Ben C. O. Grimm - One Weblog Too Many

As you may know, I started my new job (Dutch) in May of this year.

I'm working on the so-called Open Source Initiative of the "Knowledge Center" of the Dutch Department of Defense, developing and designing new IT systems and architectures based on open source software and operating systems, and open standards.

Currently, it's still very much Linux-based, but I'm sure, in time, the choice for a REAL operating system (FreeBSD or OpenBSD, either one's fine by me) will be made ;).

A strong indication in that direction is management's idea to send me and one of my fellow BSD fans (there are several) to the European BSD Conference (a.k.a. EuroBSDCon) in Basel, Switzerland.

All arrangements have been made (only waiting for the plane reservations), so we'll be flying out to Basel on Friday, November 25, and check into the four-star (hey, what did you think?) Hotel Europe. We'll be attending several seminars and workshops on Saturday and Sunday, and we'll fly back on Monday, November 28.

I'll try to update this blog from Basel (I'm sure I'll take a load of pics), and if that doesn't work out (I have a rather fascist firewall), I'll report when I'm back.

Yeah, well ... there it is!



It took some time, but I finally got my sun glasses today. Unfortunately, my optician made a mistake when they ordered the lenses from ic! berlin seven weeks ago... they were slightly too small, and whatever you try, you can't make lenses bigger. So they had to be ordered all over again.

A lot of work goes into colouring and silver-coating these lenses, so all in all it took seven weeks. I checked with the optician a couple of times over the weeks, and it became a bit of a running gag ("I just called to check whether you've gone out of business. No? Did the place go up in flames last week? No again? No one sat down on my sunglasses in the meantime? No! Ok! Talk to you later! Bye!").

All in good fun, of course! I've been with them for the better part of twenty years, and my brother has been a customer for even longer than that. To make up for the inconvenience and lost time, they knocked 20% off the price, which was very nice of them.



How about that packaging? A very light-weight funny transparent screw-top container which fits snugly around my sun glasses. Better yet, my regular glasses fit in it as well, so I can switch them around whenever I need to.

Anyway, still plenty of sun (late October, what's happening to our climate, huh?), so I used them straight away. I'm sure I'll be using them plenty of times, with the sun shining almost horizontally through the windscreen on my way to and from work (yes, I'm using this as a justification and an excuse - I'm actually driving away from the sun every day). When I arrived at the job wearing my sun glasses, the obvious first comment was: "Drank a lot last night, did you?". Serves me right ;)

I guess this almost ends a (for me) rather historic shopping spree (well, for this year, at least). I've never been much of a consumer (understatement of the year ...), but for some reason I felt like making up for a lot of years of frugality. A new mobile phone, a new car, a new widescreen TV, a new DVD recorder, a new (s)watch, new glasses, new sun glasses, new desk chair. Oh, and a new 19" LCD monitor is about to arrive any day now. Better stop this while I'm ahead...

Funny thing happened to me just now. I left my apartment to get some food. It was already dark, and just as I stepped out into the staircase, I noticed something dark on the floor, about four feet away from me, at the bottom of the stairs leading to the apartment above mine.

At first I thought it was a shoe or a hat, but that's not really something that gets left at the bottom of the stairs. So I switched on the light, just to find a black cat sitting there, totally relaxed. And totally out of place. I'm not superstitious, by the way, but a certain thought crossed my mind, very briefly.

For some reason only known to the animal kingdom, cats and dogs take an immediate liking to me. They always come up to me, totally ready to be stroked and tickled. This was no exception. As matter-of-factly as felinely possible, he/she (I didn't check, hope you understand; first date and all) walked up to me, made a nice arch with his/her back, and enjoyed what was rightfully his/hers (I better stop this).

Now, as far as I know, the only cat on the premises is mine, and she (yes, I checked that fact) was indoors, being her 20-year-old lazy self, in a quite non-black colour. I ruled out the possibility that this cat belonged to the people living in the apartment above mine; these people are from Poland, and they're only in the country for a few months. That's not a situation that squares well with taking a cat. The guy living in the apartment below me does not strike me as a cat-person, and he's hardly ever at home. So ...

The only explanation I can come up with is that this cat slipped into the front door when I was lifting my new desk chair from the back of my car into the hall yesterday evening, which may have taken up to a minute and which was accompanied by temporary less-than-perfect vision, the box being huge and heavy and leaning against my face for most of the time. There are a number of cats out and about in my street at any time of the day, so it's an acceptable theory.

That would mean that this cat slipped into my building on October 4th, World Animal Day. How the hell can I write that down, and pretend not to be superstitious?

Anyway, I decided to see what happened when I left the house, and sure enough, the cat followed me down the stairs, and accepted the open door without any form of protest (as any cat-person knows: no matter which side of the door a cat's on, it's always the wrong side).

Quite a graceful exit, and he/she never looked back ... you can leave that to a cat (m/f).