Kivela Developers blog, star date 47410.2

What’s Eatin’ You

Hi y'all.

It seems like I forgot about this blog for a long time.

Small status update on what I am currently doing:

- Writing some personal C# applications to facilitate what I am doing in my free time
- working in Czech Republic for 60% of my time since 2.5 years
- got divorced, met new girlfriend, sold my house, bought land, trying to select an architect now
- started to go back to school (part time ofcourse) to get a masters degree
- maintaining some websites that I should definitely finish and hand over
- picked up starcraft 2 a while ago to discover that even with 2x2 hours practice a week I still suck at it
- bought a Sony PRS-350 recently to solve the problem of heavy luggage on each visit to Prague
- no sports whatsoever since almost a year now, should tackle that problem in a few weeks

Things that I would like to be doing:

- Fix the problem with comments not being mailed to my mail account
- Update to the latest wordpress soon
- Sleep more, ... really
- Pick up some sports again
- Update the intellitunes app

What can you expect from this blog ?

Since I feel there are better sources out there for technical, programming articles and the likes I'll be posting thoughts and reviews of books I read from now on.
I will focus mainly on enterpr. IT architecture and methodology since these tickle my interest most.

... and yes the title is from the Runnin' Wild album of Airbourne

YouTube movies

This is one break-your-bones youtube movie that caught my attention...

Make sure you see following sequences:
Mixed martial arts accident 3:16 min before end (breaks leg on low-kick),
Jackass alike accident by 2 kids 1:16 min before end (2 kids fall in shopping cart and 1 breaks wrist)

And another fine one (in dutch)

Chris&co's impression on 'Lekker Thuis' a former cooking program.

iLife photobook

We went to the german military cemetery on the 5th of june with my wife's grandfather.
A 90 year old war veteran, still rock solid and going strong

It was a very impressive trip. There are 20.000 crosses on an 16ha field, covering 40.000 german corpses of the second world war.
It is the biggest german war cemetery not placed in Germany itself. 6221 crosses contain the name 'Ein Deutscher Soldat' which means the body could not be identified. Most victims fell during the '18daagse veldtocht' (10 - 25 may 1940), 3 battles around Aken (sept till dec 1944), and the Ardennes Offensive (16 dec 1944 till 30 jan 1945). There are also 542 german victims of the first world war here.

We decided to create an iLife photobook of this visit, just as a surprise for 'GrandPa'.
We created and ordered it the day itself, and today it arrived in perfect condition! It only took 3 work days to create the book, and the shipping took 5 work days. Talking about fast!

I've uploaded the images of the visit and the arrival of the book to my picasa pages, which you can view here

iWeb blog migration

Since my serendipity blog was getting scorched with spam attacks and I was truly tired of it, I decided to give the iWeb blog a spin, and what do you know... It just works
(I will migrate some stories I found interesting from my older blog though.)

The lack of pure html control in the iWeb studio however is somewhat annoying, the fact that I can’t even add my google adsense code in the used template is a missed opportunity.

Since I have not yet found a good reason for a .Mac account except for the commenting system I dropped this feature for the time being. (and yes I looked into Haloscan and found it not ‘nice’ enough.) If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to mail me however at stefan.venken at gmail.com

The current system of managing the site offline and publishing it to a folder, running iWebMore and publishing it online is in fact quite comfortable. For now....

! Do keep it mind that the old rss feed won’t work anymore, so be sure to update it.