holiday

We will be doing a small holiday the coming days. City trip to Milan. But no fear, we left a guardian...


Nikon D50, 70-300 VR @ 280mm, 1/60s, F9, flash.

For those of you who wonder: the picture is about life size on screen as it appears here. I'm very sorry not to have his head pictured, but I did not want to ask "Mr Spider, if you please, a bit more to the right,...".

action

First time I actually went out and did sports photography. More pictures will follow when my new flickr account is up and running.

Guess...

A beer for who can guess what and where this is.

Good

This was a good week. Best of all, our renovation permit form now resides with the Sugartown administrators. Duly dated, approved and signed threefold by all neighbors.

Training for my new function finished. This very evening we wished good luck upon my predecessor. With lots of beer, as it should be done. A nice perk: the function comes with a laptop, about the best one can get for real work apart from this.

I did some decent biking as well. It is quite hard not to bike these days - earlier this week temperatures reached 30°C. Climate change might not be so bad after all.

And tomorrow we will go forth and choose our fireplace/woodstove. If things continue like this we will even have a finished living room before summer! Oh, and all our wooden floors (the actual construction, not the finish) are now replaced with the modern stable OSB panels. With help from my father and cousin we even managed to get the last one relatively horizontal!

family

As you see, I'm not the only slightly off limit personality in my family. My cousin rules, especially since he has a spud gun.

I'm planning on a hybrid version (gas + compressed air) for next week; that way I can finally use all the plumbing parts left over here.

And it is a good excuse to buy a decent air pump. After all, I can use it for my bike as well...

Ostend

We visited Ostend this weekend. A long drive, but train was not really a cost-effective alternative. And of course in a car at least you are sure to have seat.

Now Ostend of course means gulls and poodles. The occasional Jack Russell as well, but they did not really fit in. Poodles are the way to go.





Have you ever noticed dogs look like their owners?

bike

It took a long time, but now all is done. I finally got a bike. Of course I still have my mountainbike, still in good shape for its age, but not very comfortable at all for road use. This one, the Specialized Crosstrail, was the best compromise for mixed use: roads and dirt tracks. Good price/quality as well.
A nice detail: this bike weighs about as much as I want to lose in weight... Good deal, no?

And of course, I had to try a picture myself...

hurrah!

There has been quite some good news lately.

Most important, all our neighbours agreed and signed our plans for the house. We even drafted some preliminary common plans.
We also decided on what to do with our livingroom*. No more dry plaster walls or dirty tile floors, everything in wood, it should all look quite nice and modern in the end. The end by the way is planned for July or so.

Now, professionally: I will cease to be a "customer support representative" - commonly known as a helpdesk agent, impolitely said the punk on duty - and I will be a "helpdesk analyst", no less!
The job in itself is two desks away from where I am now, with the same collegues. I will mostly not do the actual phone stuff anymore; most of the time I will be documenting our support process as it is nicely said. A very interesting (to me) part of the job shall be drafting the incident management process documentation for all the client's IT, not only the helpdesk. Nice, nice.

*: take cover. pdf.

Sugartown Station

Bank holiday here, no traffic jams. So I had time to walk the misses back from the train station, and shoot these:






Both Nikon D50, 70-300mm @ 70mm, f8