Murphy’s Law strikes again. I thought about making a backup of my website just before I leave. During this backup I notices there was an anonymous user with access to MySQL, and this seemed weird. The account did have a password associated, but still, I deleted it.
And that was the end of WordPress. No more blog. :-(
At least until I returned that annoying anonymous user… another thing learned.
Hurray! Today is my birthday :-p. The first few months in this new year of my life are looking very interesting.
I am busy packing and checking if I have everything. Still a couple of friends have decided to come by tonight. That means beer, soda, chips, nuts, cake, and you name it! And all that just while I was trying to empty my fridge and freezer by eating everything. ;-)
Yes, everything arrived :-)
I received by ticket via email. Apparently only the bar code is important. I also have a voucher for a car and a voucher for my first two days in a hotel. Everything was arranged very fast thanks to Tioga Tours, a company that I found out about while reading forums about traveling to America on Fok!.
I’m looking forward to it!
Making a phone call in America is done in a different manner as in Holland. Why, I will probably never understand, but I do understand that only with a very expensive phone it is possible to make calls in both countries. My free Postbank mobile is useless in America, so I won’t be taking it with me.
My plan is that once I arrive in America I’ll go and find a cheap prepay phone and inform my family at home about the number.. maybe I’ll even post the number on this blog. The change anyone will abuse the number is small, because any international call will cost the caller a small fortune. :-p
Of course I’ll check my emails, at least if it’s send to the correct address. I’ll also try and post some of my adventures here online. There is no reason to panic, just be patient and for sure I’ll send some note in the next three months.
Just received my flight details..
Departure:
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2004
From: Schiphol Arpt, Amsterdam Netherlands
To: John F Kennedy Intl, New York NY – U.S.
Departs: 11:00 AM Arrives: 1:10 PM
Return:
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2004
From: San Francisco Intl Arpt, San Francisco CA – U.S.
To: John F Kennedy Intl, New York NY – U.S.
Departs: 8:25 AM Arrives: 4:45 PM
and
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2004
From: John F Kennedy Intl, New York NY – U.S.
To: Schiphol Arpt, Amsterdam Netherlands
Departs: 6:25 PM Arrives: 8:00 AM Next Day
When I leave it will take me 2 hours and 10 minutes. Pretty good time, but when I return I will have to face a massive 20 hours and 55 minutes of flight time! Incredible!
Parkpop was the best! Of all the performing acts I did not know any, but this really did not interest me. Parkpop was nice because it started of with a premature birthday gift from Cees, a bottle of Goldstrike! This gift made sure we all enjoyed Parkpop that much more.
Afterwards we then to the central train station in The Hague and we stopped by at the Burger King, here instead of just eating a hamburger we met someone special. A girl that claimed to be a Playboy bunny. She told us she would be published in the Playboy magazine in August or December, and would have one entire page for herself.
She could be easily recognized because she had an tattoo of a rose and a heart in the center of her (pretty nice) right breath (for the viewers, for herself it was the left breath). The only sad thing is that I already forgot her name (I think I recall it being ‘Amanda’), but I do recall she lives near the the Hague central station.
Curious.. :-p
Yesterday I (finally) finished Good Omens… and the book left me impressed. The moral of the story was that there will always be good and evil and there will always be a balance between the two. Good cannot exist without bad and bad cannot exist without good.
A few years ago I purchased an ebook by Scott Adams, ‘God’s Debris’. It was my first and for now last ebook. The reason I bought this book was because I wanted to try the ebook concept and see it is really useful, and I like books from Scott Adams. The first thing I did was try and see if I could hack the ebook format, and get the text in an editable form and this was actually pretty easy. With the text I made a nice little book, and this paper version I used to read the story.
But this post is not about the ebook format, it is about the contents. A content that is very similar to the Good Omens book. At least in my head. The style of writing of both authors is very different, and both stories don’t even resemble, but still I sense there is a connection. It is a strange sensation that the discovery of some kind of relation between these books makes me feel somehow special.
Weird…
Sometimes I wonder if I’m a good or a bad person and which of these two options should I aspire to be. I think I am on the side of the good, but it is something you really can’t say about yourself. Luckily there are tools which can provide the answer. This site analyses texts and the result indicates this site is relatively good.
The gematriculator analyses all words on a page, in this case this blog. Then it uses all kinds of calculations to determine the amount of good and bad.
I wonder what will be the result in two months. Maybe the result will be more evil, which would be a good thing, because I like the image better. :-)
Things are starting to faster then I was recently used to. Calling here and there, arranging tickets, comparing drop off costs of various rental cars… planning my route in more detail, deciding the places I want to visit, and for how long… finally a nice bit of stress. :-p
Whats more? Well, tonight will be a boring night. Tomorrow maybe I’ll go to parkpop, but I have my doubts. Monday and Tuesday I will need to prepare and package all the stuff I want to take and Wednesday I fly! And of course Tuesday I’ve got a pesty birthday… my own. I’ll see what I’ll do. Probably when I celebrate my birthday very few people will show up because it is a Tuesday and people will have to work. We’ll see.
Why not… beer!!, specifically the quadruple variant of La Trappe, in the special La Trappe glass, from the special La Trappe jar. First a few Heineken beers and some Hoegaardens, together will some nice trance music and a bit of online chatting. :-)
Sometimes being happy is so easy. Strange that happiness is an experience that sometimes can be achieved much more easily after consuming mind-altering substances like alcohol.