Articles
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Brussels Summer Festival
Since 2002 the city of Brussels has organised a bunch of live music events around town each summer, and last year it came to my front door. Despite certain folk petitioning against its return, it has once again graced my neighbourhood and presented me with some new talent to consider.
As always, this year I missed several events, and certainly the festival lasts longer than the three days presented here. Nevertheless, once it arrives on my doorstep I cannot ignore the Brussels Summer Festival.
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Benespection
Earlier this month, I came across Ommegang as I was heading home one evening. This has now become an annual event here in Brussels, and I had heard rumours of its existence.
Essentially it's a medieval festival, with many re-enactments. The event also has daily jousting on the Sablon! On this particular evening I decided to follow the parade on it way through the city as I walked home.
At the rear of the parade was free beer, courtesy of Charles Quint, and very nice beer it was, indeed!
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Chunky Chicken, Bacon and Mushroom Pie
Coming from Australia, I love a good pie. Among my favourite types of pie, Chicken & Mushroom ranks quite highly on my list of delights. Sadly living in Belgium limits my access to pies, so I have to make my own.
Here is the recipe for my Chicken, Bacon and Mushroom Pie, which is rich in flavour and works perfectly on a chilly night.
Continue reading "Chunky Chicken, Bacon and Mushroom Pie"...
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Welcome to the Republic of Poyais
☎Scams will always exist as long as the general population of the world remain stupid and ignorant. I attribute any rise in the number of scams to be directly related to the state of the economy — any increase from the “normal” level of scams usually corresponds directly with any economic uncertainty within the market.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last twelve months, you have surely noticed that there is a bit of a problem with the global economy. If you haven't noticed then you must have at least noticed that scams are on the rise; Ingenious as some of them may be, now is a good time to use your brain.
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 10
One last day in the Ardennes before heading back to reality — that is to say, home and ultimately work.
So it hasn't been so much of a road-trip, with two long stop-overs in picturesque locations, but at least it's been a holiday!
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 9
Ahh, Belgian weather! It's amazing sometimes how you can cross the border into this small country and suddenly the weather turns sour.
That's not to say that the weather here is always bad like everyone says, but it does seem to be overcast more often than not.
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 8
With the car ready to go, and us not really willing to actually pay for the hotel room, we spent our last morning in Chamonix and decided to continue driving north.
This was my last chance to exploit the sales in the area, so after one last coffee I headed over to the Aigle shop to pick up a heavily discounted winter jacket that should come in handy in a few months' time.
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 7
Still in Chamonix today, and I've been deliberating whether or not I want to go paragliding at a nearby paragliding school since we arrived. Chamonix in the summer also offers hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing… and an adventure park!
Chamonix has a lot to offer, but when you're not sure if you're leaving today, or tomorrow, or in a few days' time, it's very difficult to plan what you want to do. Given the price and the timing, I sadly dropped the paragliding idea and we went for the very adult decision of going to Les Planards adventure park!
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 6
We awoke in our free hotel room to spend a day roaming the touristy yet placid and beautiful town of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, wedged in the heart of Chamonix Valley between Mont Blanc, Le Brévent and Aiguilles Rouges.
With last night's tartiflette digested, the day was spent generally vegetating around the town while we waited for news on the car that broke down yesterday. We returned to the tourist information office to exploit their free Wi-Fi and did a little bit of shopping.
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 5
This morning we were in Avignon — a city once full of
religious old fartspopes and anti-popes — indeed quite a powerful place, if I understand correctly. After consuming what can barely be described as the dregs of breakfast from the Etap, we headed out into the town to investigate.However, we had a slight conundrum to deal with first…
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 4
Awoke this morning with a goal of getting the real part of the road-trip started. Now that the wedding was over, it was time to decide which way back to Brussels we were going to take. Specifically, we were trying to decide which side of France to traverse.
Armed with the 2€ road atlas that Scott and I bought on a whim just prior to taking our trip and a coin, it was decided relatively adventitiously that we would return via the Eastern side of France…
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 3
After a long sleep-in, we awoke to a boiling hot day in Aigua Blava. Since we could see Wedding HQ from our rear terrace, we noticed things were a little bit hectic over there. This isn't really surprising, considering Cath & Max were to be wed today!
We decided to head into Begur for some lunch, but indecision kept us from choosing a place to sit down for lunch…
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 2
After catching the last remnants of breakfast, and a brief visit to the ATAC in Aumont-Aubrac for some bottled water (and some other… stuff…) we headed back on the A75 through the Massif Central.
While heading over a ridge, I noticed a bridge in the distance that appeared somewhat familiar, if not somewhat enormous. An excited idea popped into my head that it could be the Millau Viaduct — the very bridge Scott and I were looking for when we were crossing back into France from Spain…
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Road-Trip 2008: Day 1
Being invited to Cath & Max's wedding in Spain, Aline and I took it upon ourselves to take a little holiday. Living in Belgium, it seemed perfectly logical to go on a little road-trip — there and back.
Two years ago Scott and I embarked on a road-trip that had many ups and downs but taught me many things about how a road-trip can be conducted. Scott has fortunately maintained his website, Smile in Europe, which contains a few photos taken along that particular journey.
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The audits
My audits are in full swing at work this month, which is why I'm fairly quiet lately. Each year I get dragged into several audits because of my line of work, including an internal audit, an external audit, and a federal audit.
Needless to say, it's a pain. More-so, it's a terrible detriment to the environment. The photo shown here is one security report from our system in a format that our external auditors prefer. Each year, a small tree gets printed, each page signed by management, and approved by the auditors, all in the name of Sarbanes-Oxley — Ha.
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Fixing other people's code
I'm sick of fixing other people's code. I love the open-source community for all of the free and high-quality software that's out there. I've even contributed my own little bits and pieces, mostly in the form of patches, here and there.
What I hate about the open-source movement are the egos. The problem is that the people who started a project end up actually belittling the project because of their own arrogance. Suggest something, or even provide a patch, and these particular people will tell you that your idea is wrong, that you don't know what you're doing, and so forth. On the other hand, they may never respond. I can understand this to a certain extent; I work in IT, and we're all control-freaks at some level.
Over the next year or so, I'm going to start rewriting my blog from the ground up, because this is ultimately the only way I can get the performance and feature-set I want without hacking at someone else's system. This also means my little DVD collection database will be frozen and remain incomplete until I rewrite that part too.
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Benespection
⍨With my birthday coming up in a few days, I've been struggling to find some time for myself. I keep inventing projects for myself, but never actually have the time to dig into them and make any satisfying progress.
One example is that I still haven't made any progress on my appalling level of French, and there's no hope in hell that I'll be running in the 20km of Brussels half-marathon this year.
I suppose I need to keep in mind what Ferris Bueller once said, “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
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Blogging the PPC-1 submarine cable
Submarine cables have always fascinated me, initially from the sheer length of some of these cables, or from the sheer number of them, but also from the fact that the concept was commercially proven as long ago as 1850!
Of course, back then the cables were simple copper wires wrapped in gutta-percha (a kind of latex) and couldn't compete with today's fancy multi-strand fibre optic self-healing rings.
Curiously, PIPE have formally opened a blog that follows the installation of their new PPC-1 cable between Guam and Australia, which is set to be quite interesting.
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Cirque du Soleil's Delirium
This evening I had the privilege of being taken to Delirium, the amazing multimedia spectacular from Cirque du Soleil. Needless to say, I was completely blown away.
This production superbly combines dance, acrobatics, live and pre-produced music, along with live and pre-produced video into an incredible well paced audio-visual feast that couldn't give anyone a chance to get bored.
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Benespection
It's been quite a while since my last little Benespection post, and considering it recently snowed for the first time this year — surprisingly just as winter officially ended — I thought I might share some snow pictures with you all.
Being Australian, I tend to have a slight fascination with snow, but on this particular occasion some of us were actually trapped by it…
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