Archive for April, 2008

Brainpowered

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Rogier & me saw Brainpower‘s theater show in Eindhoven the other day. HiphopNederhop and theater, it seems a weird match. Even worse, thanks to several progressive “improvements” in education, high school kids are supposed to go to several things in a theater per year. We realised we were in trouble when this 45+ year old lady ordered 27 cola in the intermission…

Anyway, short synopsis: Brainpower is nice, the crowd sucked. The crowd sucked harder than Brainpower’s power to start a party — to bad, especially for him. He did his best, did have some nice points, but all in all, a half-filled small theater with someone actually picking up their phone, with someone interrupting Da Brain to ask for post-show autographs for his class, well… no amount of Nederhop coolness can live up to that.

In that light (Nederhop == cool?), I am now reading the following (in Dutch):

Ice Cube zelf was een tijdje terug in Nederland voor een concert en na vier zinnen was ik al banger voor hem dan ik ooit zal worden voor die blozende boskabouter Baas B.

— Nico Dijkshoorn (column at nu.nl)

PS: Sjouke’s inauguration approaching :)

House troubles (and other updates)

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Recently, several people told me they read this blog. *BLUSH*! Anyway, here is a short update to keep all you faithful readers up to date on current affairs. Apologies for the layout, don’t have time to do this in a nice fashion.

House:

  • Hot plates removed, day later wooden board placed to cover the gap (door was left open)
  • bought new hot plates, am cooking again
  • people are trying to complain all together to the University about this. This is an interesting balancing trick, because on the one hand people want this to be official (signatures and everything) and on the other hand, if it is official, it should be correct.
    after several failed attempts (vexing some co-residents), one of the law students in the house came up with a 2-page letter in French, citing several articles of Luxembourgian law. Despite the official tone and my less-than-perfect understanding of normal French, my legalese is apparently sufficient to ameliorate this somewhat.
    In any case, I discovered several errors, both insubstantial (missing ‘.’) and quite grave (incorrect date — date in the past for a future deadline).
    Aah well, at least they’re trying. Gotta give them credit for that. Still, I will try to get the message across that next time, I’d like to comment on this sort of thing in advance.
    Oh, for those wondering: yes, I am quite surprised that I could read a legalish text in French and find it less then perfect, but I could. There were phrases in there which I would qualify as questionable, and therefore not suited to such a document.
  • Heating problems are piping up again!
    This would be a hilarious pun if not for the incessant pumping sound emitted from the pipes every time the heating acts up again. It was checked (checked only) diligently, apparently by the president of the heating company, last Thursday, and apparently this week the heating company is going to come by to fix the situation once and for all. For some weird reason, the noises were intermittent on Sunday and have all but disappeared from the audible contents of my room since then. Let us hope this pleasant state continues or even improves.

Furthermore:
I just spend the weekend in Cologne (with M., it was a very pleasant weekend). Learned one important thing: book train tickets for Germany at least 3 days in advance. Savings can run up to 50% — 62.5% if you have a discount card. And, that sort of savings is needed for reasonably priced train travel in Germany.

Also weird: in Cologne we ran once again into this German juggler, who has pink highlights in his dark hair (Ward: do you know this guy? Will try to get a better description). Last time we had seen him was in Trier (nice city, Baptiste is living there now), where he was doing his show. Once again, his show involved a lot of noise and little juggling.

Okay, enough updates, back to the 2 deadlines this week (Nuovo (done) and DRM reviews (done)) and the three deadlines next week (proposal: work, BFR report: work work, WOTE2008: WORK WORK WORK).