plαdys

F*ck1n9 doctors!

Mike Reys — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:38:47 +0000

Just listen a second to what’s been happening to Karen since last year.
Early last year, doctors found out that Karen has arthritis in the knee. It made her suffer a little, but she could do most things other people do.
Beginning of this year, we went to Morzine for New Year. Karen decided that she’d minimise her skiing efforts and joined us for two mornings. Once while falling over, she did hurt her left knee a bit, so she decided not to join us anymore.
Ever since then, that knee has been getting worse at rapid pace. End of April, she had a couple of days where walking was *really* difficult after sitting down for a long time. But things got a little better and in May we did a couple of nice walks together and went to London. It went really downhill from there, and by the time we got to St-Petersbourg for a long weekend, walking was getting more difficult, which was difficult because of how the city is laid out walking was a necessity. After St-Petersbourg, the downhill proceeded.
During last week, it took Karen on average two minutes to start walking after she sat down (or slept) before she could actually do something and start walking ( if you want to call that hobbling along walking ).

Before St-Petersbourg she’d seen her GP who told her that it’s just an inflammation caused by the arthritis for which she had to take pills (!). That inflammation has only gotten worse since, despite the medication. So we thought it was time for a specialist.
So this morning at 8:20 she had an appointment. At 8:40 she was already home! Specialist said that GP was right, that it’s not that bad (clearly not being able to walk properly isn’t dead threatening!), given her stronger pills (these pills make her nauseous and give her diarrhea). Knowing that hobbling (I’ll stop calling it walking) back from the hospital must have taken her at least 10 minutes, I realise that she’s been in there for far less than 10 minutes! Despite the fact that she was told the doctor could speak English, he was barely capable to, which makes me think that he just wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible! He told her to come back if inflammation doesn’t go away… despite the fact that it didn’t go away with pills previously. He also told her to do lots of exercise, knowing she can barely walk!

I’ve spent several hours with the physiotherapist at VUB when I was a swimmer, and if there’s one thing I remember that he said (his specialisation was knees): “There’s hardly anything that can be solved by merely pills, and if so, I can solve it in at least half of the time”. I’m afraid that if we don’t find a knee specialist who is prepared to properly listen, investigate and think of solutions (either to heal or alleviate pain), Karen will have a major depression. She’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown now (and this is *not* an exaggeration).

Holiday stats

Mike Reys — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:13:27 +0000

That means that I burnt 216.5 litres of diesel throughout the journey. According to a calculator I’ve found on the interwebs, that equates to 700 kg/ CO2 emissions (very roughly). And you’d have to divide that by two, because obviously I went on holiday with K! I have no idea whether that’s much or not, but I won’t let it disturb my sleep too much. I know I drove sensibly (cruise control on the motorways), no speeding, no pulling up at the traffic lights… I’ve been a good boy!

On the alcohol front, I’ve been less good… that’s why my liver goes on holiday for the next couple of weeks

Links for 2010-07-27 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Efficiently Rendering CSS | CSS-Tricks
Right to Left
One of the important things to understand about how browsers read your CSS selectors, is that they read them from right to left. That means that in the selector ul > li a[title="home"] the first thing thing interpreted is a[title="home"]. This first part is also referred to as the “key selector” in that ultimately, it is the element being selected.

Cordes et Cap

Mikey — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:38:58 +0000

Cordes: eat and drink fest with intermissions of food shopping and the occasional dip.
Cap-Martin: eat and drink fest with regular morning swims and siestas.
Next Lyon: capital gourmand ! Guess what we’ll do there.
Saturday and Sunday: Route du Champagne!

Hurray for do-fuck-all relaxing holidays

Links for 2010-07-17 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

9 in Bourges

Mike Reys — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:26:25 +0000

Karen and I celebrated our 9th anniversary in Bourges yesterday. Why yesterday? Why Bourges?
Well, we got together on Bastille day in 2001, but as we would be spending 14/07 in the office and the car on the way to Bourges, we thought we’d enjoy it more on 15/07. So we basically pretended yesterday that it was Bastille day (which the French thought was odd) and went to Le Béarnais in Bourges for a fine dinner.
And Bourges? That’s simple! We’re on our way to see our friends Sue and Paul who have a little house in Cordes-sur-Ciel where we’ll be staying for the weekend. It’s part of our own little Tour de France!

Links for 2010-07-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

http://www.vlaamsparlement.be/vp/pdf/20102011/toepsraken/20100711_11julitoespraak_identiteit_en_autonomie.pdf

Links for 2010-07-12 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Download the Oracle Cloud Resource Model API (PDF)

Accreditation

Mike Reys — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:48:28 +0000

Accreditation is a process in which certification of competency, authority, or credibility is presented.

And the kind people of Brosella believe I’m competent enough to provide them with a good series of photographs. I’ve been shooting a number Jazz concerts this year the refine the skills. Not technically this time, but my goal was to focus for aesthetically pleasing shots and hope the current technical skills would be sufficient The improvements I was looking for were composition, play of light, the moment,…
I was quite pleased with my accomplishments, but I’m obviously chuffed by this recognition.
See you at Brosella this Saturday and Sunday.

Links for 2010-07-06 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

CMMI | Overview
CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance. CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. It helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes.

The benefits you can expect from using CMMI include the following:

* Your organization's activities are explicitly linked to your business objectives.
* Your visibility into the organization's activities is increased to help you ensure that your product or service meets the customer's expectations.
* You learn from new areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk)

I love The Onion

Mikey — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:38:32 +0000

Restoration Of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ Uncovers Horrifying New Verses

Links for 2010-06-27 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Vintage Vanguard ジャズレコード館
thank you, mr Vuylsteke

Links for 2010-06-25 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 PDT

OpenJDK 6: b20 Source Bundle Published

Apple-Adobe fud

Mike Reys — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:36:34 +0000

Earlier today, Apple released security update 2010-004 / Mac OS X v10.6.4. This update includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player (version 10.0.45.2) than available from Adobe.com. While the Mac OS X v10.6.4 update does not appear to downgrade users who have already upgraded to Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe recommends users verify they are using the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.1.53.64) available for download from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

Entire blogposts are dedicated to this in order to make Apple look bad…
This “fight” is getting childish, I miss the good old vi-emacs days

Citytrip coming up

Mikey — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:21:13 +0000

Let’s hope for the best! Cross fingers…

You must have a browser that supports iframes to view the BBC weather forecast

iOS 4: miss and hit

Mike Reys — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:22:40 +0000

Multitasking: i always thought this was a requirement, but to be fair, I don’t miss it that much on a smartphone.
Folders: hmm… will have to see what the advantage over the current way of working with screens is
Improved Mail:multiple mail accounts in a single inbox, open attachments in 3rd party apps.
I had hoped to get functionality like: mark as unread, mark as flagged. I get a lot of mail I read whilst on the move, but can’t handle immediately. Mark as flagged is a MUST for me
iBooks – browse, buy, and read eBooks. I’ve done that already via synching Dropbox with my computer
Create iPod playlists : about time!
5x Digital Zoom : that’s basically cropping upfront, but I could already do that afterwards in apps, and probably more accurately as well
Tap to Focus Video – video will refocus to whatever you tap on screen, cool!
Faces & Places in Photos: I’d solved that via Smart Albums, but live in the phone is better
Home Screen Wallpaper : nice, but irrelevant for a smartphone, not?
Gift Apps – send apps as gifts to others. Still doesn’t solve the problem when wanting to donate apps or songs to godchilderen in UK who are on another store!
Spell Checking: nice if you only type in one language. Would like to see how easy it is to change the spellchecker between dutch, french and english
Wireless Keyboard Support: pffff…

The new hardware is a HIT btw. Could have done without the gyroscope, but hey… some people do play games, not? The screen seems magnificent, and the extended battery time is also a good idea. I’m pretty happy with my current 3Gs, and will probably make the switch to the new phone when moving to the UK when I get it via O2. Extra camera, plus HD cam on the back? That seems quite cool. And there’s a LED to illuminate scenes in the dark.

If only Apple spent the same amount of time in improving the software as the hardware, they’d be miles ahead of everyone.

Gays: they are all the same

plαdys — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:56:12 +0000

Just love the whole series of this guy. Didn’t realise until recently that he made this shot at the Belgian Gay Pride.

Picture by Ben Heine