Hi all. Well, even if the above is only half true, I'll have a hard time ever getting the score even with just typing words (thousands of 'em) after looking right here: Eva jolie's photo's Is it just me or is the radio playing all kinds of nice songs ever since Eva has joined us? When I was driving home this afternoon from my mom, whom which I was visiting my sister, bro and niece in the hospital with, the radio played 'Isn't she lovely' by Stevie Wonder ... While we were in the hospital Eva was lying on my sisters stomach and was awake every now and then, only to have a quick glance around and then going back to sleep again. She's such a complete beauty, just perfect. Those little hand gripping anything they feel, the deepest eyes you've ever looked into, words are not enough. At all. That's why I'm planning on putting any picture I take or get into that gallery so you all can see what I mean :-D

Hi all. She's here. Tonight at 18:58 my niece Eva was finally born. God I'm so happy for my sister and bro, right now I'm simply and completely lost for words. At about two past eight the phone rang and when heard my sisters voice say 'met Karlijn, je bent oom!' I literally almost dropped to the floor in excitement. Good thing the chair was there. This was the message I have been waiting for for the past couple of weeks. This cute beauty is called Eva, weighs about 3710 grams, is 50 centimeters tall and in a fantastic shape. I mean it's hard to believe that just a couple of hours ago she was still inside my sister and now she's right there, sleeping like a charm. What a beauty, it's simply amazing. When I drove over to the hospital the first thing I heard when the radio came on was 'I'm walking on sunshine' and that must have been The Man Upstairs telling me everything was just fine. Thank you so, so much old chap, I owe you one! Big-time!

Hi all. I accompanied my sister to the hospital today for her checkup regarding the pregnancy and was treated to both a heart rhythm graphic as well as an echo on which we could see parts of the baby. We could hear that little heart beat like crazy compared to our own. When the baby was calm it beat at about a hundred thirty beats per second and when it moved around it had peaks up to one seventy even! This is all so amazing! During the echo we could see the baby's spine really crystal clear on the screen, and the doctor pointed out some more parts of interest but I was unable to follow him all the way unfortunately. That must be where all that medical education comes in handy I suppose ;-) Let him loose on the insides of his own computer and the score will be 1-1 again *grin* The rest of the day we spend playing some board games and setting up the new couch that arrived in the afternoon. Great couch, and I mean that literally. You can lie around on that one with three adults and still have room to spare,it's just that big. Really cool. I'm off to snooker now, see you later.

Hi all. Boy, we've got to have more weekends like this one, I'm really getting into this 'having an extra day off' kind of business. Very nice indeed. So what did I do with the extra time on my hands. Well ... Two words: Gran Turismo. Version four to be exact. Just like I was with the previous version I'm having the same kind of fun with the brand new one. And who wouldn't? I mean when fifty tracks and over six hundred and fifty cars can't satisfy you ... It sure gives me a smile from ear to ear while doing my best to win all those races, licences, driving tests, etc. Doing to also increases my car count in the garage, even with some pretty amazing automobiles. Take for example the ninety seventy one Dodge Charger, the sixty seven AC Cobra and even a Delorean. There's plenty to choose from and drive with so each should find their favorite car in there somewhere. And then there are the tracks ... I mean that's just yummy with a capital Y folks. All the 'old' GT3 tracks are there and added to that collection are some pretty impressive looking tracks, fictional ones, real ones and some based on real life locations. For example we can now race through the middle New York, Paris and Hong Kong. And my two most favorite tracks of all time are the Le Mans (both with and without chicanes versions) and the massive Nurburgring track. Brilliant stuff, just brilliant. Yesterday I pushed a Nissan R92CP race car flat out to just over two hundred and forty five miles an hour! That's almost four hundred kilometers an hour people. Trust me folks, the Mulsanne straight, which is the largest straight on the Le Mans track (specially the version without the chicanes), looks no wider than a bicycle path at those speeds, good lord that's fast. You barely have time to breath when thundering down that road and the steering get's kind of nervous ... funny eh? ;-) The sensation of speeds is very good and comes across perfectly on my big screen TV. Even though I love my racing sims on the PC and wouldn't miss them for the world, I love my PS2 and the couch gaming that comes with consoles in general. Good fun.

Happy birthday dad and Margot, I'll see you tonight! What are the odss of running into someone, quite liking them and then discovering that you have the same birthday date! Downside is that you have ony one (slightly bigger maybe) party each year I guess.

Hi all. All this waiting is driving me nuts. The twenty first was the date my sisters new kiddo was expected but it keeps us all waiting and waiting ... and waiting! I tell you the tension I have overhere is not to be taken lightly! I've been noticing that I'm sleeping less deep than normal and wake up at every 'strange' sound in the house, things that are usually not bothering me at all. No I think it's for the best when kiddo shows up pretty soon. After all, we're all ready :-)

Hi all. The weekend didn't start too well as I was once again, but this time it was final, confronted with my old Volvo. The guy who bought it from me came to pick it up with one of those car trailers pulled by a cool old V8 powered Range Rover. My dad and I figured the thing was so strong, it probably wouldn't even notice the Volvo hanging behind it. You've got to love that V8 rumble, it's great. When the Volvo was finally on the trailer and the guy was good to go my dad asked me if I didn't want to take a last picture, since I had been shooting the car from just about every possible angle before. I just didn't think it would be possible to make that a nice picture and told him that the pictures I already had would suffice for memories. Then they drove off. It wasn't a pretty sight, well apart from that rumble of course. Bottom line: my car is now gone. Then in the evening I had scheduled another race weekend with Bas as the second race of the Formula One season was due this weekend and we're going to be following this circus again all year. Because I had been a little late in the morning I didn't pack my PC yet so I had to go and get it but somewhere around six thirty I was at Bas' place, hooked up and ready to go. We didn't stay up took late as on the Sunday morning we were going to get up early, watch the videotaped second qualifying and directly after that the race itself. I liked the race, there were some good battles on the track which are always good to watch. The Renault team had their act together and they drove a very strong race with Alonso taking the highest step on the podium. Man they were busted, you could very well see the effect of the heat on them. Great race. So our Sunday started quite early and around half past nine we were ready to do some racing of our own and to my surprise I could just beat him every track we went to. Now I have to be honest and say we (read: I) we raced some of my favorite circuits which of course helped me a bit. I've never been to Barcelona in real life but I just love that track :-D Well so far so good, but all of a sudden Bas had the outrageous idea (*grin*) of rearranging his PC hard disk and partition wise and that eventually cost us most of the Sunday fixing the damage a resizing action left us when crashing out at about forty percent. Luckily I had Gran Turismo 4 with me so we could at least do some racing while the recovery was taking place. In the end we lost nothing at all but due to the amount of data that needed to be restored we could not save it all and went for a complete recovery of the most used games and restored save games of the rest of them. And how was your weekend? :-)

Hi all. Well I'm back on-line. Yesterday evening, simply while I was calmly surfing the net, all of a sudden my computer went 'kaboom' very loudly and then did nothing at all anymore. You know, blank screen, no action, no nothing, nada, zilch, Zippo ;-) Hoping that it was the power supply I replaced the (by the way kind of funny smelling) one from my machine with the replacement one just now and thank God the PC booted up nicely again. Pfew. All kinds of scary thoughts shoot across your mind when something right next to you goes kaboom out of nowhere, and it's no good for the percentage adrenaline in your blood either, I tell you. But it's fine now, and so am I. Move along people, there's nothing to see here. Not anymore :-D Suit yourself, but I'm off playing snooker now. Bye.

Hi all. Yesterday was probably the last day ever I've seen my old Volvo and it just doesn't feel right. Sure, it was just another old-timer and yes, it still needed a lot of work, has been a bit neglected for the past couple years and it sure looked like it would have been this way maybe even for the next couple of years too. And yes, I guess my dad has a (rather good) point when he says it's taking up quite a lot of space and isn't looking like it's going anywhere soon. And I sure know he has had more then plenty of patience with the project as it is already. It's just that it turned out to be way more work than I hoped/counted on which, combined with long working days, some back problems (and the usual list of excuses I guess), etc., is the main reason everything has taken so damn long in the first place. So now I guess the one million dollar (or in my case a couple of hundred Euro's worth of Volvo ;-) question is 'if you hardly looked at it for all this time Biek, why are you going to miss that old rusty thing so damn much?' To me that's kind of hard to explain but I'll give it a try. Please bare with me on this one. Mind you this might turn out to be a long 'session'. Frequent visitors of Biek.net may already know that I've never before posted a single picture on this entire site. Up until now I've so far managed to get the message across with just my words. Just for this once I'm going to put one up so you all know what I'm rambling on about. Please enjoy the view, as I once did. This specific pretty cool blue/gray 1964 Volvo Amazon P121 Coupe was mine. All mine, and has been just that for the past couple of years. During which it has been just about the only touchable thing I had left that was completely my own, it was all paid for and no-one would ever take that away from me. The untouchable if you will. A lot of things came, went and happened during that period. I've been kicked around by a number of employers, lost a couple of very good friends and generally had quite a rough period, which thank God is now behind me. But one thing has always remained: this Volvo. Even though I might not have worked on it all that I could, even though there were times when I could have but just didn't work on it. Fact was that it was there, period. I remember I fell like a brick for that cute vehicle, from the first moment my dad emailed me that picture of it, asking me if maybe it was something for me. Within two weeks the owner drove it to us, it was kind of a good bye trip for him, and then there it was, my own classic Volvo. From that moment on I had about half a year before it had to get it's mandatory yearly technical check-up which I already knew it would fail because of the state it was in. Even though I at that time had a great lease car for my work, I drove that Volvo for the whole half year to work and back, God I loved touring that car. All ideas' about haste and stress disappear like snow for the sun when you get behind the wheel of a classic car like this one. All you want to do is roll down the window, set the radio (with no less then one speaker in the back of the car mind you :-) to a background volume and cruise to the end of the world. The interior might look old (duh, let's call it classic shall we?) and sober but the seats make you feel like a king and there's more than plenty space for four grown-ups, even though it's 'just' a coupe model. To give you a comparison: it's a inch longer than the two thousand and two Subaru Legacy station I had at the time, and that's quite a roomy car. In a 'normal' or recent car when you're driving on the highway and spot a truck a couple of miles in front of you, you pass that same truck within a couple of minutes whereas when you're cruising an old car like this chances are you're looking at that truck for the rest of the journey, because it's traveling at just about the same speed you are :-) And you know what? In that Volvo, it really doesn't matter whether or not you eventually pass that truck. It's all part of the game. These are just a few nice memories I'll keep of it forever and I do know for sure that those will never be taken from me. Unlike the car itself. I do hope the new owner has just as much fun with it as I did, so at least some good will come from it. Take care baby, be good.

Hi all. I simply can't wait. This morning, at around ten o clock my brand new niece or nephew will see the light of day, or at least that's what should be happening according to my planning :-) They themselves tend to think it's going to be a couple more days, but still ... ;-) Aagghh!!! This is so very, and I mean very, exiting people, there's just no words to describe it. And I can't even begin to imagine how my sister and bro must feel right now. Even if their feelings are aminor multiplication of mine ... boy they must be really in need of valiums already *grin* Hang on in there you two, it's not going to take much longer now! And for the kid, who until I know it's real name I'll call 'Kiddo', just because I like the ring of it: come on out, we're ready for you :-D

Hi all. Yesterday I had great fun all day, playing my classic role as a big brother. My sister is on the last days of her pregnancy and because of that she is not too keen on leaving the house to travel longer than say fifteen minutes or so. This is fully understandable of course but as a result of this she's almost completely done with all her books, video's and DvD's and so on. To cut a long story short: she's bored at home and has no-one to call since most of us are at work ;-) And that's were I came in. As soon as I heard of her giant problem, I arranged at work to have the entire day off and head over there to keep her busy. We had great fun playing a couple games, talking away, going to do some light shopping so the day went by pretty nicely this way. In the evening Stefan joined us so I for one had great day. We should do this more often :-D

Hi all. In spite of what I had planned to do last night (which was playing snooker) I found myself stuck at home for the evening. My back was acting up again and I didn't think it would be a good idea to go out and play snooker as I'm normally not quite feeling better when returning from it. This of course is not a huge problem when you're fine before you begin, but since I was feeling my back already the thought of getting back home and wondering whether or not I would get out of the car at all didn't seem that great ... So I phoned both Bas and Jaap and ordered them both to play better than the other ... so I wonder what went on overthere last night ;-)

Hi all. Okay before you start: yes I know what time it is. And believe me I'm slowly, but surely, starting to feel human again after last nights Formula One race. However next time I'll do it differently because I think I missed at least some turns (and / or laps) due to eye heaviness ;-) As I found out the time where I could get away with missing my normal night sleep is far behind me. The race was a cool watch. Due to Friday's rainy qualifying (and don't get me wrong I still hate the way it's done now) the starting grid was a strange mix of cars and positions. So therefore a lot of drivers were in positions they had not been in for a while and they needed to make up a lot of places. And that's always nice to watch. This morning I was home at about seven AM and rolled straight in bed to wake up at around four o' clock again. By that time I still needed to backup the three DvD's Bas and I watched last night and this morning ;-) before getting them back to the video rental service. 'Luckily' for me one of them didn't like to get itself get copied and the other two were ready nicely in time. And now I'm going to watch some TV and head for bed again. Otherwise I might miss tomorrow's wake up call and that would be .. erm ... bad ;-)

Hi all. When I was young and made a mistake the thing I was usually told was that when I would become older I would also become wiser en therefore make less (stupid) mistakes. Stupid is possibly a bit too harsh a word but it comes pretty close to what I am sometimes ;-) This weekend the Formula One feast will once again burst loose, as usual starting with the Grand Prix of Australia. The only down side I can think of is the time difference between here and there, which is something like eleven hours or so. So when last night I wanted to see the first qualification of the season live on TV it meant me sitting in front of that big screen at approximately five minutes to three ... AM that is. The qualification should last from three to four in the morning, and I was ready for it. Mentally that was, because physically after watching half an hour of racing cars doing their best I just could keep my head straight up and simply had to go to bed. I'm guessing it's an age thing, so tonight I'll ask Bas how he does these things *grin* Tonight by the way is going to be a pretty long night again. Like last night there's first a qualification (yes again, I know. Not my choice at all but hey, who am I right? If it were up to me ... but it simply isn't.) at around eleven thirty followed closely by a couple of hours of ... nothing :S And after these hours the actual race will begin at three AM again. So all in all we'll be glued to the seats until five thirty I reckon. And then I'll head home, aim for the bed and just let go. So don't expect to get me on the phone or on-line something until way later that afternoon, okay?

Hi all. Unfortunately that's the only word I can think of to describe my 'performance' for our snooker competition last night. Now I know that I've said it before but this simply must have been the worst evening since the beginning of my so called snooker career. For some reason (apart from me not feeling quite that well) I just couldn't get the balls in, no matter what I tried. The result were three immensely scrappy frames of snooker. Two of which I even lost on the last black ball, would you believe it. They say that you tend to adjust your level of snooker to that of your opponent and if so, I need to make a huge apology to my three opponents and hope they will recover from the state they now must be in ... So I'm sorry ... to both my own and the visiting team ... I hope to do better next time.