The Time-Consuming Blog..

London, 12th of February 2010, The flight went pretty smoothly, and we landed on LCY at around 11am. Soon after our arrival we headed out towards the center of London to the area named “Euston” where we quickly found our way to the hotel (thanks to Martijn’s research) and checked into our room, which gave us some space to freshen up and head out into the largest metropolitan area available in our European Union.

First of, we ended up at a tavern called “The Porcupine” where we had some good lunch, existing of fish & chips for Martijn, and some supposedly-called Fried Gamba & Chips for myself, which looked more like fish nuggets to be honest, but that on a side-note. After this, we headed out some more and took the metro over to this place called “Angel” where we sat down and met one of Martijn’s friends whom he met while climbing Mt. Fuji in Japan last year.

At a long last, it was concert-time! We headed out to the O2 Academy to find a friend and his partners in crime waiting in the line to get a hold on the Utada tickets, which weren’t distributed until 19.00h, whereas the concert started at 20.00h. Luckily, we were able to join them in the queue, which saved us about four hours of waiting, and granted us insanely good places while at it.

Once allowed to storm the building, we found ourselves all a good place (note we were with around eight to ten people at this stage), and I myself – including Martijn and a few others – got stationed at the 5th row, which placed me at around 3 to 4 meters away from Utada herself. Prior to the main event however, this “guest performance” was given by (apparently) a DJ of whom I figured (s)he* was merely benchmarking the equipment. As it turned out: (s)he* was actually performing something.

At a long last, after an hour of patiently waiting the concert began! I have to say I can be pretty simple about this: the concert was awesome. The opening consisted of the “Crossover Interlude” which gave the band the time to get on stage. After the short introduction, Utada arrived also, and immediately raised the energy level with her ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence – FYI”.  After this about eighteen more songs were performed, including classics like “First Love”, “Can you keep a secret?” and “Automatic”, and some of her best newer ones like “Passion”, “Dirty Desire” and “Me Muero”.

My personal favorites were actually a combination of older ones and newer ones, such as “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, “Simply & Clean”, “Passion” and “Kremlin Dusk”. Naturally, all of them blew me away in such a way that all I could do was just stare and jump around like a monkey with rabies – but that aside.

Honestly though — I’ve been to a few concerts, including one of Otsuka Ai (another well-known JPop artist), of which the concert was also quite small and personal, but this one really was the best I’ve ever attended, and can’t expect to have this one beat any time soon this life. The vocals were awesome, sound was incredibly well-adjusted to the (relatively small) hall, and she patiently took the time to respond to the fans also. This alone, can’t be said (nor can be done) at a grant concert for fifty thousand people.

*To date, the by-nature-granted gender of the DJ remains to be unknown.

With just a few days left until Christmas vacation kicks in, I felt like I had no more excuses to not-post here anymore. Regardless of the fact that I have a FaceBook account, a Hyves.nl account, a mixi.jp account and even a Twitter account – sometimes I still can’t help but feel that I have not been dedicating enough time on the Internet, that being on a few of my own domains.

Naturally, my utmost valid and absolutely legal excuse would be my son sucking up my not-so-precious time at the moment. As fathership is still new for me, I’m still finding myself sometimes struggling to find that “perfect balance” in it, which hopefully would allow me one day to entertain Jesse while cooking dinner, posting a blog (yes, yes!) and going through my e-mails while at it. I don’t suspect this to happen the next 12 years.

Despite all that – I am aiming for making at least one more post at a bare minimum, writing out this year at a glance, the ups and downs and all that comes with it. Let’s hope I can achieve this goal

Luckily, some very cool guys at Geekshells.org saved my life here: they offer (free) SSH access to their system on which I can happily run a screen-session, in which I can keep my irssi session alive again, not having to worry about needing to reconnect on a daily base. So, I requested the account yesterday, but as it’s activated and accepted manually (to prevent scriptkiddies and such) I’ll just have to wait a bit longer to get access towards it. Cool thing about the guys is that you can donate a small amount of money or hardware, and get IPv4 access (rather than only IPv6 access) and a little more storage space.. Can’t say that aint worth it

Fuck that, Jostein gets the credits for providing me with SSH accesss.

Thanks dude!

Today I started paying some interest into C++, mainly because I am trying to get to know about OOP (object-oriented programming) a bit..
Anyway, here’s my first piece of cute code, what it basically does is converting Celcius to Fahrenheit, so it’s pretty simple.

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(int nNumberofArgs, char* pszArgs[])
{
  int celsius;
  cout << "Enter the temperature in Celsius:";
  cin >> celsius;
  // calculate conversion factor for Celsius to Fahrenheit
  int factor;
  factor = 212 - 32;
  // use conversion factor to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit values
  int fahrenheit;
  fahrenheit = factor * celsius/100 + 32;
  // output the results (followed by a NewLine)
  cout << "Fahrenheit value is:";
  cout << fahrenheit << endl;
  // wait until user is ready before terminating program
  // to allow the user to see the program results
  system("PAUSE");
  return 0;
}

Forgive the lack of proper formatting, but apparently WP doesn’t seem to keep it alive when copy/pasting..

With the coming of my new webhost over at GoDaddy, the unfortunate issue arose that I wouldn’t be able to keep an IRC-session open anymore, as my own server was being decommissioned soon. Me being a IRC-junkie by nature, that would’ve been a slight potential problem.

Luckily, some very cool guys at Geekshells.org saved my life here: they offer (free) SSH access to their system on which I can happily run a screen-session, in which I can keep my irssi session alive again, not having to worry about needing to reconnect on a daily base. So, I requested the account yesterday, but as it’s activated and accepted manually (to prevent scriptkiddies and such) I’ll just have to wait a bit longer to get access towards it.

Cool thing about the guys is that you can donate a small amount of money or hardware, and get IPv4 access (rather than only IPv6 access) and a little more storage space.. Can’t say that aint worth it

Okay, so I could have come up with loads of other titles, better ones, funny ones, or even play a prank on the fact that I recently became a ‘daddy’ myself, and now went ‘go’ using GoDaddy, but that’d would merely be provoking for people to not take this site serious anymore (dont get me wrong, not like I suspect that people do so, but still).

So what happened? Just yesterday, me and Wouter decided to host our websites with GoDaddy. Reason for this is that the current server (my legendary Hikari server) is getting more and more hardware failures resulting in power failures. Naturally, on top of that, there’s also the flexibility of not being responsible for managing the hardware, or even paying the electricitybill! And hence it was decided: we signed up for a three year Linux Hosting-plan at GoDaddy, giving us a pretty nice list of features, and about 1,5TB of bandwidthlimit on a monthly base. Seeing as I only have 2 or 3 people reading my blog, I wouldn’t suspect that to be a problem:)

So, from here on, my websites (Crash-O.com and Zengoku.com) will be hosted at GoDaddy, and I’ll be using their available software also for doing some blogging and what not (hell, I even have a wiki now!)