Vacation

After a nice non-working week, I decided to put some pictures online.

Sophies parents are on a 2 week holiday, so we take care of the dogs (Tobias and Senne) and the house (including the swimmingpool). Weather was perfect (always +30) to enjoy swimming, ice-creams (Senne loves ice-cream) and lot's of ice teas.




We went walking a lot, although the dogs got quite tired when we walked in open fields...





More pics...

House-warming party

Saturday, my friends came over for a house-warming... We got some very convenient gifts to use in the kitchen from Vicky, Peter, Kurt and Judith. (Vicky made me say this)...

It was a very nice evening, but unfortunately, I forgot to take some pics...

Better luck next time my friends...

Quote to remember

"On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux... "


Le petit prince

New Camera!!!

Wednesday, I received my new camera, and I finally found some time to post some pictures I took...

It's a canon powershot A610, and I bought it (after reading a lot of reviews at dpreview) at fotal, a very nice and good online shop... I paid 300€ for the camera, 4 good quality batteries, a loader, a little bag and a 1GB SD-card.

But now back to the results...

I started experimenting on a meeting in Brussels (couldn't leave my camera I received minutes before behind... (I used 4 AA-batteries that were included, but normally don't last as long as the NiMh batteries, although they aren't empty after a whole day of experimenting...)

(This is one of the demo-devices we used, just to illustrate the macro power of this camera)

At home, I took some other macro's of some fragrance sticks Sophie bought:



And today, I took some pictures of the evening sun (the first time since weeks this is possible in Belgium :D), with a balloon and some birds flying over...


Just some practicing, but I like the camera very much already!

House-warming party

This sunday, Sophie's friends came over to our house-warming party. We went bowling at Sportopolis first, I really sucked at the first game, with a resulting score of 71... The next game started quite the same, but I recovered bowling three strikes in a row, followed by 9 cones, resulting in a score of 142. (Set the record of the day with that one :))

Afterwards, we prepared dinner and had a nice drink, to catch sleep at 23.00.

Nice, but tiring day...

Busy weekend...

It's monday, and I'm quite exhausted from the busy weekend...

Saturday at 9am, after a half-hour drive, we arrived at ikea for some new furniture for our 'office', we bought a bookcase:











Some chairs:





A rack for shoes:

And some smaller stuff:

...

Afterwards, I started building everything before Sophie's friends came over to check our appartment out. (We went to the agility - dog school too in the afternoon...)

On sunday, we tried out some new recipes, and in the afternoon, we took the two dogs for a walk in Kattevenia.

Google calendar

Google calendar was released yesterday, and I need to say, it rules bigtime!

Finally, it's possible to share things I want to share on my calendar with my colleagues easily, use my calendar at home without installing programs and setting up ftp-spaces, use a nice graphical interface, ......

Very nice, and finally :)

I'm looking forward to PDA and mobile phone integrations and to everything else Google launches...

Just some updates

Hi all,


just an update of this blog, because it was quite quiet here the last weeks...

Work is quite busy nowadays, students are bugging me constantly with interesting questions and problems, my own project is getting busier and busier with upcoming deliverables and deadlines, etc., etc.

But there are some nice things coming up too, our appartment is becoming how it should be, and we are inviting people as I speak, to come over and take a look... Yesterday, Sophie's grandparents dropped by, which was very nice, except for the thing that I hadn't decafiné for the Senseo machine...
Next weekend, we'll be out for a trip to the seaside... We are staying in an hotel in Knokke for the 25th wedding anniversary of Sophie's parents, just some relaxing and nice food :)

That's it I guess, this weekend, I'll be repairing grandpa's pc, windows 2000 gives a nice blue-screen after startup, I love it :) And sunday, hopefully, we'll get some nice wheater to go on a walk with Senne and Tobias...

Beautiful sunday

Because of a very busy week at work, I haven't had time to report on our nice sunday activity...
So here comes the report ;)

It's been a while since we had time to do something fun with my old high-school friends... So -beautiful- Vicky (She made me say that, she's quite bossy...), planned a nature-walk in Zonhoven. Her boyfriend, Peter, planned out this nice walk in "Wijvenheide" around some ponds... It took the 5 of us (Vicky & Peter, Me & Sophie and Alexander) an hour and a half to take the walk. Afterwards we planned dinner with some other friends @ the Chess Cafe, there you can compose your own wok-plate, and eat as much as you want... Very relaxing and delicious...

In between (there was some time left after the walk and before the Chess Cafe), we went to Vicky's place for a hot cup of coffee, some cake and delicacy... (Vicky is quite a good host, she really is ;) )

A very nice day!

Alexander took some pictures, but since he is still using a non-digital camera, it will take a while for the pictures to get to this blog...

I googled some pictures of "Wijvenheide" to give everyone an idea: picture 1, picture 2

Photographs Igls

I made a small website with some photographs of our skiing holiday... We went to Igls, a very small village, 2km from Innsbruck, Austria.

Photographs


We had a very nice holiday... Most of the time, it was very cold (-15), but this made the skiing slopes just perfect.
The first day, fog was so dense, we couldn't actually see where we were going, which made skiing quite adventurous. But day by day, the wheather was getting better, which resulted in some nice panoramic pictures...
We returned on saturday, we left the hotel at 9.30 am, in very snowy conditions..., which resulted in a lot of stau (traffic jam in german)...
It took us 8 hours, to drive the first 200 km. After that, things got better, and we arrived home at 1.30 am. We stopped only twice, not to loose too much time on our travel, which made the trip home a living hell.
But we made it! :)

Back to reality now...

Back from skiing

No accidents, no bones broken.

Photographs will follow soon.

Busy week...

Since we moved, I haven't had much relax-time...
Sunday, I couldn't fall asleep, which made monday a living hell... Tuesday I had a business travel to Ghent, left at 9am, arrived at 7pm including 4hours on a stupid, lousy, slow train.
Wednesday a working meeting in Brussels, and on my arrival at my workplace at 14pm, there were 50 emails waiting, and dying to be answered...
A meeting tomorrow, and an evening lesson on friday will end this busy week, to leave on holiday saturday.
Yes, yes, finally! Since february last year, I haven't had a single full week vacation... But finally, we are going skiing in Igls, which is in Austria, close to Innsbruck. I'll post some photographs here next week.

That's all for this week,

Cu around!

Moved...

Yesterday, me and my girlfriend moved to our appartment.
We used to live with our parents, but since we are together for almost 3 years, we believed it was time to move our horizon...
It wasn't too easy to leave our parents, although I expected it to be more simple... Things are changing, but I'm looking forward to every minute...
More time together means less time for games like SoccerProject, and the tool SPMT that I've designed, but I don't really mind. Maybe it's time to grow up... Or maybe not ;)

Starting a blog

Today I decided to start a blog. Why? Well, I believe there are several reasons.
First of all, I want to keep in touch with newest Internet evolutions, and a blog is an ideal way to connect and stay connected with other people, and test some new Web 2.0 features...
Second, some things in my life are changing, and I would like to share these and future "adventures" with other people, people I'm in contact with today, in everyday life, but could disappear out of my regular daylife in the future.
I decided to post in English, thus making this blog accessible for everyone I know, it's a way to exercise my English, since Dutch is my native language...
What will I post here? Well, things that happen to me from day to day, interesting and less interesting stuff, ... Wait and see ;)

That's it for this first message.

Greetings,

OscarCookie