Hi all. Yesterday I did some CD feeding to my new computer and slowly but surely I'm getting it back to the last state it was in, only a hell of a lot faster as you might imagine. Lock-On, our beloved flight sim, runs like a charm now and was one of the main reasons for doing this upgrade in the first place. All other games are a joy to watch as well of course, but where not that bad before either ;-) Yesterdays Formula One race was, again, won by one of the red cars and the race was pretty good to watch. Specially since I was with my sister and bro in law who had a beamer for trying it out this weekend. Now the thirty two inches of screen on my own TV is not what you'd call small but compared to a two by one and a half meter projection it's not that big I tell you. Bigger is better definitely applies here! We also watched two movies and this also qualifies more like home 'theater' then simply having a rather large widescreen TV. Of course there are some downsides on beamers as well. When you have direct incoming sunlight the show is over and you need to draw the curtains to be able to watch. And then there is that color thing. Black is never really black, and the brighter colors were not as bright as they are on TV. That may have something to do with contrast and brightness settings, because we were unable to change them unfortunately. All in all it was a fun afternoon and it was good to be over there again, for once not with some emotional paperwork to be done, and I'm glad my computer building projects went smoothly so I had the time. Going for some more flying,

Hi all. Sorry 'bout all this inmense silence from me. Last Friday my long awaited hardware came in so at last it was computer build time :-) I've spend the Friday evening building Bas' computer so he could get a start with gaming and today I 'did' my own. Had to rush to Nijmegen for a case, as my huge bigtower couldn't keep with internal space and powersupply connectors. I'm now the proud owner of a Chieftec case, complete with window kit so I can see inside the computer, even when the case is closed up. A pretty cool feature as our Abit mainboards standard have green and red leds emitting a nice mixture of the two. Spooky even ... As I now have my system up and running again I'll be updating my site daily again, so please keep coming back ;-) Faster than lightning,

Hi all. I'm not sure how to tell you this but I'll give it a try. Yesterday snooker was a complete disaster. There, I said it. And yes I know, for a while it seemed that snooker was picking up and getting back to the level of what was once. But not yesterday. Let's just hope it was just this once shall we? This is what the dictionary had to say about Snooker: Inflected forms: snook·ered, snook·er·ing, snook·ers 1. Slang. To lead (another) into a situation in which all possible choices are undesirable; trap And that is exactly how it felt yesterday evening ;-) Oh well, I'll get over it eventually. Getting a message from a certain person that my hardware has come in might help (hint hint :-) See you tomorrow,

Hi all. What a weekend folks, and man did we have a great time. We, btw, where Bas and I on Thursday and Friday, Bas, Stefan and me on the Saturday evening and Bas, Stefan, Jaap and myself again on the Sunday. The whole GPRT team together for the first time since we 'are' GPRT, the Giant Pixel Racing Team. Unfortunately our hardware didn't arrive in time for this weekend, but that didn't stop us from having a great time racing, flying and so on. Four days of multiplayer fun is just so much fun. Because of me signing up with, and getting accepted by, the VVS 504 Squadron 1st Bomber wing I wanted to get myself better acquainted with the SU-25 bomber plane in Lock-On, our flight sim. Actually the Mig29 is my favorite plane but while doing some reading up on the VVS 504 I noticed they had a huge shortage of bomber pilots so I thought 'what the heck, let's go bombing' ;-) and so I ended up with the 1st Bomber wing. Luckily Bas also likes flying so the main part of the Thursday and Friday we spend up in the air, bombing stuff. Or at least trying to. We put together a few practice missions so we could familiarize ourselves with the various weapon systems. Not an easy thing in such a beast of a plane. After trying everything we could think of we nearly missed everything on the ground ... Shame of ammo and very irritating. So then we applied the golden rule: back to the books. After a quick read we soon found out what went wrong and after taking off again we we're king of the sky again :-) The Saturday we had Stefan accompanying us so the flying was over ;-) But no harm done, that only meant that we were to start doing the name of this race weekend some justice: racing! We first tried to do some NASCAR - PTA racing only to find out that Bas' installation was somehow getting worse and worse, so this wasn't much fun. Bas his sound went from bad to worse and Stefan's NASCAR crashed every now and then, for no particular reason. So back to Grand Prix Legends it was! Bummer, hehe. Not really of course, this is what we do best: driving old cars on our limits. I specifically say 'our' limits because the world records clearly show that the cars can go must faster than we drive with them. All three of us crushed a couple of personal records with various cars while trying to keep up with those always difficult Grand Prix Legends AI drivers. Even with the BRM and Cooper I was managing to get some top ten times on the board. This must mean I'm getting slightly better ;-) I sure hope so. On Sunday Jaap joined us so we had a 'full grid' as far as GPRT was concerned. Jaap is still thinking about running with us in the DSZ competition next season, so he jumped in his gorgeous blue and white Eagle Westlake and gave it some stick. We did a number of nice races, including qualifying, and most of the times I ended up in the paper that comes up afterwards. And that, of course, is good news :-) Getting in 'the paper' means a top six finishing place and getting there with a Cooper Coventry or BRM instead of my favorite, the Lotus 49, was nice to see. Once I even managed to have the fastest racing lap on my name, in a Cooper for crying out loud! Later in the evening we did some more Lock-On flying, without Stefan who showed us some real mental strength and went home at a bit more sensible time than Jaap and I did ;-) We found a joined A10 and SU25 mission so both Bas and Jaap could have a A10 and I could practice some more SU flying. I can't wait for our hardware to come in, Lock-On is simply the very best fighter flight sim of this moment and it can look so absolutely fantastic, providing your computer is up to the job. And it will be once our order comes through and we’ve finished building and upgrading the darn things, trust me. Four day weekends are cool,

Hi all. After a day of gaming (see also the 'no hardware' topic ...) Bas and I went to his brother and girlfriend to ... play another game :-) But this time it was an board game called The Colonists of Katan. They also have two extensions for it and that made quite a difference. I did have the names but don't have them anymore. You'll get them later. Had to do with water, boats and cities. Now I've played the original Colonists of Katan game with my sister and bro in law but not that much. Maybe 4 or 5 times all together. So I needed a bit of a crash course in what happens when and so on. And I have to admit they helped me very nicely, pointing out things I needed to look after and stuff. In fact they might even have helped me too good as in the end I won the game :-D Bottom-line: board games are nice ;-) And although you might not believe me I do have a board game myself. It's the Starwars edition of the always popular Monopoly. Yes yes, Biek owns a non-digital game. Must be the age thing, I don't know. We hade a nice evening and great fun as for some time it seemed clear that I was going to win it but in the end it was a very close finish, which was exiting and good fun. Board games are nice,

Hi all. Bummer eh? We planned on doing our giant upgrade project in the upcoming couple of days but unfurtunately our CPU's were missing from the delivery. Needless to say this dampens the overall spirit somewhat but we'll have a nice long weekend anyway. Just not that fast ... :-| Slowly but surely,

Hi all. Man there are some stupid people in this world I tell you. I met two of them today, and you could almost say 'ran into' because that was close enough. In traffic two of my greatest irritations are tailgaters who think I should move to the other lane (even when there is only one available!) and people who think their big car always has the right to go first. Every single driver that fits either one (or worse: both) of these descriptions and has had the pleasure of meeting me on the road now knows that this just isn't always the case ... And like I said this morning I met one of either kind. The first one I noticed was a VW Golf (type II, ugly car) that looked like it was trying to give an impression of a Seat bumper sticker. And he actually was quite good at that, apart from the fact that I would a) never want a bumper sticker and b) if I did, it won't be a VW sticker. Anyway ... The guy just sat on my tail as if it was freaking Nascar for crying out loud. Constantly going from left to right appearing in both my corresponding mirrors. At some point I decided it was just to early to even bother (hey, it was about ten passed six and I am getting older too :-) and I simply turned up the radio a bit to suppress the sound of his 'sports' exhaust ... thinking if that I think it must have been a GTI, hehe. Then the Voyager guy came along. We (my Nascar 'buddy' and myself) were driving near Volkel when we came to an intersection. The Voyager came from the right, but my road had right of way so I didn't even lift for a split of a second. Look out, coming through! LOL Mr Voyager (Chrysler for friends :-) must have something of a 'to boldly drive my huge 'mini'-van where no one has driven it before' kind of thought because he really braked extremely late. This caused the nose of his mini-van to stick out on my road for about fifty to sixty centimeters ... uh,oh. Now I am one of those guys who have a pretty good idea of how big their car is and where it 'ends' so I decided to pass this Voyager nose at just a couple of millimeters (okay okay, centimeters but still pretty close) to let him know that I wasn't impressed by the size of his 'mini' van ... Now we get to the stupid part of the story. Starring the VW dude as the main character. Just when I was flying passed the Voyager the VW dude made up his mind and tried to look passed the right side of my Seat ... Bad mistake. My plan of just missing the Voyager worked, his plan of looking passed me didn't ... Again I didn't lift the throttle (much) but in my rearview mirror I saw the Golf take a huge chomp out of the Voyagers nose using about the complete right side of his own and then coming to an hold. Two down, plenty to go is what I say. I can only hope both of them learn something today. Morons. They deserve it. This might seem a bit harsh but drivers like these two really get on my (and others) nerves and there is nothing much I can do about it while driving. So I just laughed my but off and continued my way to work. Watch out for the silver Seat ;-)

Hi all. Holy where-did-the-wall-go Batman!? In case you think I've lost my mind, relax, I haven't. Today was the first day of my dad's 'let's get rid of the glass' project with his house and my God, did he get rid of it ... When I drove up to the house my first thought was 'wow' ... Where once was a almost complete glass front of the old store, there now was one huge gap. I mean there wasn't a single brick left of the two wall that where once there. Truly impressive. My dad had slept quite good last night, even though he did have some thoughts on the 'what if' part of the rebuilding. After all in the old shop there were some very robust steel pillars that more or less supported the entire higher part of the house. So the big 'what if' was what if the pillars are gone ... will the rest stay up there? Well it did, and my dad says that it wasn't a coincidence, so that's reassuring, right? After visiting the ruins ;-) I stayed over for diner and we had Chinese. The food that is, that other thing is still illigal I think ;-) Well see how it continues,

Hi all. Here's just a little update on how my weekend was. The short version: nothing special, the long(er) version is below :-) Saturday I worked in my dad's shop again. Mainly getting the building ready for an 'upgrade' that should start today. Best of luck dad, I hope everything goes well ;-) Then in the evening Bas and I went snookering again. We had a nice couple of frames but both of us were a little to tired to make the best of it. All in all it wasn't that bad, five frames to four for Bas, so we're still friends ;-) When we got back home we watched a movie (Get Carter, which wasn't super great but nonetheless a nice movie) and then I went home and dived straight into bed. Sunday I woke up at around nine which I think is way to early, at least for a Sunday it is. My entire body was protesting against getting up but staying in bed didn't seem like a sensible option also. Just didn't feel right. Anyway, the bright side is that you have a very long day when you get up this early. Not that I had any great plans but you never know what might come up now do you? ;-) During the day I found out that it was better if nothing would come up. My back wasn't feeling too great and my head was aching a bit also. I did do some racing but nothing fancy in terms of lap times came out of the few laps I did. Eventually I just lay down on the couch (potato modus, yes indeed ;-) which was about the only position where I wasn't feeling just about every muscle in my back and shouldesr and watched some movies. My hopes that when I woke up everything would be fine again were in vain. Unfortunately I still have some muscles working against me, but thank God it's getting better by the hour. Taking it easy,

Hi all. After a couple of days or weeks even Bas and I ordered our pc upgrade stuff yesterday. With a little luck we will have it before next Thursday as we then have a couple of days off and a long (race) weekend ahead of us. When we finish building and installing this should be a configuration we can put through it's paces with our race sims and other games. For the first time since a (too) long period we can then slide all graphic setting sliders to the max, so everything should look plain gorgeous. This is what we've ordered: Main board: ABIT IC7-Max3 CPU: Intel Pentium IV 3.2GHz HT 1MB Cache boxed RAM: 1024MB PC3200 Dual DDR HDD: Maxtor 160GB SATA 8MB Cache The rest of the stuff didn't need upgrading so we stayed with this. I can't wait to get building and trying out. Something you can imagine I think. It's always like this: you twist and turn while deciding what to get and when you finally make the choice you'd like it to be there instantly :-) Have a nice weekend,

Hi all. She made it! Finally she's joining the 'I've been around at least three decades club'. Some of us have been a member a little longer than others, but the general thought is just the same: let's do another decade :-) Have a nice day girl, and no worries about that 'age thing' yet okay? After all you're not even halfway yet, so the best is yet to come ;-) Besides it's nice to be thirty, trust me I speak from expirience ... Hip hip, hurray,

Hi all. Well I'm back from the doctor. On one hand I'm glad because the medical statement seems to be just what we need to get things done. Given the time the doc had to make this I'm truly grateful that he made it. On the other hand I hit my like a ton of bricks to have a outsider, my doctor, make a spot on evaluation on a certain period in my life, written on about one sheet of A4 paper. God, I certainly hope that absolutely no one, and that's including me of course, ever has to go through that amount of misery I had in 2002. When I was back in my car I cried for about fifteen minutes before I was able to get a grip again. Man I hate this sort of thing, and that's putting it lightly. Let's get this stuff over with is what I say. In the lunch break I'm going to mail everything to the proper department and then it's hoping everything goes the way we think it will. Keep your fingers crossed,

Hi all. Man this snooker-is-easy thing is going to be so hard when it stops ... We've been playing snooker again and I'm really disappointed because I lost 2 frames the entire evening. Talking about arrogance, geez! I have to watch out before this is going to my head and get's out of control, hehe. Whoohoo! Going nuts and loving it, whahaha. No need to worry though, since I did loose those frames there is a slight possibility that I'm not ready for the World Championship so I won't quit my job just yet *grin* We'll see, ask me in a couple of weeks from now how thing are going. Hmm on the other hand maybe you shouldn't ... oh well Tomorrow morning I'm having another appointment with my doctor, I had one this morning as well, to hopefully pick up my medical statement which should help me solve some problems and unfinished business that has something to do with a previous employer who went out of business. I'll better get some sleep before I miss my appointment, so I catch you all later tomorrow. The snooker King, (Sorry, couldn't help myself. Last time I promise ;-)

This is just a post for testing comments and stuff, please leave them (the comments) also if you whish. Thanks.

Hi all. It was time for it: another race weekend. While the Formula One race itself was nothing special, maybe even a bit boring (whoops, was that me talking?) we, Bas and myself, still enjoyed ourselves anyway. By the way with boring I mean nothing truly exiting or spectacular happened. No great overtaking maneuvers etc, the red ones simply won ... again :-) The Saturday evening is our newly instated snooker practice time so after diner (which was pizza of course) we first went snookering. To keep things friendly overhere I'll keep it short: my snookering is still going great :-) Later back home we did some racing but we were not focused enough to race 20+ AI drivers and after several restarts we gave up on them amateurish ... b*sterds ... Man they can be irritating sometimes. And now that I think of it: most of the time actually. Geez ... A little disappointed on both our own and their performance we decided to call it a day and go to sleep. = This is the sleeping part of this weekend = The Sunday went a little better allthough we still got road rammed by the AI for no reason whatsoever. The sad thing is that both Bas and I trained hard enough to be on pole and the number two position but when we braked so much as half a meter early for turn one we got rammed of the road by the AI drivers. No fun. Then we switched from road courses to ovals, hoping that we'd be able to get a good start there since there is virtually no turn one to brake for ... I'm not sure of you know the payout of Daytona oval, but it's basically on normal oval with one straight straight and one bent straight. This shouldn't be to hard to do we thought ... Well, to say the least, we couldn't have been more wrong ... They turned out to be very eager to win the race at 'turn' one. Sometimes even before we had started the race, still running nicely behind the pace car. Just trying to squeeze in between Bas and me, pushing me off the road several times. We made one good start and pulled it of because Bas was so kind to create a small gap between him and the pace car and then accelerating somewhat so that I could quickly creep in behind him, blocking the number three from getting passed me. Right. I think we were able to have a run from about ten to fifteen laps before we something went wrong and we went in and out of the wall (and into pieces) again. We gave up racing AI again, and this time for the rest of the day. No fun at all. We spend the rest of the Sunday messing around with Vice City, LockOn, Virtual Snooker, etc with which we had loads of fun. And that's just what these weekends are all about: having as much fun as possible. All in all we succeeded pretty well. Nascar can be fun, trust me,

Hi all. The last two times we played snooker I've been having the time of my life. This past year of competition has, without a doubt, been my personal worst one so far. Due to all kinds of personal troubles and some other influences I wasn't able to keep my head with the game at all and sometimes even delivered no less then something we like to call 'disaster snooker' because it hardly resembled any form of genuine match play. It's life Jim, but not as we know it ... When you're playing as badly as I have (and still remember the days you played much, much, better) you start to think up all kinds of reasons and excuses for not playing well, simply to forget or not think of the only true reason. Which of course you know darn well. Lately I've been thinking of buying a new cue for example. Already I was calculating how long I had to save money if I added a part or even my complete vacation money to it, that sort of stuff. The main thought behind getting a new cue is that my current one has been broken two times. Or damaged is better said maybe. Picture yourself a snooker cue. It's usually made of wood, with a small brass cylinder on the end, the part where the cue tip is glued on to. This peace of brass has broken off my cue twice, making the cue about three centimeters in total shorter. Add to that the fact that since I bought this cue, eleven or twelve years ago, I have grown a little. This results in my cue getting shorter twice and me getting taller ... once ;-) The ideal length for a snooker cue is to reach the arm pit when you're standing right up. Mine can be freely moved underneath it, without even touching my arm. So technically it's about five to seven centimeters too short. And this normally doesn't bother me. Mostly because I've learned to play with it, shorter as it is and not actually missing the 'lost' centimeters. you get used to it I guess. Another reason is that when things go well you don't need to question your material. It's just okay as long as it works fine. And I do love this cue so damn much. But with the disaster season in mind I was seriously thinking about getting a new one. The thought itself is not really comforting, as this is the cue I played with for more than ten years now, so changing it would mean getting used to another cue. No matter how close it resembles the old one, it's always different. Racers among you can think of 'normal' race cars vs T-cars ... That should give you an idea. This all changed last Saturday when I beat Bas six frames to two. Man I played some great snooker, and yes it showed in the end score. After usually getting my but kicked by Bas (with snooker of course, luckily I still have a couple of other games that do go well from time to time ...) for nearly a entire year now I can assure you this felt good, even it was just this once. It's always nice to be able to tell yourself that you're still able to play well every now and then. Just now we, and that's our snooker team 'Foul and a Miss' by the way, have been practicing again, as we often do on Tuesday. Since we always play our competition home games on Tuesdays we try to use this day as a standard practice evening when we haven't got any competition to play. And my game went like a dream again. Allthough I have no clue whatsoever where this sudden change in quality came from, I enjoyed my frames very much to say the least. So it turns out that snooker can be fun after all :-) So I guess this means that I don't have to buy myself a new cue after all ;-) This saves me at least a few hundred Euro's so that's a bonus. This way I can add that to my pc upgrade plan, which should take place very soon now. Cool! Snooker is fun, really,

Hi all. Newsflash: 'A new virus called Sasser has already infected millions of computers worldwide.' Yeah right, sure. And lets not forget a couple of thousand pc's over here at Philips Medical Systems ;-) Last week I've been sick at home but when I woke up this morning I decided I was feeling okay enough to go again ... How about that for bad timing hehe. When I got here at half past six someone was already calling with 'Headquarters' about some 'network' problem. The problem however was not the network but the Sasser virus that, from only a couple of infected computers, had been creating so much network traffic that our routers overloaded and collapsed. Needless to say that affected hundreds and hundreds of users. And what do hundreds of user do when 'stuff' is not working? They call us at the Servicedesk ... So from seven until about half past nine we were kind of busy. Then it became very, very, quiet. The first thing we did this morning was enter a message in the phone system that we were having serious network problems and I guess that most of the people knew what was going on and stopped calling us. 'Good thinking Batman' ... LOL The rest of the afternoon we'll only got an incidental call from people who just came in and don't know what's going on, but that should be it. Time passes slowly on days like this, I tell you. Luckily I'm able to go home early, having made an early start this morning. By the way, this virus could affect your machine also so you might want to patch your system against it. Read all about it here and follow the instructions. What you need to install is security update 835732 and your safe again.

Hi all. Yes I know what time it is, trust me. Did you ever wake up because of your own couching? Well I just did. Man I feel awful right now. Seems that for some reason I just can't stop with trying to couch myself inside out, this feels really terrible I tell you. There is some sort of itch halfway down my throat and it keeps irritating me, and quite a lot frankly. If I was smoking I guess this would be my wake up call from The 'Man upstairs' to quit it immediately, but 'unfortunately' I don't so that's no option. I can only hope this passes soon as I need my rest. This is very tiring. Ugh, ugh,