journal.wiredreflexes.com

Welcome to my world;

I have, currently, one Portugese, two Americans, two Danish, one British and one other Dutch person sleeping over at my house. Normally I have someone come in once a week to clean my house, but since my entire living room is one large bed at the moment, and my guests are trying very hard to remain drunk throughout their entire stay while maintaining an air of cultural sophistication by visiting musea and such. The latter is a terribly nice experience, people are either giggling like young schoolgirls getting condoms handed out in biology class, or they’re clutching their head in anguish, pain and suffering like a heroin addict trying to get by on their daily dose of government funded methadon distribution.

During all of this, I am trying to get by on 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night, and working a full workday the next day. You see, with the introduction of the Euro on a couple of days from now, certain things I work on need to be upgraded, maintained and regulated rather strictly. This means no vacation for poor ole me. It sucks.

Last night our little group of people stumbled into my house after a few hours of powerdrinking. We didn’t have all that much time as we left my house at 1:00 am to have “a small beer” at a local pub. Determined to get completely hammered, one of my friends went from 0 to 60 in 0.037 seconds and most of them joined in rather quickly. So by the time we got home it was about 3:30 am and two of them decided to raid my fridge of it’s alcoholic beverages. My fridge held a couple of cans of Guinness which they quite aptly killed in a matter of minutes. When I pulled out a bottle of Bacardi that I still had laying around for emergencies just like this one; I was received like the fucking messiah, complete with chanting and everything. It was about 4:30 am when I went to bed…I woke up at 8:00 am to go to work again.

Ugh.

…at least I had a bunch of fun! :)

My christmas was an odd one this year. My christmas celebrations have always been odd ones, come to think of it. From a very early age I used to work in chinese restaurants, and christmas and new years were usually reserved for working and copious amounts of fireworks.

Around the time I stopped doing that – when I was 17 or so – Eva came into my life. For the uninitiated; Eva was my girlfriend for 4 years or so, and is now one of my best friends. Since the Netherlands celebrates two christmas days, we’d equally split the days among the two sets of parents, and everything was good. Those must have been the most normal christmas days I’ve ever spent.

A couple of years ago, my friend Marco decided he’d try his luck working for Dell Computer Corporation in Texas. He had a house here, and since we are good friends, he let me live in his house. He visits about once or twice a year for about two weeks or so, and usually he returns here around Christmas. Last year he came back a bit before Christmas, and I returned with him to Texas to celebrate Christmas with him there, together with his lovely girlfriend Clarissa.

That Christmas was…uhm…interesting. Clarissa comes from a very large Mexican family, and they had decided to gather in a church somewhere in Bumblefuck Texas; and we were all invited. So there I was, surrounded by about 150 Americans of hispanic decent, having a wonderful time celebrating Christmas.

This year, we thought it would be nifty to turn it around; this time Marco would come here, and we’d celebrate Christmas at my mother’s house. Marco had decided to take two of his colleagues along, one of which I had met before; David, and one of which I didn’t know yet; Mike. The three of them have made me miss a lot of sleep the past few days as I’ve been dragging them around Amsterdam.

So this year, while first Christmas day was spent with my father and his new girlfriend, I spent second Christmas day with Marco, Mike, David and of course Eva and Samantha at my mother’s house. My mother had invited a couple of people over as well [Family…don’t it just suck?], which was interesting, and we engaged in a debauchery of food, alcohol and interesting – and sometimes shocking – conversation.

One of the highlights of the evening was talking to Crazy Elf on the phone; yes, that’s right…I’m one of the few people that has gotten a step closer to uncovering the truth of that little Aussie Clown. He had decided to ring as he wanted to have as many bulldrekkers in one place so he could speak to as many as he could in one go. Sadly enough Van Der Litreb [a.k.a. VDL, a.k.a. Veed, a.k.a. Claus] and his sister had other priorities so they wouldn’t be able to make our Christmas dinner, and they’ll be arrive…*watches the clock*…in about 7 hours.

That’s right; tonight there will be two Americans [Mike, David], one Portugese [Marco] and two Danish people [Claus and his sister] sleeping over in my house. With a little luck Samantha will decide to stay over, which will crank up the amount of different nationalities to 5, since she’s British.

Meanwhile, I still have to work, and I’m trying to keep up with the drinking habits of Marco and David…so I need some serious sleep; recovery time.

Today I find myself in a little bit of inner turmoil. It was brought to my attention by several people that I should keep an online journal in which I’d tell my tales and thus in a cathartic sort of way expell a bunch of my anger and frustration and perhaps provide a bit of entertainment for those able to find their way here. When I first started my own website I had the urge to post something here that made all of you realise who I was. That you knew my real name and that you knew a little about the guy responsible for all this electronic spam. I hurriedly put up some information and have since then taken that down because I didn’t feel comfortable with so much personal information up for grabs so easily.

As I was done building the scripts necessary for this online journal, I stumbled across a picture as I was searching through my library of code snippets. A picture of a friend of mine, who had sent me an email with a picture attachment. The girl, Eva, had scanned her security badge a couple of months back and had sent it to me for reasons unknown. Now Eva used to be my girlfriend for four years and is still a very good friend today. She knows that as soon as I get a security-badge picture of someone I know [or a passport/drivers license picture, for that matter] that I completely butcher it and send it to all of our common friends. The picture I found was the butchered picture.

I had completely butchered this picture, wasting a good 50 minutes of my time photoshopping the picture into insanity, sticking Eva’s head on the body of a humonguously fat whale of a woman and I decided that I should post that again. I wanted one of those yellow-black striped “caution” pictures to put in between the “before” and “after” pictures. So I typed in at Google: “under construction picture” and scanned the results. What I found was simply horrifying.

Many people out there have erected websites in reverence to the Useless Fact God and the God of Fuck-all! There are so many people out there that have a homepage that is under construction…but permanently under construction. I mean there were things there that hadn’t been updated since 1973, for fuck’s sake! And for the love of Mike, why do people think that anyone wants to know what their cat is called, or what their favorite pizza is? I sure as hell don’t give a rat’s ass.

Now before you get all self-righteous on my ass and start sending me hate-mail saying that I basically do the same, because let’s face it; I do, I just want to say that this was after I was finished with building the journal section of this site. I might as well put it up. I also thought that I might distance myself a litte from those mind-numbingly boring websites by writing up and posting a few of my thoughts while I was at it. Wether or not you’ll enjoy these thoughts more than you might enjoy hearing what someone’s favorite Kool-Aid flavor is, is really something that is to much of a depressing thought to handle right now.

Anyone setting up a website just to post two or three “favorite pictures” that they found on the net [and can be found at any one of these moronic websites] should be taken out back and shot. I mean, if they had the idea to put up that website then they must have been completely thick. If they actually managed to put up that website, then that means that they somehow slipped through Mother Nature’s natural selection and went rogue in the land of the not-so-stupid. I think we owe it to Mother Nature to make sure that the people that haven’t died in a natural selection, darwin-esque way don’t mess up the genepool.

A waste of space…in more ways than one.

So, I’ve decided that if this section of my website won’t get enough traffic, or very little positive response from those of you that have been asking for me to do this – you know who you are – then I’ll simply close it down as fast as I opened it. I don’t want to become one of the darwin-esque “mistakes”…I don’t want to be hunted by the not-so-stupid.

Welcome to this section of my website. If you are reading this you must have either gotten the link through me, or been resourceful enough to click that little pi picture on the front page of this site. I’ve just finished building the backend php scripts and I’m still checking if things work properly. If you see any errors, or things that look out of place, or just plain wrong, then please let me know.

At the time of writing this, the comment scripts are not yet in place, but they will be soon. Give me some time and things will be peachy keen. I hope people will enjoy this column like part of my website, and I’m not sure how popular it will be, if at all. If you never shoot, you always miss is what my father used to say, so I’m giving it a shot.

Thank you.