I really want to check my email but this place doesn´t appear to have ssh and won´t let me download putty. Bugger. If I owe you mail, that´s why.

In other news, Popbitch says, "Holly Vallance's Kiss-Kiss is a "cover" of a Turkish pop hit called Simarik (The Kissing Song) by Tarkan - it was a hit in Germany and Holland.". Is this the same Holly Vallance from Neighbours? Oddly enough, I have the original of the song because I bought a Tarkan cd in Turkey and it was a huge hit then. I´ve heard it on Dutch radio too, so they´re not lying.

Another beautiful day in Barcelona. Saw the Temple Sagrada Familia and Park Guell last night, Casa Mila and Casa Batllo today. Will hopefully check out the Paris to Barcelona exhibition tomorrow. There´s so much to do here, it doesn´t feel like we have enough time to see it all.

It´s nearly 11pm and it´s still about 23 degrees. Woohoo!

Did I mention that Russian dolls (dolls of diminishing size that pack inside each other) are everything in Prague? I´d heard they had dolls of Russian presidents in addition to the traditional lot, but no-one mentioned the KISS dolls.

Mum locked herself out of the flat in Amsterdam yesterday, and the woman from the shop below the flats rang up to get me to come down and help her, and she called her ´my wife´! Eeew!

In other Mum news, she´s a great chaperone - I don´t get hassled at all or checked out too grossly by guys when I´m walking down the street with her. The second she´s a bit further away, I get stared at and really grossly checked out.

She got drunk on a glass of sangria today. Accidental, but very amusing for me.

Just arrived in Barcelona. It´s the feast of St George today so the streets are packed with people, and there are stalls selling books and roses everywhere. Men give women roses and women give men a book. I´d rather the deal was the other way around but no-one´s offered me either yet.

Prague is still ace1 The kezboards aren§t so good though. Will write up journal after I get back from Spain and get photos scanned. I haven§t even left and I§m thinking about it, which is sad. Saw the Museum of Communism todaz, reallz worth a visit. Hard to imagine everzthing this citz has seen.

Faze, if zou§re reading this, remind me to tell zou about the Hussites.

Tripped out to Cesky Krumlov yesterday on local buses, great fun.

Prague is ace! Thank god it's not high tourist season. Our first experience was trying to buy bus tickets at the airport. First the woman in the tabak (newsagents) could change our note, so we got change, but apparently the new note was also too big. So we went and got more change, tiny tiny coins, and she didn't have any tickets.

There's an older Australian couple one terminal over. He's standing, and dictating an email that his wife is typing. She has perfect typing school posture. He just dictated, 'hope all goes well with the fence'. They're like a blast from Mildura, 1963.

Dutch kid hoaxes FBI, leaves phone number in message, gets caught.

I know it's a big waste of my valuable life, but I can't stop reading the bbc condolences:
"The Queen Mother was not 'one of us' My Grandmother waited months for a hip operation and subsequently died."
Gary Wright, UK

"Bye, Ma'am, I'll miss you, even though I have lived in Australia for 35 years."
Sonia Morris, Australia

Did I mention that I'm going to Prague tomorrow? Woohoo!

I was trying to find the origin of that 'Queen Mother Condolences' email that's been going around. I liked this guy on the bbc.co.uk site:
"Queen Mother and Princess Margaret lived their lives of luxury off the wealth plundered from impoverished people all over the Earth, as do the remaining Windsors. They are ordinary people in possession of extraordinary wealth, nothing more.
John Connolly, U.S.A, "

Also, "Can I just say that a lot of people do not care at all as there are more important things happening in the world than some old lady passing away. She had a long life and a very well off life compared to most people, so please stop the overkill.
Disrk Simth, UK "

One Canadian guy wrote a big sucky entry but ruined it by calling her the 'QUEEN MOM' (his caps).

The joke email is full of entries like: "How refreshing to be able to mourn the death of a member of the Royal family without being accused of being homosexual", J. Fletcher, High Wycombe, and "It is such a loss, God has shat on our heads", K. O'Neil, Inverness, which makes me imagine god as a giant seagull.

Richard Neville, in The Age, on September 11, etc.

Being a sad-arse, I watched some of the orgy of cooking shows on the BBC on Saturday mornings. I really like the sound of the recipe for pickled cucumber, with fresh and preserved ginger. I've been having rice paper roll cravings for months so I'm going to try making them myself.

You'll never guess the top link from googling '"rice paper roll" recipe': Geoff Jansz at Burke's Backyard.

For those Australians who don't remember Geoff Jansz, here are a few pictures. In turn, this lead me to the classic, "Well Known Aussies who Wear Rivers". Unmissable.

Back to the food, this page has some great dipping sauce recipes for rice paper rolls.

Some boring practical information: these guys do international taxes: http://www.ess.ie/, which is cool, but they charge 16.5% of your Dutch tax refund, which isn't so cool. It doesn't say how much they charge for doing Australian tax refunds.

Also, I really should browse the Immigration and Naturalisation Service site for more info on work permits.

So I'm checking my email, decide to check out the footy scores and see how my tips are progressing... there must be a red face at realfooty.com.au, because this is what was in the rhs score box:

AFL
Round 3
Friday April 12
Blues99 d Magpiesaway_score.points

Saturday April 13
Demonsaway_score.points d Tigershome_score.points

Swansaway_score.points d Crowshome_score.points

Catsaway_score.points d Demonshome_score.points

Bombersaway_score.points d Lionshome_score.points

Sunday April 14
Dockersaway_score.points d Hawkshome_score.points

Blues99 d Poweraway_score.points

Bulldogsaway_score.points d Eagleshome_score.points


There's a huge anti-Israel demonstration going on outside, the crowd stretched as far as I could see in either direction, but you'd never know it in the insulated world that is Easy Everything.

Via NTK, Die, old witch.

I've found something on sourceforge like one of the applications I'm writing to keep myself busy - dotgone-office. It looks like a java app.

Nice, well written article on using css to save javascript on image rollovers.

Apparently Microsoft and Unisys 'have the way out' but they can't show you it. Their showcase site was run on FreeBSD and Apache until the media hammered them for it, then it crapped out when they switched it to IIS. And what did it crap out with? You guessed it, 'This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed'. There's a screenshot in the article at theregister but it doesn't include the url.

According to Yahoo, 'The "We have the way out" campaign describes Unix as an expensive trap. One ad reads: "No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever." '.

Sourceforge is doing a google, and serving me Dutch language content. I don't know what language preferences the browser is sending cos I'm in a net cafe that's locked out options, but it could be that or my ip. I know google was probably doing it on ip cos I could set my language preferences in ie and netscape at work.

You wanna know what sucks? It seems that half the things that php/apache can't do when running under Windows (sue me, it's the only dev environment I've got) are the things a) I really want to do, and b) the things that make scripts more robust. $PHP_SELF has a mind of it's own under windows, and here docs don't work.

Yeah, baby, you know you want it.

A note for leanna from olympia, washington who asked,

"Dear Departed Di,
aren,t you suppose to be dead!!!!!!"

Well, yes, that's why it says, she speaks 'from beyond the grave'.

The trouble with children's books... according to an interview with a childrens' book author in the Saturday Extra (from mid-March) about the difficulties of publishing books with realistic action that will attract boys because of the need for co-edition publishing in the US, an illustrator 'had to take the udders off a cow before they would release the book in the US'. The author also says, 'because of the Bible belt, we can't write about the supernatural, magic and witches, horror, etc.'. Also, 'writers cannot denigrate teachers or their authority'. The most amazing statement of all is that the author of the Harry Potter books that have got not only kids but adults reading fiction again, J.K. Rowling, 'is in the top-five banned authors', 'meaning government subsidy money cannot be used to purchase her books'.

I've had another idea for a reality tv show. I think it's better than my previous idea for a show where TV producers sit around trying to decide on the next reality tv show, and are voted off one by one.

Here's my pitch:

One house. Twelve residents. Twelve camera crews. Which crew will survive? You decide.

Camera Crew Challenge. There can be only one.

More late-night tv: Dutch tv has lots of those late night phone sex ads. They're usually pretty similar to similar ads in other countries, women trying to sound as sexy as possible while reciting a telephone number; except for one I saw last night, which featured a woman who sounded like someone's mum. Not a dominatrix, just a typically scary Dutch woman. People probably call because they're too scared not too.

Watching Jerry Springer last night (it's important to work with the stereotypes of being unemployed), a guest told Jerry that she walked in on her boyfriend and her housemate in bed together. She left without them seeing her, and the first thing she did was call the Jerry Springer show.

I just don't know what to say.

Sydney Morning Herald article on Linux chix with the naff headline, "Linux grrls break free". Still, it's coverage for both Linux and chicks in IT.

I came across this ad on the notice board at the library on Prinsengracht. It was an A4 page with a colour photo at the top, of this guy who wanted to start a communal house and was looking for people to help him build it, in working parties one Sunday a month. He claimed to be gender dysphoric, and that he was two-thirds female and one-third male. So he wanted to live in a house where everyone could explore life without gender stereotypes. He had a plan where the women would have sex with other women, and the men would have sex with the women, but no men would have sex with men. This seems strange to me, because unless his two-thirds of womanhood was gay, he'd be attracted to men, at least in part; but the best bit was the Freudian translation into Dutchlish:

Spiritual Growth House - At Erection - for four bisexual women and two heterosexual men.

The Queen mum arrives in heaven and gets a welcoming party.
When she walks into the party she is immediately greeted by Diana.
Wanting to make polite conversation she remarks that Diana has a lovely halo and that "we would like one just like it".
To which Diana replies: "You stupid cow, it's a f*%$'ing steering wheel!"

You'd think I'd have something interesting to say, having all this time on my hands, but it's the opposite. Maybe because the only news I get now is in Dutch, and it's hard to rant when you're not quite sure if you're getting the news right.

And now, a joke:
A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet.
"My dog's cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him? "
"Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him"
So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth.
Finally, he says "I'm going to have to put him down."
"What? Because he's cross-eyed?
"No, because he's really heavy"

I sent a letter to John Howard about protecting ancient forests today, via the Greenpeace site. You can send a letter to your leader by going to http://act.greenpeace.org/aas/e?a=cbd1&s=fst.

You can also protest Japan's continued hunting of endangered whales for 'scientific' research: http://act.greenpeace.org/ams/e?a=faj&s=whl or the legalisation of seed contamination of conventional seeds by genetically modified seeds in the EU at http://act.greenpeace.org/ams/e?a=eu_seeds&s=blue2.

(March 31, 2002). If it was April 1, these articles from the Sunday Times would make more sense.

Firstly, a report that the British Forestry Commission is 'landscaping' forests to make them less 'frightening' and 'less intimidating', spending millions of pounds and chopping down up to 15% of trees in some forests.

"We have started developing more areas where people can feel safe, with dappled shade and open areas where flowers such as bluebells can spread". They've also added 'water features' such as a man-made lake, as "water features seem to hold the greatest aesthetic value rather than the actual trees".

Secondly, "Tony Blair has been forced to abandon plans to release an intelligence dossier on Iraq because it did not contain enough evidence to support a military campaign against the country". The document was withdrawn "because it failed to establish that Saddam Hussein was a growing threat".

It's a shame for Blair, because he's expected to make a "fresh pledge of military support for any American action against Iraq" when he meets Dubya on Friday. And worse, a "senior MI6 official" said, "we just do not believe Saddam is sponsoring international terrorism".

"Blair is now expected to urge Bush to publish his own dossier based on CIA intelligence, or risk losing a worldwide propoganda war against Iraq".

Did I mention that I really, really hate looking for jobs? It doesn't help that so many ads are complete crap. One was looking for a 'web specialist'' with an MSCE.

Back in net cafes, looking for a job. At least it's a beautiful day.

Just for me, these are my job-looking links:
yahoo, web application
yahoo, asp
monster, asp
jobserve, web or asp
monster.co.uk, european, netherlands, computer software
monster.co.uk, european, netherlands, it.