You can guess what he’s famous for…

The exciting news you’ve been waiting for, or have already heard.

by Luuk @ 8:38 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, where do I start. Firstly, the delay in this post is quite intentional. We felt we should actually tell people first before they read it here. So, if you read it first here and felt you should have been told, I’m sorry and feel free to abuse me. So many people to tell.

My story runs along similar lines to Seth’s, albeit without shotguns and various other elements of the drama. The end result is the same. So, the ultra short version, or abstract if you will:

Amy and me are engaged. At this stage we are planning to get married in early March.

Now for the longer version for all you details people

This story begins a long long time ago. Just over 4 months ago in fact. Although to say it begun there would be inaccurate, but that is when Amy and me first started going out. And it really does feel like a long time ago. Anyway, since not very long after that at all, I realised that she was the person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, which brings us up to a few weeks ago, when I decided I was going to propose.

Enquiries were made about hot air ballooning and booking etc. and the date that I managed to procure turned out to be Friday, so I told Amy I would pick her up at 5 on Friday and anxiously watched the metservice website and the accuweather website and teletext and prayed for fine weather, while outside it rained and the wind blew and the road flooded. Everything was still pointing to fine for Friday though, so I remained optimistic. Friday morning came and at 4:30 am I rang the hot air ballooning hotline to be told that the flight was on! Fantastic. Got dressed, picked up Amy and drove to the Merivale Mall carpark (meeting spot), taking a circuitous route to put her off the scent. Realising I was 20 minutes early, we took a little tiki tour, eventually arriving back, still early, at the carpark where I found an area with no other cars and parked, thinking I could easily find a use for the next few minutes… I leaned in… and a car pulled up right beside us… I kind of felt sorry for them. After initially being completely confused as to why we were in this car park and then why all these other cars were arriving at 5:30 in the morning, Amy finally deduced that maybe they were all here for the same reason, and when the bus pulled up, tried very hard to read what was written on the side and was most excited when she could finally see it.

Anyway, removing some detail, we eventually departed and arrived in Darfield where we laid out the balloon and got everything set up. It was a very cold morning, so cold feet and hands, but perfect ballooning weather. Then we all climbed in and next minute, we looked down and we were a long way up in the air. Usually I’m not so good with heights, but it really wasn’t a problem. Beautiful views, weather and company. We crossed the Waimak river, eventually landing in a farmer’s paddock where the chase vehicle came to meet us and after packing the balloon a way we had a celebratory glass of champagne. We got back to the carpark around 9:30-10:00 starving and ready for breakfast, seeing as we’d already been up for 5-6 hours and had breakfast at Veronica’s on New Regent Street, which was delicious.

Then back to my place where I had a shower and a shave. After a short nap and a quick trip to countdown we had a picnic lunch on the beach at Sumner. Then I dropped Amy off at work, went home and cleaned out my car. Exciting I know. By this time I was exhausted, but I managed to make it back to Woolston in one piece and fell asleep in the car outside the cafe near her work where we were going to have dinner, while I awaited her arrival. After dinner, I slept in the car for another hour and a half outside Amy’s work, recovering my energies a little.

Then at 8 when Amy finished we headed off again, and I drove in what she thought was the wrong direction, although she eventually clicked when I turned left up Dyers pass road and headed up the hill. It was dark by that stage and I found the place overlooking Christchurch and the city lights where we first kissed. Amongst conversation and maybe a few kisses I managed to start the starters I’d been mulling over… “I still haven’t given you a list of people I want at my birthday… Do you know what would be the best birthday present? - You.” and “You know how you always say ‘I don’t know’ when I say things? Well, there’s one thing I do know - I know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you”. The responses seemed positive, so I busted out with “Will you marry me?” which was answered with an enthusiastic “Yes!”, a big smile, hugs etc. And thus we were engaged.

Eventually, via my place for a while, where amongst other things we discussed telling our parents, (Plan was to tell Amy’s parents at breakfast) Amy ended up back home, and I ended up in bed, thinking about this and being excited and eventually sleeping. In the morning I went over there for breakfast, and over breakfast we attempted to steer the conversation, covering the events of the day interspersed, no matter how hard we tried, with discussions of the contents of the newspaper. We didn’t quite get there… We only got as far as dinner in the story before everybody dispersed. We managed to meet them for coffee at Untouched World, where Amy’s sister Hannah works, where we continued our attempts. We had decided that I wasn’t allowed to finish my coffee before telling them. However, the conversation once again was heading in a completely different direction with an in-depth discussion of the Passion of the Christ. Then suddenly her parents got up to leave. My coffee was not yet empty, so there still had to be time. They’d already made it as far as the till before Amy managed to say “We have something to tell you” and I followed with “I asked Amy to marry me last night”. Big smiles and excitement and then “Well, we haven’t heard what she said yet”. I noticed that I was actually shaking although I was very relieved by the response. Ian and Hannah were there too, so they all heard at the same time and there were photos etc.

Then we went back to my place and phoned my parents who were also very excited and then contacting various other people and slowly starting to spread the word. Cutting the story a little short here. In the afternoon we went ring shopping, covering 4 or 5 jewellry stores, coming up with some options and eventually after being almost ringed out we sat down and decided. Some good joint decision making. Quick, decisive and definitely together.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. I sense the writing quality has descended since the start. I’m almost as tired now as I was that Friday afternoon, but I really wanted to finish this. 1250 Words should be enough for you.

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Monday, October 9, 2006

Go Seth!

by Luuk @ 10:53 am. Filed under Uncategorized

My friend Seth just got engaged. Officially best blog post ever!

Oh, and I may have some very exciting news which will be posted about very soon…

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Sunday, October 1, 2006

I know, I know…

by Luuk @ 9:32 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Long time since last post etc.

I don’t think I’m even going to try to catch you up on the events in the time since my last post. There have been a few things distracting me from writing to you all, but it does seem to have dwindled in priority a little. Never fear though, it crosses my mind frequently.

One reason I haven’t been posting is that I have been working on a website for Lifenet which is slowly getting there and now has it’s first iteration on the internet at a mysterious currently not to be revealed location. It really isn’t finished, but more is done than what you see if you happen to find it.

This weekend was really quite productive with me and Cameron working on the website from 9-3 on Saturday and 2-5:30 today. We did have a break for lunch yesterday which was delicious super sandwiches prepared by a certain delicious Amy. Then yesterday afternoon Amy and Me went and saw Seussical, starring Hannah Hamilton and first or last nameless Kinloch. Twas fantastic and very well done. Lots of colour and music and other wonderful musicalish things. Then a brief interlude at BK with Mark followed by a trip to see a couple of teams play a very close game of rugby. Thanks Mark for the free ticket. One of the teams was wearing red and black and the other team blue and white. One feature of all the rugby games I had been to at Jade stadium was conspicuous by it’s absence though… Namely the giant inflatable shield in the corner… If only this weeks North Harbour game was in North Harbour…

“Waikato brought North Harbour back to earth with a thump today, comfortably beating the new Ranfurly Shield holders in an Air New Zealand Cup top six rugby match in Hamilton.”

So yeah, anyway, if anyone is still reading this… I do plan to be a little more committed to posting now that I won’t feel like I should be working on the website whenever I turn on my computer.

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Friday, August 18, 2006

time marches on

by Luuk @ 12:08 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, here is another post, - once again, it appears to have been a while. Originally I was hoping to post some photos of our time up in the North Island, but Amy has them all. So, no photos from then for you. We did have a great time up there, visiting and meeting lots of people. - My family, Amy’s grandparent’s and cousins, other family friends and her best friend Hillary, and a few of my friends, including Edward, Hazel, and Ritchie. And that wasn’t all. I discovered that Auckland is a cold wet place with very limited visibility. Still had a great time though. Got to go to De Fontein - Belgian beer cafe at Mission bay and numerous other fun places.

Then, the following weekend we went to the university Christian Groups ball out at Lincoln and Yan’s birthday/Completing Masters party. Both of which were lots of fun. The ball had a jazz theme with a live jazz/swing orchestra, yummy food, great people and dancing and more. I do have a couple of photos from that that I can post. I’ll do that and leave this post at that. I’ve also added a photo to my lazy post from July 12.

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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Breakfast in Bed!

by Luuk @ 12:06 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it’s been a while, but I’m finally getting around to doing another update. One of those things that you avoid because it has gotten so massive. Since I’ve only done one real post in the last month and the month has been full of awesomeness, I’m going to miss lots out and touch on just a few things. Also, this will not end up chronological.
Firstly, as the title suggests, Saturday a week ago (15th) I got breakfast in bed. Amy came over and cooked me a fantastic omelette and kumara hash browns. When I tried to get up, I was shooed back to bed to wait, so I lay in bed with my laptop - it’s a hard life. I thought to myself “This is a great time to update your blog” so I attempted to do so. Unfortunately my site was unavailable. I received the following explanation later in the day:

This evening (July 14th) from about 5:25pm-6:55pm many of our servers were offline causing significant downtime for many of our users. The outage was due to a severe power outage in the north end of Orem, Utah where our servers are located. We do have UPS backup as well as diesel generators, but at about 5:30 they finally gave out. The power outage was for much longer than that period of time, but the reserve power was eventually consumed in its entirety. When it rains it pours.

So instead I watched the newest episode of pure pwnage, checked my emails, listened to some music and the conversations in the kitchen and just generally enjoyed not having to get up. After we’d eaten, we went and watched Amy’s friend Hannah perform in “No Moa” at the court theatre which was lots of fun.

Also, I finally got rid of my Surf, for quite a lot less than I paid for it, but in the end I was just glad to see it gone. I listed it on trademe, sold it, the buyer didn’t show, did a fixed price offer, sold it, buyer didn’t show, relisted, then withdrew and sold it to someone who was willing to pick it up on Friday of last week. Popped home from work when he wanted to pick it up. Jump started it no problems, but then could not actually get it to move. Appeared to be stuck in Park - no movement when we put it in drive or reverse, and we couldn’t push it in neutral. Somewhat frustrating. Anyway, spent the weekend at Navs camp (next) and returned to find that he had managed to remove it over the weekend which was quite uplifting actually.

Spent the last weekend with the Navs student group in Kaiapoi. Lots of good social times, seminars, speakers and food. Went to seminars on time/self management and looking at a way of analysing movies in the light of our faith. Watched clips from Shrek2, The Incredibles, Crash and The Insiders Guide to Happiness. The main talks were about living our lives in a way that matches up with what we believe and sharing that journey with people. I think the reason I often don’t talk about what I believe is the same reason I don’t talk about my work very often. - Basically because it’s hard to explain and on the surface uninteresting to people who aren’t a part of it. Part of the talks were about talking about our faith and our lives in a way that does make sense and is understandable, because our faith and the good news we have is too important a part of our lives not to talk about.

Have got into a routine of going swimming on Monday evenings at Jellie Park at 7, with at least a few of Mark, Andy, Nick, Hobbs, Amy and Me being there every Monday.
There’s so much good stuff to write about. I’ve spent lots of time with Amy - most of the time we both have spare in fact. And, not scared to say it, I’m very much in Love. I’ve received some awesome cards and presents and lots of massages, hugs and kisses - ok, maybe there’s a good reason why I haven’t been updating my blog. That’s right… I’ve been sparing you the details. We watched our way through the Firefly series at some point, followed by Serenity (movie). I won’t redescribe the day at Wainui etc. as there is an adequate description easily obtainable… In fact i’ve linked it already.

What else have I been up to - sleepy now, really short version… Went to see Superman, Pirates 2 and Cars (no links today, sorry). Went to Andrea’s 21st - 80’s theme, Amy and Me as the Blues Brothers, a little incestuous really, Rachael Whyte’s 21st - 80’s theme, Went dressed as Billy Joel in Uptown Girl music video (overalls) with Amy as my Uptown Girl. Went to Jeremy and Michelle’s Engagement party, and Matt and Aprils engagement party. - So many parties, so much good food, so bad for me, but yet it all tastes so good. Saw Mark off from work with lunch at the Fox and Ferret, won’t be the same without him. Also, there has been snow, soccer games - wins and losses and undoubtably stuff I shouldn’t be forgetting. I very much enjoyed that stuff at the time but my sleepiness and time have dulled the memories
This weekend Mike Shamy - who was the main speaker at the Student Navs camp will be speaking to the 2 older groups that have been working through the studies we’ve been doing so I’m busy again, and next weekend (From Thursday till Sunday) Amy and me are going up to Hamilton and Auckland to visit my family and various of our other friends and relatives. A bit of a flying visit which I am very much looking forward too!

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Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The ultimate laziness…

by Luuk @ 10:29 am. Filed under Uncategorized

This week has been pretty fantastic so far. I am also aware that today marks more than a month since I last posted. I have been considering it. It will happen.

Thought I’d add a photo to improve this slightly…

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Sunday, June 11, 2006

It seems like a lot has happened since then…

by Luuk @ 8:53 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I thought I was being really slack about updating my blog and maybe I have been a little, but my last (real) post was only just over a week ago.

Last weekend after Friday night, I played soccer, where we were thrashed 9-0. We did feel like we had one something after the 2nd half though as it was already 8-0 at halftime. After BK lunch at the Pink Palace, we had a lazy afternoon with a DVD (Bride and Prejudice) and then we went ice skating with Andrea and Dave, after going to Nando’s for tea. Somehow that sentence is really long. Twas cool to meet them and I think I’m getting better at ice skating too.

I think I’m going into too much detail… Sunday we went out for breakfast at Le Cafe which was delicious and then ended up being late to church because we somehow managed to go through 4 intersections that the Marathon runners were going past. So much for dodging it… Lunch at Rich and Lindsey’s after church, and a bit of reading and then we watched Chocolat, followed by one of Mike’s fantastic Roast Dinners, with the meat of the day being a huge shoulder of pork.
Monday we went mountain-biking which was fun, albeit freezing, but a spa at QEii sorted that out.

Anyway, I’ve definitely missed things from the weekend, but the last week has just been so good that it’s all blending into one big glob of goodness.:)
On Tuesday I started my new job as a software engineer, and I have already learned quite a lot I think, having been thrown in the deep end with a few curly issues. Definitely interesting.

My week has included a lot more Amy, so I can’t really write that it’s been pretty standard other than the above like I usually do, because it hasn’t, but I’m not going to bore you with the details, although they are not at all boring to me…

Then on Friday night, Amy took me out to the Pier 6 restaurant in Lyttleton for an amazing dinner. I had seafood chowder and it was delicious!

Last night, for the first time, a monumental occasion, I actually won a fast food combo bet with Mess… My bet, that Ireland would be ahead at half-time, and indeed they were. So I was cheering on Ireland for the first half, which I think directly contributed to their performance. Because at half-time I switched to cheering for the All-Blacks, which saw them emerge victorious in the end.

Well, in closing, this post has ended up rather long. Once again a list of events. I think I may become even more selective. So many things make for poor descriptions. A wee hint… You may find more about what I have been up to here. Just maybe.

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Monday, June 5, 2006

Just to clarify

by Luuk @ 7:55 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

For all you n00bs out there, Olds are the opposite to News…

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Saturday, June 3, 2006

A Whole New Exciting Chapter…

by Luuk @ 1:02 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it has been quite a long time since I last posted… Quite a lot has happened since then, but most of it is going to remain undocumented, because I have News and I don’t feel like writing about Olds today. Is the suspense building? Am I actually far too tired to be writing a post on my blog? Well, it is 12:42 and I’m lying in bed typing on my laptop, so the answer to the second question is more than likely an unqualified yes.

Anyway, on to the News! I now have an amazing girlfriend! And I’m quite excited. This is what my face is regularly looking like at the moment: (Possibly without the yellow…) What’s that? You want to know who it is? But what about the suspense? Ok, I’ll tell you… But only because I can’t keep it in anyway. Her name is Amy, and if you search this page really carefully, you may just find out a way of finding out more about her… And possibly also a little of the Olds I mentioned earlier.

And, to top it all off, today was my last day as a test engineer, so I am about to encounter lots of interesting new challenges as a software engineer, so as the title of the post suggests, I am starting on a whole new exciting chapter of my life!

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Thursday, May 18, 2006

Akaroa photos are finally uploaded

by Luuk @ 11:54 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

You can find them here. They were taken by Andy, a friendly local paparazzi abducted for the occasion.

Also I figured out that I can change the thumbnails for the albums on my photo page to something other than “last uploaded”.

In other news, I went swimming yesterday (at work) and spent about an hour teaching myself to breathe on the side that I couldn’t before. I’ve got that mostly sorted now, although more practice will help. Also tried tumble turns, which are going to take a bit more practice. Not helped by shallowness of work pool. Also did about 250m of breaststroke at the end and found some muscles I didn’t previously know I had. Bed time. The end.

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Monday, May 15, 2006

No more adsense

by Luuk @ 10:55 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

The more astute amongst you will notice that there are no longer any google adsense ads on the site. I decided to remove them, as there was really no point to them being there. I had a look today and over the time that they’ve been on there I’ve earned $US2.07. Not really worth the hassle. I did intentionally put them on non-prominent spots on the page though.

Other than that, I had work today, went swimming at Jellie Park with Andy, Anna, Mark and Nick and then cranked out the eyetoy kinetic for the first time in months to try some ab workout and some boxing with Amy, Merodie and Mike. Didn’t really last long though.

My aim of doing work on the lifenet website didn’t really eventuate, but I do have it all set up to be able to work on it on my laptop now, so I can feel myself ramping up to the really productive stage. If I get enough sleep that is, good night.

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Monteith’s Tripel

by Luuk @ 6:35 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Monteith have just released their new Tripel beer. It’s a wonderful thing, and reminds me of my trip to Holland, including the light-headedness. I got some of batch no. 01-1! Note the batch label over the caps and the alcohol content. It is a little dangerous…

I guess I can post about the rest of my weekend here as well. On Friday night after a bit of hassle organising stuff I ended up watching 50 First Dates with Amy, Hobbs and Anna at Hobbs’ flat. I hadn’t seen it before and it was vintage Adam Sandler. Some comedy gold and some cringe.

On Saturday I had a bit of a break to reflect on life. I went up the port hills and sat on a wee hilltop near Sign of the Bellbird for a few hours, enjoying the view and having some space to reflect and spend time with God.

After that I got Subway on the way to Mark’s place from whence we went and spent the afternoon fixing Anna’s boss’ computer. Then I went to Gwyn and Dave’s for tea with them and Megan and Kelvin. Great time hanging out and catching up. After that (at about 11) I went into town and met Mark and Anna and Mess and Andrew and Danny and Jackie at iconic and was there till just before 3. Then home for a cup of tea and then bed.

Today I’ve had a lazy one, dropping off Anna and Mike at their cars, talking to Mum on the phone (mothers day), watching some firefly and sampling the new Monteith’s Tripel mentioned above. I’m still in my Pyjamas… Which leads me to this point where I am considering a big fish and chip shop burger for tea. I think it would hit the spot.

Wow, a weekend update when it is still the weekend.

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Friday, May 12, 2006

I was going to say “oops I lied”

by Luuk @ 12:42 am. Filed under Uncategorized

and then I thought I’d actually do the update…

Anyway, Somehow the time has rolled on and if I am going to complete this update today I only have 7 minutes left. Not going to make it unfortunately.

Well, what have I been upto since I last posted. I’m going to go for a somewhat non-chronological approach this time and go for grouping similar activities.

Exercise type stuff: I’ve biked to Akaroa with Rosie and Mess. It was very cold and wet, I will put photos up that our support crew took, but not tonight. I went mountain-biking for the second time ever at Bottle Lake - I didn’t see a lake though. Lots of fun and I want to do it again. I played another game of soccer which we again won 4-2! It’s our biggest winning streak ever and also our most wins in a season and it’s only the second game! I played keeper the second half and didn’t quite manage a clean sheet. One thing I forgot to mention about the previous game was that one of the other teams goals came from a penalty I conceded. - They kicked it into my hand in the box. Also I went swimming at QE2 with a bunch of people, completing some lengths and then mucking around in the wave pool. I thought it would be a good idea to bike the 15km there, but it reduced the fun of the swimming a bit. I didn’t have to bike home, thanks to the wonderful David Hobbs. Got a burger and chips and walked down the pier with Kristyn and David after swimming too.

Movies: I saw Sione’s Wedding and The Matador at the movies. Sione’s Wedding was great. Very funny, NZ movie. The Matador was funny and somewhat random, although somewhat crude. Also have watched a bunch of DVDs. Saw City of God which I hadn’t seen before. I won’t spoil it with a review. Number 16 on the top 250 films of all time on IMDB. Another one I hadn’t seen before was The Constant Gardener, which I also really liked. Twas eye-opening on some issues, which I guess was it’s intention. Oh and on a whim I bought Teenage Caveman at the Warehouse and we watched it. That’s all I have to say about that. It had one definite redeeming feature. It was only 65 minutes long
Social Activities: Went to Seqoiua 88 with Craig’s family to celebrate his graduation, which was fun. I ate quite a lot. I was carbo-loading for the next day’s ride to Akaroa. Also played a few games of pool in town. Also various other occasions of hanging out, a bit of Buzz etc.

Acquisitions: Somehow, since my last post (not quite that unintentionally) I have acquired a digital camcorder and a laptop. Both secondhand off Trademe. Had a bit of fun with the laptop removing the BIOS supervisor password. It involved a bit of soldering. I was successful, right up until when I was finished and had to remove the wires and rather than being smart and desoldering it, I thought pulling the wire off was a good idea. Unfortunately it was attached to the pin of the EEPROM I had been reading from, so the pin came with it. After some emergency repairs it still seems to be working, so I’m quite glad about that. I have since (just before I wrote this post) installed Ubuntu Linux on it, which just worked - wireless, battery indicators, touchpad, office software, browser, instant messenger and more. The only problem I had was a couple of expected glitches in the installer. (It’s still in Beta)
For those of you who I didn’t lose with the last paragraph, the laptop is an IBM thinkpad T40 (P4M 1.3 with 512MB Ram, DVD/CDRW) It also now has wireless. This means I can go and work on computer stuff without having to sit in my room. Perhaps in a nice cafe in the sun with a cup of nice strong coffee.

Well, that about sums up the last few weeks. Oh wait, there was something else. Currently in our bible study group we are discussing what people’s perceptions of God/Christianity are. Or whether they think about God at all. So, fastfood combo of your choice to randomly selected commenter with a comment they have thought through. - Spam does not count. Like the song says… “Tell me all your thoughts on God.” I may even throw in a free DVD. (Which I may or may not have already mentioned in this post). How can you not comment with such a huge incentive. N.B. This isn’t intended as a debate/discusison, although if you would like to have one, I do have an available forum… Also if you don’t want to post your comments, feel free to email them to me.

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Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Sorry Again

by Luuk @ 10:09 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

If I’m not posting, it’s probably best to assume that I am busy. I promise to do an update tomorrow. This update will include cycling to Akaroa, mountain biking, some movies, adventures with my new laptop, some movies, Teenage Cavemen, food, swimming and quite possibly more.

In the meantime, if you’re bored, you could check out rememberthemilk.com. It’s an online todo list thing which is quite fancy. Let me know if you decide to give it a go, as it has contacts, so I could add you.

It is quite dangerous though, as you spend time on your todo list… Mine includes updating my blog with a due date of tomorrow, so now it has to get done.

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Thursday, April 27, 2006

Who’s that guy?

by Luuk @ 1:43 am. Filed under Uncategorized

One has to wonder… As you will have probably guessed by now, this is what I looked like during the bus trip, after Kristyn attacked me.

In other news, went to The Sentinel last night (Tuesday) after having Indian for tea. Didn’t get as much accomplished during the day as I’d hoped, although we did convince Mark to try the 4.2L milk challenge. There will be a movie, but post-production is still in progress.

For clarification of the previous post, try this.

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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Speaks for itself really.

by Luuk @ 12:49 am. Filed under Uncategorized

on a plate I believe.

Also, I fixed Tony’s age (oops) and added a blurry photo of me taking a photo of myself in the mirror wearing a toga that looks nothing like what I had on on the bus trip after the first bar. For a start I had no t-shirt. (and no sunglasses, because it was dark)

**edit** I hadn’t posted the part 2 post I am discussing yet, but will do that now.

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Monday, April 24, 2006

My Easter Holidays Part 2

by Luuk @ 6:55 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, this one is going to be a little more brief. The last post took me 2 hours and I don’t fancy a repeat. Thursday and Friday I did a bit of catching up on life.

On Thursday I did some washing etc, where I had another Minties moment - one of my pens went through the wash and leaked. If anybody knows how to get pen ink out of clothes I would be most greatful for the advice. Then in the afternoon I made curried carrot and apple soup for my small group, which I went to in the evening. Somehow I managed to go to the supermarket 3 times over the course of the day. I’m not sure if that is a record or not.

On Friday I ran some general errands, picking up some material for togas for Anna and Me for Danny’s Toga themed bus trip on Saturday. I also picked up my Buzz the Big Quiz pre-order, which we made good use of in the evening. I’m not sure if I should be glad or not that I couldn’t answer the question “Which is the smallest teletubby” correctly… We found out later that Nick would have got that one.

Saturday I tidied my room and took all the clothes which are now to big for me to the clothing bin. Now I have space in my cupboards again. Saturday night was Danny’s bus trip. We got Spags before-hand. Anna, Andy and Me walked into Spags in our togas and the others all left very soon afterwards. (We were late and they’d ordered for us). Somebody at the next table asked us if we’d scared them away. I am going to try to get some photos, but don’t have any as yet. I do have one of me trying on my toga on Friday, but it didn’t really look like that for long on Saturday night… I was attacked by Kristyn and somehow ended up with a much more risque “toga” and was dubbed “The Roman Pimp” by people we ran into. I was originally going for Latin Mafia, so possibly not too far off the mark.

We went to 5 bars all over the place and eventually ended up in time where we went to Iconic and danced for a while and eventually went home via KFC, where I attempted to convince the person serving me to sell me a vegetarian salad. I bought it with chicken when they wouldn’t drop the price to remove it. The whole night was a lot of fun.

On Sunday morning I biked over to Danny’s to pick up my car and then went to church. Then round to Mark’s again from whence Andy, Mark, Nick and me went to Cave Stream. The water was quite high, significantly higher than when I went through in March. I was glad I had my wetsuit… Nick ended up not going through as he had no change of clothes. Ran into Matt and Robin there as well. We got through safely eventually, albeit with a few bumps and bruises for some. Quite an adventure. I didn’t realise before we went that I was the only one who had done it before, so the others didn’t really know what they were in for. Twas described as “Cave Raging Torrent” by Mark. Stopped in Springfield to consume hot food and beverages. I had a lamb, rosemary and kumara pie - delicious.

Upon return I was invited to go swimming at QEII, where I eventually arrived at about 7:30 - I drove longer than I swam. The pool closed at 8. Nick, Danny and Dave arrived before me and Dave challenged me to catch up with how far they’d swum which I did eventually, although only had time to swim 700m. The 50m pool takes a bit more effort than the 23m pool at work.

Today I’ve cleaned the toilet, done the dishes, had lunch, uploaded my photos and updated my blog. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but I’ve been busy all day.

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My Easter Holidays Part 1

by Luuk @ 4:19 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, where do I begin. I’ve been on holiday since Friday, going back to work on Wednesday.

Firstly, I heard some great news the day before my holidays… As of 6th of June I will be a Software Engineer! So a whole bunch of new challenges and learning opportunities at work. I’m quite looking forward to it actually.

Now, onto my break. On Thursday night I went to the Mall and then to the movies to see Inside Man with Mark and Rachel, which I enjoyed. On Friday I had a bit of a lazy day. Cruised round to the Pink Palace around lunchtime because there was no food in the cupboard (partially) and found a few people trying to decide what to do with their afternoon. We ended up going to Subway for lunch and then a walk up the hill from Sumner with a few discussions on dancing and boom, headshots… (Clip is from Pure Pwnage episode 5). The territory was perfect.

Then in the evening we congregated at my place for some Singstar, as my pre-ordered Singstar Rocks game had arrived. I don’t think my singing is actually improving.

Then, on Saturday I drove to Queenstown. I had a couple of hitch-hikers between Christchurch and Ashburton and locked my keys in my car with the lights on at the juice factory just before Cromwell. The AA came and rescued me in due course. Definitely a Minties moment, but my Minties were locked in the car, so I consoled myself with the Nectarine juice I’d bought instead. Eventually I arrived at Louise’s place in one piece, although a little tired from the trip. We then went to church for the Easter vigil service and then on to Little India as we were a little hungry. Then we rang up Tony (my brother) to wish him a happy 17th birthday. (I hope I didn’t get that wrong) **I did and I’ve fixed it now.**
On Sunday we got up early and went to Warbirds over Wanaka, where I took a lot of photos. I have culled the photos I took on my holiday down from over 300 to 112 to ease the viewing experience for you, but that’s still a lot.

It was a great show, but we both returned to Queenstown very zonked from our day standing in the sun. Ran into Andy there as well. Having recently acquired his PPL he was a little jealous of the planes that the pilots were getting to fly. There were a few interesting things other than planes too… The World’s fastest Indian, a sister and some crazy Germans for example.

On Monday we decided to sleep in, but were woken up at 6am by Louise’s friends who wanted us to come out into town with them… They had been out all night. We managed to get rid of them eventually. Once we got up at a more reasonable hour, we were considered going mountain-biking up Coronet Peak, but that was finished for the season and the weather was a little inclement, so we went ice-skating instead. We went and had dinner at the pizza restaurant at Q-lounge (I think that was what it was called) followed by some pool (Our dinner special included a free hour). Louise knew the chef, so we got to try some delicious banana chocolate dessert pizza. Incidentally, he had been woken up at 10am by the same mob that had turned up at our place at 6. Somewhere in between a Sombrero had been acquired.

On Tuesday Louise had a lunchtime meeting at work, so I went and got some Subway and ate it on the waterfront in the sun where a Jazz band just happened to be playing. They were from here. Then we did some shopping and went to Fergburger for tea. We both got the big Al which is the biggest burger they had. It was huge. I was going to take photos, but by the time I thought of it, my hands were a little saucy… Then we went and saw Happy Coupling by the Court Theatre. (Not sure how long the link will last). I really enjoyed it and was laughing out loud for a lot of it.

Apart from the above, we also filled in a bit of time watching DVDs etc.
On Wednesday I headed back to Christchurch. I went up the Crown Range first to take some photos, because the views were amazing when we went to Warbirds, but we couldn’t really stop because of the traffic.

My timing for the trip was a little constrained as I had to be in Ashburton between 5 and 6 to pick up a TV I bought off Trademe. I thought I’d do the walk to Rock Peak from the top of the Crown Range and thought the stated time of 1 hour was well within my time budget. That was until I realised that it must have meant an hour each way, and I ended up running significant amounts of it. I also dropped my sunglasses about 10 minutes before the carpark, so on realising this when I went to drive off I had to run up and down again. Another Minties moment.
Anyway, I made it to Ashburton in time, with very few stops on the way. One very brief one at Lake Pukaki, which was like glass and one in Geraldine to find a map of Ashburton.

To add to the fun, I thought my stereo had broken as the speakers were popping, so the only sounds I had for the trip was the interminable dinging of my speed warning bell (It comes on at approximately 103-104kph). When I went to fix the stereo the following day, I found I had just inadvertently pushed the “loud” button on the stereo. Another Minties moment. Got back to Christchurch just in time to get some Noodle box and go to Mark’s place where they were watching The Grudge which was not great or even good. I’m going to stop this post here because it’s getting long.

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Sunday, April 23, 2006

Update tomorrow, a few new photos now.

by Luuk @ 9:53 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Will update my blog with the events of the last week tomorrow (with photos). I’ve been to Queenstown, Warbirds over Wanaka and more. Also played first soccer game of the season yesterday. We won 4-2! Went to Cave Stream today.

I’ve put up the photos of the rafting bit of the rafting trip, now that I have them. You can see the raft I was on upside down there just by clicking on the thumbnail below. Also a few pics from Dave’s camera of when we played playstation outside have been added to the appropriate folder as well.

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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Dirty Hacker

by Luuk @ 2:20 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I forgot to mention this last night. Yesterday morning I arrived at work to find the following email from talishka@ukr.net:

Dear Luuk

If you wish to return your ICQ number 5152468 with all data and contacts, address answer to this email.

That you have believed in gravity of my intentions I send to you a part of the list of your contacts.

…
Deleted list of contacts
…

With the best regards, Talishka

Understandably I wasn’t too impressed with this, so I wrote him back a very subtly worded email:

Dear Talishka,

You are a dick. I don’t care. I don’t use my ICQ account anymore anyway.

Cheers,
Luuk

and then proceeded to retrieve my account (Method omitted), and emailed him again:

Nice try

Then I sent this email to his ISP (with accidentally included grammatical and extra word errors)

Hello,

Today I received an email from “talishka@ukr.net”. In this email I
was told that my ICQ number had been stolen. I have since retrieved
the number, but would like to complain about about your customers use
of your service and request that you take action to prevent this from
happening again. The contents of the email is below.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Regards
Luuk.

I also changed a bunch of my passwords for good measure. The wisdom of antagonising hackers is somewhat questionable, but I do not negotiate with terrorists, especially n00bs.

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Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Far out, neglected.

by Luuk @ 11:12 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I don’t know what has happened, but I seem to have somehow started neglecting my blog and have fallen into a fortnightly update cycle. I am going to improve on this. To the update:

Last weekend I went to Amy’s 21st and into town on Friday night, played paintball and saw Ice Age 2 on Saturday and went to the food festival on Sunday. All of the above were a lot of fun. What? You want more details? Oh, alright then.

Amy’s 21st was a bbq with good food and great people and some interesting stories. Town was fun, with some good pool and some dancing, all on one bottle of bundaberg.

Paintball involved me getting shot a lot and shooting lots of people. Possibly the most fun I’ve had playing paintball. I think I got shot at least 12 times. This was mostly due to my cavalier atitude to ducking and hiding. I was in a charge and shoot mood and was enjoying the running and jumping. Went to Macdonalds straight afterwards all covered in paint and looking feral. Then home for a shower and on to Ice Age 2, which was great. This was followed by a visit to coffee culture where I had a banana buzz smoothie with a shot of espresso, which was kind of a mixture of items on the menu, but tasted great. Then I went to Borders, and as always, was sucked in and walked out with 4 books. - 3 cookbooks and Stardust by Neil Gaiman which I have now finished and really enjoyed. Then to Amy’s place for tea and then home to recover from the weekend thus far which also included making and consuming lots of smoothies.

On Sunday I went to church and then went round to the Pink Palace and dragged Mark and Dave to the food festival, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. We did almost have to be rolled home though. $15 entry fee and then more free samples than we could eat of everything. I might put up some photos of the seminar I did there if I get them off Dave. - Done. Some food festival photos in photo album. Click thumbnails to take you there.

Then home for fantastic homemade by Mike pizza and smoothies, which I did somehow manage to fit in. Then watched The Italian Job on DVD.

Ok, so that was one weekend…

I think the previous weekend was one of general relaxation, but that is probably because I am tired… Please remind me if I did something significant.

In other news, I had a job interview at work today with a view to me changing departments. Lots of probing questions. Work in general is busy this week, which is great. I like being busy. This is partially because it is a short week. I’m on holiday from Friday till Anzac day, which I’m looking forward to. Plans for the break are currently sketchy. I do plan to go to Queenstown for a few days and Warbirds over Wanaka. Who with is somewhat unorganised at the moment.

Now past bedtime. I’m off to sleep. Apologies if I’ve missed something, and feel free to let me know.

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Monday, March 27, 2006

Moonrise

by Luuk @ 10:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Almost forgot. Went and took photos of the sunset and moonrise last full moon at Sumner with Hobbs and Mark. Photos here. HIgh variance in quality due to low light and no tripod.

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Rafting

by Luuk @ 8:14 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I keep meaning to update my blog, but once I get there I just don’t feel like it. This will all be rectified now. Well partially anyway. Two weekends have passed, so I may gloss over earlier events due to fading memories.

The first of the two weekends, I went out to the navs camp that was at Lake Lyndon. Some good times were had, including some climbing on castle rock and a walk through cave stream. I then biked back to Christchurch from there with Merodie, the process of which had varying fun levels over the course of the trip. Down Porter’s pass was great, as was biking along the flat once the head wind went away. We stopped in Darfield for coffee and I stopped again in Kirwee for a banana and some chocolate. It then took a long time to catch back up to Merodie, but I did eventually manage it. Just as we were coming into town along Yaldhurst Road, cruising at a leisurely 29kph a guy on a road bike blitzed past us with a friendly I’m blitzing past you greeting. I decided I would quite like to catch up to him and was soon burning along at approximately 44kph right on his tail. Despite his efforts to lose me, he couldn’t. Eventually we had to stop at some lights where he found out that I had just biked all the way from Lake Lyndon (he asked how far we’d come) and then the lights changed and I left him in the dust. So I arrived back at the flat completely amped

I went to a flatwarming at Emily’s new flat on Thursday just been and then saw Lord of War at the movies on Friday which I enjoyed, but didn’t blow me away, which I guess you can’t expect from every movie.

Then on Saturday, we went whitewater rafting! Lots of fun. Started out with Macdonalds for breakfast on Colombo st. which meant that we got to see the Le Race riders go by, as we happened to be there at just the right/wrong time. Rafting was lots of fun. Despite it’s incriminating nature, I will link to Mark’s description, rather than repeating it, as it is very detailed. We had a bit of a competition to see who could do the most girly scream jumping off the 10m jump rock, which I was winning comfortably right until some actual girls actually screamed on the way down. There are some photos of before and after the rafting here. We are getting some photos of the actual rafting which does show us in the water as well after the raft flipped, which I may add when I get a hold of them.

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Monday, March 13, 2006

What’s happened since the last post.

by Luuk @ 9:58 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Life keeps moving. I’ve been to work for another week and a couple of weekends have passed. It never actually seems like that long between updates. The first weekend out of the two was Rachel’s 21st which was spent up in the Porter’s/Arthur’s pass region at a lodge. Merodie, Mike and Me went for a walk up Temple Basin and did some scree running while we were up there. Lots of fun. I still don’t like heights and sharp ridges though. Fantastic bbq dinner and cooked breakfast too. My plans to bike back were scuttled by the weather forecast, which resulted in me leaving my bike in Christchurch. Turns out the weather would have been perfect. However, after the 3-4 hour walk on the Saturday I wasn’t too disappointed.

On Monday was my Mum’s birthday, Happy Birthday! Then on Wednesday we went out for tea to celebrate Anna’s birthday which was on Tuesday. It appears to be a birthday week. We also went out and played some pool afterwards, which was great once I found some form. On Friday night we went to see Walk the Line. I want to see it again! I thought it was great and came home and listened to Johnny Cash. Then on Saturday evening, a group of us went bowling and then watched Maverick. Then last night we watched Stickmen. I went to church in the morning and then church lunch, which I eventually returned from around 3pm.

Acquisitions since last post. There have been a few. New shoes! Finally. The old ones had almost fallen apart. More new shoes… with clips on the bottom and some pedals for my bike for them to attach to. So much more power! I tried them out on Wednesday before we went out for dinner. Average speed just under 30 for 21km with some crazy head winds and hail (and a bit of tailwind too). Also traded in a bunch of my PS2 games on Saturday because EB games had a promotion and ended up with Pro Evolution Soccer 5 and pre-orders for the next Buzz and the next Singstar.

Anecdote of the week. Was late for a meeting coming back to work on Friday, came round a corner a little fast in my car and watched my registration labels fly out of the pocket, across the dash and out the open drivers-side window. I went back, witnessed one being run over and picked them up. Then drove onto work. Went to put them back in the pocket a couple of days later… I still had the 2 expired ones which had been behind the current one, but I possibly should have checked that I had the current one when I was picking them up… Because I didn’t. Anyway, I went and got a new one printed today, so all is well. Except that I noticed that it expires in less than a month anyway. :p

I’ve probably missed stuff. I’ll leave you with this startling fact. Wait for it… I tidied my room this evening! So much floorspace. Here is a shot with my webcam that doesn’t show much except that webcams don’t like low light and that I look silly. The significant part is that you can see floor in this image.

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Thursday, March 2, 2006

Too busy or too slack. Who knows, two weeks.

by Luuk @ 12:06 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Since last update: Had a poker night. I was one of three people to come away with winnings. Twas Mike’s birthday on Friday. There was a bbq and singstar. Also did a fair bit of exercise in the weekend just been. I won’t bore you with the details. Mainly because I’m a little tired and don’t feel like writing any. Current projects that have been fighting for attention are blender (3d modelling) tutorials, Swedish language course, A bit of programming, and exercise. With all of this the blog gets pushed into the background. The competition finished today. I ended up on 76.9kg, which I thought was quite a good effort. I am considering posting before and after photos, but the before photos are possibly too disturbing and I don’t have a suitable after photo as yet. To celebrate we went out to Drexels for breakfast and ate lots of delicious food. Somehow today became an eating day with cake day at 10:30 (baileys cheesecake) and a fantastic bbq dinner. I also had about 7 coffees over the course of the day (including 4 at breakfast). I did bike to the bbq and back which offset things a little, but I can’t see days like that being a regular occurence for the new Luuk. I’m not going to format this post into paragraphs.

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Tuesday, February 14, 2006

More memory loss

by Luuk @ 11:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

So many things to write about. Realised after I went to bed that I still hadn’t written about everything! On Sunday evening I went to Rachael Whyte’s place for her farewell dessert evening. Great times, with some volleyball, great people, great desserts and more.

Also an amazing dinner last night, cooked by master chef Michael Rutledge. Perfectly cooked Pork Sirloin steak on a cheesy herb mashed potato base served with summer vegetables.

Today, apart from standard work, I had lunch with Emily which was fun. Twas good to catch up. Also went to new small group where we attempted to make up church history. Well, we attempted to write a timeline of the history of the church without any references individually, followed by attempting to consolidate this into one slightly more accurate timeline, aided by actually referring to some references on the way. More interesting than it sounds.

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Monday, February 13, 2006

Delays leading to apathy and memory loss

by Luuk @ 10:29 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it’s becoming kind of hard to muster enthusiasm to post about everything I did over the summer. The task just appears to keep getting bigger. I’m thinking I may have to cut my losses and just hit some of the high points in this post and refer you to other sources to avoid duplication of effort.

Well, In this post, I promised that I would post later about all the things I listed. Some of them don’t really appear to be worth posting more on, like going to the movies… Others merit a lot more attention than they are going to end up getting. I have already posted about my new surf here, but I’ll run through some of the others quickly.

The exponents concert was great although my ears were ringing for a long time afterwards. Definitely some anthems in there. We went to Sophie’s for tea beforehand. I had a Ned Kelly Steak Burger I think.

Rich and Lindsey’s wedding was also very cool. I’m sure I saw photos of it on the web somewhere, and after a little searching and some lucky autocompletion I have found the link for your viewing pleasure.

Our family holiday in Queenstown was also great. I feel kind of bad writing so little about it, but it was very memorable for everyone concerned. Highlights not visible in the well-captioned photos describing the rest of the trip would include kayaking in hail on Milford Sound and the reaction we got when my parents realised the 5-star hotel room Louise was showing them through was where they would be staying that night (25th Wedding anniversary).

Now we move on to events since that post, and there have been many. As mentioned, I flew up to Hamilton for a week. Merodie, Craig and me went tramping on the day after we arrived, through some of the heaviest rain that had fallen in the region for some time. (Not a small amount considering this is the Waikato we are talking about.) However, as the rain was very warm, we didn’t even don jackets. There was a break for about an hour or two in the middle of the tramp, during which we had our lunch and saw an aptly named widowmaker plant fall out of a tree about 20m from where we were sitting. The following day was amazingly fine though, resulting in a bit of sunburn, as I had decided that sunscreen was an unnecessary item to carry up the hill due to the previous days inclement weather. Here’s the link to the photos from the tramp again.

The following day we made our way to parachute which was also a great time in the sun with friends and great music and more. Captioned photos here. Twas great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for ages and just hang out in the crazily hot weather.

On the Tuesday after Parachute I visited Hazel and Baby Jordan, followed by flying back to Christchurch where I met my new flatmate Emilee, after initially wondering who the visitor in our lounge was…

Camping at Mt. Cook the following weekend was great too. A nice walk up the Hooker valley track, where I made stream where there was no stream before. (Just to clarify, I did this by diverting water down a different course). I named it Luuk stream. Most original I know. I actually got quite a decent flow going. I think Andy took a video of the flow starting, so badger him if you know him and want to see that. - I must remember to do that. Apart from that, and what is shown in the photos, I’m going to weasel out of it by saying “What happens camping stays in the camping”. I also know that makes no sense, but I can’t be bothered working out how to word it better and you know what I mean.

Then, this weekend just been I was away again at the Navs start of the year leaders camp at Glen Tui. This was another great time, a bit of a renewal of focus, as well as some good adventures. Bush bashing up a nearby hill was a lot of fun, although the long list of people who injured themselves on the way may take a different view. A knee that required 5 stitches, 2 damaged wrists and about 4 wasp stings are the specific injuries I can remember people having, although I think everybody had at least a few scratches. I may (note the lack of a promise) post more about some of the things the camp got me thinking about in a later post.

In closing, I’ll say that I can relate to Mark’s latest confusionism, especially with all the busyness of late. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll leave finding that out as your homework.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2006

I can use my bike again!

by Luuk @ 5:58 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Bad things happened with my bottom bracket, but now all is well again. It has been broken for about 3 weeks, which has been most frustrating. Luckily I was on holiday for most of that. However, now it is fixed and I can bike to work and get back into regular exercise. I did substitute a swim yesterday, and walked to work. Mainly because my car was there.

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Friday, February 3, 2006

Turns out I lied…

by Luuk @ 12:01 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Despite my best intentions, there is still not going to be a blog update today. Before you shoot me, I have provided something to occupy your time a little. I’ve put up 170 photos of our family holiday in Queenstown and Milford Sound (I have ruthlessly cut them down from over 400 photos). I have also put up photos of the tramp we did last week and also some photos of parachute. I’ve even put captions on the parachute ones already!

Instead of updating my blog I went to see Domino with Mark and Andy. I have to say that I agree with the IMDB rating. I couldn’t really decide if it was a 5 or a 6. I was surprised at the end that it was actually only 2 hours long. There were some classic bits in it, but most of it wasn’t. Tomorrow after work I’m going camping at Mt. Cook for the weekend, so I’ll be gone again, so posting will be delayed further.

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Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Priorities

by Luuk @ 11:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Tonight is tidy room night - starting at about 10:30pm. Tomorrow is post on blog night.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

No post for long time

by Luuk @ 9:09 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Sorry about that… This one isn’t going to be much better as I am at work. The reason I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been doing lots of interesting stuff. Very quick summary which will be fleshed out later, with photos. (By later I mean in about a week).

Stuff I have done since last post

Holiday in Queenstown and Milford sound with family for a week.
Acquired Toyota Hilux Surf - Deregistered, bit of a project.
Went and saw Fun with Dick and Jane at the movies.
Went to Rich and Lindsey’s wedding.
Went to Exponents concert
Played pool in town with a bunch of people on Friday night.
Attempted to put a new bottom bracket in my bike.

I promise I will tell you more about all of these next week. I’m flying to Hamilton tonight. Going tramping up Mt. Pirongia Wednesday and Thursday with Craig and Merodie - hopefully weather is better than predicted. Then Parachute Music Festival from Friday to Monday and then maybe sailing or the beach or possibly some biking on Tuesday before flying back in the evening and then back to work Wednesday.

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Saturday, January 21, 2006

Hilux Surf

by Luuk @ 4:33 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, here is the first post in my catchup on blogging marathon. I am going to backdate everything. I will create a new post with links to all the ones I do so that none disappear once I finish writing them all.
I acquired a deregistered Hilux Surf off trademe as a bit of a project. Various things need doing, including new brake discs, power steering belt, exhaust, a bit of panel beating, some lights, rear bumper, a mirror (done) and more. Here is the pic that was on trademe. It is currently a little more dismantled. The biggest problem at the moment is finding time to work on it.

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Thursday, January 12, 2006

My Family

by Luuk @ 12:51 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Just a quick update as it’s late and I’m starting to get very tired. We watched the extended edition of Dances with Wolves tonight… 227 minutes! Watched it with Mark and Anna and made friends with Mark’s dog Jess.

My family is currently down on holiday, travelling around the South Island in a campervan. They arrived in Christchurch on Saturday evening and left Monday. In between we had a fantastic dinner at the Beavons, played some Table Tennis and some buzz, went up the gondola and also played minigolf. Also fell asleep during a few movies. I took a few photos on Sunday up the Gondola and at minigolf. You can find these here.

On Friday I’m off down to Queenstown to meet up with them and Louise, which should be an awesome time. I’m sure I’ll tell you about it when I get back…

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Wordpress Upgraded

by Luuk @ 12:37 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Not that you’ll probably notice any difference, but I just upgraded wordpress to version 2.0. The admin interface is significantly jazzed up which is cool. Very painless upgrade.

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Tuesday, January 3, 2006

The short version

by Luuk @ 1:22 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I still haven’t posted about what I got up to at Christmas or New Years… This is going to end up being the short version otherwise I’m never going to end up doing it.

Christmas was great. I spent Christmas Day with the Beavons and their extended family which was great - awesome people and amazing fodd, and then came home and hung out with Nick and Anna from about midnight. I spent most of the long weekend (Friday - Monday night) going to bed at an average of about 4am which is possibly why I’m struggling to remember what happened for some of it. On Monday we went to the beach and then we decided to get pizza and play some playstation outside in the sun, which actually worked quite well!

Somewhere around that time I also managed to fit in watching all the back to the future movies, which I’d never seen before. We also went and saw Legend of Zorro at the movies which was alright, but nothing overly fantastic.

For New Year we went camping at Lake Taylor in North Canterbury, which is at the end of a 35km gravel road and out of cellphone reception. - Fantastic! The North-West wind was also pretty strong, with a few tents threatening to take off here and there. I’ll let the pictures tell most of the story. We went up on Friday afternoon and came back on Sunday afternoon. We went for a walk up a nearby hill, from whence a number of the photos are taken, and went for a swim around the other side of the lake later in the afternoon. Pictionary, Uno, Cricket and various other games were also played with a number of quite vocal and probably justified accusations of cheating flying back and forth between all parties (mainly on the pictionary). We also had time for some tasty food in there and general enjoyment of each others company. Twas good to meet a bunch of new people.

Today I helped Gordon out by emptying the contents of his fridge, freezer and pantry and a large amount of the rest of his kitchen, which is now spread around my bedroom, the kitchen and the lounge (Well, the freezer and fridge stuff is actually in the fridge, but the rest is everywhere) I’m sure I’ll get around to sorting it out some time. Spent the afternoon and evening playing Playstation with Anna, Nick, Dave, Mess and Mark and also watched Dumb and Dumber, which I hadn’t seen for ages.

Tomorrow I’m going to the cricket (NZ vs Sri Lanka for those who don’t know), which will be a new experience as I’ve never been to a cricket match before. Should be fun, but I should probably go to bed now to be awake for it, so I’m going to stop writing.

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Sunday, December 25, 2005

Merry Christmas everyone!

by Luuk @ 3:22 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I just finished making a bit of a photo collage with photos of me from this year, to send to all my distant (geographically) family and friends, and I thought I’d put it up here as well, so nobody misses out. I’m off to bed now, making it took somewhat longer than expected. If you read this site regularly, you may have seen most of them before.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

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Monday, December 19, 2005

Sunny Weekend

by Luuk @ 10:01 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, after a bit of a drizzly week, The weekend (and Friday) pulled through with some actual sun, which was excellent. I got a whole bunch of washing done on Friday and organised a bbq with work people for Saturday. The bbq was a lot of fun. The sun came out just in time and it was great just to hang out, drink a few beers and eat some meat. Things got a little messier later on with a bit of a waterfight and some possibly unwise sculling. Also, despite Mark’s claims that “December sun doesn’t burn”, apparently it does, with most people coming away at least slightly burnt, despite liberal application of sunscreen. Gordon was there taking photos, for part of the time, which I will post a selection of when I get home. (Done)

I went into town with Anna and Mark afterwards and met up with a bunch of their friends. Twas a great night, meeting some new people, re-meeting others, some dancing, and more. I even managed to catch up with Emily, Mike, Erin and Adam at Sammy’s later in the evening.

Sunday morning we watched The Blues Brothers, which I hadn’t seen for ages and is still fantastic. In the afternoon I went to a Pre-Christmas Christmas at my friend Robert’s house. I hadn’t seen him for ages until he randomly pulled up next to me in his car after King Kong on Wednesday. I had a great time, hanging out, yummy food, and even learned how to play Taboo, which was a lot of fun.

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

I have a problem…

by Luuk @ 11:25 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I think I like movies too much. Either that or some awesome movies are coming out this year. And now there is another one to add to the list. King Kong! It is amazing. I will not be providing any spoilers, but you should go see it at the first available opportunity. I was on the edge of my seat for a good part of the movie.

I’ve seen some comments around saying that it is better than Lord of the Rings. I think it is different and in some aspects it was better in my opinion. This could be because I have read Lord of the Rings about a million times so there were really no surprises. King Kong had a lot more suspense for me and also a lot more action and even emotion I think. But, Lord of the Rings being one of my favourite books, I’m not going to make a call. They are both/all amazing movies. Go Peter Jackson!

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Slack

by Luuk @ 8:13 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m getting so slack at this blog updating thing.

I did go to the midnight showing of TCON-TL,TW&TW - I refuse to type that whole name again. The group of us that went was, Matthew, Mark, Luuk and David (Now also known as John). Despite the length of the title, the movie was fantastic and well worth going to see, especially if you like the book.

Friday night I went to Adam’s pirate birthday party, which was a very fun evening. I met some new people, tried some delicious drinks and just generally enjoyed the relaxing and hanging out.

Saturday morning I had coffee with my stalker Lannah who I met at the party. - This sounds a lot weirder than it actually is. We went to starbucks, and after ordering my Grande Caffe Americano, I was asked if I would like a 4th shot of coffee. Now, having just recently started drinking coffee again, of course I said yes, although I have to say I was a little worried by the implications. Twas a fantastic coffee though.

Saturday afternoon I was introduced to Lord of the Rings Risk, which I proceeded to lose. I made up for this on Sunday though when Emily and Me as the powers of good, defeated Matt and Paul as the forces of Evil against overwhelming odds, with the ring arriving safely at Mt. Doom. I also somehow managed to fit the groceries and a 2km swim in somewhere.

Well, another movie tonight, organised by our wonderful social club. I managed to resist going to the midnight showing of this one last night, so I could actually be awake this morning. A 3 hour movie at midnight is not often a good idea. Tonight it starts at the much more reasonable time of 7:45. The movie is of course King Kong and it is going to be fantastic.

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Thursday, December 8, 2005

The Forum

by Luuk @ 9:01 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I just posted a topic about the forum in the forum if you’re interested (and registered). It even has a poll.

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Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Wow, it’s December

by Luuk @ 11:32 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Since last update:

Saturday 3rd: Work Christmas party at the Crowne Plaza hotel. Great food (ate too much) and band and atmosphere. Awesome time. Followed by some time standing in queues in town (and a bit of talking in between). Also swam 2.5km beforehand.

Spent a lot of time on a number of days mucking around with my website. You may notice my new Library page which is kind of designed to be a useful way to lend DVDs/books/CDs/Games to people I know. Feel free to sign up (probably helps to be in Christchurch) and feel free to add your own stuff you don’t mind lending. Also added a bit of undocumented functionality to that to do other things that I want it to, which involved a few hours of late night and during the day programming which could have been spent exercising but weren’t

Friday 2nd: Anna moved in! - We went and saw Four Brothers in the evening which I enjoyed.

Sunday 3rd: Went to the beach with Anna, Mark and Nick. I got turned into a mermaid and my back got sunburnt everywhere I couldn’t reach - quite defined lines. Then came home and played Buzz with them, followed by some chess with Mark (score 3-3).

Thought I should include some photos because I haven’t for ages. - There is no bigger version because they were taken on a cellphone.

Me as a mermaid at the beach.

Going to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tomorrow at midnight. That is a very long title for a movie.

Probably more happened too, but in the interests of all the other emails and MSN conversations I’m busy with at the moment I’ll leave it at that.

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Monday, November 28, 2005

Buzz

by Luuk @ 11:00 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, thought I’d update while I was waiting for a licence for one of the applications at work.

I think I’m going to cut down on the detail in my weekend updates a little (maybe - who know’s what will happen).

I went for a couple of bike rides on Friday evening and Saturday morning. On Saturday I bought Buzz, which is a quiz game with buzzers for the playstation. Despite planning not to buy anymore games till I’ve finished a bunch of the ones I have, I am still a sucker for any games which have associated gadgets or which can be played by large groups of people. We spent a couple of hours on that on Saturday afternoon.

Then after tea, Mark and Andy came around and we played some Buzz and watched Batman Begins. Buzz lasted for quite a few hours…

I then got up in time on Sunday to watch the rugby (taped) at Lynton’s at 8am, as well as bits of the league. Then church. After that I helped Merodie shift out of her room. In the evening we had a flat night to farewell Merodie, starting with dinner at Cafe Valentinos, followed by some Singstar and Buzz action. I think it was my best ever singstar performance, breaking 7000 four times! With ranks of “Lead Singer” and “Rising Star” Not quite sure what was different from other times - maybe it’s actually improving my singing…

Well, that was kind of shorter… Note the lack of an in-depth description of the food I had. - I had a seafood platter/soup type thing with a foreign name . It was kind of like a seafood platter in a tomatoey broth/soup. Anyway, the licence I was waiting for has come available, time to go.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Newsflash!

by Luuk @ 9:12 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I just stood on the scales and the first digit was an 8! - much better than the first 2 digits being 10… So, 9.8kg to go. In other news, I went hunting and found the bag of clothes that I was going to take to the clothing bin at the start of this year because they didn’t fit, and found some shorts in there that fit perfectly. Also I have a new flatmate! Although reading that description, I’m a little scared… “Most cunning and devious” Uh oh…

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Saturday, November 19, 2005

Captcha

by Luuk @ 12:13 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been getting a fair bit of comment spam lately - invisible to you because I have to moderate it all first, but I’m going to put in a captcha plugin to try and stop it coming to me as well. This post may have some test comments.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005

180

by Luuk @ 1:20 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I had a pretty great weekend. We had an extra bonus day as well due to Canterbury show day on Friday which was pretty sweet.

But anyway, first things first! On Thursday night I went to see Serenity with a bunch of guys from work and it really was all that. I just realised that I missed a whole weekend from my blog… Here’s the update on that:
Went to end of year leadership team meeting for Navs, where we had the best lunch ever! There were smoked chicken spring rolls, asparagus rolls, frozen grapes, chocolate strawberries, lemon muffins, sushi, mini pizzas and more. It was almost a week and a half ago now, but the delicious flavours come back to me even now! Then I went round to Gordon’s place where a LAN was happening (weather was awesome, as per normal) and played on Blair’s laptop for a while, while he went and got lunch. I then went for a power bike ride to Sumner (My heart rate monitor tells me my average heart rate for the hour and a half it took me to get there and back was 162BPM) and then the Navs end of year party, where we had some fireworks and lots of conversation and some food, which I mostly resisted. When I got home (reasonably late), I watched the first episode of Firefly, the DVDs of which I borrowed off Mark at the LAN. On Sunday I watched the other 13… I did manage to pick up my bike from the party location and go to a BBQ in between, but other than that, it was pretty much solid all day. Firefly is the series that the movie Serenity is based on, so I felt I should watch it before we went to see it on Thursday and became completely hooked very quickly.

Anyway, back to weekend just been… Just before I went to see Serenity, I got a txt from Craig asking if I wanted to go waterskiing, and I did, which I duly did on Friday and Saturday at lake Aviemore with Craig, Adam and Andy. We camped out in style and had our fair share of adventure, which I should possibly not elaborate on to protect the innocent… Suffice to say that We paddled the boat for a while for no apparent reason on Friday afternoon, and raced back to where we were camped through hail, thunder and lightning on Saturday afternoon (amongst other things). On the actual waterskiing front, I think I improved somewhat and looked less gammy on two skis (I did get up first time which is always good). Also I managed to get up on the wakeboard and accidentally did a 180 because I didn’t know how to turn… Then I fell off. Craig also did his first 180 on the wakeboard, and like me, fell off. Then I kept trying to do 180s every time I got up, somewhat/completely unsuccesfully, when I should have probably been concentrating on turning properly and actually learning how to stay up on the thing.

I got home to find that Mike had acquired a couple of American girls, which I met on Sunday morning. We went to the beach (North Beach). I met the others there on my bike. Mike managed to convince one of them to eat some seaweed and we introduced them to the concept of a compulsory swim… Lots of fun. It poured down with rain after we got back, so we got some DVDs and made pizzas. Watched Flight of the Phoenix and The Castle. The castle was intended as a bit of a social experiment as the girls really like Napoleon Dynamite and it’s kind of an Australian equivalent. They liked it, which was impressive, given it’s apparent track record with clueless international audiences.

I went for another random bike ride last night and tonight, we had Captain Ben’s followed by a bit of ultimate frisbee and then a lot of singstar, of which I now have the 80s iteration.

Then I decided it was really about time I updated my blog with a real post… Here it is, enjoy?

Edit: If you go see Serenity, it is not essential to see the Firefly series first, but it gives the characters a whole lot more history when you see the movie and makes it that much cooler. Incidentally, the movie is currently sitting at #196 on the top 250 movies of all time on IMDB…

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Monday, November 14, 2005

by Luuk @ 3:36 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I promise to do an actual post soon, as I did do plenty in my weekend to post about… In the meantime, you may notice some google text ads placed (hopefully unobtrusively) around my blog. Normally I’m not really pro-ads, but if you see something you’re actually interested in there and click on it, it could help pay the costs of having the website, which is always good.

Currently it seems to be displaying lots of food recipes… I’m not quite sure where that came from. I thought it was supposed to be relevant.

I noticed it was displaying ads for some Australian sites and for smilecity.co.nz, so I stopped it doing that. as NZ is not Australia and I don’t think anybody’s website with a smilecity ad on it can really be taken seriously… Most annoying banners ever.

Oh, and if you really object, The adblock extension for firefox is your friend…

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Thursday, November 10, 2005

Squirrels

by Luuk @ 8:28 am. Filed under Uncategorized

If you like squirrels, this video clip is definitely worth a watch… It’s zipped, and about 953kb.

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Thursday, November 3, 2005

Mouth a little furry

by Luuk @ 8:48 am. Filed under Uncategorized

The Don - Don Amaretto went to a poker night last night with Boris, Frankie Four Fingers, Feral and Scarface. Whilst he had a great time, he’s not so glad that he had to come to work today… And is unsure of his status with regard to strong liquor and cigars. He distinctly remembers photos being taken, but will have to track them down, although it could be in his best interests if he doesn’t.

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Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Since Thursday

by Luuk @ 8:47 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, the rest of my birthday was pretty sweet too. I talked to my sister and my parents on the phone and we had an awesome bbq tea, as well as a fine corona, a pina colada and a wee dram of fine Scotch whisky.

The weekend was a little lazier than the previous one… I went for a good solid rollerblade on Friday night though. On Saturday I bought Eyetoy Kinetic for the playstation and got a new wheel for the back of my bike, which should hopefully put paid to the spokes breaking all the time.

I had an appointment for a fondue dinner at 6:30 with the youth group, which was a little jeopardised when I noticed it was 6:25 after Mike and me had been playing EK for about an hour or so… It is a lot of fun and also quite a solid workout. I did make it to the fondue which was great. Good food and great people to hang out with.

Sunday afternoon I started my 12 week fitness program which is the main part of the EK game, which means I have to do regular sessions with it from now on. I also finally finished watching the first season of Lost. Ready for the second now…

Yesterday night I went out and played pool with Merodie and Craig. Twas Craig’s last night in Christchurch which is quite sad.

Well, the reason I actually thought of posting. Went to get cash out of the cash machine this morning and was told the machine had a temporary limit of $400… I soon found out why when I walked away with a wad of 40 $10 notes in a most annoyingly fat wallet. I may go and change it at lunchtime.

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Friday, October 28, 2005

Recent search strings that have led people to my site…

by Luuk @ 12:04 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

katies my daily muffin

meaning of you can’t have your cake and eat it too

words to song family reunion by the ojays

$4.95 pizzas domino’s

australian jokes

intoduction of table tennis

jagerhof

meaning of merodie

sister eveleen retreat house sumner nz

xorg invert mouse

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Thursday, October 27, 2005

Fantastic Day!

by Luuk @ 9:00 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, today is pretty fantastic. First of all it’s awesome and sunny - with a temperature reading of 21 degrees on the sign on the way to work at 8:43. Secondly Mike made us an awesome cooked breakfast with bacon and hash browns and mushrooms and tomatoes and eggs, with juice and followed by some spicy fruit loaf. He went out at 7 to buy it all too. We ate it out in the sun at the picnic table. Thirdly it’s my birthday! (which may have had something to do with the secondly).

While I’m here I might as well update you on the rest of my week. On Tuesday Merodie and Me went for a bit of a walk… We started at the bottom of Hackthorne road and then walked up until we got to the sign of the Takahe, from whence we proceeded down the Harry Ell walkway which turned into the crater rim walkway, which took us all the way to Sumner. All in all about 6 hours. Then we went for a swim, had an iceblock and then biked back to the start where we had left the car. (We dropped the bikes off beforehand) Then we went to the Navs bbq, which was a good relaxing way to end the day. The views and the exercise and the weather were awesome!

Yesterday evening I went for a rollerblade from about 9pm till 10, which was great, as I hadn’t been for ages. I hadn’t realised how much I miss it and will definitely go again more regularly.

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Monday, October 24, 2005

A Post

by Luuk @ 11:50 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it seems pretty onto it to be posting in the middle of my weekend rather than half a week later… Although this being Monday I may be stretching the term weekend somewhat. This weekend is going to have somewhat monumental significance for the next 4 months though, so I thought I should post.

Basically, Merodie and Me have decided to have a wee competition which ends on the 1st of March next year. We each have a target weight that we are attempting to achieve in this timeframe. The person who is the furthest away from their target weight (or least under it if we both get that far) has to pay for us both to go skydiving. Now this is monumental for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I am going skydiving in March! or when we book it. I do have a fear of heights, but as this usually causes me to think I’m going to fall off, jumping out of a plane shouldn’t be too much of a problem right? I’m actually really starting to look forward to it. Secondly, the last time that I weighed my target (80kg) was 5 years ago, so reaching it is going to be no small feat. As of Saturday, I have to lose 17kg in 18.5 weeks. There is a slight but very important caveat to the competition though. Fortnightly for the 2 months following the competition we get weighed again, and if we way more than 2kg more than our 1 March weight, then, if we won, we have to pay for our own skydive. However, if we both go over then the loser still has to pay for both. So not eating or drinking for the final week is really not an option!

So because of all this I have been quite psyched up on the exercise and eating less fronts. On Sunday I went for a run in the morning and biked around for a fair bit of the rest of the day and today I biked to the shop for an iceblock… The shop was in Sumner though which was pretty much a 40km round trip. I’ve also managed to find time in my weekend to do a fair bit of reading and play a good chunk of Beyond Good and Evil which is a fantastic game! I was up till 2:30 last night when I decided I should really go to bed…

The challenge is going to be to keep this level of exercise up during the week when I have work to contend with as well, but I’m sure I’ll manage. I already lost a few kgs in the couple of weeks before the competition just by eating less, without any extra exercise, so I’m confident that I can give this a good crack.

I have turned to the darkside a little though, changing from blue to green milk. My calculations are that this will reduce my fat intake by about 800g over the course of the competition. It did take the calculations to change my mind though, I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.

Anyway, you’re probably all sick of this by now so I’ll stop.

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Friday, October 21, 2005

Delaying tactics.

by Luuk @ 5:44 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, this post seems to keep getting delayed. I’ve had a fairly busy week, so every morning at work I’d think that I would just churn it out, but then I realise that I want to put in photos which are at home. Anyway, last weekend was Mike and Jude’s wedding in Blenheim which was very cool. It was also Jason and Rachel’s wedding in Hamilton, which was a little disappointing as there is only one of me… Anyway, I went up on Friday night with Merodie and Jeremy in Jeremy’s car and he dropped me off at the campground I was staying at at about 10:30 pm. I then managed to set up my tent in the dark and went to bed. The campground was quite close to a railway track and state highway one which woke me up a few times…

On Saturday I got up and saw Mike as I was wandering up to the cabin section of the place where he was staying and we had a bit of a chat. He introduced me to his friends the Bugdens, who were nice enough to feed me breakfast and lunch and breakfast the next day as well! I also caught up with Dave and Gwyneth and a few of Mike’s friends that I’d met before.

Anyway, on to the wedding. It was very cool. I’ve put some photos here. The reception was awesome too, with great food and conversation and an awesome live band which played some good music for dancing. I even got to dance with one of the bridesmaids! Twas great catching up with Debz, because I hadn’t seen her for a while. I’m not going to describe the food, because apparently that’s cruel, but there is a photo of the menu, so you can go look if you like. It actually tasted even better than it sounds from the menu!

Then on Sunday I came back up with Gwyneth and Dave which gave us plenty of time to catch up as well. We stopped to see the seals at Kaikoura and had lunch there too, which was yum with brie and salami sandwiches. All-in-all a very cool weekend. Sunday night we decided to have a bbq which was yum. Monday - Wednesday I went to various bbqs and dinners as well, so it’s been quite a busy week really. I have been eating a lot less though in my ongoing quest to become a mountain runner, not having seconds at any of the occasions, which is pretty much unprecedented for me.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Great Weekend!

by Luuk @ 8:12 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I had a pretty awesome weekend. It was made even better by the fact that I had Monday off, so it was longer.

On Friday night I went to a 21st birthday dinner for Craig with his family at the Beavon’s. Twas an awesome roast dinner, along with some delicious venison casserole and some yum dessert. Then lots of chatting and listening to music. Fred Dagg definitely brought back some childhood memories. I’m sure we must have almost worn out that tape when I was little.

Then on Saturday I dropped off all my flatmates somewhere at some point in the morning, due to the pouring rain. I thought I might play a bit of Final Fantasy X and see what all the fuss is about. I’m not quite seeing it yet. The game seems to mainly consist of cutscenes, but it is quite relaxing. Then in the evening I went to Katie’s 21st, which was great. Awesome atmosphere with people just hanging out and talking. Some great nibbles around as well and the cake was delicious. It was interesting to hear some stories about Katie in the speeches too. Also, Jo arrived at our place just before we went to the 21st too.

On Sunday we (Merodie, Jo, Mike, Craig and me) went tramping at Mt. Somers, after running around trying to find some gas for the cookers and buying food in the morning. It started of with quite a steep climb, but we still got to Pinnacles hut in just under 3 hours, which was a pretty good effort considering the sign at the start said 3 hours 30 minutes. Craig and me (Well, mainly Craig) then went looking for firewood in the wet snowy surroundings and ended up chopping up a log we found, which was quite hard work. For future reference, walking on hills through snow in jandals is not the easiest or warmest or smartest idea. We had rice risotto and steak for tea, followed by tim-tams and hot chocolate, followed by crackers and cheese with wine. Also talked lots and played cards.

Monday morning we awoke to rain, which was kind of expected, but still not that appealing. We had lots of toasted pita bread pockets with smoked chicken and brie for breakfast. - I think we were all completely full and then walked back. We were walking in rain for a while, but then it changed to snow, which was very cool. Despite what might be called inclement conditions, we were actually quite enjoying the weather. Mike charged off about half way down to have hot soup ready for us by the time we got to the carpark, which was great. We actually got down significantly faster than we got up, arriving back at the carpark in about 2 hours 15 minutes. I didn’t take many photos, but I might post some if I get them off the others. We had a lot of fun.

Monday evening me and Craig played Colin Mcrae rally 04 in my bedroom, because the girls wouldn’t let us watch mov ies with them in the lounge… I think they were scared that we’d laugh at them or something. Rallying was quite a lot of fun actually, with me grabbing the early upper hand and Craig taking some wins later on.

Last night was the last Navs night of the year. We all had dinner at the Beavon’s, with some awesome chicken and some great desserts too. We then farewelled all the people who were leaving, which was a bit sad. They also had a bit of a slideshow of photos from the year which was cool and had some very funny photos and at times had some very apt backing music…

Oh, I should probably mention that I’ve decided to become a mountain runner… The only obstacle in my way is the approximately 30kg Mike reckons I need to lose to have the right sort of frame. It could happen. Although, 30kg could be a bit extreme… I have put on 28 since I started uni though, so I must be able to lose something!

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Friday, October 7, 2005

Unleashed

by Luuk @ 8:06 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Went to see Unleashed last night with Mark, David and Daniel. I thought it was great! It had some brutal realistic violence which I think justified it’s R18 rating (which we noticed once we bought the tickets), but the overall story was one of the redeeming power of love, which funnily enough made a brutal martial arts fightfest into a bit of a feelgood movie.

We went to the supermarket beforehand and got lollies. I got jaffas (Ojays) and “Tangy fruit sticks” which are tangy fruit sticks, not tangy fruit sticks, which was a little disappointing. I think I may have bought too many as I was all sugared out by the end of the movie and really didn’t feel like any more. I still have about half a bag left.

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Monday, October 3, 2005

Numerous anecdotes.

by Luuk @ 5:04 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I know there have been numerous times since my last post that I thought “Hmm, I should post on my blog about that before I forget”… Let’s see how I do. This may not come out in order and I will definitely forget stuff.

On Friday night, Emily and Merodie wanted to have a girls night, so politely asked me if I could have something else to do. I went and saw Stealth with Mark and Hobbs - David?, followed by a vanilla frappacino at Starbucks, which wasn’t very good. In fact it was kind of like vanilla and ice, which has led me to the conclusion that Vanilla Ice knew exactly what he was doing when he named himself that. (Calling himself crappy) The experience was somewhat improved by eating the cream off the top using a couple of straws as chopsticks. We then proceeded into town and played pool at iconic for an hour or so. I had some great shots and also some really bad shots. My consistency was not fantastic. Apparently I arrived home about 5 seconds after the girls had gone to bed, which was quite good timing. Stealth was better than I expected, although it will never be called an amazing movie.

Saturday morning we cranked out the singstar, which was probably painful for anybody listening when it was my turn. At one point in the proceedings I thought I was doing awesomely for about half the song, thrashing Emily completely, before realising that I had been looking at her bar and was in fact failing dismally. I think I did some washing too.

Watched Frida in the afternoon. I’m really not sure how it managed to pull off an R13 rating. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Me and Craig watched Life on tv in the evening, which was interesting, although it did drag on a little. Emily’s Scottish friends came back again too. - Not sure if I’ve mentioned them previously, and we cranked out the Singstar again. There was a large range of talent…

On Sunday I went to church in the morning, and saw Debz which was cool. Merodie and me decided to go get some chelsea buns from the bakery for lunch and Mike wanted a custard scroll. We walked to KB’s which had crap stuff, but we bought some anyway, just in case we missed out at other bakeries. Then we went home got our bikes and biked to Couplands and got some much better chelsea buns. We then realised we were short one custard scroll and biked to bakers delight. We ended up with a lot of baked stuff…

We watched HHGTTG in the late afternoon and then Mike and me watched Walking Tall while we made tea, which was quite late, but that was fine because we’d eaten quite a lot in the afternoon - Pork roast with apple sauce and roast yams and roast kumara and roast potatoes and broccoli and beans. - Awesome!

Oh, I haven’t had any coffee for a week and a half and I feel great. I had a coke somewhere in the piece and I actually felt quite messed up afterwards…

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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

What, another week already?

by Luuk @ 8:53 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I think I may have had a few too many late nights last week with the lure of the playstation. However that has now all changed… On Friday night I went into town with , Amal, Andy, Matt, Mark and Megan. I think I was the odd one out because my name starts with L. I got to the dux just in time to catch the start of the rugby (Canterbury vs Wellington) and despite my cheering Wellington came up 2 points short in the end. Although I guess they can claim the satisfaction of actually having scored a try… The others were eating a BBQ seafood pizza which smelled sooo good, but I refrained as I had already had a great feed at the Validation team BBQ at work.

We then moved upstairs to the lounge bar and sat around talking for a while before deciding to head to Rockpool, where my pool skills were somewhat rejuvenated and occasionally in evidence. I also quite enjoyed the ginger beer I had, which Mark had been told they’d run out of. - I think Andy, Amal and Matt quite enjoyed their’s as well… I think Mark was the first person to ask.

Saturday I helped Matt with his car a bit once I finally got up and spent the afternoon attempting to tidy my room amongst other things. Then watched Dodgyball with Merodie and Craig, which I have to say I wasn’t all that impressed with, although it definitely did have it’s funny moments.

Sunday morning I woke up with a headache and really tired, and realised that I hadn’t had any caffeine for about 36 hours. I decided over the course of the day that I wasn’t giving in and haven’t had any since, which has actually resulted in a lot more alertness for the rest of the week so far. My current replacement for my 4-5 cups of coffee a day is Rooibos tea, which I’m quite enjoying. I think I’m being a little bit more sensible about going to bed too, which is also helping, although possibly a contributing factor to the lack of posts.

I just made it to church on Sunday morning, which was definitely worth the effort, and spent the rest of the day doing the groceries with Merodie and some washing, which meant that the weather went kind of bad. I did play a little bit of playstation in the mix, but I have been remarkably restrained.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

I’m getting really slack at this…

by Luuk @ 11:49 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I think part of the reason why I haven’t posted much in the last week is that I decided to buy a playstation. However, as I haven’t actually played it that much, it’s kind of hard to use that as an excuse. I have spent a fair bit of time on Trademe though, looking at second-hand games. I did a little too well at this and am now up to a total of 18 games once they all arive… I’ll add a list at the end of the post for those of you who may be interested. Some of them I bought in a set with others, so I may sell them individually if I don’t like them.

On Friday last week I went into town to Anna’s farewell party, which was at Iconic. I actually had quite a lot of fun, although when I arrived there was pretty much noone I knew there. On Saturday I cranked out some washing, washed my car, oiled my bike chain - although now my gears are behaving strangely and generally enjoyed the awesome sunny weather.

On Saturday I went to the rugby with Mark, Amal, Andy and Mess, confident that Waikato would reclaim their Ranfurly Shield. Unfortunately my cowbell broke relatively early on in the piece and from that point on they were like sheep without a shepherd - or is that a cow without a cowbell, or just doomed. Anyway, I think Canterbury got a little lucky, but I do owe Mess a Double Cheeseburger meal at some point. I once again learn my lesson about the folly of gambling. :p After the game we came back to my place to watch the election results, which was made more digestible with some cheese, crackers, wine and chips. We also played a little bit of Tekken 5 ,which I’d bought earlier in the day, just to break it in…

Sunday was also a bit of a lazy one, played a fair bit of halflife and drank banana milkshakes. Also went to Spreydon Baptist in the evening and saw Luke and Ferg getting baptised. Then back home again for more cheese and crackers and wine - I think I’m getting quite cultured… Also at church they asked a few people what they thought of when they thought of Love, and one girl said she loved Cheese, which I may have cheered at. I think Merodie was quite glad we weren’t sitting at the front

Monday morning I awoke to snow everywhere. It was still snowing, and I decided it would be a good idea to bike to work… They actually closed all the schools in Christchurch, and the university and stopped the buses and a number of companies closed. A number of people who lived further away or on hills went home from work early, and I managed to get 12/10 for trying, eventually going home at about 3pm. I arrived home to a big pot of mulled wine and a movie (Finding Neverland) which I hadn’t seen, but did enjoy. Then later in the evening I enjoyed rewatching Sahara. Excellent light-hearted entertainment action movie.

Oh, I saw this igloo on the way to work - the following day I think. Today was an awesome sunny day again, so pretty much all the snow is gone. I’m really looking forward to summer, where pretty much every weekend will be warm and sunny. I love warm sunny weekends. Warm sunny weekdays seem kind of a waste when I work inside all day.

Well, that should just about do… List of games to follow as promised.

Singstar Pop
Tekken 5
NBA Street 2
NFL Street
Soul Calibur II
Tony Hawk’s Underground
Max Payne 2
Final Fantasy X
Colin McRae 4
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
FIFA 2001
Tony Hawk pro skater 3
Cricket 2002
Crash Bandicoot, the wrath of cortex
Hitman contracts
Return to castle wolfenstein
Driven to destruction
Gran turismo 3

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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Weekend

by Luuk @ 8:49 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I had a pretty good weekend. On Friday night we had Kelly’s 21st which had a 1920-1950 swing theme, so there were lots of interesting outfits. I was kitted out with a black double breasted suit and a black fedora. I will post photos when I find some - I forgot my camera again. A little bit of swing dancing and lots of talking to people. I also smoked my first cigar, which I apparently looked far too professional at. It kind of went with the whole gangster outfit.

On Saturday I slept in followed by waffles and ice cream for breakfast. Then I did a load of washing and helped Matt bleed the brakes on his car, after which we discussed cars and engines for the rest of the afternoon. I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again in the evening with Merodie, Craig and Mark. It just makes you want to bop your head. I’m still loving it.

Sunday I had a very lazy day. On the productive front, I did find out that our local liquor store has a reasonable selection of Dutch and Belgian beers (no I’m not talking about Heineken and Stella), although at $4+ a bottle, I can’t see it being too regular an indulgence. I did buy a 4 pack of Hoegaarden though. I also cooked tea, with a little bit of assistance from Craig at the closing stages, after which we ate tea, during which we consumed aforementioned beer. Mike wasn’t too impressed with the beer and passed his on to me - I will find one that he likes. Then went to bed reasonably early after Top Gear and CSI.

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Thursday, September 8, 2005

Craig’s 21st!

by Luuk @ 11:45 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m quite glad I don’t have the holiday posts to catch up on any more. It means I can get onto posting about all the fun stuff I did on the weekend!

On Saturday morning Emily, Alannah and me drove down to Balclutha for Craig’s 21st. We stopped in at Emily’s Grandad’s place on the way. Twas quite cool meeting him. He was quite cheeky really. We got there at about 5:30 and the 21st was starting as 6, so it didn’t take long before we were down at the A&P showgrounds where we had some good conversations and an awesome roast dinner and dessert before hearing some embarassing/funny stories about Craig. There were a few I hadn’t heard and also a few which possibly were not elaborated on as much as they could have been… We also got to watch the rugby, which was a little scrappy, but we finished them off in the end. We cleaned up and after that we all bedded down in the lounge at Craig’s house. I was in the other half of the lounge, which was quite convenient as apparently I fall asleep quite quickly… and they could shut the dividing doors to block out most of the chainsaw.

In the morning we went for a drive around the farm on the back of the ute, which was heaps of fun. - I really should do that more often. Jeremy followed us around in his primera, which suffered a few knocks to the front skirts and also found a few of the steeper slipperier hills a bit of a mission. Then we went to church, after which we got to have a go with Craig’s shotgun and clay bird thrower, which was awesome fun. I know I hit at least one target… Merodie was the star of the occasion, having never fired a gun before, she managed to hit the first 2 clays and then moved onto doubles, hitting one of the first pair and both of the second pair if I remember correctly.

Then after lunch, we eventually had to head home again. We arrived back around 10pm, after showing Alannah how steep Baldwin street was and stopping for Burger King in Timaru. I was actually quite disappointed to be back in the city. Anyway, an awesome weekend which would have been made even awesomer if it wasn’t just a weekend. I’m sure I’ll go back sometime, in fact I’m planning on it.

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Monday, August 29, 2005

Must finish posting about Holidays

by Luuk @ 7:20 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been lacking motivation/not even thinking about posting about the rest of my holidays recently. I read the Chronicles of Narnia last week, which could have something to do with it… Yep, all 7 of them.

My weekend was quite good too. Saturday we had the end of season 7-a-side soccer tournament in the morning in the rain with cold Southerly winds. Despite not winning anything and being cold it was still a lot of fun, although it did highlight my lack of exercise over the last 2 months. I’m still feeling it actually.

On Saturday night I went round to Mark’s place and watched the rugby, which was a fantastic game. Well worth the watch. Mark appears to have a phobia of M&Ms - he has never eaten one in his life. I have now tried unsuccessfully offer him all 3 flavours - original, peanut and crispy. How could you possibly refuse such sweet chocolatey deliciousness?

Sunday night we watched The Interpreter. I was sure I had seen subtitles for some of the foreign language sections on the plane, but the only result of trying to see if they were there somewhere by turning on English subtitles was to see “[Speaking Ku]” on the screen. I will find them!

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Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Productive Evening

by Luuk @ 9:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’m having a fairly productive evening. Most of this week has just involved me sitting around reading a book or surfing the web, not really being in the mood to do anything useful. Tonight however, I have already done all the dishes, (which I was supposed to do on Friday, said I would do on Sunday and finally did today) and have cleaned all the clothes off the floor in my room and put in a load of washing. (I hadn’t done any washing yet since I’ve been back.) I’ve been home alone since Sunday, as the rest of my flat has gone to Nelson till Friday, so the dishes sat there quite happily… It only took me an hour to do them

Anyway, the plan for this evening is to bring my blog up to date. I might back date the posts a little so that they fit in in the right place, so you may have to scroll down a bit. I’ll use this post to update you on what I’ve done since I’ve been back though. On the Tuesday I got back I caught up on everything that has been going on since I left and went to Navs in the evening. I was quite tired, and was rambling a lot about anything that anybody said to me. - This was the case before Navs as well. I even got an awesome “Welcome back Luuk” cake, which I wasn’t expecting, but was very cool and yummy. I had a good 9.5 hours sleep and went to work the next day feeling pretty good. I spent the rest of the week regularly feeling very sleepy in the afternoons though…

On Friday night we had a cocktail party at Matt’s place which was good fun, although I was driving, so couldn’t sample all the concoctions. On Saturday we had a LAN at Gordon’s, where I actually won the occasional track in trackmania and the occasional map in MOHAA which made for a nice change. Then I went to Michelle’s 21st, which had a Barbie theme. I even prepared for it and went online to look at some options. In the end I decided against swimsuit Barbie and went as “Barbie Cali Girl Ken” which involved wearing board shorts a singlet and jandals, which I managed ok, although due to not shaving I was a lot more manly than the Ken in the photo… Lots of fun, and some very disturbing costumes…

On Sunday I went to church, and then came home, planning to achieve lots with my day, but instead did very little…

Anyway, here I am an hour later with a post about how productive I’m being, so I should probably actually do something…

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Sunday, August 21, 2005

Photos are up

by Luuk @ 8:05 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve put the rest of the photos from my trip up. I do plan to add captions, but for some reason I’m feeling really tired, so I’ll do it later.

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Thursday, August 18, 2005

Back in NZ

by Luuk @ 9:08 am. Filed under Uncategorized

For those of you who are wondering what happened to the rest of my holiday, I do plan to write about it, but have been busy sleeping off the after-effects and working. I will post about it soon and put up the rest of my photos.

I did make it back safe and sound.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005

The Journey home

by Luuk @ 11:12 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

The journey home was relatively uneventful. I watched a bunch more movies on the plane, which I won’t go into because it’s to much to remember at this time of the evening and not really that important.

I had an approximately 15 hour stopover in Singapore, arriving just after 6am and leaving around 9pm. I was fairly feral by this stage, having not shaved for quite a while or had a haircut for a few months and reasonably travel worn as well. I looked all over the airport to try and find a cheap t-shirt to change into and eventually succeeded, finding one for 8 singapore dollars. I then booked a hotel room for 6 hours, and went for a shower. Then went and had McD’s for breakfast, followed by sleeping for about 4 hours, after which I noticed on a piece of paper in the room that I could get a shaving kit at reception, which I did and then shaved and had another shower - the showers were awesome. Then I had a haircut (which included a head wash and massage (the third time in 5 hours that my hair had been washed, which was a little excessive), followed by a bus tour of Singapore. We weren’t allowed off the bus, as we were technically still in transit. After that I bought a webcam, which was about $40 cheaper than I could get it in NZ and had dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant. - This was brought on by how much the tour guide talked about food. She was awesome! I think she was even more passionate about food than me…

After that I bought a single volume Chronicles of Narnia and hung out on the free internet for a while and then hopped on the plane home, where I arrived safely to be greeted by Mike. I was surprised at how warm it was actually, although twas nothing compared with Singapore. There, the trip is done! Now I can start posting about what I’m doing now again.

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Sunday, August 14, 2005

Amsterdam

by Luuk @ 10:57 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Right, I’m going to finish this. I got back to Amsterdam around 2pm and walked to Pieter’s flat again. This time in the rain. Every single shop along the street had a stand with umbrellas outside it, but I managed to resist the temptation and just used the hood of my hoodie. I made it there in one piece, albeit slightly damp. We then went out and bought some beers and snacks and went to the video store, and got Collateral, which we watched. Then Pieter’s friend Melle came round. For tea we went to a Surinamean? restaurant which was down the end of a long narrow street full of “coffeeshops“. We had a yum dinner and then went to a kind of theater festival thing in a park called “De Parade” where they have lots of fairly short theater/music/various shows in tents, and you just walk around and choose what you want to go to and then pay and go see it. There was a bit of a variance in quality, but most of the things we saw were pretty good. Then we went back to the flat and watched a movie (Miller’s Crossing) which I did sleep through a significant part of I think. Oh, I also managed to get the tram ride back to the flat for free because the conductor didn’t have change for my 50Euro note.

The next day Tim came down. Before he got there we went for a wander through the fleamarkets. We met him back at the flat and then went out again and bought a whole bunch more special beers and food for lunch and returned the DVD. We went to De Parade again and arrived bang on 5pm which is when the admission charge started and were just waved on through. We had tea there, saw a few more shows and got back in time to watch the soccer, although I would be lying if I said I could remember who was playing. We were consuming a few of the specialty beers as we watched the game, starting with the weakest and slowly working up to the strongest… This was actually quite funny comparatively as the weakest was 8.5%, working up to 11.6%…

After that at 2:30am we decided it would be a good idea to go have a look at the seedier part of Amsterdam - apparently my experience would not be complete without walking through the red light district. So we set out, Melle with his trusty umbrella, - I did actually end up with the hat, which we later lost in a bar where we went for a few more beers. I talked to an Australian girl there and Melle tried to convince a couple of Spanish girls that he was Irish. Anyway, long story short, we got back to the flat at about 4.30 and then I got up at about 7.30 to get ready to get to the airport via the train by 9:50, which I made right on time. At which point the journey home begun…

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Friday, August 12, 2005

Nijmegen

by Luuk @ 11:17 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

When I arrived in Amsterdam, I rang up my cousin Pieter to see if he was busy and then caught the train from the airport to the central station and walked to his flat and then up 3 flights of the steepest stairs ever. We then went for a wander through the streets, stopping for lunch with some massive salmon rolls and a beer at vondelpark on the way. Then when he had to go to work at 5:30 I caught the train to Nijmegen (about 1.5 hours) where I stayed with Oom Stef and Tante Yvonne for a couple of days.

The first day (Wednesday) we went for a look around Nijmegen (supposedly the oldest City in the Netherlands - they were celebrating their 2000 year anniversary this year. We walked through the city and thought we’d go and have a look in one of the art galleries, where they just happened to be having an art exhibition, with lots of artists from Nijmegen. There were some very cool paintings. Then we went up a tower that had been set up as part of the celebration. It was about 50m high and made of scaffolding. It was on the site where a Roman watch tower used to be. The view was awesome from the top (see photos).

Then we went to the museum and had a look at the Roman artifacts etc that had been dug up around the area, followed by a beer alongside the Waal river.

On Thursday we went to visit my cousin Tim at his room in Nijmegen. We had lunch there and then Stef and Yvonne went to go look at tents and me and Tim watched a movie (The Big Lebowski) and then played some Tekken 5. All I can say is that my practice in London served me well… Then we went out for dinner - I had steak and it was yum. Then we tried to go to Café Jos, which is a special beer café with hundreds of beers, but it was shut because the owners were on holiday, so we went to Café ‘t Haantje instead. Lots of fun.

On Friday I went back to Amsterdam to stay with Pieter. Which I will talk about in my next post. I’ll get there eventually.

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Tuesday, August 9, 2005

Forgot to mention…

by Luuk @ 11:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I almost forgot to mention that Sunday and Monday in Scotland were amazing sunny days. It does not always rain in Scotland. Although according to the placemat on the bar at the restaurant at Loch Lomond it does rain 312 days of the year… Happy Ayley?

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The rest of Scotland

by Luuk @ 10:22 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Trying to figure out how best to divide up the rest of my trip and have decided that by country is probably best.

On the Saturday that I wrote the last post, Ayley and me went to Edinburgh for the day. We arrived there early afternoon and visited some of her friends. After that we wandered around in the rain for a while. (I had been informed earlier that there was no way we would need the umbrella that day.) We had a before dinner snack and drink at a nice place I have forgotton the name of (help Ayley) - something Bistro, and then met up with Ayley’s friend David Bradley. We managed to procure reserve tickets to see Antonio Forcione, a famous, most excellent jaszz/acoustic guitarist and his quartet. Twas fantastic. Then we went to a German beer garden, where I was ribbed by some South Africans (more friends of Ayley’s) about the fact that we had just lost the rugby. We’ll see this weekend is all I can say…

Then on Sunday we went to church and then to Loch Lomond with Ayley’s friend Kemi. We had a great lunch on the shores of the lake and then Ayley and me may have jumped in the lake… I’m sure that if we’d known there would be water at the lake we would have brought our togs.

On Monday night I took Ayley out for tea afer another day of relaxation while she was at work and then on Tuesday, all too soon I was winging my way back to Amsterdam… Not going to be written up today though, you’ll just have to wait a little bit longer. There may be some hints in the photos…

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Saturday, August 6, 2005

Delayed post…

by Luuk @ 4:58 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I don’t really know where to start, because I’m writing this offline and I can’t remember when I wrote my last entry. I think it was during my time in London. When I say offline, I mean offline on a mac, on which MS word just crashed so I had to write all of this again.

On Monday, after some Ninja Gaiden action in the morning, we went to Canary Wharf Mall and Baz bought Singstar Popworld. The rest of this story should possibly remain untold. Suffice to say that doors were closed by others in the flat and I may in fact be a Sk8ter Boy…

On Tuesday me and Baz caught the underground to Kings Cross station. We didn’t try running into any walls so we could get to Hogwarts, as running in stations in London is not recommended at this point in time… On that note, I managed to not get blown up on the Underground in London and I rode it many times. I still have a whole mound of tickets to prove it… We had some breakfast and then I took the train to Glasgow. The trip went reasonably quickly. I read a book and listened to music on my X drive.

In Glasgow without a map, I was immediately tasked with finding the corner on which Ayley had parked her car, which was accomplished via texting. We then went for some coffee (and internet), did the groceries and then went out for dinner to a place called Antipasti, which was excellent. We then went to the video store and rented Million Dollar Baby.

On Wednesday I had a look around Glasgow while Ayley was at work. I went to the Glasgow Cathedral, which was amazing, and also to the Museum of Religious Life and Art next door and the oldest house in Glasgow. I then wandered up the hill/cemetery called the Necropolis. From the top you can see pretty much all of Glasgow. Before I did all of that though, I got sucked into one shop that was advertising 3 DVDs for £20 (6 DVDs later I escaped). I also got sucked into a bookshop and bought a few books. I also had a quick glance through the lonely planet under Glasgow to find out what I should go see which was very helpful, and may in fact be the only reason I knew about the Cathedral. I saw the other places on the way there. After tea Ayley and me went to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory, which I think may be my new favourite movie of all time! Actually, I tend to enjoy most movies when I go to them and don’t generally pick favourites, but this may be an exception. Best in genre anyway. The category movie is really much too broad to be picking a favourite for. Not quite sure what genre you’d put it in though. On the way home before tea, I also took some photos of a squirrel rummaging through my bag looking for food, but I probably won’t post any more photos till I get home.

On Thursday I had a rest day, just hanging out at Ayley’s flat watching a DVD, reading a book for a while. It was pouring down with rain for big chunks of it too. Then I went to meet her at Beanscene again and took in the Museum of Transport on the way. I got to the café nice and early (I was kind of travelling between showers) and read my book for a while with a coffee. After tea we watched some DVDs of Ayley’s farewell and Merodie’s 21st.

Yesterday I went to Edinburgh. I had a look through the castle after climbing up the mound to get there. The view from the top was amazing. Lots of little museums throughout the castle. I also tasted some Whiskey. On the way down the road from the castle I was bombarded with leaflets for various plays etc happening as part of the Edinburgh fringe festival. I also stopped for some lunch at a gourmet burger place to escape the rain which had just started falling. I forgot to mention that in my hurry to leave for the bus in the morning, I forgot my cellphone, which is also my watch, so I had no way of knowing the time, which is a little worrying when you have to catch buses etc. I did make it to the bus in time, which was good as I was walking quite fast and had to catch the subway for part of the way and didn’t really know where the bus station was. In the afternoon it meant that I got to the bus station just over half an hour early, so I went wandering again and got to see the National Portrait Gallery at high speed, and still got back almost 15 minutes early.

After tea we watched Edward Scissorhands, which despite being quite old-school now, I still enjoyed it. After the movie we went out for a few drinks with Ayley’s friend Colin. Spent some time discussing movies. Strangely they are both of the opinion that Lost in Translation is a good movie….

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Sunday, July 31, 2005

Another Week has gone by…

by Luuk @ 2:14 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I really haven’t been posting much recently. This week has been full of fun and excitement though. On Friday we went to the “Tilburgse Kermis” which is the biggest funfair in all of Europe. We went round, won played a few games, won a few prizes, had a drink and then went and swapped some of our prizes at the “ruilpost”. This procedure involved filling out a convoluted form and putting the prize to be swapped on a set of scales to measure up against the article being swapped for. We also went out for dinner (Greek) beforehand, which was excellent!

On Saturday I went to Meppel to visit Paul and go sailing. The more astute amongst you will have noticed that there have already been photos up for a few days. Sailing was fun, we had a few showers, but the slightly rough weather provided some excellent wind. Saturday night we went clubbing. We had an excellent vantage point from the balcony of a fight down on the dance floor between a couple of rival villages. Doesn’t happen very often apparently, but it got out of hand enough that they closed early. I also tried a few new drinks at the second club. Sunday morning we crawled out of bed around 11am. In the afternoon we went to Giethoorn, which is a small village that isn’t accessible by car. Lots of little canals and walkways. I have photos, but I’ll probably post them later. We had an icecream and went to a shell museum and a rock museum… I’ll leave some of the story till I’ve posted the photos. Then I caught the last train back to Tilburg. On Monday I went tent shopping with Oom Frans and Tante Rita and came back with a new pair of rollerblades…

On Tuesday Oom Frans and me went for a bike ride on the tandem, which was a bit of a new experience, and lots of fun. Also some much needed exercise. We covered quite a lot of ground, stopping at a couple of cafes and a brewery along the way. At the first cafe we had lunch (It was already about 2pm). Lunch consisted of 5 eggs on toast with ham and cheese and some salad. It came on a huge plate and was very yum. The brewery we stopped at is also a monastry. The monks brew the beer to earn a living - a noble calling!

On Wednesday Oom Frans dropped me off at the airport at 7 in the morning for my flight to London. At the airport they had a couple of computer terminals. I went over and had a look, figured out you had to pay to use the internet and then went and sat down again. Then a kid walked up to them, had a bit of a play, started cranking out some hip-hop tunes someone had previously downloaded and started playing pinball. - I must be losing my touch… I did go play some pinball after he’d finished though.

I haven’t been blown up on the underground yet, although I did feel somewhat dodgy with my huge backpack and dark hoody with white writing… Baz had a dentist appointment, so I went and had some breakfast at Canary Wharf mall and when he’d finished we went and dropped my stuff off at his place and then Baz, Cat and Me went out again. We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant (Wagamama) and then saw Fantastic Four at the movies. It wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t call it fantastic. Then we had pizza for tea.

On Thursday Baz and me went and saw some of the sights in Westminster. We got a “free” t-shirt each at the Saatchi gallery, and had some pretty awesome waffles. There were lots of police everywhere too.

Yesterday I took it pretty easy. Played a lot of Halo 2… and went and shot some hoops with Cat.

Today we went to the Burroughs market and spent a lot of money on food. Now, the first game of the tri-nations. Currently at 13 all…

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Friday, July 22, 2005

More about my holiday

by Luuk @ 9:57 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, since I last posted I’ve actually done quite a lot.

On Monday we went to visit Oom Han and tante Annie. We went for a bit of a walk and saw some funny things like an animal cemetery. Also lots of horses, because it’s a bit of a horse area. I will post photos soon for all you horse people. We also went and sat in a few cafes and then went back to Veldhoven reasonably late. A fun day all round.

On Tuesday we went to Amsterdam to get my brothers’ Ajax shirts printed with names at the Ajax fan shop at the stadium. We then caught the metro from there into the centre and had something to eat at an Argintinean steak house. From there we went to the Van Gogh museum and left there when it closed at 6 and had some drinks, some ice cream and some bitterballen at a bruin (brown) cafe. Then back to the stadium on the metro again and then back to Veldhoven.

On Wednesday my parents went to visit Opa and I went into Eindhoven by bike. My mission for the day was to get Tony’s KNVB shirt printed (Dutch national soccer team), but on arrival in Eindhoven I found that I had left it behind and had to bike back and then back to Eindhoven again - probably 20-30 minutes each way, I wasn’t really timing. I got the shirt printed and then went and sat in an Italian cafe for a while, with a coffee and a slice of pizza, followed by an awesome ice cream sundae. While I was in the cafe I also managed to organise most of the next few weeks of my holiday. A few texts back and forth to Ayley and Paul (my cousin) and I now have some actual dates. Then I biked back again and when my parents got back we drove to Oom Frans’ place in Tilburg where we had lots of good food for dinner.

On Thursday we went to Amsterdam again to drop my parents off at the airport. We went and visited Tante Maria first, and then dropped them off at Schiphol at 4pm and drove back, luckily just without any traffic jams. Then we had another yum tea - Oom Frans is a fantastic cook. He also had another visitor (Ton) over for tea. After that the three of us biked into town to a cafe and sat there and talked with a few other people too over a few (8-9) beers, and then eventually biked (a little wobblilly) back home again. A great evening.

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Monday, July 18, 2005

Lax

by Luuk @ 8:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’ve been fairly lax about updating my blog lately. Athough, if you’ve been paying attention, you would have noticed that the photos have been updating. I probably won’t write too much now either because we are going out again. On Friday we went to Oom Stef and Tante Yvonne’s place. They live just next to the Dyke in the country near Nijmegen. Twas awesome. We went for a walk in a nearby nature reserve as well and saw wild horses and cattle. Have a look at the photos. (One photo on that page and the rest on the following page.) I also saw a few other things that reminded me of home… Then we had a fantastic dinner and then we sang for a while… (8MB unedited, badly recorded MP3 - go X drive.) After/During that Marieke and Richard arrived and we stopped singing.
We sat outside and talked for quite a while with a bit of a fire going as well. Summer is fantastic

The next day we went to Pietersheim in Belgium for the Perry family reunion. Lots of sitting in the sun and eating and drinking and playing cards and talking. I possibly should mention that I won both games of cards that we played. (The second time I was partnered with Eric so it wasn’t entirely under my own steam. We played Chinese bridge first, which is a bit of a family tradition and then Hearts. After dinner and some more talking we went back to Oom Bert’s house. It was good to see everyone again and see how they’d changed and catch up on things.

Yesterday morning I got up early and chatted to my flat on MSN for a while, with webcam which was very cool. It’s quite funny seeing the keyboard war from the other end.

After that we went to Maastricht. We also visited my Oma’s grave in Echt. Mum and Dad dropped me off in Maastricht and then went to visit Mum’s friend Denise. It was going to be my first day of actual touristing. I then quickly realised that a number of options were going to be closed to me because it was Sunday… I went and looked through the St. Servaas Basiliek Church, but not St. Jan’s next door, because it was shut. Then I went and sat down for a while at a cafe in the Vrijthof. Sitting “Op en Terrasje” (on a terrace - outside a cafe) is a very common pastime in the Netherlands. I had a white beer, a Hawaii burger and a ginger ale. Then I went for a boat tour (photos) on the Maas and visited the tunnels at St. Pietersberg (in the middle of the boat trip). There are 220km of tunnels with 24,000 different hallways. They were created through mining for Stone and have been used for many purposes since. There are also lots of inscriptions/artwork/carvings/graffiti on the walls. Even Napoleon Bonaparte has his mark on the wall. The tunnels have been used for growing mushrooms, vegetables, sheltering from the German’s in WWII and various other purposes. There was a plan in place in WWII to be able to house 50,000 people in the tunnels. There was a bakery with 5 ovens and a chapel amongst other things. In the end about 8000-10000 people lived down there for about a month or two just before the Americans liberated Maastricht.

Anyway, after the boat tour, I got picked up at the railway station and Denise, Rens, Mum, Dad and me went out for dinner to a wok restaurant. The way it works is that you select your food (raw) and you take it up to the counter and they cook it for you, with your choice of source. You could go as many times as you liked, so needless to say, I ate quite a lot… It was all very yummy though. Then we went back to Denise’s place and we watched some videos of when they came to visit NZ. It was very funny seeing our family and their family on film 5.5 years ago and seeing how much everyone had changed. I then proceeded to sleep in the back of the car all the way home.

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Friday, July 15, 2005

Thursday

by Luuk @ 8:51 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

On Thursday, we went for a walk in a nature reserve somewhere. Can’t really describe it more specifically. One thing I noticed is that even when the sky is blue, the horizon is still a bit grey… I noticed some Gallagher electric fences, and a few other things that reminded me of home. - Have a look at the photos for more details. We stopped off at a cafe in a small village on the way back.

In the afternoon I biked to the supermarket all by myself to get some pizzas. I did it with directions too, no map or anything. Twas to get some pizzas for tea, which I then proceeded to cook while Oom Bert and Richard and Shirley got ready to go on holiday. They got away about 8.30 at which point we sat down and watched The Mosquito Coast which wasn’t amazing. All seemed to end rather suddenly.

Today (Friday) We’re going to Oom Stef’s house, then tomorrow is the Perry family reunion (My mum’s side).

**NB** The first 24 photos in my last lot were quite massive (700kB each or so). They have now been reduced to a slightly more dialup manageable size.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Lazy Days

by Luuk @ 9:33 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Haven´t really done much the last couple of days. Monday we went to the supermarket (Albert Heyn), which took a long time because Mum and Dad seemed to have forgotten how to shop. It was actually quite different though, mainly in the little things.

Yesterday Richard and me biked into Veldhoven (no helmets required, much more civilised. I bought the dutch version (can also play in English) of Beyond Good & Evil for 7 Euros. However, I´m going back today because it doesn´t work. You may have to learn to read Dutch to read the thread though.

It´s been hot and sunny. We did spend some time playing computer games though.

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Monday, July 11, 2005

Photos

by Luuk @ 8:23 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve put up some photos of the weekend here. No descriptions yet, although I will probably add them at some point.

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On the internet again!

by Luuk @ 6:50 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it’s been a few days, but now I have access to the internet again. On Wednesday we went to my Opa’s place (in Germany) and stayed there a couple of nights. He is currently between internet providers as he is just having his ISDN replaced with ADSL. Good times! A bit of Nostalgia from my Dad in Sittard during the day. (Twas where he grew up.)

Then we went to Jagerhof for my Opa’s 80th birthday and Oom Bert’s 50th too. Summer finally arrived, and my Mum got very sunburnt. We played soccer, consumed lots of yummy food, went for a ride in a horse cart, played poker, sat in the sun and drank lots of various beverages. The Dutch I had is coming back, although I still struggle a little. Lots of fun. I also have hundreds of photos, which I may have to censor a little if I value my life… It was great to catch up with family too, some of whom I haven’t seen since I was 5.

Now I'’m at Oom Bert’s house. I may even get around to putting up some pictures later…

The whole language thing is quite interesting. I speak Dutch, but I can understand the Southern dialect, which is quite different to actual Dutch a lot better than I can understand Dutch. I think it’s because my parents always speak dialect at home, but we lived in an area that didn’t speak it just before we left Holland, so I didn’t actually speak it. It was actually quite weird hearing my youngest cousins speaking it, because i’ve only heard adults using it. Anyway, enough.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Day 2

by Luuk @ 6:16 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday me and my uncle - enough with the uncle - Oom Frans went to pick up my parents from the airport. We spent a few hours in Den Bosch - I think that’s what it was anyway, and had a look through the cathedral there - massive, and saw lots of old houses, which really don’t stand up straight. Once again, probably will post photos. We went to bakker bart for lunch. It’s a bakery, and they make a roll for you on the spot. Oom Frans has an “old car” It was made in 1991. He also has some actual old cars, but his car is considered old here. I saw my auntie (Tante Maria) at the airport as well.

I’m still speaking a lot of English, but I’m going to try to move more and more to Dutch. Taking the plunge. I’ll just have to think more about what I say… Today we’re going to visit Opa.

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My Surname is Paulussen

by Luuk @ 6:04 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

One thing I forgot to mention the other day… Cracked me up at the time. My uncle asked me if I wanted some strawberry pie and I said yes, followed by “I never say no to food” to which he responded “My surname is Paulussen, why do you even bother asking.” Now you all know. It’s completely genetic!

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Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Tilburg

by Luuk @ 10:27 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Tilburg is where I am now, at my Uncle’s house. The second half of the flight went a bit slower than the first half. I watched another couple of movies - 2 weeks notice, which I thought I hadn’t seen before, but I had, and Million Dollar Baby, which I had seen before but wanted to see again. However, my on demand video died just before the end and I couldn’t watch anything after that. I had a window seat and the guy next to the aisle was sleeping, so it was also kind of hard to get out and walk around. I could still play games though, so I thought I’d try playing some chess. Normally the computer always beats me at chess, but I won 3 games in a row on the medium setting and then changed it to hard and won the next 2 games as well, so either I have improved at chess, or the computer really sucks.

Anyway, enough about the in-flight entertainment. Coming in to land in Amsterdam was surprisingly similar to landing in Hamilton (apart from the lightning I saw) We came in across green paddocks and it was grey and rainy. however once we landed we taxied for ages - probably close to 20 minutes, so the airport is somewhat bigger than Hamilton… At the airport I bought a new sim card for my phone on the Orange network, which as it turns out only works intermittently in my phone, so now I am borrowing my Uncle’s. I had to catch the train to Tilburg, so bought a ticket and waited at the platform. One guy holding a beer came up to me and asked if I had a cigarette, which I didn’t, but that was quite interesting considering it was about 8:30 in the morning. There were so many new things to see from the train, but I didn’t take any photos. - Canals and a marina with hundreds of boats tied up, windmills etc. Probably the funniest thing was reading one of the small newspapers on the train and seeing a classic NZ photo of dog trials with a farmer holding a gate, a few sheep and a border collie, but it was talking about the Dutch competition. So they do it here to… Something for Craig This was all before Den Haag, where I was supposed to change trains to Tilburg. However, when I got there, there was a problem with lightning hitting somewhere, so I had to go to Rotterdam and change trains to Tilburg there. All worked out eventually though and I was met at the train station by my Uncle and Auntie. My uncle sells rare bike parts on Ebay for a living, so lots of interesting stuff to see. If you want to have a look, try this link. Not sure if it will work though. If it doesn’t, you should be able to figure out his username from the link address. We went for a walk after that and went out for tea. We had some drinks before that, and I was almost absolutely gone after just 2 beers. A “dubbele trappist” and a “La chufee”. They are both reasonably strong beers, but I think it was mainly because I was tired. We had a massive platter of seafood for tea. We also had some “bitterballen” before tea with our drinks. We’re going to go pick up my parents from the airport today.

There are so many old buildings around too. For example, this house was built in 1928. I’m sleeping up in the attic. I will put up some photos at some point (probably). That’s probably enough for now.

Oh, my new mobile phone number is +31638167568. I think you may only be able to send and receive texts from me if you are on Vodafone though (not Telecom).

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Monday, July 4, 2005

Singapore

by Luuk @ 2:09 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’ve made it as far as Singapore… The flight has been good thus far. I almost watched 4 movies, with my headphones being collected 2 minutes before the end of the last one. I hadn’t seen any of them before. On demand movies is awesome. I watched Sahara, Miss Congeniality 2, Hitch and almost all of Caddyshack. If I could open multiple tabs or windows I would include IMDB links, but I can’t, so I won’t. One thing I feel that I should mention is that it is really annoying if you are my height and the person in front of you reclines and you want to use the screen, because you have to recline your seat and slouch right down to get a clear picture :
When I got here I went for a swim in the pool on the roof and sat in the Jacuzzi for a while (total time nearly 2 hours) It’s actually not a bad deal. Swim, jacuzzi, shower, towel, shampoo etc and a free drink (non-alcoholic) for $13.65SGD which is pretty good for airport prices. Only another hour and a half to kill now… I should manage ok. Also got a Sunday Star Times on the plane which had some fantastic articles on the rugby. I really should show them to some of the Lions supporters around the place… Also, this computer has a mini mouse.

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Sunday, July 3, 2005

Today!

by Luuk @ 8:05 am. Filed under Uncategorized

See y’all in 6.5 weeks! Spent most of yesterday packing and tidying my room for the new occupant moving in on Monday. He moves out again just before I get back, which is all very good. Ran out to buy a few necessities during the day as well. Then picked up an extra 6kg of textbooks from Gordon for Baz. All about economics and accounting and stuff… There I was thinking he was a Software Engineer. Then I went to the Beavon’s for tea, which was Yum with a capital Y. Then to Mark’s place to watch the rugby. Dan is currently the man. Then we went and watched War of the Worlds. Possibly not the best movie to watch before flying… Saw Yan and Carrie afterwards as well. Yan’s first comment was “You’ve put on weight Again???” Got home just after 11:30.

We’re going out for breakfast this morning and then to the airport. When I get to Singapore, my current plan is to go for a swim in the pool on the roof.

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Friday, July 1, 2005

We’re all going on a Summer Holiday (Well, I am)

by Luuk @ 5:45 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

It’s slowly starting to sink in that I don’t have to go to work for the next 6 and a half weeks… Actually that’s not true, it really isn’t sinking in at all. But, I still don’t have to go to work for the next 6.5 weeks. W00t!

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barp barp barp barp barp barp

by Luuk @ 9:44 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Wednesday night we went out to Lone Star as a flat and consumed much good food. I had the “Big John” Sirloin, which weighed in at approximately 350g. Then home again for a few quiet drinks.

Last night I went and saw Star Wars again with Merodie, Mark and Anna. Scarily I nodded off through some of it, which I don’t think I’ve done at the movies before. I think it only happens to me in movies I’ve seen before. The only time I can remember it happening with a movie I haven’t seen before was the time we watched Once upon a time in China at Baz’s old place after some social club thing one time. I don’t think it was as good as IMDB makes out…

Anyway, I digress. This morning I woke to the incessant sound of Emily’s alarm at the other end of the hallway, and lay there annoyed at it for ages, wondering why she wasn’t waking up and turning it off, before realising that she’s in Oamaru…

On the getting ready to go front, I’m not making much progress, but as I got paid today, I will go pay my car registration and get some Euros from the bank. Planning to go hard tomorrow and sort everything out - I don’t really have any other time to do it… Work midwinter Christmas tonight, and our flat’s going out for breakfast on Sunday.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Grooaan…

by Luuk @ 11:38 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Feeling so bloated after so much good dessert…

I accidentally left my X drive recording voice in the kitchen when my small group was over for dessert. (I was playing with it and forgot it was switched on when we went to the lounge about a minute later). When I mentioned it would be kind of interesting to listen to (when I noticed almost 4 hours later), Emily demanded I delete it as she and Rachel had gone to the kitchen for a private conversation. I can see a lot of fun being had with this device… It said on the screen that it had enough space for about 1010 hours of voice, so it could be left running anywhere, as long as it was plugged into the wall, otherwise the batteries would run out.

If you’re wondering, I did delete the file.

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Great Day

by Luuk @ 5:48 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I had a great day at work on Monday. Got lots of work done and spent some time teaching a new employee how to run a testsuite. - It quickly became apparent to me that I have learned a lot over the almost 2 and a half years I have been here. I’m thinking about trying to document the process and all the tid-bits of information you need to know in any spare time at work. I also found out that I’m going to get promoted to Senior Test Engineer, which is great news to hear 5 days before I go off on holiday. I came home on a high. The rest of the week is going to be rather busy, with our small group coming here for dessert tonight, going out for dinner with the flat tomorrow night and the Social Club mid-winter Christmas party on Friday night. All that without any mention of getting ready to skip the country on Sunday. Feel free to comment if you can think of something I should remember to do. (And don’t forget to state the obvious, because I will forget.)

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Monday, June 27, 2005

Ages!

by Luuk @ 11:59 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Far out, I haven’t posted for ages. I’ll write some stuff while I’m running my test. Let me see. Aah, Thursday night I didn’t end up being home alone, because Mike came home from Nelson. Turns out there really isn’t much going on on TV on a Thursday though.

Friday night I went into town with people from work. Some interesting concoctions were consumed. I guess that’s what you get when you ask for “something good” at the bar. We started out at the dux, then went down to Iconic and ended up at Shooters. I got home about 3:30am.

On Saturday I biked to Riccarton and picked up some plug adaptors for my trip overseas and found out that the cheapest option for cellphone is to get a sim card over there, which means I’m going to have to write down and transfer all my phone numbers. I also happened to go into the Dutch shop on the way home and came out with some Dutch Liquorice and an interesting bottle of the same without the ice. It looks something like this if you’re interested.

Then I watched National Treasure in the afternoon with Emily, followed by going round to Mark’s to watch the rugby and then more town, although we stayed at Iconic and came home around 12. The highlight of the night was definitely the last game of pool. I was playing Rachel and Mark, and managed to win, despite one of their supporters surreptitiously shifting most of their balls into the pockets without me noticing…

On Sunday I went to church in the morning which was really good, and then to Amy’s farewell lunch and then to Michelle’s flat, where Mark eventually turned up and Stalker met Stalkee - or is that Stalkee met Stalker? I consumed vast quantities of hot drinks over the course of the afternoon, with two coffees at the Blythe’s and then three cups of hot chocolate at Mrs Yang’s. I also saw their fox, which was quite disturbing and may result in me not going back there for at least 6 weeks… Then I went home and straight out again to church and then came home, ate tea and watched XXX on TV. I hadn’t seen it before, but as Merodie said, it achieves a whole new level of far-fetchedness.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Migration Complete

by Luuk @ 9:18 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve finally finished transferring all the archives across from my old blog. Also, any post that had comments on my old blog has a link back to those comments. (Sorry to anyone who has an rss feed on my comments, it could be somewhat repetitive at the moment.) Having completed this process, the word count at the bottom of my blog is now accurate and before this post reads 28,894 words, which is pretty crazy really, although if I was to reproduce my blog over the course of a month and it was a novel, I wouldn’t even be 60% of the way to finishing a nanowrimo novel. However, it is significantly more than the word count required for most university essays - not that I ever had to write one of those… The joys of engineering! But I digress. That’s all I have to say really, so I’m going to stop now.

Oh, I found this funny.

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Oops

by Luuk @ 7:05 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday I emailed my flight itinerary to my Dad (because he asked for it) and while I was typing it in, I noticed that I arrived back in Christchurch the day I was supposed to start back at work, which was not supposed to happen. This left me with two options - try to get another day of leave from work or change my flight. I thought I’d try the flight option first, so I went into flight centre at lunchtime today. I explained the situation to the lady with the white fingernails and after asking mildly mockingly “You’ve had these tickets since 11 February and you’ve only just noticed that the dates are wrong?”, she changed them with no hassles whatsoever. In and out in a couple of minutes. So I am still coming back on Tuesday and will make the last navs night of the term.

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Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Tuesday.

by Luuk @ 5:41 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I was home sick again yesterday. I spent most of the day reading, well - attempting to concentrate on a book. We had builders in fixing Mike’s ceiling, so sleeping was kind of out of the question. Turns out all the wetness which caused the problem was due to the shower fan venting straight into the ceiling space, with nowhere for the steam to get out. The highest point in the roof is above Mike’s room, so it all condensed there and then dripped down onto the plaster.

The internet was out all day too. I thought I’d try re-installing Syberia in the afternoon, as I’ve re-installed windows since it was crashing as soon as I started playing it. It worked, so I played a bit of that too. Quite a relaxing game.

I spent most of the weekend without any energy, coughing and spluttering. Feeling much better now though.

Saturday night we went to a Jazz concert by the Canterbury foundation brass band, which was awesome, and then went to the Fox and Ferret and played a bit of pool.

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Saturday, June 18, 2005

Room

by Luuk @ 12:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I have been tidying my room, which has included looking at what was on some of my old backup CDs. On one of them I found a backup of my old geocities website. At the risk of mockery, I have put it up on my site. All email addresses have been deleted and I don’t care if a link doesn’t work - it’s probably because I don’t have the file.

Here it is. Bear in mind that this was created quite a long time ago and last updated 5.5 years ago.

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Life in Queenstown.

by Luuk @ 11:36 am. Filed under Uncategorized

My sister has a new blog - the old one was pretty much stagnant. I have changed the link in my sidebar.

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Friday, June 17, 2005

Slick

by Luuk @ 11:18 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

The new definition of the word slickness is kind of a mixture of the word slack and the word sick. I sort of feel like I’m both at the moment. I’ve picked up a bit of a cold, which I’m not feeling fantastic because of and it is leading to apathy and lack of energy to do stuff. “Stuff” includes posting to my blog, but I’m doing it anyway and seeing if I can actually remember anything as I type.

This has probably not been helped by going to see Batman Begins at the midnight screening on Wednesday night. - The best Batman movie I have seen.

I ended up coming home sick at lunchtime yesterday, because I was feeling nauseous, light-headed and snotty. I did manage to cram pretty much everything I had to do into the first half of the day though. Watched Hook on my sick afternoon while drinking hot drinks. Hook was one of the first movies I ever saw at the movies.

In food news, lots of pizza before meeting at The Castle on Wednesday, Fantastic cheese at meeting at Lynton’s yesterday evening, Cake Day at work on Wednesday, Apple and Rhubarb crumble for dessert yesterday and Lemon Sorbet for dessert tonight. Oh, there was also a game of chocolate chess against Merodie, which would probably be best described using the words total annihilation.

Took my car in for a warrant today. Apparently both the front brake hoses need replacing.

That’s enough from me.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Lightning Speed Rundown

by Luuk @ 12:35 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Ok, haven’t posted since Thursday… What’s happened since then. Saturday and Sunday, people involved with Navs from around New Zealand gathered to spend some time getting some teaching on how we can better live out what we believe in our everyday lives. - What does it look like to be a follower of Jesus where we are currently placed. We had/have Erin staying with us from Auckland. Saturday night Craig, Adam, Kelvin and me went and played pool at Iconic, with the final result being 8-4 to those with North Island origins. Some close games, although all 4 of the 4 were due to us accidentally sinking the black or the white when we weren’t supposed to… (or in one case, both at once). I won’t go on, as I am humble in victory and it was mostly Kelvin’s doing anyway. We had tea (pizza) with lots of people at The Castle beforehand. Tonight I am already up much too late, as Mark convinced me to go see batman at midnight tomorrow when it opens. Sunday afternoon a bunch of us went for a walk up in the port hills. When we were coming back, I saw Theuns going the other way… An interesting end to that story right here.

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Thursday, June 9, 2005

Business Cards

by Luuk @ 8:39 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I have discovered another use for business cards beyond the construction of geometric shapes, and a fantastic use it is! When one goes into any restaurant or other location, one can put one’s business card into the large jar which serves as a collector for entries into a monthly draw.

For this example we will use the NZ Blood Service… I went in a couple of weeks ago, saw the jar and thought, “I have business cards, I’m going to put one in.” Then, yesterday I got a call and lo and behold, I was the proud owner of a basket of wonderful treats! I must try this more often… Although I think I may run out of blood.

I went and picked it up today after I went out to Tulsi Indian restaurant for lunch with my new team at work. Twas yum.

Yesterday my old flatmate Jeremy came round to visit and to pick up the stuff I’ve been borrowing off him for some time, because he’s leaving the country. Great to catch up and reminisce about the stuff that happened back in the day. We also got to talking about my trademark double click and fart (Has to be seen to be understood) and whether I still did it, and upon rendition cracked up completely. Also talking about the farting related presents I have received for birthdays over the years. The ones I can remember are “The little book of Farting” and “The little toilet book”, a motion activated farting gnome named Hans from Austria, “The Complete Book of Farting” and (loosely) the movie Ice Age. I still have no idea where this whole reputation came from…

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Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Wordpress

by Luuk @ 11:03 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

In case you missed it, my blog is now powered by wordpress. This post is mainly so that the people who read it via atom feeds will see that it has been updated and will know that they have to change it to the new RSS feed…

I have shifted across the last few months of posts and will shift the rest as I go. It is a one at a time manual process, so it’s taking a while. I haven’t started figuring out the best way of transferring all your fabulous comments, but rest assured, if it is possible it will be done!

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Good to know :P

by Luuk @ 9:25 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Love Horoscope

Scorpio
08/06/2005
There’s almost no aspect of the game of love you don’t have covered. With the Sun and Mercury bringing a sense of passion and Mars, planet of passion moving through the most romantic area of your chart, anything bland will leave you feeling flat. They don’t call you Sexy Scorpio’s for nothing.

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Dancing like a fox!

by Luuk @ 8:39 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Last night we had a dance evening for Navs, organised by Tony and Emily. Twas at Wharenui hall, and the people from UCanDance at uni came and gave us a 2 hour accelerated course in modern jive. The most fun I’ve had in ages! I’m still on a bit of a high. I think this may have something to do with it being the only exercise I’ve done for a week and a half too.

My long weekend ended up being kind of mundane, with a lot of sitting behind my computer mucking around with my website. I really should have been more disciplined and done something outside and fun (in the cold and sometimes rain). The highlight of the weekend was Reuben’s 21st, where I met some new people and got to know a few that I already knew a bit better. There was also food. before the 21st Hannah, Craig and me watched a movie (True Lies). Everyone else “Had lots of work on” or “Had a big essay to write” or “was really busy at the moment”…

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Friday, June 3, 2005

Sleepy

by Luuk @ 11:27 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Feeling a little sleepy - in a good way, about to go to bed. Word of the day: Vulpine, revealed by Michelle, defined by google define as “Of or pertaining to the fox; resembling the fox; foxy; cunning; crafty; artful.”

I had tea at the Beavon’s on Thursday night, because Emily and Merodie were too busy with uni to cook tea. Yum food and good to catch up. I also got some newspaper and firelighters to take home. However, I couldn’t find the firelighters in my car when I got home. After attaching my new bike lights to my bike, I went looking for them and found them about half way to the Beavon’s where they had fallen off the roof of my car…

Then delivered some supplies to Emily and Merodie at uni and came back with an Emily.

Lazy night in front of the TV and fire tonight and now some chatting and blog “updating” before bed.

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Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Quick update

by Luuk @ 7:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m kind of sick of sitting behind a computer at the moment, so I don’t really feel like updating, but just for you I will.

Sunday I went to church in the morning and then prepared for the bit of the small group leaders meeting that I was leading at 3. Then went to church again in the evening, where they had some baptisms, which reminded me (as well as this post) that I was baptised 5 years ago on the 28th May.

It was a little challenging to be reminded that 5 years ago I publically committed my life to God, and a good chance to refocus my life a little on that basis. I’m not going to write any more about that now, but I may some other time.

Other than that, things have been routine, although our Navs study last night was great.

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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Searches that have led people to my blog.

by Luuk @ 10:12 am. Filed under Uncategorized

From Yahoo

as you can guess
Famous Haircuts in the year 2005
oops famous
famous indonesians

From Google

hack oztips

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Saturday, May 28, 2005

Like a Fox on the Run!

by Luuk @ 1:29 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’m typing this rather late at night, (for me - It’s nothing compared to the hours young Mark keeps) but I thought I should update while certain things are still running through my mind, and while some caffeine continues to wear off.

Wednesday was my Dad’s birthday. Happy Birthday! A little bit on the late side. I will refrain from posting a bad photo of him though like I did for Tony. It was a good day for photos though…

Thursday night Emily, Louise and me went to the movies and watched Bride and Prejudice, which was better than I expected (substantially, because I really wasn’t expecting much). It helps to have seen the original Pride and Prejudice as a lot of it is shamelessly translated into a modern Indian setting. There are also lots of outbreaks of song and dance too. One of the main actors is Sayid off Lost, and the main actress also happens to be a former miss World amongst other things. Have a look at this list of trivia. - It’s amazing the stuff you can find out about a movie and actors and actresses on the internet.

Then I dropped Louise off at the bus stop first thing (7:15) this/yesterday morning and then went to work. After work I visited Merodie at uni with some energy supplies, where I also talked to Gwyneth, Adam and Ashley. The scary thing about that is that two of those (and me) no longer actually go to uni and yet we were all there around 5pm on a Friday night… After that I went to the Dux to say goodbye to Lindsay and Kerstin, where I sampled some of the Dux’s fantastic BBQ seafood pizza and then went home for tea, and then to Alannah’s 21st which was a lot of fun, getting to know a few people a little bit better (I think). I may even have put one of them to sleep.

When I hopped in the car to come home, this song was playing… A perfect end to an already great day. I’d also like to thank Caffeine, without whom the goodness of this day would probably not have been possible. A bit more than usual, with a couple of coffees, a bottle of lift plus, a substantial amount of coke force-fed to me by Adam and a cup of tea. It should all wear off soon…

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Lunchtime Update

by Luuk @ 12:56 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Seeing as I’ve finished everything I had to do at lunchtime ahead of time, (go home, eat the lunch I forgot and come back) I’m going to be good and update my blog. It appears that I haven’t updated since Monday, so I’m going to have to stretch my brain a little, trying to remember. Thursday night I went and saw Star Wars and it was fantastic. What was even more fantastic is that the social club at work paid for my ticket and for my popcorn and coke!

Friday night, Louise arrived from Queenstown just before 9pm and at about 9:30 we picked up Chantell and Katie and were on our way to Hanmer for our small group weekend away.

The pouring rain experienced on the journey was gone by morning and we had amazing weather for the rest of our stay. We did a few things, including walking up Conical hill, drinking coffee at a Cafe, playing on the playground, watching movies, sitting in the hot pools and eating lots of chocolate and biscuits and lollies and chips and popcorn. I don’t know if I should post a link to the photos I took… They mostly aren’t very good anyway. We got back on Sunday and ate more.

After we got home, Louise claimed that she could eat 1kg of chocolate in 1 sitting, which we turned into a challenge (6 hour time limit), that she gave up on after only about 500g in 3 hours.

I also got a haircut and we went to church and came back and looked at all my baby photos… Possibly not a good thing.

Oh, I played a little bit of the trackmania demo last week, which was quite fun. Some of my friends have a bit of a challenge going, which I haven’t really had time to give my full attention yet.

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Lack of Posting

by Luuk @ 9:07 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Sorry for the lack of posting. After just getting my own web-hosting space, I decided to change to a different hosting provider, so I haven’t been posting, to avoid stuffing things up. It should be all sorted now though, provided this post appears on my site.

There will be a bigger post some time soon. My sister is staying, so I don’t have much time to be posting at the moment.

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Monday, May 16, 2005

The Weekend.

by Luuk @ 9:38 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Quite a good weekend.

After I wrote my post on Friday night, we watched an episode of Lost and then Emily went to bed. at about 11:45 Mike, Merodie, Adam, Andy and Erin showed up, back from an afternoon of tramping and sitting in the hotpools at Hamner and we watched the Emporer’s New Groove - so much for my early night!

I played soccer on Saturday morning and we had our first non-loss of the season, drawing 0-0. We had quite a good turnout, with 21 players, 4 fans and 2 cheerleaders! We decided to have a pre-match game to warm up, which was quite fun considering we had almost two full teams, and “we” managed to win that one 5-2.

After the game we went to the Blythe’s place for a bbq and sat around in the sun and ate meat, followed by ice cream and then talking. Meeting at 4, followed by takeaways, and then a 21st. After the 21st, Merodie and me watched the same episode of Lost again, so she could catch up again. On Sunday I read the Da Vinci Code (about 7 hours of Sunday anyway), which I’d borrowed from the Blythe’s on Saturday. That was pretty much my achievement of the day. We had waffles for breakfast too, which was yum. Also went to Spreydon again in the evening, which was really good. Then home for Steak and Wedges and ice cream, donuts and chocolate self-saucing pudding.

Now I’m back at work, still in the same office, waiting for my computer to come back to me…

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Friday, May 13, 2005

Engineering Manager

by Luuk @ 9:53 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I am now the engineering manager at work. - Well, maybe not, but I got to use the former engineering managers office for half of today, as my computer mysteriously carked it. I’m almost sure it wasn’t my fault this time. But once again it is being reformatted by IS. Luckily I just finished a project and didn’t have any pressing work, or it would have been quite disruptive. I’m guessing Monday’s going to be mostly spent re-installing everything on my poor compy though.

We did have beer and pizza after work today and it was all over - including the eating, by quarter to 5, which was most impressive.

After that I came home and spent the next 3 hours organising my photos in Picasa, which is a bit of a boring way of spending a Friday evening. At 8:30 Emily ceased studying and we watched an episode of Lost, and now I’m back on the computer. I’m probably about to go to bed. Busy day tomorrow.

Last night I wrote my about page if you hadn’t noticed. It’s worth checking out if you have nothing better to do. If you don’t get it, follow the links.

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Thursday, May 12, 2005

Atom Feed

by Luuk @ 1:45 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

For those of you for whom this is relevant and have been refraining from complaining about it, I found out this morning that the atom feed for my blog wasn’t working at the new location, and this has now been fixed.

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Tuesday, May 10, 2005

My Day

by Luuk @ 11:38 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I had a reasonably interesting (to me anyway) day today. A little bit of a deviation from the run-of-the-mill get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep kind of day. First of all, I slept in, due to going to bed a little late the night before. This meant that everyone in my flat had a shower before me. In the meantime, I had breakfast, hung my washing and did the dishes. I then had a shower and a shave, not necessarily in that order and still made it to work by 8:40.

At lunchtime I headed off to the university careers fair with the intention of having lunch there and then doing my stint on the Allied Telesyn desk promoting the company. I got a park right in front of the UCSA building, which was quite handy (as opposed to Mark, who was parked way down past engineering…) On shutting my car door I felt my pocket and to my chagrin I noticed that my keys were not in it and were in fact still in the ignition of my car, which was unfortunately locked. Incidentally, I only did that word of the day thing once and have pretty much given up on it. - I thought of chagrin all by myself.

Un-phased by this, I headed inside and had a chat with the people currently on the desk and was told that it would be fine if Mark drove me home to get my spare key. I then headed off to get some lunch from the cafe and ran into Kathryn and had a good chat, which was good, because I hadn’t seen her in a while. Then I got my wedges and went to the library steps and texted Emily to get her flat key so I could get in at home to get my keys. I then bought a book at the bookshop on the way back - CCNA self study guide. It is for an exam which has now been retired, but I’m guessing the material is still pretty much the same.

Then went home with Mark to grab keys - turns out Merodie was home anyway, so I could have omitted one of the steps above. Then back again to talk to people about the company and explain why we didn’t take biology majors etc. A certain Walker did come up and rant at some point. Actually it was more of a chat than a rant, but it just works better with the URL that way.

Home for tea after work finished and found my washing all dry, due to the fantastic weather of the day. Some of it has been hanging there since Saturday, during which time it’s been almost dry, drenched, frozen, thawed, and then finally dried, so it has been through a lot in this whole cleaning process.

Then we had our navs group with Gwyneth bringing an awesome chocolate cake covered in pebbles for Kelvin’s birthday. It was still warm too! Twas a good study too. If you’re interested in what we’re studying, have a look here. We did study number 3 this week.

Now, I’m tired, so I’m going to bed.

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You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

by Luuk @ 11:05 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, we were discussing in our small group today what the meaning of this phrase was, and I for some reason thought it was one of those phrases that is often misquoted, so my homework assignment was to go away and figure that out. It appears that the phrase is correct, although the original slightly more understandable form is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

This page seemed to have a reasonably good answer. Basically, this is what it says:

When given a choice between 2 mutually exclusive desireable things, you can’t have them both. For instance, you can either eat a cake, or you can keep it for later, but you can’t do both. Unless you only eat part of the cake, but that doesn’t count..

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Monday, May 9, 2005

Frozen Washing

by Luuk @ 11:55 am. Filed under Uncategorized

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Sunday, May 8, 2005

Grand Central Lake

by Luuk @ 2:12 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Our front lawn

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Various

by Luuk @ 10:49 am. Filed under Uncategorized

We had a LAN at Gordon’s yesterday, and as per the rule of LANs, the weather was fantastic. Domino’s Pizza had $4.95 pizzas 10-4 yesterday and today, so we got 8 - one each. A few of us came here to watch the rugby at 9pm after picking up some takeaways for tea, and I found that our nice, wide, big enough to stretch out on couch had been replaced with a small, narrow, low-backed model and the old one had been chopped up and put in the woodshed. All I can say is that I am un-impressed, and I should probably leave it at that. Then we went back to the LAN, and after packing up our computers at about 2am, eventually went home at about 3:30.

I woke up this morning to hear the rain on the roof. The sound of my washing drowning outside on the line. The other load is still in the machine.

Plans for today include getting more pizza and eating it at uni with Emily at lunchtime and possibly a shower and a shave.

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My New Website

by Luuk @ 10:49 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Any thoughts on what I should do with my new website? I have a few ideas myself, but suggestions are always welcome.

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Saturday, May 7, 2005

In Progress…

by Luuk @ 1:00 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Ok, so it doesn’t look completely amazing right now.

If you’re wondering why I even picked some of those colours, I’m trying to replicate colours from my PC, which has a few coloured lights on it… Some of them aren’t quite right and some of them really need that inner glow.

**edit** In case you’re confused, I have actually changed the colours since I wrote this…

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Friday, May 6, 2005

The geekiness continues…

by Luuk @ 9:37 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Bl00dnu7.net

Went swimming at Wharenui pool with Merodie yesterday. Quite possibly the furthest i’ve ever swum. Watching her lapping me over and over again was somewhat demoralizing, but I’m guessing it can only get better from here. Merodie just came in and reckons it’s not true…

I did however manage to swim further than her without breathing - 1.5 lengths as opposed to 1. I possibly have an advantage there, because I’m really not very good at breathing when I’m swimming anyway.

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Thursday, May 5, 2005

Do you know what day it is tomorrow?

by Luuk @ 11:52 am. Filed under Uncategorized

http://www.nopantsday.com/

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Wednesday, May 4, 2005

A Title

by Luuk @ 10:31 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Firstly, the photos of the pizza we made back in March have been added to the post.

Secondly, once again I haven’t posted for a wee while due to busyness. I think I’m just going to stop saying that in future. The weekend was one of eating and sitting around in the sun, amongst other things. We had a few people staying to, for the purposes of replacing Mike’s head gasket. Friday night Mike made roast chicken. Saturday, we played soccer again, and lost by a smaller margin than last time, with a final score of 3:2, although I think we were a little unlucky, as we many more shots at goal. Saturday afternoon, Mike and me did the shopping, coming away well over budget, due to the number of cleaning products required. This was followed by a bbq tea. Sunday morning we had a brunch at the Beavon’s to go to, which was quite a struggle. There were bagels, waffles, pancakes, sausages, bacon, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, peaches, cream cheese, and I could keep going all day. I ended up being there till about 5pm, when I went home to cook tea, after which I went to church at Spreydon Baptist again. This time it was about reading the bible with two eyes, and seeing it from the perspective of the 80% of people in the world who have never heard a dial tone. - Very challenging.

The rest of the week has been pretty much routine, so I won’t go into it. Incidentally, my 100th post slipped by without any fuss a couple of posts ago.

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Friday, April 29, 2005

Darth Vader’s Blog

by Luuk @ 10:35 am. Filed under Uncategorized

An entertaining read… Find it here.

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Thursday, April 28, 2005

Option B

by Luuk @ 8:56 am. Filed under Uncategorized

In the previous post, it was in fact the “too sleepy to think” option rather than the “nothing to report” option.

We were planning to go tramping on Sunday, but due to inclement weather, we nipped that idea in the bud in the nascent stages of planning. Merodie and me went into town and played pool instead, after going for a run in the rain in Hagley park in the morning. Well, it was supposed to be a run, but my shin splints decided otherwise, although I did still run a significant distance. After pool, we got Subway. I decided on a Turkey, ham and bacon melt with double meat, which surprisingly turned out to be quite a lot of meat.

Then we went round to Merodie’s parent’s house in search of warmth, before going home for a roast dinner, which was yum, but a bit of a struggle after my mammoth sub.

Went to Spreydon Baptist Church after that, where the guy who headed up World Vision’s relief effort in Sri Lanka after the tsunami was speaking, which was excellent.

Then came home and watched Love Actually (one of Merodie’s imported VCDs)

Monday was another lazy day. Gah, now I’m trying to remember if we actually went running on Monday… We went and watched Mike’s rugby game in the afternoon, which his team (Old boys div 1) won 42-15 over Marist-Albion, which was a very good win. We were a little worried at the start when Marist scored the first try, but everything came right.

Incidentally, I’m going to attempt to incorporate the word of the day into my posts somewhere - although that doesn’t necessarily mean I will post every day.

Oh, and I got all my Oztips Super 12 picks right again. I just can’t help myself.

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Wednesday, April 27, 2005

23.5

by Luuk @ 10:55 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I think half birthdays stop being interesting as soon as you stop wanting to be older, but I am 23 and a half today. Mark, Andy and Amal turned up at work today just to celebrate. Well, actually, they probably didn’t even realise, but they are back from their trip.

Not much else to report, or I’m just too sleepy to think, one of the two. Have been reading a couple of reasonably interesting articles sent to me by a friend about school. The first is the acceptance speech by 1990 New York teacher of the year. The second is another article (more recent) by the same guy.

I especially liked this bit in the second article, and yes, I am all about the hugs.

“So far I’ve asked you to consider three aspects of modern American life we all have been accustomed to think really matter: the space program, our well-funded government schooling, and state-of-the-art technology. On close inspection all seem to me the obsessions of madmen more than essential parts of a good life or a good society. How did they come to matter when many things that really matter (like getting hugged a lot) are overlooked?”

Just some food for thought if you’re bored.

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Sunday, April 24, 2005

Midweekend Post

by Luuk @ 8:57 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I thought I’d post now, because I was a bit lazy last week, and because it’s a long weekend and I’ll probably have forgotten everything. Friday night we spent the evening together as a flat after another fantastic Pizza a la Mike (I take no responsibility for blatant ruining of the French language), just talking over a few drinks. Quite a good bonding time really. Have I mentioned before that we have an awesome flat?

Yesterday was quite lazy. I went and got Croissants for breakfast from the bakery, which went down quite well. Eventually I convinced Merodie to be lazy and we sat down and watched a movie (Anchorman), after which we both fell asleep.

The afternoon was not completely lazy though. We did stew a whole bag of apples, and another one of pears.

Then we had a late takeaway tea with Nick and Will and a movie (Wimbledon). Just after the movie finished we heard things hitting our window and found that it was Cameron egging the place. Unfortunately for him, Mike caught him, and he ended up covered in his own eggs.

Just after Cam left, large quantities of large hail started pelting down, along with lots of lightning and thunder - I’m guessing every few seconds for the lightning, which was quite unusual. I had to drop Nick and Will home, and the roads were still covered in hail, but I resisted the sliding temptation.

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Thursday, April 21, 2005

Gone…

by Luuk @ 10:06 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, after many months of not updating, The life and times of PaulieB have been snuffed out… Now I’m going to have to replace my sidebar link “Paul (+links from there)” with actual links. No, wait, I can just shift the “(+links from there)” to Kelly’s. Excellent.

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Monday, April 18, 2005

More Food and Tipping Goodness

by Luuk @ 10:47 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Another fun weekend has just passed, although I am somewhat feeling the effects now.

On Friday, Merodie got home from Indonesia, so the place is a lot more lively again. Mike made an awesome tea on Friday night. Chicken with peaches and peppers wrapped in bacon with roast potatoes and pumpkin. Merodie was watering at the mouth as she got ready to go out to the Park Royal for tea.

Then on Saturday we played our first game of soccer of the season, which I am still feeling the effects from. Then in the evening Adam invited me out to a buffet dinner at Sequoia 88 to celebrate his graduation, at which I ate quite a lot and twas excellent.

Sunday after church, Jo came round which was cool and we had a BBQ. Then we had our Navs small group leaders meeting and then a bunch of us talked late into the night. Then I got up early to make the girls breakfast in bed (Waffles and Coffee). Check out the morning faces…

On the tipping front, another perfect week This coming week seems a lot more difficult though, lots of possible upsets.

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Thursday, April 14, 2005

Impromptu Supper

by Luuk @ 11:09 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Adam rang me up after work today and asked if I’d like to come around for “a bit of a supper” he was having, so I went along. Turns out it was his birthday… Happy Birthday Adam! Lots and lots of food and now he is as old as me again

Big day tomorrow! Merodie comes back from Indonesia, and lots of people - Merodie, Jo and Adam are graduating and, last but definitely not least, it’s my brother Tony’s birthday. In honour of this auspicious occasion, I think I should post a photo… This is Tony - I’m sure he’ll love me for this

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Tuesday, April 12, 2005

I don’t like to Brag…

by Luuk @ 11:05 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

It’s funny how that sentence is always followed by a “but” as it will be in this case - you see, I actually do like to brag… I am now outright first on our work Oztips Super 12 ladder by one point.

In other news, I got a new hoodie today, which is somewhat subtly, albeit completely irretrievably geeky. Here’s a picture:

The world of computers can eat your time deceptively quickly. I thought I’d do a quick blog post with a photo of my new hoodie, then found that the only editing software on my new windows install is MSpaint. I then thought to myself, lets go check if there is a new version of The GIMP, rather than installing from an old installer that I have lying around. It turns out that a new version has just been released, but has yet to have the Windows binary installer package created, so I’m going to hold off till that’s done. Then I decide to install antivirus software, which has PDF documentation, so I have to download Acrobat reader (new version of that also), and decide to see if Steam is still working after the reinstall which takes time also. - Somehow HalfLife 2 and CS source have become uninstalled, althought it says they will use local files (including save games) to reinstall, but apparently the Steam servers are too busy. Anyway, still no photo. Ok, all done now, finally, photo is in. It’s weird, whenever I try to take a photo of myself with the camera on timer, it never looks like I’m actually looking at the camera.

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Friday, April 8, 2005

It was all worth it!

by Luuk @ 1:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I re-installed Windows, and barring a few glitches and random reboots that I had to sort out (driver conflicts/problems) everything went smoothly. Now I’ve re-installed Splinter Cell and it started up first time and went perfectly. Haven’t had much of a chance to play it yet. Had a quick go at the first level, but I’m going to start again, because I haven’t really got the hang of it yet. I did have time to notice the Airwaves gum product placement in the cutscene before the first level though…

Also went round to Adam’s for tea last night, which was yum steak and wedges with some probably much needed frozen vegetables… (well, they weren’t frozen when we ate them.) Also helped him remove the radiator from his car after we figured out the water wasn’t coming from the radiator hose…

And now a handy tip for all you people who have lost their whole posts due to something going wrong with Blogger… If it happens, click on “new post” again and look just above the top left of the text box under the bold/italic/etc icons for the magical words “Recover post”. It worked quite well with this one - twice. and then thrice and then quadriplegic.

**edit** I just found out that that recover post function is new today!

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Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Taking the plunge.

by Luuk @ 9:07 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’m going to do it, I’m going to re-install Windows. This in itself is not generally that difficult a task. The reason I have been avoiding it is the 60GB of games that I have to reinstall along with it, which again would not be an issue if I actually finished games and didn’t have to worry about savegames and the like. However, having already put this off for far to long, I’m going to take the plunge and risk having to replay some games from the start.

Currently downloading the latest video drivers etc. to ease the process. I have already managed to locate my windows CD. - now just service pack 2 left to find. Incidentally, it has been about a year and a half since I last installed Windows, which was when I got my computer.

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Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Games are not fun anymore.

by Luuk @ 10:52 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I really haven’t had a lot of luck with games lately. Syberia crashed right at the start and now Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory is failing it’s CD check. Disturbingly, someone on a forum said reinstalling windows fixed the problem “as well as sorting out some installshield issues” - I have those issues and I’m starting to think I may have to do the same.

I started the CD check, which pretty much slowed my computer to a halt and then pishhhheeeewwwwww… everything did grind to a halt as the power went out. So I lit some candles, played my guitar for a bit, watched Peter hang up a clock in the dark in Merodie’s room and then went back and tried again when the power came back - still no luck. The dreaded Windows re-install is drawing ever closer.

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Monday, April 4, 2005

Queenstown

by Luuk @ 9:15 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, here I am, reporting back after a fantastic weekend. I went down to see my sister Louise in Queenstown - the adventure capital of the world, and it went a little something like this…

Friday I was planning to leave work at 4pm to start the trip down, so I arrived at work at 7am (as I did the previous day), only to find out at about lunchtime from Blair that there was a certain DVD player on sale at the opening sale of the new Bond & Bond on Moorhouse. (Half price at $150), so I left work just before 4 planning to shoot over there, grab a player, shoot home, drop it off and continue my journey. On arriving there, I stood in a queue for about 15minutes. Considering I was at the front pretty much the whole time, I thought this was a little excessive, but they were having some teething problems with the new tills and everyone was going nuts on the hire purchase, so this was kind of to be expected. Anyway, I started heading out of Christchurch at about 4:35pm, which corresponds almost perfectly with rush hour, so that took a little longer. The rest of the trip was uneventful, stopped at Subway in Ashburton and ate half then and half in the dark at lake Tekapo.

On arrival in Queenstown, I started reading Louise’s directions, which started with “When you get to Queenstown, go right down Shotover street and follow the lake along.” I misinterpreted this somewhat. First question, when have I “got to Queenstown”, Secondly searching for Shotover street on the right doesn’t work when it actually means “Go all the way down Shotover street”, Thirdly, what Lake? It was 11pm at night and there was no lake to be seen. Anyway, after speaking to one Service station attendant with not very good English at Mobil and then another that was much better at explaining where to go at Caltex, I eventually found my way to Louise’s flat, where we proceeded to consume a pizza, and eventually went to bed at about 2:40am

In the morning we went to her hotel for breakfast, which was half price for the buffet. I think Louise ate at least as much, if not more than me, which is quite impressive considering the ~40kg weight difference. I think eating must run in the family or something.

Then we went on the Shotover Jet, which is in fact the world’s most thrilling jetboat ride. I’m sure we came within inches of most of the rocks! (or even centimetres in the metric system) Louise got to go on for free - the benefits of working in the tourism industry, and I got on for a child’s price by association. I splashed out and got the photos too, which I will post right here as soon as they are updated on the website. - and they finally have been, so here they are:

After that I took her to The Warehouse to pick up a few things required in preparation for winter. We then walked up Queenstown hill, which was a solid effort. A nice lady was kind enough to take our picture in the “Basket of Dreams” while we were up there.

The Basket of Dreams…

View from the top of Queenstown hill

Wouldn’t want to mess with her…

We got back down in time for our next half price deal at “Solera Vino”, a flash French restaurant. - They even had snails on the menu. However, I decided to start with the famous Solera french onion soup, followed up with some fantastic Venison, all washed down with a Steinlager, and then Profiteroles for dessert. Honestly one of the best desserts I have ever had. On being presented with the bill, I was very glad that it was half price… There was also a wonderful quote on the wall there, which is going to become my new motto - well it would be if it wasn’t pretty much already.

“Life’s too short to be slim.”

Sunday morning I eventually got up (10am) and we went to the supermarket to obtain the necessary ingredients for pancakes, which we then cooked and ate.

The flat is furnished in the cardboard style…

Including Louise’s bedroom.

Although this is more than made up for by the view from the balcony!

After that we went for a wander through the city centre, taking in all the various end of season sales in the various outdoorsy type shops around the place. We both managed to avoid actually buying anything though. Then Subway for lunch and twas time for goodbye. The drive back was good too, actually better than the drive down for most of it, as I could actually see the amazing scenery in the form of mountains and lakes etc. that I was driving through. I stopped in Ashburton for Subway again and got home in time to watch Men in Black 2, which I hadn’t seen before, but definitely wasn’t as good as the first one, although it did have it’s funny moments.

I returned my old DVD player today, getting a full refund, so I’m not stuck with two DVD players… The new one is awesome. It can play pretty much anything, including Divx video files. Also finally got around to watching last Wednesday’s Simpson’s, Scrubs and Lost tonight, just before I wrote this post.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Charming Indonesians

by Luuk @ 4:50 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

New link in my sidebar to the blog of the Charming Indonesians… (Cam, Haussmanns, April, Rachael and Merodie) who have headed off to Indonesia for the uni holidays.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Snap, Crackle and Pop

by Luuk @ 8:42 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it was a long weekend, and as such a long time between posts, but I’m back now and did plenty over the weekend, so in theory I should have lots to post. The only disadvantage of the delay is that I have to remember all the way back. For people in countries with different public holidays than NZ, we have Friday and Monday off for Easter.

Emily’s brother Patrick and his friend Sean stayed for most of the weekend (late Thursday till Sunday afternoon. I spent a fair chunk of Friday attempting to fix my car heater, with a little bit of assistance from Sean (who happens to be a mechanic) toward the end. I think I have been mostly successful. The main problem once I unblocked it, was removing all the airlocks from the cooling system, as the heater core is above the radiator. I went for a blast around the block and actually felt hot air come out intermittently, which was an improvement. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied, so I repeated the process on Monday, as well as replacing the thermostat - probably didn’t actually need to, but not expensive and replacing the antifreeze that had been severely diluted on Friday. The heater works much better now.

Other than that, I spent a good day attacking the lifenet website (by attacking I mean working on rather than attempting to hack) and am starting to get my head around PostNuke a lot more, although there is much left to do. Currently I am trying to make a page that scales well to various resolutions, while incorporating the curves suggested by the graphic designer. Unfortunately, scalable vector graphics are not natively supported in many browsers yet. I think that most of my curves will include straight lines…

We also spent a lot of time watching movies, with my DVD collection being extensively utilised, as well as a few TV movies and one that the boys rented, which I can’t remember the name of and really don’t want to recommend anyway.

We were planning to go to Riccarton mall on Saturday afternoon, but after the 6 of us shoehorned ourselves into Sean’s skyline and got there just after 4, we found out it was shut and went to McD’s instead. I got a boss burger combo, which Mike tells me contained over half my daily calorie requirements. Fortunately it was one of only two meals I had that day (the other being waffles), so twasn’t really a problem.

Then Em headed back up to Nelson with Sean and Patrick and I decided to go see Million Dollar Baby, which was an awesome movie. I won’t spoil it for others wanting to see it, but it does make you think. The big question really is whether you can look back on your life when you are about to die and say “I did alright”. Also, I almost laughed out loud at the following exchange:

Frankie Dunn: Father, that was a great sermon… made me weep.
Father Horvak: What’s confusing you this week?
Frankie Dunn: Oh, it’s the same old, ‘one God-three God’ thing.
Father Horvak: Frankie, most people figure out by kindergarten that it’s about faith.
Frankie Dunn: Is it sort of like Snap Crackle and Pop, all rolled into one big box?
***
- Can’t find the script for this bit, so I’ll adlib.
Father: Did you just compare the holy trinity to a box of cereal? Answer: just one God.
Frankie: So what about the Holy Spirit?
Father: manifestation of God’s love (can’t remember exactly here, probably misquote) and Jesus is the son of God
***
Frankie Dunn: So is Jesus a Demigod?
Father Horvak: There are no Demigods, you f***ing Pagan!

Anyway, the acting was amazing. You’d never guess that Clint Eastwood was 74.

Yesterday afternoon we played some soccer at Jellie park and then went back to the Castle to watch the end of the day’s cricket - depressing and for tea. We made the biggest meat pizza ever. We used scone dough for the base, so for a start the four of us were eating 4.5 scones worth of base each, let alone any toppings. On the pizza we had mince, luncheon, tomato relish, onion (except Adam) token garlic, sausage, lots of cheese and bbq sauce. Adam took photos which I’m sure he’ll email me to add to this post. To quote Mike - once it was cooked and we’d cut it into quarters and started putting one slice on each plate: “The full gravity of the situation is only just starting to become apparent.”

**Edit** Here are the photos:

We then proceeded to eat aforementioned pizza. I polished off my bit reasonably quickly with Mike following a wee while later. Adam finished his with a bit of a struggle and a lot of determination, but Tony unfortunately failed to cross the finish line. So the ease of finishing appears to have been inversely proportional to body weight… I probably shouldn’t mention that the four of us ate this very manly pizza while watching The Princess Diaries.

Today I went back to work and finally got around to taking my plate in to get fixed at lunchtime (approximately 20 months after I broke it). I had to leave it there and will go back for it tomorrow. It’s the first time in ages that I’ve eaten without it in my mouth, which is actually a really strange feeling. The roof of my mouth is quite sensitive. - I wonder if having the plate contributes to the speed that I can eat… The dental technician asked me how long I’d had the plate and I realised I’d had it 5.5 years which seems like a really long time.

Also got my photos today, so put them into the album. Most frustrating part was continually skipping pages by accident and then having to shift all the photos back a few pages.

Anyway, that should keep everyone going for a while. As an aside, you can no longer complain about lack of updates if you haven’t updated your own blog since I last updated mine. That means if you don’t have a blog you can’t complain at all.

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Thursday, March 24, 2005

Reminiscing

by Luuk @ 4:38 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

After I got home from work on Tuesday, I decided to sort through all of my old photos and put them into an album. Well, I actually decided that on Monday, giving me time to get the album on Tuesday before I came home. The main time period the photos cover are from when I started uni, till I started working, so about 3 years. After that I got my digital camera and the printing of photos kind of stopped. I’ve kind of rectified that too, by selecting about 113 digital photos from my collection on Wednesday, to print and add to my album. Anyway it was kind of fun to look back at what I’d been up to.

One of the things that struck me the most though was that there was a lot that I didn’t take photos of, like us rollerblading till 2/3am most nights in first year. This could have something to do with the incompatibility of skating and taking photos and also the fact that it was dark, but I still don’t have a single photo of any of us on our blades. I also don’t really have any photos of church or youthgroup things from that era, apart from one tramp we went on.

All of this could have something to do with the cost of film and processing to a poor student or that I was having too much fun to take photos, but I guess I’ll just have to manually remember all the good times.

More Scrubs and Lost last night, with the worthy addition to my verbal repertoire of “So’s your face” as per the following section of Scrubs:

J.D.: So’s your face.
Elliot: That doesn’t even make any sense.
J.D.: “So’s your face” always makes sense.
Carla: J.D., that’s stupid.
J.D.: So’s your face! I’m on fire! Helloooo!
He leaves victorious.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Almost Tidy

by Luuk @ 8:12 am. Filed under Uncategorized

All of the floor (that isn’t covered by furniture) in my room is now visible and even vacuumed!

Hanging washing while feeling the first few drips of rain starting to fall is somewhat depressing.

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Monday, March 21, 2005

Woefully inadequate

by Luuk @ 3:06 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

On re-reading my post I have decided that it’s coverage of the fun-ness of camp and the stuff we did etc is woefully inadequate. Possibly due to the sleepiness mentioned in the title. I don’t think I’m going to try again, but you can pick some of it up from Kelly’s post-camp report here, although I didn’t really participate in a lot of the stuff mentioned. I was the instigator of the starfish slap though. It started out with me attempting to imagine how a starfish would swim/move through the waves, which involved falling over a lot with arms and legs spreadeagled - I think that might be the right word. It then moved onto doing the same thing in close proximity to others while spinning around. Thus the slapping.

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Sunday, March 20, 2005

Pleasantly tired and sleepy

by Luuk @ 7:39 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, another weekend, another camp. This weekend it was our church camp at Woodend, which again like the camp last week was a fantastic relaxing time to hang out and get to know people. Helped set up a big army tent on the Friday night, which had a few engineering challenges to overcome, but we got there in the end.

Saturday we played some minigolf and spent the afternoon at the beach, which had actual waves, which was exciting. Only very minor sunburn. Also, shock, horror, I went for another run in the morning, down to the beach and back. How many times do you have to do something before it comes a habit?

Went back into town with Jeremy, Eoin, Michelle and Kelly after tea to Cam’s 21st, which was fun, with a few games and an awesome dessert thrown in. When we got back to camp, we caught the second half of The Terminal, which I actually quite enjoyed. Daylight saving came at just the right time, and we were served breakfast in bed at 8:30am. Then got up for second breakfast. After cleanup after lunch, Kelly, Matt and Me went back to the beach for a final swim and then headed home with Matt’s bike on my roofrack.

I have been sleepy all day, but not really in a bad way, just in an overly relaxed flop kind of a way, which is fine when you don’t really have to do anything.

p.s. Kelly, you still have my hoodie

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Thursday, March 17, 2005

Quickie

by Luuk @ 9:19 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been trying to not turn on my computer again after 10pm, which has meant I haven’t been doing the last thing post routine. Anyway, highlights of the last few days… Got awarded a prize for being the most impressive eater at camp at navs on Tuesday. Two bags of lollies, which was quite lucky as I had just been told that I had to provide food for our group on account of not preparing for the study.

More good Lost and Scrubs action last night. Also got up at 6 this morning and went for a run - no, really it’s true, and then came back and did the dishes. It’s been almost a year since the last one, which was about a year after the one before that, so hopefully the trend doesn’t continue and I can motivate myself to go a little bit more regularly. I plan to work some swimming in somewhere too.

Staff BBQ at work today at lunchtime, which should be good. Happy Saint Patricks day! Yes, I am wearing my fluoro green t-shirt.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2005

This is Cool…

by Luuk @ 10:42 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Flickr words:

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Tonight/Tomorrow morning.

by Luuk @ 6:41 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Here comes my fantastic weekend… Our Navs camp was at Wainui, so we met outside R&R to give people rides etc. and got a map and lollies along with some suggestions to spice up the trip. These suggestions included such pearlers as do a Chinese fire drill at the first set of traffic lights, which resulted in me not driving the rest of the way to Lincoln where we picked up Paul as I returned to my door and found my seat occupied by a Merodie. Others included writing a song with the word sheep twice and another kiwi icon, and counting all the oncoming cars… I have to say that our estimate was actually quite close to the rigourous count that one of the other cars did. I include the full text of our song below for posterity:

Rugby rugby rugby,
Sheep sheep sheep
Rugby
Sheep
Rugby
Sheep
Rugby rugby rugby
Sheep sheep sheep.

Some of the other cars came up with some awesome songs with instrumental backup and all.

After we arrived (9:30ish) we just kind of hung out for the evening, played a bit of cards etc.
Saturday was awesome. We went to Akaroa with a packed lunch and split up in various directions - one group went shopping, another played soccer in the park and we decided to go swimming and jumping off the wharf. This was a fantastic idea, right up until when we wanted to get out and found that the ladders were encrusted with razer sharp barnacles and were quite hard to get onto - The fact that it was low tide didn’t help. All 6 of the people who jumped in got cut somewhere, but Mark H took the prize, needing two stitches in his toe. I just got some relatively minor gashes on a few of my toes and a few nicks on my hands. I start to understand where the term “cut to ribbons” comes from though. Due to the lack of climbability of the wharf and Mark’s need for medical attention, we left the wharf and those of us who weren’t taking him away headed off to the soccer game. We then proceeded to spend the afternoon at Wainui beach, where I got a little bit sunburnt and had a lot of fun.

After tea we played Storm the Heights on the hill behind the camp, which got a little feral in some places, the prime example being Merodie ending up with blood on her mouth after biting into Tony’s arm. More exercise than I’ve done for a while.

This was followed by our own Wild foods festival to coincide with the one in Hokitika, with each group having prepared a wild food to bring along. Someone from each group had to sample the wares of the other groups. Our offering was Eye of Groper. I actually ended up eating some of everything except the hot Chilli. So I ate a little bit of ox kidney, a sheep kidney, a chicken foot, half a plate of chicken hearts with chickweed and violets (all the leftovers) and three of our eyes. There was one each, but we had a couple left over which I thought I’d just polish off. I think there are photos somewhere which will emerge in due course. More cards and talking followed. Sunday morning we had a cooked breakfast! and then Amy presented a bit of a talk about the masks we all wear and then we spent some time discussing that as a group, which was really useful. Then Adam said that it would be awesome if people cleaned the cars they came in to say thanks to the drivers. - I wasn’t complaining We did get told off by the camp staff as they pay for water and ended up getting buckets from the stream, which was fair enough.

Then we had lunch and cleaned up, a few people played some more soccer and then we left and spent the afternoon at the beach again, where I got a little bit more sunburnt and also swam a lot further than the previous day. An impressive sand formula-one car was created by a few people too. I made a rock and seaweed wall to protect Merodie and Rosalie’s sand castle from the sea, which actually worked quite well until the water went round it…

Then stopped for ice-creams in Little River and blobbed in front of a movie (Ronin) after we got home and had tea. (Another success for the DVD player - maybe I just had to break it in…)

All-in-all, a fantastic, relaxing, fun, multiple, adjectives, weekend. Thanks to Adam and co. for organising it. Also, I haven’t said too much about it, but the food was fantastic, especially considering the whole weekend was only $30.

The other thing I experienced, along with a number of the other drivers, was the reduced braking power of my car after descending a large hill, even with engine braking, although I got a lot better at that throughout the weekend, to the point where I tried to avoid using my brakes altogether. I could still stop at the bottom though and managed to make the turn into the road up to the camp. A few people actually overshot it.

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Monday, March 14, 2005

Ph34R the Cowbell!

by Luuk @ 10:11 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I will post about my weekend tonight, which was fantastic by the way, but I just had to mention that I’m on a bit of a high today, after finding out that the Chiefs won! Which means that I picked the winners of all 6 games correctly this week, lifting me up to the top of the table in our work tipping comp on oztips (with 7 others.) You get an extra point for getting them all right, which gave me 7 points. All I can say is that I really feel for the 18 people who would have got 7 points if only they’d picked the Chiefs… Haha

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Friday, March 11, 2005

Must. Fix. Heater.

by Luuk @ 8:42 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Drove to work this morning (lazy) and it is definitely time to fix my car heater. Windscreen fogged up something chronic, despite having windows open and the sun was at just the right angle to strike the window and make it pretty much opaque at certain points, which made it quite scary to drive. The main blind spots were turning right out of my driveway onto Main South road, and turning onto Riccarton? just before countdown. (The place where I once saw a car parked on it’s side and where there is frequently car debris lying around)

All of that aside, I was cold.

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Nuked.

by Luuk @ 11:14 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Went out to Andrew, Deb and Mike’s flat for tea last night, which was awesome pizza with some ok chocolate mousse for dessert (I made the mousse and it wasn’t totally succesful) - twas runny in the bottom for some reason.

I’m currently having a play with various Content Management Systems for the purpose of constructing the national lifenet website. I installed PostNuke today which looks like it could be the one we end up using. I’ve also had Drupal installed for a few days. I was having some annoying permissions problems with PostNuke, but I appear to have them sorted now. I got distracted in the middle because everyone wanted to watch a DVD and I ended up watching it with them (Dangerous Minds) which I have seen before, but was worth seeing again. On the plus side I can now say that I’ve watched a whole movie on my DVD player, although there were a few glitches.

Going on a Navs camp tomorrow, so you won’t hear from me for a few days.

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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Probably should stop with the rat thing…

by Luuk @ 11:19 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Ok, apparently the rat wasn’t given the last name leper because rat’s spread disease, it was because lepers wouldn’t notice if rats were eating them because they have no feeling in their limbs. Thanks Judy for clarifying that…

A more productive day at work today. Also first small group night for navs which was cool. I’m not sure if the confidentiality rules within the group allow me to tell you that we had lots of good food including Chocolate muffins, popcorn, lollies, and fizz, but I’ll risk it just this once - We had lots of good food including Chocolate muffins, popcorn, lollies, and fizz. Our group leaders must be fantastic. Thanks Paul and Rachel. Note - Paul, if you read this, the fact that I just put a link to your blog means that you must update it…

Also the first game of pool I’d played in ages. Let’s just say that foxes are bad at pool and I played like a fox, although I improved somewhat later on. - much like these foxes which are also being “improved”. And yes I do want one.

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Monday, March 7, 2005

The Weekend

by Luuk @ 9:30 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Friday night I thought I’d have a quite one because I was really tired and didn’t feel like doing anything. Everyone else in my flat was off to another flatwarming, but I thought I’d stay home and watch a DVD and go to bed early. So I chucked the DVD (The Long Kiss Goodnight) in my new DVD player and it started playing. Well, it kind of started playing with a skip every few seconds, which was really annoying, so after a bit of fiddling I decided to watch it in my room. Twas an enjoyable watch, with some classic lines like “everyone knows, when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of “u” and “umption”" Then Emily came home and I went to show her the skipping problem and it didn’t happen, but then it started happening again when she went out of the room. Then, I was about to go to bed, checked my cellphone and found a message from Tim telling me that him and Leah were having a flatwarming, so I went round there till just before 1am - so much for the early night, but I enjoyed it, including the game of charades our team cleaned up. Another evening of much food too with pizza at work to start, followed by lots at the flatwarming.

Saturday was a fantastic day with awesome weather, and I did my washing and went out and did the groceries and picked up the plastic hose I need to help me fix the heater in my car - not sure when I’m actually going to find time to do it though. When I got home there was lots of people around, watching the cricket, getting haircuts, studying Indonesian and praying in various parts of the house. More food as well Saturday night we had takeaways for tea - I had a bacon burger, a crumbed blue cod fillet and two potato fritters. My flatmates went out to watch a friend play in some band at some place and I went to bed early (just after 10)

Sunday, I met up with Craig first thing in the morning, then went to church and then had a picnic at the botanic gardens with my navs small group from last year, which was great. We were all there, and enjoyed more good food and good music - from my musical chilly-bin. We also saw a rat in amongst the bushes and the others named it “Randy Leper”. I’m not quite sure what the thinking behind that was, but apparently Randy is a gender neutral name because they didn’t know what it was and Leper had something to do with rats carrying disease (I think). Then, went home played THPS3 for an hour or two and then had Mike’s fantastic pizza for tea. Then I rang my mum (It was her birthday - happy birthday!) and then thought I’d try my DVD player with another DVD - The Good the Bad and the Ugly which started playing ok, but is in 2.35:1 widescreen, which the DVD player decided to chop the sides off, so I watched that one on my computer as well, interspersed with more pizza and talking to flatmates. I ended up going to bed about 12:30.

Today at work was fairly slow. Probably the biggest thing I acheived was constructing a cube out of 72 of my old business cards, as I got new ones today. I’m quite proud of the cube. Here is a photo:

Went round to Rachel’s flat for a BBQ tonight which was yum and now I’m typing this and I’ve written plenty so I’m going to stop now.

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Friday, March 4, 2005

No Rugby Now

by Luuk @ 2:25 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Just piked on the rugby due to a lack of interest from others. - Our work social club was giving us a discount on tickets, but only a couple of others signed up, which kind of takes half the fun out of it.

In other news that I forgot to post, I bought a DVD player yesterday so no longer have to lug my computer to the lounge when I want to watch a DVD.

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It’s Friday!

by Luuk @ 8:47 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m quite looking forward to the weekend. Going to the rugby on Saturday night. The mighty Chiefs vs the Umm, what was that team again, oh yeah the crusaders. One could say that I live in hostile territory, but there’s no way I’m supporting the crusaders.

The social club put on a fantastic afternoon tea yesterday afternoon, with pastries, savouries, cream filled things and sandwiches from the Village Bakehouse - recommended. This was followed up by tea at the Beavon’s in honour of Emily’s birthday and then the mammoth task of putting everyone at navs into a small group, which went reasonably smoothly. I did notice (in the form of a headache) that I forgot to have my coffee in the afternoon, which is possibly not a good sign.

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Thursday, March 3, 2005

Happy Birthday Emily!

by Luuk @ 8:07 am. Filed under Uncategorized

It’s Emily’s birthday today. Got up at 7 this morning to find our house full of people cooking us breakfast. People usually meet at our house on a Thursday morning at 7:30 to pray (this is the 2nd week) and I’ve completely forgotten both times and woken up as they are all arriving. However, this week they were early on purpose so that they could make breakfast. Maybe we should make this a daily thing…

Last night I talked to my sister on the phone while I was cooking and eating tea, with the upshot being that I’m going down to visit her in Queenstown on the first weekend in April. I get to go on the shotover jet for half price which is pretty cool. - She gets on for free… there are advantages to working in the tourism/hotel industry.

Also, the photos from the car rally are up here.

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Wednesday, March 2, 2005

The Title of the Post

by Luuk @ 8:16 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Had another Navs night last night. Twas another introductory night to give new people an idea of what we’re about. They also awarded the prizes for the car rally, with our car winning best jump photo and each being presented with a skipping rope. Will post the photos as soon as I get them. Just between you and me, I think we probably won all the categories, but they wanted to share out the prizes…

In other news, I think this is an accurate reflection of the browser market shares at the moment

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Monday, February 28, 2005

Another busy weekend.

by Luuk @ 6:02 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I think I may have to change my posting regime to a weekday thing, because it never seems to happen in the weekends. That being said, if I decide not to post in the weekend, it might not happen more often, so I’ll stay with the daily plan without feeling bad if I don’t post for a couple of days in the weekend.

The only downside about that is that I have to think back to what I did. Friday night was fairly quiet. Saturday was a great relaxing day which included some room tidying, driving around finding materials for Mike’s shelves, Hassling Mark for having an ICQ status of “occupied” on a Saturday (he was at work), watching the cricket on TV for many hours with Luke and Adam and eating waffles. Then in the evening we went to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, aka Rich Bramley’s 21st, which was a great night with many interesting theme outfits - I’ll post photos if I get any. Also some interesting, if somewhat embellished stories and lots of food.

Sunday I went to church, came back and made some actual progress on tidying my room, so I may actually get around to posting photos of it some time - not quite tidy yet. Then watched Crocodile Dundee II with Mike, followed by picking up Merodie from the airport and my first “early” night for ages.

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Thursday, February 24, 2005

Gaming Geek

by Luuk @ 11:02 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

You know you’re a gaming geek when you see the Ubisoft logo on the back of someone’s t-shirt and you chase them to find out what game it’s for… (Happened at work, wasn’t a complete stranger)

Installed Skype this evening. Haven’t talked to anyone except Mrs Echo Test Service though… Kind of an unfortunate name. This is a photo of me all set up to talk to people. Note the second headset. - You need that 5.1 surround sound when you’re talking on the phone…

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Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Car Rally

by Luuk @ 11:07 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Had a car rally with navs tonight. Not the one where you drive really fast down gravel roads though. The idea was to drive around in cars and take random photos in various locations around Christchurch. The idea of it was to show people new to Christchurch a little bit of the town. I will post some photos once they get emailed to me if there are good photos. The photos aren’t on my camera, so I can’t post them straight away.

Incidentally, you can now send me email at likeafoxatpoboxdotcom, although all the addresses you know already will still work, apart from luuk.paulussen@paradise.net.nz which is now gone and will bounce. Why? Because I can.

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Sleepy

by Luuk @ 7:38 am. Filed under Uncategorized

When I got home last night after work, I suddenly just got really tired to the point where I was thinking about not going to the first navs night for the year, but in the end I decided I would and we had an awesome time. Lots of new people, catching up and there was dessert too.

We also discussed the need for a name for our flat and have settled (if it sticks) with “Grand Central”. Partially due to the grandness of it - no that wasn’t it… because of it’s central location to everything (shops, uni, work etc) and it’s similarity to a train station - lots of visitors streaming through regularly. Other possibilities we discussed were anagrams of the first letters of our names (pickings so slim as to be non-existent (melm)) or anagrams of art deco - coderat, race dot, were some I thought of, but there are a few more…

The other thing of note that happened last night was that I said “like a fox” about something to Hannah at navs, and she replied with “All the way to the bank”. Muahahahaha - it’s spreading. I think she read it in my blog

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Monday, February 21, 2005

LAN

by Luuk @ 11:52 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Although you may think from the title that I am planning a fantastic day of gaming (unless you just don’t understand what I’m talking about at all), that is not actually the case. I just finished running the adsl and network cables tidily around the house and we now have a local area network (LAN). To those of you wondering (at work) , my AR410 is currently operating as a layer 2 switch of all things, with the ADSL router plugged into one of the VLAN ports. I probably will move it to the eth port eventually, but the hour is late and I just wanted to get all the computers connected to the net as fast as possible.

Other than that, we had a seemingly endless stream of visitors popping in throughout the evening (feel free to visit any time if you know us) and had our first flat meeting to work out everything for the year such as cooking, cleaning, money etc. A large portion of it was sorted out during the ad breaks in game of two halves.

I also saw the dreaded words “Cool Web Search” come up in ad-aware on Mike’s computer, but I think it may be one of the easy to kill variants. Will have another look tomorrow.

Time for bed…

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Sunday, February 20, 2005

It’s been a while…

by Luuk @ 10:09 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

So much for daily update goodness. Was very busy at work Wednesday and Thursday with a couple of trips back in the evenings, but it all paid off with the testing I had to do being all finished by Friday morning, when it was supposed to be. Friday afternoon I went shopping for presents and came back with a couple of shirts for myself and no presents…

Anyway, Saturday night was Merodie’s 21st party up at the sign of the Kiwi, which was a fantastic time of food, speeches, video, and dancing. Jo came down from Whangarei for the occasion - We picked her up at 8:10 on Saturday morning and dropped her off at the airport again at 6am Sunday morning. So I was in bed by 6:30… Got up again about 11. I spent Saturday cleaning all our junk out of Mike’s room, shopping for presents (slightly more successfully) and helping sort out the sound gear for the party (my stereo). Also helped Mike shift his stuff when he arrived at 4pm.

For lunch today, we tried out Merodie’s new waffle maker. Mike and me prepared the mixture and did the cooking. Unbeknownst to the girls, we polished off about half a dozen waffles before we told them that we had started cooking them (For taste testing purposes of course). They were quite surprised that we were full before they were.

This afternoon, I walked back into the flat to find everyone else covered in mud. When I tried to photograph Mike, he strongly resisted/ran and hid, and then said I could take a photo if I had mud on my face too. Meh… I got my photo. I may be falling off the bed.

***addition***
I just realised that I completely forgot to mention the fantastic bbq/flatwarming I went to on Friday night at “The Castle” - Thanks Adam and co.

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Thursday, February 17, 2005

Busy.

by Luuk @ 9:07 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Quite busy at work at the moment, we have a project that needs lots of work done by tomorrow morning. Last night I was at work till 6:30, then went home and took most of the evening off, with a bit of tea, groceries, scrubs and Lost action. Then I popped back into work for about half an hour to change over some tests, came home and went to bed.

Lost is shaping up. I’m sure I was dreaming about it last night, coming up with lots of crazy theories about what’s going to happen next. I’m wondering if Lock actually did used to be in the army. Very impressed by his killing of a boar after being paralyzed for four years. And what’s with the guy in the black suit… If you know, you aren’t allowed to say anything. We’re only up to episode 3 here. Also wondering if Lock did actually see the monster and if they will find the other half of the plane. So many mysteries. I think the backstories are very well done. Like when they reshowed the footage of Lock, it suddenly all had so much more meaning.

Anyway, break while tests are running is at an end.

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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

It’s all about love.

by Luuk @ 10:05 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Last night I went back out to the navs camp again after work. Glen was speaking about “Everyday faith transforming every day life” which is kind of the nav motto. Beyond the slogan, he was talking about what living out our faith practically in the world looks like - quite a good follow on from the previous talk really. It’s kind of hard to summarize a fairly chunky talk down to a few lines in a blog, but basically what it comes down to is that it’s all about love.
A follower of Jesus should stand out because of the way they love the people around them. Not just the people they know and like, but everybody they encounter. He used the examples of the good samaritan and also John 13. John 13 is where Jesus is having his last meal with his closest friends, and the message of how we are supposed to love comes through very strongly. Firstly, Jesus knows that one of his friends is going to betray him and one of the others is going to deny that he even knows him. Knowing all this, he proceeds to demonstrate his love for all his friends by washing their feet, a job that even the Jewish slaves didn’t have to do. (The job was left to the gentile slaves.)

Then he said to them “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

So, to summarize, being a Christian is not about praying lots, or memorizing bible verses, or going to church on Sunday, it is about loving everybody we encounter, not walking past someone in need etc.

Glen then went on to talk about how easy it is to lose focus on that goal with all the advertising we have fired at us about what is important and our own selfish nature. For example in the US, in whatever year his statistics came from, about $2000 is spent per person per year on advertising.

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough. Hopefully there is something useful or interesting in there somewhere.

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Sunday, February 13, 2005

The big question.

by Luuk @ 10:42 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

This is carrying on a bit from my previous experience/emotions/proof post and also about today at the navs camp. This morning Logan was speaking. Logan is a guy with a lot of life experience (somewhat older than us) from Auckland. The first thing he said really got my attention because it captured perfectly the way I’ve been thinking recently and really dragged in my focus for the camp (I was a little zoned out before he started)

He was talking about sitting in his office looking out toward little Barrier and thinking about his life. He has staked his life on an ancient book and the stories of like-minded people that have influenced his life and who’s life he has influenced with his own stories. So he has spent his life trying to live for God and advance his kingdom. Sometimes he looks at his friends who have strived for different things and have gone down different paths, and he wonders if he has wasted his life and if the whole thing is true (the big question). Then, the same way that I feel, he looks back at his life and sees how God has been at work in his life, and he know’s that God is real.

That for me is what faith is all about. Staking your life on God, putting all your trust in him and living as if advancing his purposes is the most important thing in my life. I don’t think I’m completely there yet, or that I will ever be completely there, but that is what I want to give my life to and to strive towards. To become more like Jesus, the perfect example and guide we have been given of how God’s love is supposed to be worked out in the world. Living in the knowledge that nothing can seperate me from God’s love. (Romans 8:37-39)

There’s a song by Third day called “Creed” which I really like, especially one line. A creed is a “A formal statement of religious belief; a confession of faith.” I grew up in the Catholic church, where we would say the creed every Sunday. One version was the apostles creed
, which is what the song is based on - lyrics. The one line that really sticks out to me from the song is the first line of the chorus: “And I believe what I believe in is what makes me what I am.”

The reason it stuck out the first time that I heard the song was that it isn’t in the creed that we said every Sunday at church when I was growing up, but it is really the crux of the whole thing. If what you believe doesn’t translate into who you are and the way you live your life, do you really believe it? I’m still trying to work out exactly what giving my life to living out what I believe looks like practically, but I know it’s what I want to strive towards.

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Garage Sale

by Luuk @ 10:00 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Saturday morning we had our garage sale, which was a moderate success, with a reasonable amount of stuff being sold. The lounge suite didn’t sell, so I put it by the side of the road with a free sign on it and soon after helped someone carry the couch to an old mans house around the corner and the chairs disappeared all by themselves a short time later. Friday night was mainly spent getting stuff ready for the garage sale. Merodie also moved in on Friday, so now we’re up to 3 with one to go.

Saturday evening I went to Northlands pizza hut for tea, where my youth group was farewelling me as a leader. Much pizza was eaten. I may yet be convinced to come back for Easter Camp.

After that I headed out to Kaiapoi for our first Navs camp of the year and was out there all day today as well. The camp goes until Tuesday, so I will be heading out there tomorrow night after work too.

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Thursday, February 10, 2005

Project almost complete

by Luuk @ 11:54 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I thought I’d set up my other computer as a websurfing/instant messaging/word processing machine to reduce possible demand for my main computer in the flat. I am almost there after a relatively painless journey. The only pain was caused by the onboard network card not working and not being able to find any spares lying around. Luckily Mark has heaps and a quick trip to his place rectified the situation. While there, I also met his flatmates Adam and Nick (who I had met before and does not look like David) and lost a game of chess to Mark.

I now have the machine up and running the Debian sarge linux distro, with firefox, gaim and openoffice.org on icewm. - It’s a PII 400 with 128Mb of Ram, so I’m trying to keep the strain to a minimum. All that remains is to configure icewm to my satisfaction with relevant programs on the taskbar etc. I’m currently writing this post on it, so I can’t be doing too badly Firefox is however taking up 25% of the memory… (and the rest)

Also watched the next (taped) episode of lost, avoiding the “Next week on lost” section at the end. Interesting developments, although I couldn’t believe Jack didn’t want to know what Kate did and that the dumb guy didn’t shoot the dying guy in the head. Also “Dude” is going to be an excellent quote (really can’t reproduce the pronunciation in text form).

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Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Delayed

by Luuk @ 10:07 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Not much to post about last night. I did however make the biggest single purchase I’d ever made. I now have the plane tickets for my trip to Europe. Merodie has finally started shifting her stuff in. Had a meeting about mentoring and then just after 10:30 I started playing MOHAA as pre-arranged with Mark and went to bed just before 12. Somewhat gratifyingly, I shot Mark (AKA [Dregg] Shojun) 3 times before he shot me. It was fairly even from that point though. I even managed to avoid some of the grenades he always drops on himself.

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Monday, February 7, 2005

Experience vs Proof vs Emotions.

by Luuk @ 10:36 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

At work today we were talking about different kinds of faith and Simeon posted a quote talking about 2 types of faith. The first was faith based on “proof” or facts - deciding to believe in something because of the evidence you can see and being willing to change your beliefs on the introduction and acceptance of new evidence. The second was faith based on emotional feelings, which is afraid of anything which might contradict it and unwilling to accept that others may believe differently. (I will possibly update this when I have the quote in front of me again - there was more to it.

Anyway, I mentioned that I thought there was a third type, based on experience. i.e. experiencing God directly or through answers to prayer or miracles etc. Much of the faith of the people in the bible is based on this. Some examples would be the plagues of Egypt, Elijah’s faceoff with the Baal prophets, Everyone seeing Jesus’ Miracles, Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. (just a small sample)

I think that experience is a very powerful thing, and is something it is very difficult to argue with or take away from somebody. That being said, it is possible to look at the world in different ways depending on what you believe. I thought I would share a story from my life. Some of you may write it off as a series of coincidences, but to me it was very real example of God at work.

We are going to head back to the year 2002 to March the 20th in fact, so almost 3 years ago. (I know this because I just looked it up). I was at the time (and still am) involved with the navs group at uni (link on sidebar) and we were looking (quite aptly for this post) at a study on faith - available off the navs website in both word and pdf formats. In our small group we were discussing ways of seeing God at work in our everyday lives, so I guess I was suitably primed to be looking for stuff. Ok, preamble over, on to the story.

At that time I used to ride around on a bike with rather dodgy brakes. I had replaced the brake cables a couple of months earlier, but the breaks had gone out of adjustment again and only the front ones kind of worked properly. Anyway, I was biking along and had to hit the brakes reasonably suddenly for some reason and the front brake cable snapped. As we were busy looking for God in our everyday life, I thought to myself - where is God in this - brand new brake cable, snaps, not really very safe etc. Anyway, I walked my bike off the road and walked into the bike shop that just happened to be right there next to the intersection (church corner cycles) and bought myself a new brake cable. Then I headed home and installed it and thought I might as well adjust the back brakes at the same time, so I got all my brakes adjusted perfectly - instant stoppage, and thought no more about God being involved.
The next day, I was biking along again, going reasonably quickly because I was late for uni, and a car turned across into a driveway right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, slid a few metres and stopped just short of plowing into the car. If my brakes hadn’t have been fixed, I would have plowed straight into the side of the car, or possibly have even been hit by the car as it turned. It was very clear to me at that point that God had been involved when my brake cable snapped right outside the bike shop the previous day… It felt like God was showing me that he was involved, and also teaching me a lesson that the things that go wrong today may well have a future purpose.

To sum up, was I looking for God - yes, did I see him at work - yes, if I hadn’t have been looking for him would I have noticed - probably not. Was it all just a coincidence? I don’t believe it was, but I can see how others would interpret it that way. Some people are possibly overly eager to believe everything they see, but I think others are overly skeptical to the point of missing what is there.

I’ll leave you with this quote by Aldous Huxley:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
Aldous Huxley, “Ends and Means” (1937).

N.B. It took me a while to find (hopefully) the actual quote, as it is misquoted around the place. See this link for further discussion.

****edit****
Here is Simeon’s original quote (from somewhere else) - obviously I munted it with my “paraphrase”
In regards to books being ‘dangerous’…
It seems to me that there might be a couple different types of believers. One group might have faith because they are logical, they believe they have proof for their belief and they can accept or discard any new ideas based on their continually expanding knowledge of the world around them.
Another type might have more of an emotional-based belief; they have strong faith for faith’s sake and it feels right for them. They don’t know - and don’t care to know- all of the ins and outs of why this particular set of beliefs has landed on their doorstep. People they trust tell them that this is the truth, and they accept it.
It is this second group that might be affected by information (lies or not) that contradicts what they believe. The first group is in no danger; they might even learn more about what other groups of people are declaring and by invalidating those ideas logically, their own belief becomes even more well-rounded.
Unfortunately it seems to me that there are only a couple of solutions in terms of protecting that second group.
The first is to shut off sources of information unapproved by some trusted authority. This to me smacks of fascism and I think most learned and civilized people would recognize this.
The second is to recognize what drives your own faith, and if you don’t want to research the history and details of the sources of that faith, then accept that it then must be your responsibility to censor your own exposure to ideas and literature which contain new ideas or opposing viewpoints.

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Title misleading…

by Luuk @ 8:20 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I possibly should change the title of my last post to MOHAA time… I accidently clicked on MOHAA after posting and it kept going for an hour. For the non-gamers among you who are wondering what this “MOHAA” is, click here.

Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes, even though stuff happens, my posts are dead boring, because I just list the events - This is usually worse when I’m posting tired. I will endeavour to make things more interesting.

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Sunday, February 6, 2005

Bed Time

by Luuk @ 10:09 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Quick post and then to bed. Lazy but productive day today. I was very sleepy, but managed to pull down the ivy on the fence that our neighbour didn’t like, do 3 loads of washing, clean the toilet, do the dishes and install Ubuntu linux on my computer. I decided the X problems weren’t worth the hassle, so went through a completely trouble free installation. No more compiling! Then went round to the new castle undies flat for tea and The Brewerton/Moffatt team managed to beat the Cotter/Paulussen team twice in a row at Pictionary, with both games coming down to the last square. Last night I also discovered the world of online gaming, claiming 3 kills in MOHAA before I was shot myself (beginner’s luck I’m sure).

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Anybody not have Gmail yet?

by Luuk @ 5:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Just noticed that the Gmail invite mechanism has changed again, and along with the change I have been given 50 invites. p.s. If I don’t know you, you may have to convince me you’re not a dirty spammer Not sure about the best way to do this, as commenting won’t give me your email address, unless you post it, in which case it will become vulnerable to spam. Probably the best way is to post your email address, I will send you the invite and then delete the comment. (Of course none of this is really going to happen, because surely everybody who wants gmail has it by now).

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Saturday, February 5, 2005

Mission Accomplished

by Luuk @ 10:10 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, the secret weekend planning can now be revealed as mission has been accomplished. After work yesterday Merodie, Emily and Me drove up to Nelson for Mike’s (our other flatmate) 21st, arriving at about 9:30pm. The party finished at about 12, and then a bunch of us sat in the spa at his place till about 3 in the morning. I’m not sure if I should discuss the Truth/Dare games played… Suffice to say that sometimes it’s much easier to say truth, especially when the dare involves moving an unwilling goat a long distance. Then we stayed the night at Emily’s family’s place. I got up at about 10:15, and just after 11 we headed back towards Christchurch, as Merodie had another 21st to go to at 5pm. Picked up a hitchhiker on the way too.

The drama mentioned in the previous post had to do with the fact that we thought it was on Saturday until Thursday night… All came together in the end though, and there’s still a whole day of weekend to go!

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Thursday, February 3, 2005

Eclectic stream of consciousness

by Luuk @ 10:40 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Cooked tea, another random concoction. I liken my cooking to Jazz - creativity through improvisation. Big dramas about plans for the weekend, more info later (wrong people might read it). Currently listening to lifefm via internet radio, which is pretty cool. Steam is all updated (except for halflife source) and I think I killed my X in linux upgrading everything (Xorg instead of Xfree). I will get around to fixing it eventually… Probably Saturday night or Sunday. Garage sale is going to be delayed a week. May even start posting stuff on trademe.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2005

TV

by Luuk @ 10:39 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Spent most of the evening watching TV while downloading Gentoo updates. Caught the second half of Joey, Scrubs and Lost. Lost looks like it could be a good one… Although, this comic “accurately” describes the lack of information and suspense building etc. I’m lost

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Parachute! - Part B

by Luuk @ 7:03 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Carrying on where I left off. The speaker on Sunday morning was Wayne Alcorn from Brisbane City church, who was speaking about knowing who we are and who Jesus is and what place he takes in our life.

Then we went to a political forum hosted by the Maxim institute featuring politicians from most major parties (Notably Bill English and Nandor Tanczos) The first half of it was between most of the major parties (Labour, National, Greens, Act and NZfirst) on a number of issues like The Civil Unions Bill, Education (Discussing government’s decision to turn down UN doha declaration (google it) section on education about parents having the right to choose how their children are educated - focusing on funding for integrated schools) and 1 or 2 other issues. I thought the most interesting thing said in the whole debate was Nandor mentioning that the issues being discussed were issues important to the maxim institute, which is quite right wing and conservative and that that wasn’t the way Jesus was. (Food for thought, which I did agree with to an extent)

The second half was with 4 “emerging parties” (United Future, Christian Heritage Party, Destiny NZ and the Maori party.) All except United Future did a good job of losing my vote (not that they had it in the first place). That common sense thing is still good for the worm (You may have to be a kiwi to get that reference). The Maori party guy was just a clown (trying to be funny and really had nothing to say), and the other 2 were too anti the current government. While I have to agree that some of the policies implemented by the current government are not exactly what one would call Christian policies, they have been doing pretty well in most other areas. Most of the policies in question have come down to a conscience vote anyway. Destiny NZ appear to be campaigning quite strongly to decrease the seperation between church and state, which is not something I agree with.

Anyway, enough politics (might start some discussion)… Next was lunch and a relaxing afternoon of not doing a whole lot that I can remember.

5pm we went to the Parachute band live recording for a couple of hours and then had tea. I went to the hip hop showcase at the Palladium at about 8:20 and saw EPR and Rapture Ruckus again, who had some B-boys and B-girls up on stage doing some impressive breakdancing. Then went from there to the mainstage and caught most of Jeff Deyo. Next up was Third Day - one of my favourite bands. One notable happening was someone on stage yelling “Are you ready to… (can’t remember)” and a random girl behind me saying “Ready like a fox” - kind of made my day. Most of you probably won’t get that, but it is a bit of a running joke at work. (Everything is like a fox and all the way to the bank). Following Third Day was Shawn Mcdonald, who I hadn’t heard before and also really liked - I ended up buying his CD.

Then more hanging out in the village, donuts and chips and trying to eat biscuits off our foreheads - which I think I have mastered.

Monday Christine Caine spoke, then we packed, shopped and saw a bit more of Grits. Then we went back to my place for another swim and then Tony dropped me off at the airport and I flew back to Christchurch.

The first leg (Hamiltron to Wellington) most of the people were from Parachute (including one of the guys from Rapture Ruckus, although the plane was only about half full. I kind of missed takeoff - fell asleep right after the safety demonstration and woke up in the air. (This was after drinking a 600ml coke at the airport.) The lady next to me said she was quite impressed and was wondering if she should have woken me up in case I was embarassed about snoring in public. The second leg I had a row of 3 seats to myself and fell asleep while we still had to have the seat backss in the upright position and woke up in time to recline it, stretch out across the seats and be told that I had to put it back up again because we were about to land.

Emily picked me up and then we talked lots about our respective weekends. Then bed because I was tired, which was why there was no update Monday night.

I’ll skip a day now and jump to the present, where I am posting this using our freshly connected bitstream internet connection. Sweet sweet broadband.

That’s all for this post.

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Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Parachute! - Part A

by Luuk @ 11:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, where do I start. I went to Parachute and had an awesome time. Let’s start with the weather. All sun and very hot, perfect for lazing around during the day. I took my digital camera, but was too busy having fun to take any photos of the goings on… I did take a few photos, a couple of which you will see. I think I’m going to have to go with telling chronologically so I don’t miss stuff out, so hopefully it won’t be too boring.

Friday morning I left home at 7:30 with Dad (he had work), Tony and David. Around 9am we went round to my old school because Tony had to check some problems with his subjects (which turned out to be a printing error). The receptionist remembered my name which was cool. The subject checking was at the careers centre, so I thought I would check out the UOC display. The thing that stood out most was the amount of info on Speech and Language Therapy, considering it is an all boys school and there are very few guys (if any in some years) who actually do it, and the ones that do generally drop out.

Then I got dropped off at Parachute and waited for the gates to open and then the long walk down the hill. While we were waiting for the gates I recognised a few people from Christchurch - Breo and Jess and a couple of others, who I had never really met before. I ended up setting my tent up in a circle with theirs.

I caught up with Eoin and we decided to sleep in the same tent so he didn’t have to set his up. Then we went and by a very circuitous route met up with Megan - She couldn’t be bothered meeting us at our tent and then we went to the H2Go mist tent in the village and stood in the mist for a while and then went and sat down somewhere else just before she got there and finally found her at her tent.

After that Merodie finally started replying to her txts and we ended up shifting my tent all the way throught the village to where they were camped (one person on each corner and someone else carrying the chilly bin.)

I forgot to mention before that on the way to parachute I bought some jandals at the Warehouse. I put them on after I set up my tent, walked to the village to get ice and back and the strap on the left one broke, so I was walking gammy for the rest of the weekend.

Friday night I saw Mumsdollar, Wash, Detour 180 and Grits (basically just hanging out at the mainstage). Then hung out in the cafe for ages eating mini donuts, and eventually went to bed. Just before 6:30 I was rudely awoken by banging and crashing and reversing beepers. Check out this picture I eventually got up and took out the door of my tent:

This went on for about an hour, which was followed by discussions at breakfast about how we were going to get up and tell them to go away if it happened again the following morning - The truck ended up coming at 8 the next morning, so we thought they had been informed to come later, but the following morning it was there at 6 :{

Saturday morning we went to the morning meeting where the president of World Vision in the US was talking about “The 7 Steps to Poverty”, which was trying to help us imagine what it is like to be truly poor, by taking things away step by step (To give you an idea, the first was all your clothes but the ones you were wearing) Others (in no particular order) were water, food, electricity, healthcare, house and the final and most important one was hope. Then we went and met Jo and Helen at the gate - great to see them again, and helped set up a tent for them and then went to a seminar about HIV/AIDS in Africa by the same guy who did the morning talk, except he was followed by an African lady with AIDS telling her story.

Then we had lunch and went to some Ceroc dancing lessons, followed by about 9 of us going to my family’s place for a swim, which was fantastic. Unfortunately Jamie left his cellphone and wallet on the roof of his car when we left and lost his cellphone. (He heard the wallet fall off about 1km down the road). Then Spaghetti Bolognaise for tea (I took a few random photos of my fellow campers at this point - not very good ones, but here are a couple)

Then back to the mainstage for The Lads (I think we made it in time for them - I’m referring to my program),Rapture Ruckus, Day of Fire, Audio Adrenaline and Brooke Fraser, followed by the cafe again for more donuts and then sleep.

Well, it appears to be bedtime, so tune in again tomorrow for the rest of my parachute roundup. I enjoyed Grits the most on Friday and Saturday would be a toss-up between Rapture Ruckus and Brooke Fraser, with a few good songs by Audio Adrenaline. Brooke Fraser is really funny on stage with some really random comments between songs. (While saying something deep about worrying about death) “Don’t worry, you won’t die just yet, unless you drink and drive, which is stupid”. Probably the main down for Audio Adrenaline was that they have been playing/touring for 15 years and the lead singers voice is pretty much shot.

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Friday, January 28, 2005

Serious Offence

by Luuk @ 7:13 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Couple of things I forgot to mention… Firstly, I had a bit of time to kill at the airport and had a pie at the cafe for the price of a gourmet meal - crazy. While sitting in the cafe I went to pull out my boarding pass, and found something unexpected in my pocket - twas my trusty leatherman clone pocket knife… Which I was going to put in my pack, but accidentally dropped into my pocket. Oh well, no security checks on the smaller planes, so it made it safely to Hamilton (as did the rest of the passengers, because I didn’t attempt to hijack them.)

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Thursday, January 27, 2005

Posting from Kaniwhaniwha

by Luuk @ 11:23 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, home again. Going to parachute tomorrow. A smooth flight up, although it seemed to go on forever. I think the combination of it being a direct flight (no Wellington stop), having already read the January edition of the Air NZ magazine and having no other reading material made the flight seem to go on forever.

Thanks to Adam for dropping me off at the airport. I almost started worrying that I wasn’t going to get home from work in time when Mark and Greig’s 5 minute each chess game turned into an epic cliffhanger.

If you’re wondering what the title is talking about, that is where my family’s house is, in the larger area that is Te Pahu. Typing Kaniwhaniwha into google does yield a respectable 143 results.

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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Busy

by Luuk @ 11:31 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m flying up to Hamilton for Parachute tomorrow, have to be at the airport at 5:30 after work. Cleaned out the garage at the old flat with Dave and shifted Megan’s bed to his place on the roof of my car. Typed up minutes of oversight meeting and bought and sold numerous blogshares. Still have to pack, but am scheduling that for lunchtime tomorrow (amongst other things).

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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Nothing amazingly exciting

by Luuk @ 11:04 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Not much happened today. A reasonably productive day at work, recycled a pile of cardboard and engine oil from our old flat at the dump, cooked tea and had an Navs oversight team meeting which had yummy frozen chocolate covered banana slices and watermelon and after match mints. Looking forward to going to bed now. At some point in the future I will start thinking of interesting things to talk about when it’s a slow news day… but that day is not this day.

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Friends don’t let friends use IE

by Luuk @ 9:59 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Got this from Mark just now, and just had to post it… Anyone that has ever had to deal with spyware will relate.

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Monday, January 24, 2005

Not much today.

by Luuk @ 10:30 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Lost a game of chess to Mark Rhodes at lunchtime in an epic battle, with a huge crowd of spectators at the end. He never quite made that fatal mistake… More takeaways for tea, Chinese this time, shouted by Emily’s amazing brother Shaun. The kitchen is unpacked now though, so no excuse for not cooking tomorrow. I may even volunteer. In other news, I own Baz’s blog.

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Sunday, January 23, 2005

Urge to create somewhat satisfied.

by Luuk @ 8:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I had a good day. Went to church this morning, and was quoted in the sermon… Not something that happens to me everyday, and I’m not quite sure the writing was up to quotable standard (you cant judge for yourself by clicking here)

After church, I couldn’t resist the urge of captain Ben’s, and picked up some chicken on rice on the way home. I had decided last night that I should build some shelves for my room, to go on top of my drawers, as my room isn’t the biggest in the world and was a little short on storage space. So I set out in my trusty Toyota and headed to the hagley kitchens bin opposite work and picked up everything that looked vaguely useful and could fit in my car. Then I went to Bunnings - my first visit, I finally see what all the fuss is about… and bought a $19.25 Jigsaw, some blades, some screws and a screwdriver bit for my drill. Then I went home grabbed a hammer, went back to the hagley kitchens bin and tore apart some pallets. Then, back home and proceeded to build myself a set of shelves for the rest of the afternoon out of 100% recycled materials (and some 100% new screws).

I am pleased with the result, although it wouldn’t win any awards. It looks a little rough, but it is solid and shouldn’t collapse under the weight of all my stuff. Ok, enough talking it up… Here’s a picture of it in place on top of drawers. You can see the doorway on the right to get a sense of scale. Note the wee lip going over the back of the drawers which will stop it from falling off. I’ve given it a few shakes, and it’s not budging!

I’ll post more photos of my room once it’s cleaned up and those shelves are full, currently there is kind of a mound of stuff on the floor, which gets shifted regularly to allow safe passage to my bed or desk.

After I finished it I gave in and went to the fish and chip shop again - like I said, it’s way too close. (It was about 20 to 8 when I finished the shelves and cleaning up, and the kitchen isn’t unpacked yet, so I don’t feel too bad about it)

That’s enough for today…

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Saturday, January 22, 2005

First Post!

by Luuk @ 4:34 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, obviously it isn’t actually my first post, but it is my first post from our new flat, and I only missed one post We had our fish and chips on the beach yesterday, and then came back and I carried on shifting. Then today Adam and Caleb helped us shift all the big stuff - Thanks Adam and Caleb! Unfortunately, the post isn’t on our ADSL connection yet as it hasn’t been connected yet (I think - how do you tell?). On the plus side, We have 24 days left on our paradise dialup account, so we aren’t without internet. I missed yesterdays post because my computer was here and our phone connection was at our other flat. I will post some inside photos once I have finished loading my room. Currently it and Mike’s room are mostly full with my stuff, so it could be an interesting exercise shoe-horning it all in. Like I said, I’m going to have a garage sale in a couple of weeks. (I would have it next weekend, but I will be at parachute! I’m flying up on Thursday night and will be back on Monday night, so there may be a few missing posts then - unless I get really motivated and find some netcafe thing at parachute.

I’m trying to decide what I should do now. I’m currently trying to decide between unpacking and sleeping. For some reason I am very tired…

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Thursday, January 20, 2005

Updating while waiting for test to run.

by Luuk @ 5:03 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I just mastered juggling while kneeling on my swissball - balance and hand-eye coordination all at once. I thought I’d do my update now so I wouldn’t have to do it tonight. Am playing basketball in about an hour, and then yep, you guessed it… more shifting.

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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

More shifting and more relaxation

by Luuk @ 11:52 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Did a bit more shifting today, mainly the small stuff and my books and some other stuff (List ended due to boringness). Then I went round to Rich Bramley’s place and saw some of the photos Adam took on their trip with Chantelle, Rich and Emily. Then we had a spa, which was very relaxing and an excellent end to the evening - although, this is the actual end to my evening. Fortuitously, I happened to have my togs in the car. In other news, the unpaid leave I applied for, for my trip to Europe in July, was declined, which raises interesting questions about what I am going to do in the middle of this year. I have a reasonable idea, but probably shouldn’t discuss it here.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Process has begun

by Luuk @ 10:45 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I have started the shifting process, with a couple of car loads to the new flat this evening. Also managed to sort out the power and phone. To those of you who know it, we will be keeping the same phone number. I got in just in time on the power - one more day and we would have had to pay a $50 reconnection fee, as it was about to be disconnected. I had a bit of a play this evening with scale paper rectangles of all the stuff in my room on a scale drawing of my room, trying to make it all fit, as my new room is smaller than my current one. I had moderate success and am optimistic about fitting everything in. I’ll post a photo once the move is complete. I am considering a garage sale to get rid of stuff I don’t need anymore. If anyone who reads this is interested, the list currently includes a canon bjc265 printer (no ink), a small stereo, sega master system, green commodore 64 screen, a lounge suite and various other bits and pieces (brand new laser pointers at $4 a piece too - I have approximately 20). I’m sure the list will grow if I actually do get round to having one.

Also, Happy Birthday to my brother David, who turned 14 today and is about the same size as me and probably somewhat stronger too.

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Monday, January 17, 2005

So, so, full

by Luuk @ 9:16 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Strong Nor’ Westers today. Picked up Emily from her job in Woolston after work. We had planned to have fish and chips on the beach. However, this idea somehow changed into having the banquet at Little India, which explains the title. Much delicious food, followed by almost having to be rolled out the door. Then we went to our new flat and decided rooms and thought of where we were going to put stuff, which was quite a useful exercise. The plan is to get rid of “my” lounge suite, as it isn’t really very flattish - it’s kind of more of a Grandma thing with high backs, and get something more comfortable. The only thing I forgot to do was plan network cable layouts, but I will get to that next time.

In other news, I have decided to change the photos on my blog to thumbnails (click to enlarge) to reduce the amount of time it takes to load and also the length of the front page. I’ve only converted the stuff on the front page so far, although I think I will leave the spelling thing big.

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Sunday, January 16, 2005

Tired and a little bit sunburnt.

by Luuk @ 11:35 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

A fairly long day after the late night last night. Went to church this morning and spent most of the rest of the day cleaning, well Emily and Dave were cleaning and I mowed the lawns and weeded the garden, which was a bit of a mission, as the lawns were getting pretty long - not quite knee high, but getting there and definitely not to a grasshopper. Also inspected our new flat and wrote down everything that we don’t want to pay to fix when we move out. Went round to Dave’s for tea, and eventually came home and watched The Mexican.

One piece of awesome news for the day to end this post with…

Emily is going to flat with us!!!

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Saturday’s update

by Luuk @ 3:10 am. Filed under Uncategorized

For me, it’s technically still Saturday, because I haven’t gone to bed yet…

Another great day. Once again fantastic weather - apparently it got up to 33 degrees in Christchurch, although I wasn’t in Christchurch most of the day, I was in Waipara, attending Tim and Leah’s wedding, which was awesome. Start time was 1:30pm First they got married in the church (description somewhat abbreviated) and then we drove to the reception, which was in a marquee and listened to a number of great speeches and had a nice afternoon tea, which was good due to the lack of any form of lunch consumption on my part. After the speeches we were told that our next course of action was to hop on the steam train which had pulled up outside and travel Weka pass (and back again), which was an unexpected surprise and another opportunity to mingle, consume beverages and peruse the amazing view as it came past us. When we got back to the tent we found a helicopter waiting outside to take Tim and Leah away! which I thought was a very cool idea.

After helping a bit with the cleanup we eventually arrived back in Christchurch at about 8:45 after which we had some sandwiches for tea and then headed around to Katies for a much needed swim (did I mention the weather) By this time it was dark, but the swim was still fantastic. Then Emily, Merodie, Rachael and me went into town and played pool for a bit and then went to meet the bridesmaids and some of the other wedding guests at shooters just after 12. We hung around there till about half past one and then went to Denny’s for some wedges and oreo shakes and then headed home.

And true to my word, I am updating my blog before I go to bed. I ramble when I’m tired.

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Friday, January 14, 2005

Aaaaaaaah, so relaxed

by Luuk @ 11:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, for the first day of my daily post extravaganza, I’d just like to say that I am feeling extremely relaxed, due to having just returned from a fantastic evening which culminated in sitting in a spa for about an hour. The weather was fantastic today, not a cloud in the sky and the Miller’s home world temperature board said it was 23° when I went home from work just before 5pm. I didn’t manage to convince anyone to have a game of petanque or giant chess outside at lunchtime though. Apparently they were booking plane tickets to South Africa or something… Anyway, after I got home and there was nobody else there, I wandered around to the Beavon’s because I knew Emily had gone there and spent some more time attacking the spyware on their computer. Then I took Emily to meet her new employers in Woolston for about 3 minutes and then we came back to the Beavon’s for tea. After that I continued my assault and I think we may have defeated the spyware, although I haven’t heard a final definitive verdict yet. Then me and Merodie went round to Rachael’s house and we played volleyball, ate waffles with ice cream and cheesecake and bananas and half a muffin (Rich ate all the other muffins before we got there and then we sat in the aforementioned spa. Paul and Judy were there too (and Rich and Rachael if that wasn’t obvious from previous comments. Now I’m back here completing my daily post obligations, which having now been completed (and slightly backdated by less than 15 minutes) will allow me to go to bed. I was tossing up whether to have it as Saturday’s post since I already posted today, but I will have more to post by then, so I didn’t.

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New Day’s Resolution

by Luuk @ 8:10 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Right, I decided yesterday that I am going to try to update my blog every day, no matter how boring this will cause the output to be… I may have to start rambling about random stuff to make things interesting. The only thing I’m wondering is if I decided this yesterday, and aren’t updating until today, does that mean I’ve already broken the resolution meaning there’s no point continuing? Anyway, because I was having a bit of trouble spelling continuing (one u or 2) I clicked the spell check button and it turns out blogger doesn’t know what a blog is

As for the past week, I watched all three movies in the LOTR trilogy (extended) with Emily. One on Saturday, one on Sunday and the other one on Monday. We currently have a family of 6 staying for my friend Tim’s wedding on Saturday, who it turns out I know from back in Te Pahu (The Taylors). Last night I went to Tim’s stag bbq, which was quite relaxing and I think Tim was quite relieved by the end of it as nothing actually happened to him.

Also, we finally have some good weather! which will hopefully continue through the weekend.

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Thursday, January 6, 2005

Oops…

by Luuk @ 2:26 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I cleverly decided based on information in their Blog and the fact that there is only one flight from Singapore to Christchurch each day, that Emily and Adam would be arriving on the 11:50 flight from Singapore this morning. However on arrival at the airport and watching people who weren’t them coming out of the arrival gate for about an hour, I decided that they weren’t… and have since had it confirmed by Emily’s brother and Adam’s mum that they are actually arriving tomorrow. I guess that’ll learn me for trusting 2.5 month old information.

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Thursday, December 30, 2004

Quick Update

by Luuk @ 10:34 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

This is going to be a quick update because I’m somewhat sick of sitting in front of this computer. The main reason for this is that I have spent most of the last few days trying to remove a fairly nasty trojan/malware/spyware thing. One site described the difficulty of manually removing it as “Battle axe or chainsaw recommended”. I’m almost certain that this or something like it was what I was trying to remove. Anyway, I have fought the beast and I have conquered.

Christmas was great, although it was a bit rainy. An awesome dinner cooked by my sister in the evening with a huge ham. Lots of chocolate etc received too. My parents and sister then had to leave for the airport in Auckland at about 6am boxing day as my sister was starting her new job in Queenstown on Monday. Monday the weather finally looked like summer and I played minigolf with my friends, followed by some lunch and games for the rest of the day (of the playstation and cards varieties) Then eventually made my way home after tea. I might post some photos when I am remotivated.

Went to see Ocean’s 12 today with my brothers, which I thought was excellent, with some excellent dialogue and LOL moments. Although I do hope that the last scene was not setting the movie up for a sequel…

That’s all I’m going to write.

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Monday, December 27, 2004

Sunglasses

by Luuk @ 11:41 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

When I went up to Kerikeri, I accidently left my sunglasses behind… I have since received some rather interesting emails, which I felt I should share with everyone. Hopefully the copyright holders and photographic subjects won’t mind too much… As the people in the photos are all wearing dark glasses, I think that privacy is preserved

I’m almost relieved that they are now flying back to me!

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Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Movierama

by Luuk @ 6:30 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Again more than a week has slipped by since I last posted… - I am trying to do better, honest… Although I am doing better than Mark who last updated on the 3rd of December. I’m guessing it has something to do with him shifting and having no internet yet. However, when he does, get his internet back, I expect a huge influx of posts as he posts all the ones he’s been writing to keep up with all that has happened while he hasn’t had internet. - You are still writing the posts aren’t you Mark? I haven’t really done much since my last post, apart from watching lots of movies, as the title suggests.

The movies I’ve watched since then include National Treasure, The count of Monte Cristo, The original Ocean’s 11, Amélie, The new Ocean’s 11, Big Fat Liar, Sweet November and Out of Sight. I watched the original Ocean’s 11 at Tim’s and National Treasure at the movies with Mark and co. Other than that, I’ve pretty much been watching them alone.

Apart from the movies, I went into town with Mark and Andy after National Treasure on Friday to play pool. When we got there we saw some strangely dressed characters (superman, optimus prime and a zombie) who turned out to be Mark’s brother and his friends.

Saturday I went flathunting with Merodie, and we actually found a flat! A couple of preliminary photos below (taken early this morning). The inside photos I took through the windows were all kind of spoiled by reflections. The brown one is our backyard.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours on the phone to Megan, which put paid to my plans to clean the flat before I go home… I am leaving to go home tomorrow evening and am going out for tea tonight, which doesn’t really leave any more time. I did tidy a little bit though.

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Monday, December 13, 2004

Trip

by Luuk @ 11:17 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, quite a lot has happened since my last post… Thursday I was at work till 11 trying to get as much done on our project as possible, because I wasn’t going to be there the next day. We did have a break from 6-8 to play basketball though. Then I came home, ironed my clothes and started packing to go up to my flatmate Dave’s wedding in Kerikeri (He was marrying my other flatmate’s (Megan) sister Gwyneth.

I finished packing in the morning and Merodie dropped me off for my 7:40am flight. I caught the bus from Auckland airport into town and then hopped off to find the bus depot (for my bus to Kerikeri). I got there about the same time as the bus that I’d hopped off did For the record, the bus depot is at the sky tower and the airport bus stops there… I dropped off my bag there and then went exploring.

First I went up the sky tower and stood on the glass floor and looked down into a swimming pool… Reminded me of True Lies, - if only I’d come up the elevator on a horse .

They also had some remote control cameras up there, which were obviously powered by windows XP - due to there being some unused icons on the desktop

Then I went shopping for a tent, and after I fed my lunch to the sparrows in Albert park, I bought one. Then I bussed to Kerikeri, hopping off at the Bishopwood distillery and Restaurant, as I had been instructed by Megan. I then txted Megan and a few minutes later she pulled up in the car with her brother, picked me up and then drove across the road into their driveway…

After meeting lots of people I set up my tent on the lawn and had a yum barbeque tea, then we had a bit of a pool tournament, with Kelvin and me dominating the table Mike, Jude, and Leah arrived about 11. Mike stayed in my tent and we spent a big chunk of the night catching up. In the morning, (wedding day) we txted Gwyneth and Megan to place our order for breakfast in bed. However, suprisingly, breakfast was not forthcoming. We finally gave up hope when they went for their 9 o’clock appointment at the hairdressers, so we went and had breakfast. Then Mike and me went for a drive, did a bit of a tickie tour and got back in time for Lunch.

Then, just as we were about to leave to go to the wedding, someone came running up to the window of the car and said they needed one of the guys to drive a car… As we were sitting in Mike’s car, the job fell to me by default, and I found out that I was driving the bridesmaids to the wedding in a 1939 Morris 8! We made it safely, which was somewhat of a relief, as it was a bit different to driving a modern car.

The wedding was a success - they were married at the end , actually it was very cool. After the wedding there was an afternoon tea, then we went into town for coffee and then came back for a steam boat ride.

The reception had awesome food and excellent speeches. Below is a photo of the bride and groom having their first meal together

The next morning, Sherbert and Jerry came and visited us in the tent.

After breakfast Megan, Kelvin and me went shooting. Megan and me each got a turkey - I shot mine in the head Then Megan took me down the back of the farm to see their taniwha - a rather fat eel, which I got to stroke - a somewhat slimy experience In the afternoon we played Risk and after NCIS we went shooting again, with Kelvin getting a possum and me getting another turkey.

Today was a fairly lazy day, due mainly to the large quantity of rain - I now know that my tent can withstand both wind and rain… My plane departed at 5:30. Mrs Walst made me an awesome packed tea, which even made the air hostess jealous ~:)

I arrived home to find Tuesday’s leftovers still on the bench… They have now been disposed of

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Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Sucker For Punishment.

by Luuk @ 10:18 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I just got home from work, (left about 10pm) (arrived just after 7:30am) and the first thing I did was to turn on my computer, which you’d think would be about the last thing I would want to do… However, I pretty much only turned it on to write this post, so I’ll be in bed before too long.

The long day at work was punctuated somewhat by a reasonably long lunch (lots of stuff to do, ending with sitting in the sun eating some monster sandwiches) and the trip Andy, Baz and me made to the all you can eat sushi place at church corner. I think I ate as much as I could eat… which I think we worked out would be about $35 from the amount of plates worth I ate, but all you can eat is only $16 if you have 3 or more people, so they weren’t making much money off us

The funniest thing that happened today was at lunchtime when I went to the warehouse to print a photo of something and was confronted on the screen by a number of photos of (flatmate) Megan with an af and crossed eyes, which I’m sure she thought she’d deleted, and which I didn’t know were there, but it turns out when she deletes the photos from her mac, they actually go into a hidden trash folder, which wasn’t so hidden to the machine at the warehouse. - Turns out there were 25 photos on the card when I thought there were 3. I’m considering actually posting some of the photos, because they are very funny, but I don’t know if I’d come out of it in 1 piece. Maybe after I come back from Kerikeri in the weekend and I won’t be in reach of her for some time…

I guess that’s pretty much it, possibly another late night tomorrow, but hopefully not, and then flying to Auckland at 7:40 Friday morning.

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Sunday, December 5, 2004

A good weekend

by Luuk @ 7:38 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, I’ve had a reasonably good weekend… Somewhat surprising as I did spend 9-6 at work on Saturday, but it didn’t seem like that long. After work I went round to check out Mark’s new place which was very nice. I also met Jess - Mark’s (parent’s) dog and his parents.

A bit later we went into town to iconic and Merodie and I carved up on the pool table. - I think it may have been because we managed to find a cue that was straight… and got home just after 12. When I got home the TV was going and I watched the rest of a movie called Loser which wasn’t awful, although the ending was predictable.

Today I watched a couple of movies and did some shopping. Also cleaned the kitchen and threw out the decomposing food in the fridge. The movies I watched were “The Four Feathers” (1939) and “Dangerous Minds”. The Four Feathers had some classic location captions… This one in particular had me laughing out loud:

The funny thing was that it was completely serious

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Saturday, December 4, 2004

Cars are expensive

by Luuk @ 11:08 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Spent a significant sum of money on my car today, but am not unhappy, as my car has come out of it with a new cambelt, 3 new fanbelts, a new water pump, new battery lead, new brake light bulbs, new muffler, new rear brakes, antifreeze, engine flushed, oil and filter changed and a WOF. In other words, all the major maintenance which would conceivably need doing for the next few years.

Also feeling quite lucky that I got it all done now, as the cambelt was already missing a tooth, was loose and the rest of the teeth could be peeled off by hand. In other words, things could have been a lot lot worse.

Managed to get back to work in time from picking it up for beer and pizza as well.

In other news, we are running a wee AI contest at work, based on this one. I spent about 5 minutes modifying one of the examples and ended up with something which could compete quite well with others, which have had hours spent on them. As yet, I have made no improvements on this though, and the few attempts I have made have ended in failure. However, I have plenty of ideas, just waiting for me to figure out the maths that goes with them…

Anyway, after beer and pizza, I watched Demolition man and then went round to Merodie’s to play some pool. A satisfactory result at one game each.

Today, I get to spend all day at work! because we have a project due at the end of next week, which is not a long way away.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Spoke too soon

by Luuk @ 7:17 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Dave ran off to Nelson with Gwyn

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Not Quite…

by Luuk @ 5:43 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Found out that I’m not completely home alone this week, because Dave has finished work.
We had our Navs oversight team end of year dinner yesterday, prepared by Annette and it was amazing… Full 3 course meal with lots of stuff I don’t know the name of but will try to describe anyway. The starter was garlic bread and some kind of salmon and watercress paste rolled up thing - very tasty but hard to describe, surrounded by baby tomatoes and green stuff. The main was a filo pastry smoked chicke and pumpkin and various extras pie, baked/grilled/yummy potatoes, honey glazed carrots and some greens - I remember asparagus and cucumber. (correct me if I’m wrong anyone who was there who reads this). The dessert was these awesome chocolate baskets full of fruit and vanilla and almond ice cream. All accompanied by some great wine. Then we had some after dinner mints thoughtfully provided by Ayley. I managed to come away not feeling like I’d eaten to much which was good, as that doesn’t often happen to me when there is yum food around, which made everything even better.

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Monday, November 29, 2004

All alone :(

by Luuk @ 2:56 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Megan left on Friday, Emily left today. Now I’m effectively all alone. I say effectively, because Dave is still there for another week, but seeing as I work 7:30am-4:30pm and he works 3pm-11pm, and given our relative sleeping patterns, I don’t actually see him.

Oh well, I should be alright. Going out for tea tonight, and I’m sure Mark will have some kind of house warming party when he moves into his new house on Friday… Also, have many food in the fridge, including (but definitely not limited to) 5 half blocks of butter.

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Friday, November 26, 2004

Permanent International Dutch Draughts Championship Score Table

by Luuk @ 4:02 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

International Dutch Draughts Championship of the World
Week	Flying Dutchman	Draw	Crazy Scot
1	6	0	1
2	4	2	5
3	2	1	5
4	1	0	6
5	5	3	4
6	2	0	3
7	1	2	0
8	0	1	0
10	0	0	1

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Friday, November 19, 2004

For anyone who cares…

by Luuk @ 10:11 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I have updated the international dutch draughts championship of the world score table. I can’t be bothered writing a new table every time, so I’ll just try to keep the old one up to date. I am considering making a new post for it though which I will permalink from the sidebar.

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Thursday, November 18, 2004

Busy Week…

by Luuk @ 11:18 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, Thursday to Thursday it’s been quite a busy week. Thursday night we had basketball after work. I decided to bike to work that day (which I hadn’t done for a wee while) which meant that I had to bike to basketball, which would have been pretty cruisy except that I was trying to keep up with Baz resulting in me being severely stuffed by the time we got there. However, I recovered enough to play in the end. On the way home I was thinking about going to bed early to get up for work, when I suddenly realised that Friday was a day off!! This was quite a revelation really, considering I’d known all day, but it didn’t actually sink in until that point which kind of made my day.

I spent most of Friday playing games (Dawn of War specifically) which was a fun way to spend a day off, if not entirely productive. A group of us watched Pride and Prejudice in the evening which (despite the mockability of this statement) I have to say I enjoyed. As Adam put it - it is very well done, but about such a stupid subject. 5-6 hours about girls trying to find a husband…

Saturday was good too, a reasonably relaxing morning (sleep-in followed by a bit more gaming and then talking to flatmates (and Adam)). Then Megan left, never to be seen again until next week and then I went to our class reunion, which consisted of a casual game of soccer (I was goalie for quite some time, allowing me to lie in the sun for most of the game) and then a delicious spit roast dinner, which I ate a lot of, - this was helped by the relatively small number of people who turned up.

The large dinner was quite fortituous as Sunday was our Navs oversight team planning day for which we had decided to fast, so stocking up the night before was definitely a good thing. It was at the sister Eveleen retreat house in Sumner, which had some fantastic views out over the sea. The funniest part of the day would have to be when Ayley, Tim and Me were waiting by the car when we were leaving and I mentioned that it might be a bit difficult for Lynton to get his car out from where he was parked and Ayley responded by saying that the people walking up the hill looked like they were leaving which would be bound to make it easier. This probably would have made it easier if it hadn’t been Lynton and Annette. When I got home I decided I wanted fish and chips so ate way too much of them, feeling sick afterwards. Dave actually refused when I asked him if he wanted me to get him some, which came as quite a shock.

On Monday my new mouse arrived. I have to post a few pictures…

Photo of mouse taken with flash

Photo of mouse taken without flash

Photo of mouse taken in the dark

Tuesday was halflife 2 day, which ended up costing me an extra $80 due to me absent-mindedly speeding down Riccarton Rd. on my way to Baz’s place to get my copy. Good on the NZ police for their vigilance. Once that was all sorted I headed back home to play it, and yes it really is as good as they say! The graphics, physics and story are awesome. The people are very cool, as they have realistic facial expressions and you can see the glisten in their eyes and sometimes they even blink (something I noticed yesterday). Oh, I almost forgot… Megan (at work) came back from her holiday in Fiji and I almost recognised her.

Wednesday we put on another “cake” day at work for our team, which went off well, especially the vegetables, which the vegetarians were very appreciative of, - given their absence in the past. I should probably explain that we have converted cake day into more of an assorted yummy food day. More halflife 2 in the evening, where I was introduced to the joys of the airboat.

Today we had our quarterly company BBQ at lunchtime, and some more basketball fun in the evening.

Daily diary signing out

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I have actually done stuff in the last week…

by Luuk @ 9:09 am. Filed under Uncategorized

But a little game called halflife 2 which has just come out means that I have no time to tell you about it all. I will, later.

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Tuesday, November 9, 2004

The promised update

by Luuk @ 8:09 am. Filed under Uncategorized

International Dutch Draughts Championship of the World
Week	FD	Draw	CS (Hax)
1	6	0	1
2	4	2	5
3	2	1	5
4	1	0	6
5	5	3	4
6	2	0	3

Week 5 is the current week and no I don’t know why there is a big gap at the top

**update** I got rid of the gap! The key is to put all the code for the table on one line, otherwise there will be a newline added for each line of the table.

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Monday, November 8, 2004

Way past my bedtime

by Luuk @ 11:34 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Well, it’s been a wee while since I updated, as various people have reminded me, so I thought I would write something despite being well past my bedtime. (For those laughing, I will be getting up at 6:20). The most stand-out thing that happened this week was going to the beach yesterday, which was fantastic, with awesome weather, soccer, swimming and I didn’t even get sunburnt. However I did manage to obtain a rather large gash in the bottom of my heel, courtesy of a large chunk of glass that I stood on when I jumped out of the car to go grab Baz at his place, resulting in large amounts of blood, mostly on his floor. We repaired the damage with a kitchen towel and some electrical tape, which lasted till we got to the beach (Taylor’s mistake for those interested) at which point it fell off. I decided to ignore it, which resulted in the cut filling up with sand which I then had to attempt to wash out once I got home (mostly successful). Anyway, you’ve probably had enough of me describing my wounds in graphic detail, so I’ll stop…

I got a bigger swiss ball on Saturday too, which I sat on all day at work today and don’t feel any worse off, apart from it rubbing most of the hair off the back of my legs.

Ooh, before I forget, Baz and me came up with the idea of a social club beach day/evening. (Take note Mark) or possibly even just a bunch of us going to the beach straight after work for a bbq. We were trying to figure out how to beat the weekend crowds, so we thought organising it for a Wednesday would be best. (The social club beach day that is).

Anyway, bedtime… And I may update you on the draughts results tomorrow if I remember, although they aren’t too flattering.

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Thursday, October 28, 2004

I am old.

by Luuk @ 7:20 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday was quite uneventful, which was kind of strange, being my birthday. I really must be getting old… Actually, I quite enjoyed the relaxedness of it all. I may have just invented that word… We had a romantic dinner for four (Spags) by candlelight, after which my Sister rang. After I talked to her I opened the present that my flatmates got for me which was very cool! - A sushi kit… Someone must have been noticing the copius amounts of sushi I eat my way through Then the rest of my family rang up and I talked to them for some time. Possibly the most interesting piece of news was that my brother Frans who kept pretending that he couldn’t be bothered learning how to drive has been getting lessons in secret since Tony got his learner’s. Dad told him that he had to get 10 lessons with an instructor before he could drive with Dad and the first Dad knew about the lessons was when Frans asked if he could drive. After that I had a piece of very yummy carrot cake that Megan baked for me while I was on the phone (no Mark, it wasn’t bacon cake) and then went to bed. Oh, today is actually the day that I am playing basketball

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Monday, October 25, 2004

I wrote this on Monday…

by Luuk @ 11:33 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Sunday was great. First I had church, which was excellent. Some of the lines in one of the songs really stuck out to me. The lines were “Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me” and “Restore unto me the joy of my salvation”, both of which stuck out as I have been rather grumpy and tired of late, and the grumpiness really isn’t a “right spirit”. Reuben recently wrote a post which used a lightbulb as an analogy for Jesus, and I made a rather cryptic comment at the time about taking light bulbs for granted. I think it is possible sometimes to take God for granted and forget how amazing he is, which I think is one of the reasons that we worship, - to remind ourselves. I think there are a lot of things that we take for granted, for example I am writing this post in a text editor, because blogger doesn’t seem to be working. I expected it to just work, but the link just wouldn’t work which I really wasn’t expecting before 7 in the morning.
Anyway, on to the rest of my day. After church, we went out out to the Martin’s place (near Prebbleton) and had a massive bbq. When we came back, there were some people I knew playing soccer on the Ilam school field, so I joined in, possibly the first exercise I’ve had in weeks. I’m writing this on Thursday but pretending that I wrote it on Monday, so it seems a bit weird to write that I’m playing basketball tonight, which will be my next bout of exercise, but I’ll write it anyway because I am. Then I had a meeting with food and got home in time to watch CSI and NCIS. One of the highlights of the day was telling everyone who asked what I had planned for Monday “Nothing”.

Today (Monday - Labour day) I played Myst IV most of the day (small amount of progress) and then went to Rachael’s house with Megan and had a spa, which could have been quite relaxing… Then after tea I introduced Megan to the world of Arnie, in the form of True Lies.

**Update, I figured out why I had to write this post (and the next one) offline… “A major error was made in the network routing“**

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Sunday, October 24, 2004

Who’d have thunk it…

by Luuk @ 8:11 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I actually did quite a lot yesterday, looking back. I got up just before 7 (Yes it was the weekend) and went for a roller-blade, which I haven’t done for ages, which was fun and also some much needed exercise. A wee bit of boring stuff like tidying my room and doing my washing. I played the prince of Persia demo some more, which was not great, and I got to a point where everyone else has problems and the big monster gets stuck in the corner and you can’t kill him. Anyway, too much detail. Played a bit of Myst IV as well (very small amount of progress), re-potted my cacti, went to a meeting, watched “The Castle” - I’d never seen it before, classic comedy - recommended… Then watched some of the rugby which wasn’t all that exciting due to not having any teams I cared about, so went to the undies flat to watch another movie…

That is what this post is really about. The movie was “Lost in Translation.” This was possibly the most boring movie I have ever seen. Nothing actually happens, and it is about two bored people hanging out together. The only reason I didn’t fall asleep was that I was hoping that something was going to redeem the movie, but alas, no, nothing. We did watch it rather late in the evening which could have contributed, but I’m sure it can’t have been that big a factor. I decided to check out what others thought about it and looked it up on IMDB. I cannot agree… (See post title) This movie is ranked an 8/10 and is number 153 on the best 250 movies of all time. I’m not quite sure if we were watching the same movie, but I really didn’t see it. Anyway, enough ranting… I recommend this movie if you have absolutely nothing else to do for an hour and forty minutes and have seen all other movies.

Now, to end this post on a more positive note, I am going to post a photo of my cacti. From left to right: As yet unnamed, Shaggy and Spid.

In other news, The two games of Dutch Draughts played between the flying Dutchman and the crazy Scot on Friday both ended in a draw…

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Thursday, October 21, 2004

Due to accusation of slackness.

by Luuk @ 2:45 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been told that I am a lazy mofo and should post, so I am… (posting that is.) To see relative laziness, it may pay to compare wordcount between accuser and accusee, which tells quite a different story, considering the two blogs were created within a day of each other! At first I thought not a lot had happened since my last post, but looking back, that is not actually the case. Here is a selection:

I decided to let the juggling challenge die it’s natural death… Incidentally, I did 26 juggles this morning which would have seen me well into next week. Juggling is actually a lot easier if you aren’t trying to count.

Dutch draughts is going somewhat worse now. Baz won the first game and I won the next nine, and he is currently on a winning streak of 6… I did catch him perusing draughts problems on the web when I came in one morning, so I think he might be putting a little bit more effort into learning the map… (Gaming reference)

I played some of the prince of persia - warrior within demo last night which wasn’t all that, but I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll reserve my judgement, but I’m not really overly impressed and will quite possibly cancel the pre-order I placed just over two months ago. (It comes out in a month’s time.) This is also partially due to the large number of games that I already have and haven’t finished.

On Tuesday we farewelled Ayley, which involved eating a Scottish dinner, including haggis and “taties and neeps” (mashed potatoes and turnips) and fine malt Whisky. Eoin did a fantastic job of addressing the haggis before we ate it as well (Scottish tradition). Jeremy and Me (well, mainly Jeremy) had put together a bit of a presentation of video clips and photos of Ayley during her time here, which we showed as well, including the guaranteed technical difficulties. Windows media player really does suck. Then I somehow managed to recover Peter’s 11 page assignment which his computer had crashed and eaten… Possibly the first time I have ever got something useful out of a windows tmp file. I was quite impressed that it actually worked.

I think I’ll leave it at that… I could include more links if I really tried to but I don’t really want to link to Microsoft… They have kind of cancelled themselves out. On the one hand, the aforementioned technical difficulties and on the other, actually managing to recover the data lost when Windows crashed… Apparently this was due to a problem with HP’s printer driver and not Microsoft’s fault?

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Saturday, October 16, 2004

Dutch or International Draughts.

by Luuk @ 8:55 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Recently at work me and Baz have taken to playing Dutch draughts at work (also known as international draughts.) See his blog for scores. It is a much more interesting game than what most of you know as draughts or checkers. I will try to explain the differences as well as linking some actual rules.

The first difference is that it is played on a 10×10 board with 4 rows of pieces instead of 3 (20 pieces instead of 12). Any piece can take backwards, not just the king. Taking is compulsory and if you have multiple options, you must take in the way that will allow you to capture the most pieces. (A king counts as one piece). The biggest difference though is the kings. They can move as far as they like along a diagonal in any direction instead of just one space. If they are jumping they can start any distance before the piece they are taking and end any distance after it. However, they must still follow the maximum take rule, so if they can land somewhere where they can take more pieces, they have to land there. This can lead to some serious carnage, once you get a king and makes them much more important. You win when your opponent can’t move (no pieces or completely blocked in).

I think that’s about it, see the above rules site for the rest of the rules, although I think I’ve covered most of them.

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Thursday, October 14, 2004

Very quick juggling update…

by Luuk @ 11:35 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m still managing to go home every day! Today my target is 14, which I have already achieved. I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it…

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Wednesday, October 13, 2004

The end of the year.

by Luuk @ 9:00 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Last night marked the end of small groups for another year of navs. A bit of a sad occasion, but a good time to reflect on how the year has gone and looking ahead to the future. A lot has happened this year, which I won’t go into here because I don’t really have that much time to write this post, but I might go into it in more detail in a future post.

I had quite a long talk to my family the phone on Monday night too, which was really good, with my brother setting an all-time new record for him on the phone, of about 70 minutes, which is extremely impressive. Incidentally, if there are any girls aged aproximately 19 from the Hamilton area reading this… (Not very likely but it could happen) I won’t say anymore, but feel free to post a comment.

I also got Quake 3 on Monday, which is a fairly old game now, (which made it really cheap) but still a lot of fun. I installed it linux too, and it installed and ran without a hitch, which I thought was pretty cool. I’ve never really played the game before either, because when it came out my computer was too slow to run it, causing the people I was trying to shoot to appear to teleport around the screen instead of smoothly running.

So, a combination of quake 3 and the long phone conversation meant that I “decided” not to go to the gym on Tuesday morning. I will try again tomorrow… Now that daylight savings is here, getting up at 6:20 is starting to become more of a struggle again.

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Sunday, October 10, 2004

Snippets from Sunday…

by Luuk @ 11:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I went back to Captain Ben’s today after church and because I wasn’t feeling adventurous, I pointed to the same thing as last time. Strangely, I got a different meal… I think this one was bacon and egg on rice. Still very tasty, but I’m back to square 1 on the learning the list front.

I clocked the original Myst today - well, at least I think I did… It doesn’t seem to actually end. It just lets you keep exploring. I also played quite a lot of single player MOHAA earlier in the day, which was actually quite a sobering experience. One of the missions was the allied asault on Normandy. I was landing on Omaha beach and the suicidal nature of the whole thing was quite a thought provoking thing on the stupidness of war. Every single time all the people in front of me on the landing craft got mowed down by machine guns, as I did 9 times out of 10. Luckily it wasn’t real, or I’d be dead at least 30 times over.

I also installed Myst 4 just before I went to bed. I think it is possibly the biggest game I have ever installed, weighing in at a whopping 8GB on two DVD’s. It is very pretty though, although Cyan and Ubisoft failed to provide “invert mouse” as an option, which is somewhat annoying for my upside down brain.

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Pointy Thing

by Luuk @ 12:21 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

We went to Captain Ben’s - the local fish and chip shop for tea, (about 8:30) and I decided to try something different for a change. Every time I go there I see this sign written completely in Chinese advertising the Chinese dishes that are available and every time I tell myself that the next time I will actually pick one of them. So, today I actually did it… Here is the dialogue with the girl behind the counter…

GBTC: Hello, what would you like (or something similar)
Me: I’ll have one of those please (pointing at Chinese writing on the menu)
GBTC: You can’t be serious.
Me: Yes
GBTC: Do you even know what it is?
Me: No
GBTC: I suggest you choose something better.
Me: No, this is what I want
GBTC: It’s kind of a chicken and tofu thing on rice - Is that really what you want?
Me: Yep, sounds good.
GBTC: That will be $6.50
(Money changed hands)

Some time later…
GBTC: Ummm… The pointy thing (announcing that it was ready)
Me: Thanks
GBTC: Would you like chopsticks or a fork?
Me: Chopsticks please.
GBTC: (Somewhat mockingly) Have fun trying to use them.

And that was pretty much that… Incidentally, it was very tasty and I wouldn’t hesitate to order it again. (I know which one on the menu it is too.)

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Saturday, October 9, 2004

Aaah, That’s better…

by Luuk @ 4:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Thank you omega drivers, you just saved my life, well, my hair anyway, from being torn out. Note the time… I arrived at the LAN at 11am and now I can finally start playing games.

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EXTREME FRUSTRATION!!!

by Luuk @ 3:21 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Ok, I have been at the LAN for more than 4 hours now and I still can’t play games. I got counterstrike source, abut when I tried to play it, it said I should update my video card drivers, which I then proceeded to try… Midway through the install it crashed, royally screwing my computer, leaving me trying to revive it for the rest of the day.

I did have slightly better luck this morning, coming away from the garage sale with a jigsaw puzzle and 5 packs of Girl Guide Mini chocolate biscuits. However, the warehouse only had two swiss balls in the size I wanted and they were both purple, so I didn’t get one of those. I did buy some croissants from the bakery outside the warehouse though, making for an excellent breakfast back at the flat - apparently the girls had just been discussing making some kind of different breakfast seconds before I walked in the door. On a positive note, the other 8 people at the LAN are having no trouble gaming…

51 seconds till I have another driver download to try…

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I really should be in bed…

by Luuk @ 1:19 am. Filed under Uncategorized

I should be in bed doing the necessary preparation for the LAN tomorrow… oops, today, but instead I am still being dragged back to this blog thing. A couple more people have joined the bandwagon… Louise (my sister) and Baz. Anyway, I thought I might order halflife 2 from steam, but then it started trying to update steam which I really couldn’t be bothered waiting for, (does anyone think I have begun to speak a foreign language) so it’s just going to have to happen today at the LAN. But first I am going to hopefully buy a swissball, which I may even use as my seat at the LAN if I’m crazy enough, followed by trying to find some bargains at the garage sale at the church at church corner.

We had beer and pizza or “Monthly Company Update” as it is now called at work this afternoon, followed by some discussions about the things that were said, which are going to have to remain confidential … and then we went to Baz’s and ended up playing Nintendo for a couple of hours before eventually heading off to Rockpool to play some pool, after which I headed back to Baz’s to pick up my cellphone and headed home to write this, after giving him some valuable tips on how to set up his blog from my vast blogging experience. Anyway, that’s probably enough rambling about how my day went. I think I may actually prefer writing posts that are about something interesting or that have some sort of theme, but in my tired state you are going to have to settle for my night out. (You may want to put this in the “Where the geek guy hangs out” section of my previous post.)

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Friday, October 8, 2004

By way of intoduction

by Luuk @ 1:30 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Paul posted a link to an article about geek guys yesterday, which was scarily accurate, so I thought I would go through it and comment about myself point by point… (The article is here) If you haven’t read it you should read it. It will also help this post make more sense.

“Geek Guys are smart, loyal, interesting, have an cool sense of humor and are very creative. Parents love them, too.”
Yes, I can agree with that

How does it work?
The pulling everything apart thing. Yes, to a certain extent… although somewhat reformed.

Toys.
Not huge on the toys like I used to be, but I do have some juggling balls, a frisbee, a tennis ball and a cd case that can be made to eject rapidly on my desk at work

Creativity
I like to create, but often find it gets pushed to the background with all the other stuff I have going on.

Science Fiction/Fantasy Conventions.
No, not really, at all. Although… The dressing up part, I nearly went into town dressed as a pimp the other day. Silk dressing gown, jewellery and shiny shiny aviators. in the end I left the dressing gown behind.

Gaming and role playing.
Gaming yes, role playing no. I tend to prefer a bit of adrenaline/action and more fun in less time from the games I play. I don’t really like RPGs that much. Partially because I think they are more addictive than fun - much like gambling - you don’t see that many people smiling at the casino but it’s always full, and partially because there is a lot of magic/demons/occult in there which I don’t think fits with my faith very well. But then one could argue against the excessive violence in the other games I play too, so that’s not really the main reason. I tend to play mainly first person shooters and driving games, although I do enjoy the occasional real time strategy or adventure game.

The Net.
Yes, definitely, I started doing the instant messaging thing (ICQ) in 1996 and did the BBS thing before the internet really got going. I’m not really big on the online gaming thing though, partially because we only have dialup. Up until this point though I had managed to avoid blogs, although I did have my own website on geocities for a while, which got scarily out of date.

Geek guys and a challenge.
Definitely can’t resist a challenge. Ask Jamie about the foozeball or Merodie about the pool. Current challenges I am working on are the juggling (mentioned in a previous post) and trying to find my flatmate Emily’s blog. Usually I can find stuff in a matter of seconds, but I don’t think her one has hit google yet… Ayley and Kelly can tell you how fast I found their blogs. In breaking news, I couldn’t be bothered waiting and she told me what it was. If it had been on google I would have found it with the search terms I was using…

Humor.
For obscure references see Blog title and URL… Currently I’m stuck on a bit of a “you’re” kick. You take what the other person has said and you kind of modify it and make it funny by adding “you” or “you’re” or “your” to it.
For example:
Yesterdays Dilbert cartoon
Statement: “That’s crazy”
Reply: “You’re crazy”
Statement: “This pan’s kind of hot.”
Reply: “You’re kind of hot”
Sometimes it’s funnier to just do it in your head…
You get the picture.

Dress. Casual, comfortable and ‘wearable.’
Yes, although I do try not to look too heinous… and do even make an effort on occasion.

Geek guys and a mystery.
Similar to the challenge. Possibly what keeps me up for hours when some part of my computer isn’t working quite right

Music.
I do own a guitar, but definitely plink and I listen to most things. A lot of Christian rock/pop/hip-hop, along with the beatles and pretty much anything. Don’t really like lyrics which have heaps of swearing or otherwise bad - really couldn’t figure out how to put that. And no, I don’t really like country. I’m definitely not as opinionated about music as this.

Diet.
I can cook and usually eat reasonably healthily, if maybe somewhat too much. But as the article says I do tend to eat junk food when gaming.

Loyal
I’d like to think so, but I’m not shy and I think I make friends reasonably easily.

Intelligence.
Pretty much - like what it says in the article, although I don’t really like blowing that trumpet.

Parents love Geek guys.
Everybody loves me

Geek guys are romantic.
Not something people see in me every day, but it’s there. Although, I don’t think I would make a heart out of microchips or write a poem comparing a girl to a piece of hardware.

Geek guys are passionate about pleasure.
meh, never really thought about it.

Occupation.
I am a system test software engineer, which is fairly technical, although sometimes it’s not challenging enough, and I really don’t work well when I’m not being challenged.

Where the Geek guy hangs out.
Yeah, pretty much anywhere.

Well, hopefully that wasn’t too boring…

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Thursday, October 7, 2004

Wanganui: Probably not the place to be.

by Luuk @ 11:01 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Just finished watching this weeks episode of “The Queen’s Tour” with John Campbell. As you can probably guess from the title, it was in Wanganui. As per usual, Jaquie Brown was profiling the Saturday nightlife, which consisted of attending a roller hockey practice, followed by annoying the design school students who were working on their assignments, then watching the rugby at a boarding school - probably the one redeeming feature, but then I guess they have rugby everywhere, followed by visiting some wierd cafe which wasn’t exactly pumping. Possibly a little lacking in terms of an awesome night. At the start of the night she was trying to flag down cars which were off to Palmerston North for their night out to see why they would want to leave.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s an alright place to live… Possibly the most disturbing part of the show was the end where John Campbell did the titanic “I’m the king of the world” scene on the paddle steamer Waimaire.

That was followed by the stunning revelation on Nightline that Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction.

Well, that’s 3 posts in one day. I wonder if there is any way that I am going to keep that up… Probably not, but at least if I get into the habit there’s more chance that it will happen.

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September 2010
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Apr
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Friday, February 23, 2007

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Monday, October 9, 2006

Sunday, October 1, 2006

Friday, August 18, 2006

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