Begin maart kreeg ik een mailtje van een Duits weekblad met de vraag of ze één van mijn foto’s mochten gebruiken voor de cover van hun volgende uitgave. Uiteraard heb ik terug geantwoord dat het een eer zou zijn als er één van mijn foto’s op de cover van een tijdschrift terecht komt. Het mailtje werd verstuurd en na een tijdje was ik het al weer vergeten.

We spoelen door naar afgelopen maandag en wat ligt daar op de mat? Een uitgave van het Duitse tijdschrift met mijn mooie tijger foto op de voorkant en mijn naam op de eerste pagina. Als mijn dag verpest zou zijn geweest dan zou één blik op dat tijdschrift hem weer goed gemaakt hebben. Dus bij deze even mijn bedankje aan Feng Shui Aktuell voor het gebruiken van mijn foto!

I have been using the car to go to school. Not because it’s so far away or because there is no public transport available (heck I have three bus stops near my house, none of which have a bus that goes past my school), but simply because it’s faster. I live maybe ten minutes away from the train station. From station to station it’s a little under three minutes, yet it’s still faster for me to take the car in the middle of rush hour. Funny how time works sometimes, huh?

Now, I have been driving the same damn route for the entire year. I know the choke points in my route. There is a junction with retarded traffic lights and a railway crossing which I have to wait in front of if I leave the house a few minutes late (given the train is actually running on time). When I’m past the railway crossing it’s usually smooth sailing to school.

But wouldn’t you know it. Out of every day and every place a terrible accident can happen in this city, this idiot driver choose this morning and that particular junction to park his car into someone else’s with 70mph. The entire thing was locked down, traffic jams were forming in every direction and you didn’t realize what was going on until you were stuck in the middle of it with no way out.

Since I had exams I was supposed to be there strictly on time, otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to make the exam. And for a moment I thought the gods were with me because I managed to drive onto the school parking lot at 8:55AM, 5 minutes before starting time. At least on my watch. By the time I got to class it was 9:02AM and I was late for my exam. Access denied.

Luckily I can still do the exam, though I won’t have a second chance to do it in case I fuck up. So I better not fuck up.

I hate strict times. I hate how you can leave your house well in advance and still manage to be fucked over because of circumstances you have no control over. I hate god for hating me for hating him. But then again I probably had it coming.

Robin

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It sucks! But I guess nothing has only fun sides. Every job has it’s downside and soldering is the downside on this job. We need to be able to do quick repairs should something break and if that involves some minor use of a soldering iron then we are expected to fix it.

However 90% of our classroom has no idea how to do it. I did it as a kid a long time ago but I do not remember it being this bloody difficult. How hard can it be to solder two pieces of metal together? Okay in all honesty it’s not the soldering per cé that difficult, it’s the bending and keeping things in place that’s driving me insane. Whenever I try to bend something a certain way the metal just shouts: “FUCK YOU!” and seems to go live a life of it’s own. And when I do finally get it bent the way I want it I have to keep a tiny piece of metal against another tiny piece of metal and solder it together. You do know metal conducts heat quite quickly don’t you?

So yea, I haven’t burned myself yet though and I hope it’s not going to happen but the assignment they gave us was just retarted. We have to make the letters of our class code with metal and each letter can only be a little over 1 inch high. It’s a precision task like you wouldn’t believe and it’s really trying my patience. Today we have another six hours of soldering ahead of us so… more on this lovely subject later.

International Currency & The Internet

A little something offtopic I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention are the downright scams companies are trying to pull off on the internet these days. I’m sure everyone knows what I mean. An American based company sells their product in America for 50 dollars BUT when you try to buy that product from Europe they suddenly change the dollar sign and change it to a euro sign. So 50 dollars suddenly became 50 euro’s and at the current exchange rate I won’t have to tell anyone that’s some major bullshit, especialy because over here we ALSO have to pay 19% taxes over those 50 euros.

Let me just give you the math on a 50 dollar product right here:

$50,- = €38,- at the current exchange rate. (If I were to pay in dollars I would save 12 euro’s.)

€50,- = $65,- at the current exchange rate. (The selling company just made 15 dollars extra!)

19% taxes over €50,- = €9,50.

Which would mean that instead of saving €12,- I’d be paying €21,50 EXTRA! Yea that’s easy money, isn’t it. I’m surprised something like this is even legal.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up now is because I just noticed to biggest scam in history when it comes to the above matter. My Norton account expired so I went to the Norton website to renew it when I noticed that a new version (Norton 2009) had been released. I decided to upgrade from 2008 to 2009 and checked how much it would cost for an existing costumer to renew his subscription AND upgrade his software. After some searching this appeared to cost me a mere $50,- for a 1-year subscription + Norton Internet Security 2009.
I then decided to take the easy road and upgrade my subscription from my Norton software so I was sure everything went as it should. The software directed my to the Dutch version of the Norton website which was no surprise, until I saw the Dutch prices. On this version of the website I suddenly had to pay €108,- to renew my subscription and that didn’t even include the new software! I literally started laughing, this was absolutely ridiculous!! Luckily I’m keen enough to find a way around this bullshit and just bought the 50 dollar package from the website. It came as no real surprise that my Norton software then started to complain about the code being invalid but a quick stop to the live helpdesk fixed that problem. Not only did they give me a working code for the 2009 subscription, they also added 7 days to it for the trouble.

So this is just a general warning to everyone who regularly buys things overseas: Put some time into checking if you can pay with dollars instead of your own currency, even if you have to do some effort. It can save you a LOT of money!

Robin

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And I’m already turning 21 in 5 days, can you believe it? I still feel like a 17 year old.

Anyway, have a good new-years eve everyone! And best of luck in the new year!

Robin

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Make sure to start the video on the right first and start the video on the left after the countdown to sync them up as good as possible. Have fun!

Clicky click!

Robin

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The painting is done (by someone else, might I add…) and I got around to putting some stuff in place today. This post, in fact, is the first one in about three weeks which is written on my very own computer. Not some school piece of crap, not some tiny laptop, but my very own powerhorse of a computer that weighs in with at least 15 kilo’s (you should have seen the look on the mover’s faces. They thought it would be ‘just another computer’).

After most of the hardware was in place I wanted to start pulling internet wires through pipes in the walls meant for such occasions. My modem is in the electrics closet (I have NO idea what that’s called in English, so electrics closet will have to do, and it’s got a nice ring to it) and following logic I decided to put my router there as well and use as little wired connections as possible. I did, afterall, buy a new fancy router especially for it’s awsome wireless capabilities (and it works very much as expected, D-Link Xtreme Gaming Router, recommended by yours truly). Anyway, since wireless connections do eat some of your download limit I prefer to have my Mainframe computer (yes, it’s actually called Mainframe) wired to the router.

Everything seemed so easy when I started. This modern house actualy has pipes running from the electrics box to pretty much every room in the house so you can pull your own wires through as you see fit. So I had this awsome idea to just pull the internet cable through the wall, to my office and connect my computer there. However things did not work out so well between me and the wirepuller thing. It either got stuck midpipe, broke, twisted or whatever and after 4 hours of torment I still don’t have my internet coming from the wall!

How does he have internet to post this you ask?

I ran the wire underneath the door, down the stairs and straight into the electrics closet into the router. It looks like shit but tommorow I shall try once again.

Wish me luck!

Robin

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And damn can I use it. Like I’ve said before I used to be a very lazy person. I wasn’t doing anything, spent most of my time behind the computer (gaming day and night). I didn’t go to school, I didn’t have a job. I had the life most working people dream about. Trust me though, it gets boring quickly.

Anyway, now that I’m actualy doing something full time reality is starting to hit like a brick. Combined with the stress of moving in the past few weeks the daily routine of going to school has really wrecked me. I think that it’s adapting to the new life mostly but the moving stress is certainly a big part of it. Every day since I started planning the move to the new house I felt exausted when I came home and fell asleep on the couch after dinner on more then one occasion.

Today when I came home from the last day of school before the christmas break I just collapsed on the bed and didn’t wake up until my girlfriend came home from work, which was a good four hours later. That’s just an indicator on how tired I was from only five hours of school.

In any case I’ve gotten a lot more respect for people who work their asses off. I used to think; work, how hard can it be. But now that I have a daily ‘job’ myself (which isn’t even close to the hours I’ll be making when working with a real media company) I have certainly gotten a lot more respect for working and a lot more appreciation for the weekends and vacation.

But on the flip side, no school means no posts related to school. So that’s going to have to wait till next year. In the mean time I’ll make a random post or two.

Enjoy your vacations (if you have one) everyone! Have a nice Christmas and a happy new year!

Robin

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Robin

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However this will also mean I’ll be cut off from the internet for about a week. I might be able to make a quick post at school but I won’t make any promises!

Wish me luck and see you all in a week!

Robin

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I started writing stories when I was fourteen years old, children stories fabricated from my fantasy mostly. As with pretty much anything you do at that age I though I was a kick ass writer, right up there with people like Steven King and whoever else made millions writing stories. Well, not so much.

While I was busy with some random stuff today I suddenly thought about one of the stories I wrote back in those days and decided to dig it up from the tomb that is my hard drive. And as I started reading I became somewhat disgusted with myself. Over the years I have developed my writing skills to an okay level. I will no longer pretend to be an expert at story writing but I’m well on my way. Anyway, compared to my level these days, the stories from those days were just absolutely craptastic. I came up with the most god awful names for characters, the most cliche story ideas and the writing style was sicking.

But hey, writers and any other forms of artists are generaly never happy with their work. Revision, revision, revision and it’s still not as perfect as we want it to be. So the moral of this story, I guess, is that everyone has to start somewhere. No-one is born with a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other. But reading old stuff back sure sucks…

Robin

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