"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."-James Bovard At this moment, both The Netherlands and the US are gearing up to elections. Ours is at November the 22nd, and at this moment the race is between the parties …

Life goes on and things come and go. My girlfriend has been a professional pharmacist for 2+ months now, working full-time, while I am wrapping up the last courses of my computer sciences study, doing its projects in the meanwhile. Alex in the meanwhile got his Master in AI, while …

Today I reached the 10000 spam email count, not counting my university address. Mind that this is from January first this year, so that makes for an average of 10082/308 = 32,7 spam messages a day. Thanks windows botnets!

Today it's cold. Last night it has been storming, and today it's not all that much better. I guess it's nice Halloween weather, whether we celebrate that here or not. It's also storming a bit in my head, as I look for ways to finish projects and wrap up my …

So, what do you do when waiting outside the Pandadroom [3D cinema at theme park the Efteling - beware, Flash] while already having laid your hands on the polarised glasses for the 3D show? Right:

Heading out of the main entrance of my university last Friday the 13th, picking my way through a crowd assembled there, I wondered why they where all craning their necks. Also, the police officers and some officials obviously waiting for somebody made me ask who was being awaited. "Maxima!" was …

Some very good reasons not to use Word and send people Word attachments. It would be nice that people start realising that: Not everyone has MS Office and/or cares about it Word and such aren't free [lots of people use illegal copies, causing them to think they can get …

OK, after finding me a tray icon plugin for the Linux version of Thunderbird, I came to the conclusion that the default icon Debian is shipping with it [the non-branded Mozilla icon], is just ugly. It's a aliased icon [read: jagged edges etc], brown, and doesn't play nice with my …

I just got myself a new laptop^Wbattery. The previous battery of my two year old Acer was down to about an hour of usage on a charge when it suddenly went over to another dimension and refused to provide my trusty workhorse with juice. I ordered a replacement battery …

It's the day against DRM today. Say no to those crippling techniques too. Say yes to being able to use your purchases on the devices you like to use it on, and not the one[s] where the companies want you to play it on. Say yes to Freedom!

Full Frontal Nerdity has a nice comic about "A few things in entertainment we'd like to see made into felonies for committing to film", mostly regarding the use of "science", applied by people who don't have a clue:

Currently, a command frequency meme seems to propagate through Planet Debian, and I thought I'd run that one-liner as well. Some interesting results yielded: At my laptop: 09:43:23 mbscholt@galadriel:~$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10 331 cd …

Avast! Every September 19 people around the world celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's been marked on all continents -- even Antarctica. Why? Because it's fun, it's anarchic. Its very whimsy -- trying to get everyone on the planet to talk like a stereotypical Caribbean buccaneer on the same day …

During a quite boring class of ICT in a Social Context [mainly about the Information Revolution and Codes of Ethics], I stumbled upon the idea of hacking a spammer. More specifically, hacking his overlay network of spambots. You may know that some spammers [mostly the "normal" corporations] have their own …

So I finally released aquamorph v0.4 [which is available from sourceforge.net now, so feel free to download and try it!]. I reduced my projects to a minimum [I'm even using Liferea as my primary newsfeed reader now instead of overload :/], so I have time for classes and such …

You hear it well, Satan's gone scating: I finally released a new aquamorph! At this moment it's only hosted on this not-too-fast server, so if you can wait half a day, check back tomorrow when I've uploaded it to a faster server :) It even has a manual:

He's dead, stung by a stingray. A worthy dead I guess :) A weird person, but he'll be missed.

Oh shiny consumer society, with its broad streets lingered with deadly McFlurry cups, Britney Spears listening sheep with iPods and our fast-food consuming I'm-not-fat-I'm-big-boned fellow humans. Mrs Bsag has a piece about "More", triggered mainly by the advertisements marketing campaigns sling at us: excess masquerading as progress, and increase in …

Yesterday we went to a very nice building of the University of Utrecht, located right at the sight of the Dom [nicer pics on the Dutch page]. Here, twenty-one students of my girlfriend's year -- including she herself -- where officially made pharmacists in a nice ceremony. Congratulations sweety! After a nice …