crowd intelligence

read the wiki, mr employer at **insert company name here** .. not listening to your experienced staff is a mistake that comes at high a price, see examples of columbia disaster, nine-eleven, and the past plan top down excercise.. need I say more?

google earth

to illustrate one of my favorite sayings:
a picture paints a thousand words..
in the below example, replace '1,000' by '4,000 +', and 'words' by 'airplanes'..
compare reading about it to seeing it.. type 'allied airstrip, tucson', and be amazed..

also, i tend to get lost when driving to work in brussels (therefor i normally commute ;) google earth, however, does not only tell me how to drive, but also shows me the main buildings i should pass by as long as i'm going the right way.. my preferred route passes by nato in evere, hp, bordet train station, then haachtsesteenweg, to end up next to the botanique..

but also: look into the pope's backyard, bejing's forbidden city, palm trees in the gulf, the white house surroundings, space shuttle outside NASA.. takes your mind off of work for a minute ..

hét boek - thé book

indeed, not a book, the book.. that's the ambitious title of a fat white pile of paper i nearly fell over in the library the other day.. written by geert lernout, a clerk in antwerp university - my promotor indeed.. i originally intended to publish a review of the book here, so i took it home and started reading.. after 10 pages i was bored to death, and after 120 pages and three extensions in the local library, i'm now giving up.. having learnt nothing worth remembering, and having fallen asleep on every other page while riding the train to work, i now return this blatant waste of good trees to the library.. where it may rest in peace and soon get lost between the shelves..

that 'a short history of the book' soon be reduced to 'an even shorter history of the book', amen..

PS: funny he should write this

Textual critics tend to become very excited about the presence or absence of a comma while remaining blissfully unaware of the fact that these obsessions are shared by an extremely limited group of people.

here, as all he ever said about my thesis was something about a comma missing..

blogdinner

am attending..

reading about my dinnerdates for the day, and am happy to see that few of them really post on a daily basis.. blogging is big.. blogging is still small, really.. whatever..

some really do get frantic about what they write - i'm being positive here, read it as passionate if you will.. others simply dump some links, or have no coherent blogging-tactics (just like myself ;) some never update certain pages (business, luc, really?), some only blog in languages that hardly x% of europeans can understand (that's a joke, my francophone friends ;), some publish pictures, and others don't.. blogging used to come under different names before, so it appears: scrap books, diaries, portfolios..

'do the following blog-types exist' is really what keeps me busy lately.. (well, for a small part of the day that is.. the other part is mainly finance, work related):
family blogs (where aunts and uncles unite with nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters), business blogs (where insider trading and company secrets are the flavor of the day), tour blogs (for the upcoming sessions of the night of the proms, blog someone?), ...

aiaiai, il y a des bloggeur francophones qui vont venir je vois.. allez, c'est bien, je commence mon cours de francais demain.. et je mekskuze deja: je naime pas trop les accents (ni graves, ni egus), ni les sesedilles.. as i said on luc's blog today (sorry luc), i'm indeed an anti-spelling germanist (meaning that i couldn't care less about the groene-boekje correctness, grammaire 2000 correctness or what do you have..) (i'm more of a haakskes [brackets] germanist, and a comma one, too (very much so, even)).. and a product of flanders: i tend to mix languages freely into a big denjames soup.. [referring to 'denjames' is not my sick pluralis majestatis kicking in: two year olds still tend to refer to themselves with their own name, rather than saying me, myself or i.. and yes, so does my two year old.. so mummy and daddy babble in third person as well from time to time..]

well, that's for now.. who am i having this dinner with?

Hip Hip Hip - Hoera

zon zon lieve zon

kwou dat ik je pakken kon
kzou je vriend'lijk willen vragen
blijf toch schijnen alle dagen
lieve zon ga nooit meer weg
wil je dat beloven zeg?

Or, as Dorien puts it, "papa zingen zon?"

And she'll mimick half of the words along once you get going. It's a must-see, at the next family event, for sure.
Other candidates are the evergreens 'broeder Jacob', which in her case - technically - should be 'father Jacob', and 'On a big mushroom' (yes, at her age...)

It will be clear that she'ss lightened up our life for the past two years now, and also that you urgently need to take some dutch classes if this is too much gobbledygook for you..