Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

The whole family has been dealing with getting over a nasty bug.

Eloïse started vomiting late last week; on Thursday, I think, but I've rather lost track of time. She didn't seem to be suffering much discomfort, though. After being sick, she would immediately go back to smiling and playing. Even though the vomiting continued for a couple of days, she didn't become listless or dehydrated. Perhaps that's because the vomiting wasn't accompanied by much diarrhoea.

In an effort to stop her vomiting, we took to feeding her breast milk from a syringe, so that she wouldn't get too much food in a single sitting. This approach seemed to work quite well.

Saturday evening, I rapidly went downhill and by the middle of the night, I was vomiting, too. A very restless night of endless diarrhoea ensued.

By the morning, Sarah had had her head down the toliet, too. All of us were now affected, although Sarah and I had it much worse than Eloïse .

Sunday was spent oscillating between sleeping and feeling like death warmed up. It's incredible how much one can sleep when a virus (or whatever it was) takes hold of you. Sarah and I barely ate a thing, as we both felt incredibly week and had lost our appetite.

Whilst the McKenna-Macdonalds were more or less completely incapacitated this weekend, our friends Lauren and Brian (and their son, Max), who are holidaying here from New York, have so far remained unaffected by the dreaded lurgy. Hopefully that state of affairs will continue until they return home on Wednesday.

Lauren, Brian and baby Max returned to the US on Wednesday. Within hours, Mandy (my mother) and Ian turned up, making for two trips to the airport that day.

The guest room felt like a hotel room, with just enough time to strip the bed and put on some clean sheets before they were being slept in again.

Their trip was short, just two full days, and so they were gone again by early Saturday morning.

Our next set of visitors arrive towards the end of the month, just in time for Koninginnedag. That will be Sarah's parents on their first trip out here since we moved into the new house.

The overdue task of maintenance on my code base continues.

Some time last October, Yahoo made changes to its finance site, which broke the currency conversion module of my Ruby/Finance library. I've finally got around to fixing this and the result is the newly released version 0.2.2.

Ruby/Finance is a partial port of Perl's Finance::Quote. I initially wrote it so that I could track Google stock movements as the company became publicly traded, which is why it hasn't seen a lot of expansion since first being released.

I must get around to fixing the AEX module, too, at some point, as that's been broken for ages. That will require a large rewrite of the module, however, as the underlying service used by the module has disappeared.

As of yesterday, we finally have a DVR in the house. Unfortunately, it's nothing as configurable and flexible as the MythTV box that I was trying to build not so long back.No, this is the very pedestrian, low-intelligence Philips DVDR7300H.

Just a few of my complaints after 24 hours of use:

• Its GuidePlus+ electronic guide system covers only a small subset of the channels that we receive. Important ones that are missing are BBC3 and BBC4.
• The maximum number of programmes that can be queued for recording is a rather pathetic 25.
• One can not elect to start the recording early to account for imprecise broadcasting schedules.
• The steps by which one can allow a recording to overrun are too rough: 10, 20 or 30 minutes. Why not 2, 5 or a user-configurable amount?
• There is only one tuner, so one cannot record two programmes at once.
• One cannot set a programme to record daily. A daily news programme, for example, would require three of the 25 recording slots: one Monday to Friday slot, plus a weekly Saturday slot and a weekly Sunday slot. This is just plain stupid.
• The machine offers the user no choice what to do when there is a scheduling conflict. I assume it allows the first programme to finish, rather than truncating it and commencing the recording of the next.
• The G-Link IR blaster was a pain in the arse to configure. I need it to work with a Thomson set-top box, which is what UPC's digital cable package uses. The DVDR7300H requires you to tell it whether you're using a cable, satellite or terrestrial set-top box, at which point it presents a list of manufacturers. Unfortunately, Thomson doesn't feature in the list of cable set-top box manufacturers, so I tried telling the Philips that I was using a Thomson satellite box instead. Sadly, none of the infrared codes it sent to the UPC box were successful in changing the channel. Eventually, I got lucky by trying a bunch of different manufacturers at random. Telling the Philips that I was using a Motorola cable box did the trick, but it took a lot of time and energy to reach that point.

In spite of these and other shortcomings, it's been so long since we were able to even record a programme from the television, that just the reacquisition of this basic functionality feels novel to me now. I'd still give almost anything to have my TiVo back, though. It could do so much more than the Philips DVD-R, which is essentially a piece of rubbish (no intelligence and a very poor UI), and was much cheaper, too.

The magic to turn the Philips DVDR7300H into a region free DVD player doesn't yet seem to be common knowledge, so I may as well report it here. Thanks to the magic of search engines, the information will then soon rapidly spread around the Web.

To make your player region free, first turn it on and ensure there is no DVD in the tray. Then, hit [Browser] on the remote-control. Finally, and without hesitating between each keypress, enter the following incantation:

[Play] 159 12 12 12 005 255 [Play]

If you hesitate between any of these keypresses, Error will be displayed in the top right of the screen. If, on the other hand, you enter the above sequence correctly, the player will offer no hint that it has, in fact, positively reacted to your command. UNIX-esque, it is.

Assuming all went well, place in the tray a DVD mapped to a region other than the one for which your player was crippledmanufactured (and don't use a region 0 disc either, obviously). With a little bit of luck, you should find that it now plays instead of producing an error message.

It continues to irk me that DVD player manufacturers continue to handicap their products in this stupid and ineffective way. Why not just sell the bloody machine region-free in the first place? I know all of the arguments why this isn't done, but they only hold for a player that is hard-wired to a particular region and can't be reconfigured.

If you're going to make it possible to reconfigure the player via the remote control, you may as well supply the unit in an unhandicapped state to begin with; or at least supply the required code in the manual (but that would just serve to indicate how trivial and thus pointless the handicap is in the first place). Information wants to be free, as they say, so those who need a region free player will do the research and, assuming it can be done, find a way to make the player fully usable. They will then tell others. Why make life so awkward for everyone?

Another thing that annoys me: the parasitic shops that charge a €25 to €50 premium for making brand new players region free. All they have to do is plug in the unit and type in the code, but they make it appear to be something requiring knowledge and skill. The disrespect that manufacturers show for us, the paying consumer, is creating the circumstances for this parasitic cottage industry to thrive. It all seems so pointless when the full functionality of the player is but a few keypresses away.

We've been making some good progress of late on furnishing the house.

Some time ago, we decided that it would be nice to place a Persian carpet in the sitting room. We then held off on purchasing furniture for that room, because we needed to see what kind of carpet we would eventually buy. After all, such a carpet would set the whole tone of the room and the rest of the furniture would have to be chosen with that in mind.

Unfortunately, because we had a strong suspicion that it would take us forever to decide on a carpet, we found it all too easy to constantly postpone going out and even looking for one. We also needed a rather large carpet, 4 m × 3& m, which we knew would mean we wouldn't have much choice in the small shops in and around Amsterdam.

Then came a recommendation from one of our favourite furniture shops to try I.C.E. Oosterse Tapijten in Waardenburg, so we drove the 70 km or so along the A2 yesterday to see what they had to offer. We were not disappointed.

A couple of hours later, we'd picked out five quite striking carpets as candidates for our living room. We made an appointment with I.C.E. to bring them to us Friday morning so that we could look at each one in its prospective surroundings.

An hour or so later, we'd picked one of the five to spend the next several decades gracing the floor of our living room. I.C.E. fitted an anti-slip undermat to keep the carpet in place and then left, taking the four runners-up with them. A genuinely frightening invoice will be winging its way to me within the next few days. On the other hand, every time I think of how much it cost, I just glance over at it and am immediately forced to admit to myself once again that it truly is a stunning work of art.

I have an armchair in mind for that room now, so Sarah and I went out Friday afternoon to see if we could find a couch that would look good with the carpet and that chair. We think we've found one, but we need to shop around a bit more before committing to purchasing it. To complete the room, we're thinking of purchasing a couch, two armchairs and a glass coffee table. We'll probably add a sideboard of some kind, too. We've already seen a couple of nice coffee tables, but we're looking for one with a wooden frame, as Eloïse is sure to bash her head against it at some point.

So what else have we done on the house lately?

Well, we finally ordered some dining-room chairs to go with the table we purchased a few months ago. I've lost track of how many shops we had to visit before finally settling on a model at a local shop. Again, they're an expensive set of chairs, from the Maxalto collection, but the quality is superb. Not only do they look great, but -- most importantly, of course -- they are extremely comfortable. It's essential to me to be able to spend hours at a time at the dining room table, because, for me, that's the focal point of the main living area during the day. I like to relax there, read the paper and drink coffee. Many dining-room chairs are comfortable enough to enjoy a meal, but don't stand the test of prolonged sitting. Anyway, we ordered them in brown oak with reddish brown leather upholstery.

In the name of security, we've also had all of the glass panels at the back of the house replaced with break-in-resistant glass. This will hopefully deter future break-in attempts. If not, it will certainly retard their progress. We're also planning to add some motion-detector activated lights that will be turned on if someone trespasses in the garden. Speaking of the garden, we need to turn our attention to that now, too. It looks rather spartan and dull at the moment.

Our foyer now has a beuatiful old lamp to illuminate it. It really adds character to the entrance. Unfortunately, we were unable to hang up the lights we had purchased for the downstairs hallway and the bedroom, because the light fittings in those places were unable to hold the weight. One of those lights is now in a box in the cellar, whilst the other has been returned to the antique shop for a refund. It would be a lot of work to alter the fittings so that there is a cross-beam above them to support the weight and now is not really the time for us.

Owning a home and furnishing it with carefully chosen items of high quality is actually hard work, we've discovered. Obviously, however, the reward is proportional to the amount of work you put in.

At our latest visit to the Consultatiebureau, Eloïse weighed in at 9210 g. Her growth has slowed a little since our last visit, but that's quite normal at this stage.

She now has more teeth breaking through, three or four of them on the upper jaw, but I can't yet be sure of the number. They're just starting to breach the surface of her gum.

She's still not truly crawling, but is getting closer to doing so with each passing day. However, that's not to say that she is immobile; she can drag herself around somewhat, but the rhythm of the true crawl still eludes her for the moment.

On the food front, she's still being breastfed, of course, but in addition to that, she enjoys apple sauce, pureed carrot and mushed up prunes. She's also very fond of beetroot, which turns her shit an alarming shade of burgundy. It pays to remember when she has recently eaten this particular root vegetable, lest you be beset by a moment of panic when removing a poopy nappy and discovering what momentarily resembles a haemorrhage.

Bedtime is almost invariably preceded by the reading of a couple of stories. Allemaal In De File and Nieuwsgierige Lotje are her current favourites; or perhaps they're mine; I'm not sure.

This evening ended up being a late bedtime for her. Whilst she was playing on the floor just after having had Ik Wil De Maan and Over Een Kleine Mol Die Wil Weten Wie Er Op Zijn Kop Gepoept Heeft read to her, I noticed some blood on her index finger.

Blood always looks more serious than the actual cut that produces it, of course, so I wasn't too worried, even though seeing my daughter's blood for the first time definitely made me uncomfortable. Unfortunately, the placement of the cut made her want to pick at it with her thumb, so we had a devilish time getting it to stop bleeding. A sticky plaster was made short work of by her, so we had to resort to playing in the bath to distract her. That mostly stemmed the ooze, but Sarah had to eventually put her to bed in the hope that she would fall asleep quickly and thus not be tempted to play with it any more.

We just can't figure out what caused the cut. My best guess is that she tugged on a page in her book and gave herself a paper cut. The cut is straight enough that this explanation seems plausible. There's simply nothing else on the floor where she was playing. I was right there with her, too; I barely took my eyes off her the entire time.

Anyway, she wasn't bothered about it at all, and just seemed rather frustrated and annoyed that these two big oafs were running around after her and delaying her being put to bed.

No, I'm not really a coffee snob; honestly, I'm not. I like good coffee, yes, but I don't bore people with endless talk of beans, roasting, grinding, etc. How could I? I'm no expert, so I'd sound like a complete idiot. Besides, when all is said and done, it's still only a hot drink, right? I just appreciate drinking the stuff when the quality is good. There's really nothing quite like the pleasure of a great cup of coffee.

In search of the ever better cuppa, I biked over to Brandmeester's this afternoon to pick up the two Grand Cru coffees I ordered at the beginning of the month.

I picked up 125 g of each of Jamaican Blue Mountain and Puerto Rico Alto Grande. I'm really looking forward to trying each of these and discovering if they're as good as they're cracked up to be. Production of these coffees is limited, so they're only available a few times per year by advance order. Sounds snobby, doesn't it? I wonder if I'll even be able to tell them apart from all of the other varieties I've recently drunk. We'll soon see.

Ruby/LDAP 0.9.5 has been released.

There are no actual changes or enhancements this time around. Rather, all of the work in this release went into getting the code to build and work on Windows platforms. Accordingly, this version should build and work straight out of the box on Windows systems. It's been tested on Windows XP SP2, using SVC C++ 6.0 to build it.

If the code also works with other breeds of Windows and compiler, this will be a nice milestone to have reached, as the library has not worked on Windows since I took over maintenance of the code, somewhere back at the end of 2004, I think.

We reached an important bureaucratic milestone today. After some eight months of letters back and forth between us and the IND, we finally received word today of their decision to grant Sarah her application for a verblijfsvergunning (residence permit).

She's been granted an initial period of one year, backdated to the date that the application was submitted. The bureaucratic road has been meandering for so long, that this means she has but four more months until the permit will need to be renewed. Exactly how much renewed bureaucracy will ensue at that time remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful that, once granted, the permit will be considerably easier to renew than it is to initially obtain.

Much, if not all, of the awkwardness in our case was caused by the fact that Sarah's sponsor (that's me, her husband) is unemployed. The IND is simply not set up to deal with applications from people whose sponsors are not working, a student, an au-pair, a man of the cloth, a diplomat, a foreign journalist, etc., etc.

Proving that I could ensure that Sarah would not be a burden on the Dutch state was thus not as easy as simply producing an employment contract. Instead, I had to show evidence of independent means. Things got an order of magnitude messier when, after demonstrating that I could financially support Sarah, the IND tried to disqualify our assets from consideration by pointing out that no Dutch tax had been paid on them. The fact that no Dutch tax was yet due on them seemed to them to be an irrelevant detail.

When I pointed out that they could not reasonably expect me to prove that I had paid tax that was not yet due and thus could not yet be paid, they conceded, but then immediately countered by demanding to see a copy of the 2004 tax return that I had filed whilst living in the US.

It's a game of chess, you see? Since governmental departments are a monopoly (you can't just go to a competitor and get a residence permit from them), you have no choice but to deal with them. And no matter how stupid and time-consuming each of their requests is, the only pragmatic course of action is to comply with it.

I don't often recommend the path of least resistance, but where bureaucratic governmental departments are concerned, it's the only sane choice. You see, each request with which you comply effective removes another chess piece from the board. Ultimately, after you have fulfilled each and every one of their requests, there will be nothing left to ask of you, except perhaps that you bring back a piece of the moon on your next trip.

Anyway, the whole process ultimately took so long that our 2005 taxes eventually did become due in The Netherlands. Predictably, the IND responded by requesting a copy of the filing, which I duly supplied. And with that manoeuvre, I captured their queen and put their king in checkmate. As I said, we'll be having a rematch at the end of August.

So Sarah now has to wait for the local council to contact for with an appointment to pick up her shiny new residence permit. Once she has that, the whole process of inburgering will be just around the corner. They like to keep life interesting over here.

We ordered another couch today. Like the one in our living-room, this one will be coming from Forma in the Utrechtsestraat. Sarah and I both really like the stuff in that shop and find ourselves going back time after time. The guy who assists us, René, is always helpful and objective, too. It wouldn't be half as much fun without him.

The new couch will be positioned in our sitting-room with its back against the window, so that the view from the living-room will be into the body of the couch. That should serve to provide the room with definition, framing the room and making it feel less open and chaotic than it is now.

We expect to order some armchairs tomorrow, once we've made a final choice about colours and material.

We're still on the lookout for a wooden-framed glass table and a sideboard to complete the sitting-room; plus the never-ending search for the perfect lighting, but we've kind of postponed that element of the furnishing for the time being. It's very hard to concentrate on so many things at once.

Speaking of furniture, we also bought two seats today for our little bundle of joy. They're not in the house, though. No, these are for our Pack Max and 995 bikes from the Fietsfabriek.

With summer now well on the way and Eloïse now large and strong enough to cope with the rigours of a real seat, this will give us an element of freedom we haven't enjoyed before. For example, Sarah will now be able to bike with Eloïse without requiring me to be present. She doesn't feel comfortable with the 995, a.k.a. a bakfiets, so the child seat on the Pack Max will allow her to carry Eloïse using a bike to which she has grown accustomed.

On other occasions, we'll still use the 995, but now we no longer have to place a child's car-seat in the trough. Instead, we have a proper bicycle seat affixed to the bench. The only disadvantage of this system is that it will be much harder for Eloïse to sleep whilst being biked around, but we're just going to have to see how that works out in practice.

Today was nice and warm, at least until the late afternoon. I went out in shorts for the first time this year.

We biked through the Vondelpark to the exit near the Kinderkookcafé (Children's Cooking Café) and made our way to the Porcelein- en Kristalhuis on the Overtoom.

The purpose of our visit stemmed from the fact that we're close to choosing a set of new cutlery to last the rest of our lives and then on into posterity; the proverbial family silver, you could say. Sterling silver cutlery is expensive, however, so we have to be very sure about the style we eventually choose. After all, we're going to be looking at it for a long time to come.

After a spot of lunch and a quick visit to Jacob van Wijngaarden, a travel book shop, we biked back through the park and then went on a diversion to Pisa in order for Sarah to sample the city's finest ice-cream (in my opinion, at least).

When we got back home, an outdoor scene for the next series of Keyzer & De Boer Advocaten was being filmed on the stoop of Emmalaan 21. We stopped to watch several takes of a scene that involved Pim (Porgy Franssen) and Maarten (Daan Schuurmans) hanging up a sign outside the office, whilst Nina (Henriëtte Tol) looks on and supervises. Keyzer & De Boer Advocaten is a really good series, which sadly can't be said for most Dutch drama shows, so it's fun to see it being filmed just around the corner from where we live.

Rounding out the end of the day, the Albert man turned up and delivered our groceries, so we're stocked up again in time for Sarah's folks to descend on us this coming Friday.

Yesterday, we had a cleaner come in for the very first time. She was like a tornado and did a really nice job on the place. It still feels kind of odd to have someone else do our cleaning, but the convenience is undeniable. I hope she'll be available for some time to come.