HUMO magazine has a regular column in which they interview someone for the 10 records which changed their lives. This got me on the idea of compiling a list with my 12 favourite songs of the last year. So far, I compiled this list of the past months. For every song, there's a story and a moodswing, but that's for later :

• January [Sadness] : Wall of Sound, by Covenant


• February [Hope] : Technoman, by And One


• March [Party] : Merging Oceans, by Rotersand


• April [Pain] : Care for You, by Wolfsheim


• May [Recovery] : ?


• June [Love] : Could It Be, by Hungry Lucy


• July [Busy] : Love Parasite, by Fad Gadget

I'll place these songs on the Radio Blog entry when I find some time to convert these to Flash audio.

Last Saturday was a full moon, which looked like an ordinary full moon, but actually was a bit extraordinary a blue moon. A blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. For a blue moon to occur, the first of the full moons must appear at or near the beginning of the month so that the second will fall within the same month (the average span between two moons is 29.5 days). July 2004 had two full moons: the first on July 2, the second on July 31 that second full moon is called the blue moon. Obliquity.com has a great article with FAQs about the blue moon.

The Simple Minds were headliners on the Suikerrock festival in Tienen, so this was an excellent chance for a shot of nostalgia. We arrived pretty late, only to discover that the concert had already begun, so we decided to skip the 15 Euro entrance fee, and simply wait half an hour untill security opened the gates. After the Simple Minds concert, we visited some of the smaller podia, like the Bakstage, with a concert of DJ Sven Van Hees (see the picture in the Snapshot box). Too bad we missed out Buscemi or Vive La Fete...

OReilly just posted a nice overview of the new features in PHP5, and especially highlights on exception handling.

A softer world is a great picture cartoon, often bittersweet or melancholic.

(via FuckHedz)

I had it up to here with the Belgian Postal 'Services'. In the last two years, I had to endure :

• packages being opened


• blunt and rude staff


• clerks who refuse to open the postal office


• clerks who refuse to pay out a postal cheque, just because my name is spelled slightly different

And yesterday, I discovered that the information about the opening hours is just plain wrong on their website. Do I really have to take A FUCKING DAY OFF JUST TO POST A FUCKING LETTER ???

Next Friday is Sysadmin day. Support your local sysadmin, and maybe buy him some geekwear. Though many would be happy with a cup of coffee (I would ;)

The neat little mobile in the snapshot box is the Sony Ericsson T100, which I bought for my girlfriend M. Mobile phones are so cheap nowadays; I recently saw a Siemens GSM for only 50 Euro ! What a difference with 5 years ago, when I bought my first (Kenwood) mobile : 150 Euros for a phone that was 6 times heavier, had only SMS features, and the battery was dead after 3 days...

I've read a few articles about Sun's new powertool called DTrace, and I must admit that I'm eager to get my hands on a Solaris10 to test this out. Some Linux developers have the same desire to see this implemented on Linux. Karim Yaghmour claims that DProbes and LTT gives you anything DTrace has, but RedHat developer Daniel Berrange has posted a comparison of DTrace and DProbes/LTT which gives DTrace the advantage.

Boekblog (Book blog) is a refreshing blog by Dimitri Antonissen, a young Antwerp writer. In the last series of posts, he publishes short stories/poetry on different Belgian and Dutch blogs, like these excellent poems Trouwen and Kermis