachute. I just don’t know why my fucking head hurts this much. Do you know this feeling when you try to get up but just can’t because of the pain? Well, it’s almost like that. I’m wondering what causes it. It could be a tumor or some moisture inside my skull or something. I really don’t know. What could it be? A lot of interesting theories have been made up about my mysterious headache, none of them even close to being likely.
Normally I never have any headaches. Now I think about it, I never had one. That’s what confuses me, you know. It could actually be serious. Then what? I could get brain damage, or even die. Well, pure hypothetical. The only thing coming close to a remedy is drinking beer. It sounds silly, but it seems to work. I only drank one bottle of ice cold beer today and the headache did get a bit lighter. Just for a while though. It’s back again right now. I can’t drink beer all day, I’m not that desperate.
Oh well, I’ll just wait and see what this weird illness will do. I think it’ll just heal automatically as long as I don’t do anything stupid like smoking weed or something.

Oh, some updates:
The ecommerce thingy is coming along nicely, but I don’t seem to have the time to get that linux distro running. Oh well, it’s time will come (if mine doesn’t come sooner ;) )

So much to do, so little time.
This day is a wasted day. I’ve been reconfiguring my laptop. Some people want me to run Windoze on it (school!) so there’s this small 8 gig partition for this semi-OS. It took me over 3 hours to completely install this friggin OS. It didn’t detect my video card, so I had to work in an ugly 800×600 desktop all the time. It didn’t detect the Intel e100 so I had to burn a fuckin cd with the driver just to get lan working. It even had the guts to destroy my MBR and install the Micro$oft boot loader over it. I had to re-install Debian anyway, but just imagine I didn’t. Ok, Windoze XP Pro with it’s service pack 2 boots and runs quite stable. Finally!
The 32 gig I had left on this d505 were going to be Linux native. It really was a nice sight after 3 hours of micro$oft shit to see the red Debian logo appearing after inserting the testing netinstall cd. Fixed it to become Sid and installed my fav software. I chose to try the new Gnome (2.10.1) in stead of my trusty fluxbox. It’s really an improvement. I’ve used Gnome on PII machines and because of the lack of speed I switched to fluxbox. Gnome runs really good on this centrino. A lot of apps are even faster with Gnome. It’s so fast and looks so good, I’m not gonna use fluxbox on high-end systems anymore.
The Debian unstable installation took me about 2.5 hours, fully functional. Windoze doesn’t even have a proper browser or office suite installed right now. With Debian I’m surfing the net with firefox, chatting with gaim, listening mp3s with xmms, watching dvds with totem and writing code with bluefish. Oh, the freedom.

The weather sucked over here the past few weeks. Moist, warm and sunny. It really sucked. Hard.
I didn’t have anything to do. I couldn’t go outside because of the heat and I didn’t have to got to school or work or whatever. Boring huh? In times like these I tend to just grab a beer and listen to metal all day. There were positive things though. I can’t remember them quite clearly right now. But I’m sure there were some positive things.
Oh yeah, the times I did go outside I met a lot of nice people. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the beer or a combination of both, but a lot of people were friendly and stuff. Even some who were a bit too friendly. I even had a discussion with this christian girl while eating french fries. I couldn’t talk the nonsense out of her, but I did like the fries though.

Yeah. I’m going to write a blog. I just want to write stuff on this page. News and important stuff. Usually I’d use the shoutbox for that stuff. It doesn’t belong there.
Anyway… Since this is my first entry to my blog it’s going to stay this way. All the blog first entries are about being the first entry. So is this one. That’s it for now.