It snowed all of 13mm (0.5 inches)!

So of course traffic public transport in the entire country was disrupted and the train I take to work was 30 minutes late.

Okay, so in some other parts it was like 8" of the stuff in two hours, but still. This country just isn't used to snow.

			Hit
	Player	Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	Total	Shot	Hit	Score
1	thaily	Green	--	17	4	2	6	6	0	11	46	396	12%	3450
2	hiryu	Red	5	--	11	10	2	2	10	3	43	455	9%	1675
3	skunktaur	Green	1	6	--	1	4	6	2	10	30	265	11%	1250
4	hackrabbit	Green	0	8	1	--	6	7	0	4	26	151	17%	1175
5	rob_d	Red	2	0	6	4	--	0	6	1	19	126	15%	725
6	bander	Red	1	0	6	5	0	--	6	0	18	211	9%	600
7	jonesybunny	Green	0	4	1	1	5	5	--	5	21	176	12%	400
8	pegla	Red	0	0	2	7	3	4	7	--	23	473	5%	-125
			9	35	31	30	26	30	31	34

			Hit
	Player	Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	Total	Shot	Hit	Score
1	hiryu	Red	--	0	4	1	1	17	13	15	51	381	13%	3350
2	rob_d	Red	1	--	8	0	1	6	13	12	41	234	18%	2600
3	hackrabbit	Green	8	7	--	5	3	0	0	1	24	310	8%	1475
4	jonesybunny	Red	1	0	3	--	0	0	7	11	22	231	10%	1225
5	skunktaur	Red	0	0	1	2	--	3	9	7	22	210	10%	1150
6	thaily	Green	11	9	0	1	3	--	0	0	24	259	9%	1100
7	bander	Green	5	5	0	6	5	0	--	0	21	116	18%	0
8	joseb	Green	6	4	0	5	5	0	0	--	20	601	3%	-250
			32	25	16	20	18	26	42	46

You hit Enemy: 100, Enemy hit You: -50. You hit Team: -25, Team hit You: 0

Just got back from a lovely two weeks of vacation in the US.

First week I stayed with wolfbrotherjoe and brianblackberry, gracious and generous hosts as ever. Played fun boardgames, saw the local sights, went to the zoo, and I got to fire a gun.

This segued nicely into Midwest Furfest. It was a working convention for me, helping out with the Artist's Alley. I have to say, MFF takes great care of its staff. They hand out some very nice perks, not the least of which is a free registration for next year.

Despite staying busy herding artists, I still had time to say hi to various and sundry folks, to visit all the panels I wanted, and to collect a number of very nice additions to my sketchbooks. And the evenings were filled with fun dinners with invariably great people.

I'll definitely be back next year. In fact, it looks like I'll be Artist's Alley Co-Director. Worst part? I'm looking forward to it.

The week after the convention was spent with genet, roho, their four cats and one dog. Together with their other guests (shadowstalkerw, steelhelix, tarinfirepelt) I had a great time hanging out, gaming, shopping and shopping some more, finally culminating into the traditional Thanksgiving dinner at the MFF Chairman's house, complete with turkey, cranberry sauce and apple pie.

Edit: Tarin's con report is now up.

Now I just have to survive St. Nicolas's with the family coming weekend.

[	Mood	|	happy	]
[	Music	|	virt - lorem ipsum	]

Some of you will appreciate this because you know who Virt is. Others will appreciate it because they know what Lorem Ipsum is.

• Virt - Lorem Ipsum (lyrics)

The rest of you.. Just listen to the kickass tune.

[

Mood

|

working

]

Made myself a custom mood icon set, based on the Superintendent. It's gonna need some fleshing out, perhaps with a bit animation here and there, but eh. It's not like I use many different moods anyway.

I shall be at Midwest Furfest 2009. Look for me in or around the Artist's Alley.

Chai is a wonderful beverage, especially when made with condensed milk.

The leaves are falling off the trees and the days are turning grey, wet and cold.. So, to keep you comfortable, have some phonedoodles!

( Phone Doodles Week 44... )

Well, I'm.. not better as such, but at least back at work. Taking it slowly, and making good use of the company espresso machine.

And in completely unrelated news, happy 09-09-09. (Or 09/09/09, depending on your locale.)

Still sick, but my fever seems to be breaking, thankfully.

When I called work to inform them I'd be staying home a bit longer, just until the world stops being all wobbly, they mentioned that six update: eleven other folk called in sick also. Almost all of them seated around the desk of the guy that had been coughing and joking about how he didn't have influenza earlier last week, and who called in sick Thursday.

So yeah, seems he knocked out a fourth third of the company, including me.

I really do hope I didn't infect anybody at Thursday's dinner. If, somewhere tomorrow, you want to put your head between a door and then slam it shut to feel better, it was me and I apologize deeply. My only excuse is that at the time I didn't know about it yet.

In other news, people who can check and maintain water boilers are highly-demanded craftsmen whose time is worth something in between of pure gold and printer ink. If I email them all my info, they'll get back to me somewhere later this week. Maybe.

Oh, and happy Labor Day.

[

Mood

|

sick

]

I haven't been this sick in a long, long time.

It all started the morning of Friday 4th, when I woke up feeling.. off. Okay, I had gone to bed slightly late the day before, so let's shower and shave and see how I feel. Nope, didn't feel any better and I was starting to develop a headache. Grabbed some breakfast, sat down, realized I was feeling hot enough to count as a fever. Considered going to work anyway, but finally called in sick.

Hauled myself back to bed, laid down.. And that's when the neighbors decided to start redecorating their kitchen. With my headache, it felt they were drilling straight into my brain, so I simply fled. Put on some shoes, walked over to the nearby mall. This was an as good as any time to buy a medical thermometer to see just how sick I was and I could really use some cough syrup, too.

These two items in mind, I walked into the local computer games store. They had a copy of Tales of Vesperia, an RPG for the 360 I not yet owned. Grabbed it, went to the counter. Where the friendly sales person discovered, after a try or three, that their network link was down, and they could only accept cash. Hiked over to the ATM, got cash, bought game. I got a 10% discount for my trouble.

This all had taken rather longer than anticipated, I quickly went into the drug store next door, got my thermometer and headed home. 38.5°C, or 1.5°C fever. Also, those paying attention might've noticed I completely forgot about the cough syrup.

I also discovered that my water was turned off. Okay, neighbor was still working on the pipes, they likely turned off mine to be safe, whatever. And I apparently pushed myself too hard on that trip to town, because I ended up puking up my breakfast. I crashed back into bed, had some entirely unremarkable fever daymares about flowcharts and got woken up by my phone much later.

My sister was inquiring how I was doing, and if I wanted to come over for dinner. Well, I was doing terrible, and I didn't think it would be a good idea to come over. Also, I still didn't have any water.

Went downstairs, rang neighbor's doorbell, politely inquired if they could turn on my water. They were very apologetic and checked immediately, but finally determined that my water was turned on. They'd call the water company first thing tomorrow and gave me water so I could at least flush my toilet. I crawled back into bed.

Next day, Saturday 5th, the water company guy showed up nice and early, poked around, determined I was getting water pressure from the mains and therefore the rest was out of his hands, I needed a plumber. As luck would have it, neighbor had already called a plumber, because they had a leak in their newly refurbished kitchen. At no point did it occur to me this might be a indicator to the quality of the rest of work those refurbishers did.

Towards the end of the day the plumber showed up, they fixed the leak and then looked at my problem. Hearing a plumber go This can't possibly be right.. is not a fate I wish upon anyone.

Apparently, when doing the pipework for the kitchen, the refurbishers hit my water pipe and it sprung a leak. They immediately went around fixing that, and quite well, too. So well that they not only plugged the hole, but also the pipe itself.

The plumbers replaced the entire section of pipe and lo and behold, I had delicious water once more.

Of course, when I went to take that shower I had been looking forward to for over a day, I discovered one small thing: While my cold water was fine, my warm water hardly has any pressure. I rather suspect my boiler needs to be looked at. If I can muster the energy, I'll ask the neighbors for the address of those plumbers and see if they can drop by again Monday, or something. -.-

[

Mood

|

busy

]

So I've been looking for a new job. Didn't go exactly fast, because some of the companies I applied with are just naturally big and slow, and others were slow because their HR department is on vacation. Lucky bastards.

However, one company did get back to me, invited me for an interview, and even made me an offer! One catch, though. They really, really needed me to start in August.

So I'm now working for Virtual Fairground on Galactik Football! (It's about soccer.)

Secondly! Like every year, it'll be my birthday on August 7. That's Friday. Since I'm kinda busy with the work thing that day, I'm planning a get-together at my place on August 8. Pretty much everybody reading this that knows where my place is, is invited. Just let me know beforehand that you're coming so I know how much cake to buy. If you didn't already bug me about gift ideas, just show up somewhere noon-ish or later and bring a bag of crisps and a bottle of your favorite soda.

I envision this being a hanging around, playing games sort of deal. And I haven't even started considering how to do dinner, although under no circumstance will I order out for pizza. We'll see.

I've been keeping busy filling out forms for the government, and sending my resume everywhere that looks interesting. Between those two, I'm finding myself more busy now than I was when I still had a job. It's a very odd feeling. The job hunt itself is slow-going, but progressing. I've already gotten two rejections, but I've got plenty of more leads.

However, I've also managed to spare a moment to finish a project that's been standing on my dinner table for like forever, namely some miniatures:

( More Photographs of Painted Plastic... )

Well, the news is out (sorry, Dutch only).

In short, my honorable employer, Spellborn Works B.V. has filed for bankruptcy and as of yesterday I am officially looking for a job.

Personally, I loved the Spellborn project and my coworkers, and despite it being very hard work and long hours, I enjoyed every moment of it. If I could do it over, I'd do it all again.

The game will continue to run, with EU operations taken over by Acclaim, and development will continue on a Far East and perhaps even a re-visioned EU version.

I'd love to continue working in the computer games industry and I've got a few leads for a new job already lined up. And I've got enough savings to take a few weeks off to recover before starting something new, even.

My Internets are back to their happily working order, so I'd better finally post this huge stack of phonedoodles that's been building up for the last six months.

( Phone Doodles Week 24... )

As always, feedback is welcome.

bander.nl and bander.org are down. Should be back up again in a day or two.

(Depending on when they'll assign me a new permanent IP address and how quickly I'll manage to update the DNS records for those domains.)

A mere two posts ago, I wrote about how tablet PCs sound really neat but are overly expensive, and that sub-notebooks with touch-sensitive screens are The Wave Of The Future.

So what I end up doing a week later?

Exactly. I go around and buy myself a tablet PC, with a bit of much-appreciated help from hiryu. Meet Hamlet, a HP Pavilion tx2000. Not the most current model (that would be the tx2z series) and second-hand off of an auction site, but a model that got some okay reviews and that for certain used Wacom technology for its digitizer.

And I love it. Granted, it's my very first notebook, so I don't have much comparison material. And what happens on the screen does lag behind what you're doing with the pen, which takes some getting used to.

But it's just plain fun to sit and doodle while you've got zoom and unlimited undo and all other things software can do for you!

I got rid of the HP-branded Vista it got shipped with and installed Windows 7 Release Candidate instead, which Microsoft will let you try out for free for a year. So far, I've got remarkably few complaints about it.

Then I installed Wacom drivers (digitizer's a Graphire) and I'm currently trying out various art applications to see what works best with a tablet. I'm really liking Art Rage 2.5. Competent, dirt cheap, and if that's too much, they even have a free Starter Edition. When work calms down a little and I get the hang of it, you might start seeing tablet doodles instead of phone doodles.

It is with great regret that I wish to inform you that I've been strong-armed into that Twitter thing.

I might actually even update it. Some day.

Over the recent years, laptop computers have been getting bigger and more powerful, to the point manufacturers started calling them notebooks, because you're really not supposed to put them on your lap anymore.

Slightly more recently, manufacturers came out with a new generation of sub-notebooks, which are basically half the size of regular notebooks and quite affordable, one of the more popular ones being Asus's Eee PC range. Other names for similar concepts are netbook and Ultra-Mobile PC.

Especially the UMPCs attracted my attention. They are a continuation of the Tablet PC idea, a portable computer with a touch-sensitive screen. This is something which I'd love to have as some sort of electronic sketchbook, the equivalent of a Cintiq glued to a portable computer. Preferably at a lower price point, too.

Unfortunately, Tablet PCs suffered from a very high price, poor battery life, and poor performance; and UMPCs are a bit too small, more the size of a modern GPS unit. Rugged UMPCs found use as glorified barcode readers and units for couriers to record signatures on and the consumer market for handheld computers has been cornered by Apple's iPhone.

However, now they're starting to make, well, tablet sub-notebooks, such as the Asus Eee PC T91 and the Gigabyte M912V. Sub-notebook size and price, but tablet PC form factor and a touch screen. So far, all using passive digitizers (like found on smart phones) and nothing using Wacom tech yet, but even without pressure sensitivity these might make for a very nifty and relatively affordable electronic sketchbook. I'll see if I can try one out in a store sometime soon.

I work relatively close to the beach. Close enough for me to take a short walk along it during lunch if the weather is nice. And the other day, I ran into a sand castle that somebody made, round about here. I took some pictures with my cellphone. Like all cellphone cameras, it uses tupperware as a lens, so please forgive the quality.