Articles
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Brazil: Day 10
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Brazil: Day 9
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Brazil: Day 8
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Brazil: Day 7
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Brazil: Day 6
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Brazil: Day 5
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Brazil: Day 4
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Brazil: Day 3
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Brazil: Day 2
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Brazil: Day 1
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Happy Obama Day!
After what feels like a sempiternal reign of incoherent belligerency, we can finally say goodbye to that imbecilic Texan simian and his band of merry idiots, and welcome something fresh — hopefully something successful.
Now Barack, I might be just one voice in an enormous sea, speaking from outside your country's borders irreverently, but let me say this as clearly as I can so that it might be picked up by a whitehouse.gov flunky: Don't screw up.
I don't particularly care about politics within the United States especially, but considering how inextricably tied the world is to your country — financially or otherwise — and the current state of society at large, it seems you have a hell of a mess to clean up; In particular after your predecessor. I don't envy your task ahead, but please: Don't screw up.
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Christmas is nearly over, finally
It's Christmas time again. It comes around every year, and for some reason this year I really couldn't care less. I don't think I'm becoming a scrooge, but rather I think it has something to do with the fact that Christmas started four months ago and I'm sick of hearing about it.
But never fear: for in a few day's time Valentine's Day promotions will start, and before too long Easter will rear its ugly head — all obscenely ahead of schedule.
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A day in the life…
☃For the last two years, I have dedicated the arbitrary date of December 13th to recording a snapshot of my life. In what is quickly becoming an annual tradition after last year's repeat of much the same, I present to you this year's effort.
To set the scene, you need to know that it's been unusually cold across Western Europe lately. Today was certainly no exception, and as the previous night was spent avoiding my company's Christmas Party in favour of another company's, you can understand that things were a little difficult…
As with the last two years, all photos here have been taken hastily with my Nokia E70 and have not been modified.
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Rediscovering Photography
I've spent a bit of money lately. Okay, I've spent a lot of money — more than I probably should have — on returning to an old hobby of mine.
Photography was an old hobby of mine that faded away after I started working for Hitz FM and ultimately didn't have any money to continue. Over the last two years, I've been keen on getting back into it, and after Scott came over to Brussels for our road-trip around Europe with his Nikon D70 I've been itching to buy a digital SLR.
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Goodbye Walibi
Tonight we visited Walibi for Halloween. For a change, “we” not only means friends, but sadly half of my office came along tonight as a gift from one of our vendors.
I'm sorry Walibi: You had me, but you lost me.
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Kyiv
As you may have noticed from yesterday's post, John and I headed off to Kyiv (Ки́ев) for the weekend for our brief but memorable visit to the site of the Chernobyl disaster.
While our stay in Kyiv was only concomitant to the tour to Chernobyl and Pripyat, the city seems quite lovely and the trip itself certainly wasn't uneventful!
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Chernobyl and Pripyat
On Friday, 25 April 1986, engineers at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Station were preparing to shutdown their forth reactor for maintenance. They took the decision to use the maintenance window to test certain emergency safety systems, in particular those related to keeping the core cooling systems operational.
Engineers at the time were concerned that any major disturbance in the power grid would cause a peak in electricity demand from the reactor that would provoke it to overload and shut-down automatically for safety. Sadly, this safety precaution could have also shut down the water pumps that kept the reactor's core cool, and the engineers believed that the backup power generators would take too long restore power to the water pumps, causing a melt-down situation within the reactor.
The engineers had a plan to use the momentum of the turbines from the power plant to generate electricity for the water pumps while the backup generators would start up. This was a great plan on paper, but it hadn't been successfully proven on the equipment for many years since the plan was developed. Naturally, another test was required.
This article is somewhat large, weighing in at around two-megabytes. Slow or mobile internet connections may struggle to load the full article.
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Ghost Towns
☢Ghost towns have always piqued my interest. There's something interesting about how a large number of people can gather together to build a town, or even a city, only to have some unforeseeable event render the area deserted.
Because of the Victorian Gold Rush, I'm familiar with quite a few ghost towns from an Australian perspective, however sadly there's not much left due to the Australian Government's policy of destroying them.
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Benespection
⌛If you're a regular reader, you've probably noticed that I've had a terrible time lately trying to update the blog. Things have been ridiculously busy for me lately, to the point where my spare time has completely evaporated.
I am trying to change the situation, but until then posts might be a little later than usual. That doesn't mean that I still haven't seen some odd stuff around the place, so it's time for me to use my invented word again; it's time for another (tiny) dose of benespection.
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Fluffy Cheese Cake
Everyone loves a cheese cake, and if you think my Toblerone Cheesecake is too sweet then maybe try this cake out. This is a cooked cheese cake that is light and fluffy and goes well with mixed red berries.
This recipe is very simple and it only takes about an hour to put one of these cakes together!
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