The Creeping Deadline

What is it?: an IT project is sold and a delivery date is set. Now at some point during the project, people (the management, the client, the shareholder) realize that they might be better off if the deadline moves forward a couple of days or weeks, so it better aligns to other departments (finance, marketing, HR)...
Pros: better alignment, thus adhering to client's new constraints
Cons: greatly increased stress on project team (unless of course, the project can defer some of the deliverables to after the deadline)

The thing is, after this entire project ends and is handed-over, the message to the outside world is going to be that the project was completed on time and under budget. The subtext is of course, original time and budget.

And if you get deeper into this discussion, you end having to match every single deliverable to every single sub-deadline defined, and you have a huge mess. People generally just don't bother (unless they're auditing).

Now having a house built is cool. There's this acquisition contract that says the buyer pays for the material and labor costs, for an expected number of days needed to complete the construction. If the contractor goes over the alotted number of days, any additional costs are on his account. But, there's no deadline.

Mind you, this can only be done for mature projects.

Who'd have thunk it?

Back in high school we had this nice older math teacher running the class for a year. He was fast approaching his retirement so we kind of made things easy for him (unlike for some other teachers we had during the time). He had a long white beard, and was short and stocky. If you put a red pointy hat on his head, he looks just like a garden gnome.

Anyways this guy at some point during the year confided in us that he was in fact living with his boyfriend for some time now. At the time that announcement was a big thing. You wouldn't expect that from an nice old man.

Now in every high school class the same roles are played: there's the popular divas in one corner of the room, the nerdy brains in another. And then there's the alpha male, the guy who always shouts the loudest, talks to the most chicks, and always causes trouble. This guy was the typical alpha: was never in class, because he always had some chore to do as punishment for something else he had done. As a result he was not around when our math teacher told us about his sexual preference.

Near the end of the year our alpha started treating us to I guess cake. He lost a bet or something. During math class he passed cake around, and eventually there was so much left over, that he gave everything to the math teacher, adding that he and his wife could enjoy it...

At that point the class fell silent, and all eyes primed on the dude. He was completely stunned and surprised that everyone was staring at him. He didn't know he made a faux pas. We didn't know what would happen next. It wasn't until later he was told the explanation. And seriously, he couldn't sink any lower into the ground at that point.

We've now moved on a decade and apparently our alpha male is dating a male television personality and singer. I can't say what I'm more surprised about: about the idea that he's into guys now, or about the notion that he is dating someone relatively famous.

A fool is made in haste

The most truthful thing I've read today was from an SI.com article, and is about John Madden, now most commonly known as a sportscaster and colourman in NFL games. He doesn't fly planes anymore due to his claustrophobia, and travels around in buses, trains and the like. It changed his outlook on life:

"If the claustrophobia thing didn't happen, I wouldn't know what this country is or what these people are like, (...) I would have been like everyone else: Run, run, run; airport, airport, airport; hotel, hotel, hotel; city, city, city. I wouldn't have found time to see things like I see them now. I got so I knew nothing other than football and the Raiders. You focus in so much, and you miss life."

Aww... shucks

Who Cares? Really this would be a nice gift for a newlywed couple.

Unknow, v.

Verb:
to unknow (third-person singular simple present unknows, present participle unknowing, simple past unknew, past participle unknown)

1. To deny knowledge and familiarity of a previously introduced concept: friendship, failures, movie quotes.
2. To forget, with intention

Irony is Bliss

The most ironic thing I heard today, was at the end of a Delinquent Habits track.

"I thought you don't hold a grudge."

"I don't. I have no more surviving enemies."

Middle East, anyone?

Cheat or Visionary

Three things spring to mind now that Tour de France-winner Floyd Landis has tested positive for high-performance drugs:

• Doping is a bad thing because it supposedly skews the playing field; so make doping legal, make the results public and make the Tour a championship whomever gets the best technology, just like Formula One. Of course people will find new ways to cheat anyway, but if you find out, give them a slap on the wrist, fine them big time, and leave them be. Keeping sports purely natural is rather old fashioned.
  
• If an athlete takes doping, and their health deteriorates, it's their own damn fault. Anyone who wants to take a shortcut, knows some kind of cost is involved. There are no free rides.
  
• Doping really falls second place to inept officiating (see World Cup 2006); I'd rather watch sports where everybody takes drugs than a game where officials muck up with strange decisions, egotistical attitudes and just plain stupidity.
  

Bored out of their mind

People have no higher goals to strive for. All the land on this planet has been colonized (Google Earth), everyone has already done everything (marathon running, climbing Everest, kite surfing, fisting etc.), new technologies are following each other at such great speed that we don't even notice anymore; There's no great threat or enemy waiting just around the corner. No commies, no dictators (because we ousted them all), no diseases (at least not for very long).

Everything's just more of the same. Been there, done that.

People are bored. So people do as people do when they get bored: they surf on the interweb, complain about the high taxes, traffic, the weather, or they go to war. If there are no ideals to reach for, we just make them up on our own. Fight terrorism? Check. Take away nuclear power in Iran/Korea? Check. Israel? Check.

If things are supposed to be faster, better than ever before, then why do people feel so bored out of their minds? In that respect, why do people choose to fill their boredom with extremely pointless activities (genocide, grass, video games etc.)?

Question of authority

You've made it through high school... barely.

You've completed trade school... barely.

You got a job, and now, at 23/24 you are an inspector for the civil works.

You come to my building site on an inspection.

You act all high and mighty that everything is either alright, crap or something in between.

I laugh and dismiss you.

(of course, this is when the full force of the civil works department bears down on me, figuratively crushing me beneath its boots)

Now you'll have to forgive me when a 24-year old boy doesn't make an impression on me, even when he brandishes his official badge in front of me. For some reason with me, you need to earn my respect. Legal issues aside, authority comes with age, experience, and perhaps admiration. I had to earn mine when I was 24 (and older even), and some punk from trade school is not going to change that perception.

I'm just prejudiced like that. Young guys from trade school should know their place. Pay your respects and bring a senior person along for the inspection, alright?

How Consultants Program (Part 1)

Consultants, real consultants, are supposed to be a little bit of everything. A tiny bit accountant, a dash of project manager, a tad of a kindergarten teacher, and a small amount programmer...

Now real consultants who do IT jobs tend to do things in a typical way. They exhibit these little behaviours that are at the very least peculiar to IT specialists. Sometimes it works out okay, other times it's a source of frustration, both for clients and for techies.

1. If it can go wrong, it deserves to be caught.
Exhibited in: code with huge amounts of if-statements or exception handling. Better yet: nested if-statements. Consultants are careful, therefore all situations need to be identified, handled and taken care of. The upside of this is that a consultant can always point out to the client "I took care of that, there: it says so in the code." The downside is that debugging is a losing proposition, as techies wade through a jungle of code.

2. Job done... in a single unit of code.
Exhibited in: huge, huge amounts of code (1000s of lines), that perform one business requirement from top to bottom, without stopping. The upside: consultants show they understand the client's needs, because they did everything in a single run. The downside: lots and lots of code to support. Good luck if you need to find something, let alone change something.

More next time.

Melting

In this heat being outside in the open sun for a significant amount of time is actually not a good idea. Even if you're wearing a bathing suit or a bikini. Even if you drink plenty of water.

So you've got construction workers working on the roads, walking enthusiasts in Nijmegen, sun bathers on the beach, busboys and -girls working the terraces, but other than that there's very little reason to be out there.

Just put me in an air-conditioned room and leave me to my beer. Better yet, stick a parasol in the ground and I'll gladly picknick there.

I just can't seem to put more than two coherent sentences together...

ECHO!! Echo! Echo...

My conscience is eating me... lately I make some statements about work, about pop culture, about life in general, and others are repeating what I said almost literally... now how should I react:

Creative not much? I know it's a good idea, because I've just said it. I don't need it repeated back to me.

Or:

Should I be flattered that other people are listening to what I say, and are picking up on it? Should I feel solace in the fact that people apparently think the same way I do?

Some guidance now would be nice...

Distractions

People easily get distracted by news and events. As a prerequisite, the news must be of interest to them. There's also a hierarchy: if something bad happens, that's more interesting than if something happy occurs. Also something very far away (geographically), is less noteworthy than something close to home.

Unfortunately these matters of fact allow for some really strange observations.

For example, up until last night, no one in Italy (or Europe for that matter) spoke of the World Cup victory. Instead whatever it was that set Zidane to headbutting an opposing player was the focus of the news. And last night the relegations of Italy's Juventus, Lazio Roma and Fiorentina stole the limelight. None of this is really joyful, yet people like it so much they devote so much of their time on it.

Observation 1: since when is an (alleged) insult more important news than a team winning the biggest prize in their craft?

Another example. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon were momentarily headline news, even drawing the attention from one G.W. Bush from the United States. The next day it drew second billing to the annual local fish market survey.

Observation 2: since when is local non-threatening news more important than global life-threatening issues?

Human nature is to select (prioritize more like) what is of value to any individual and ignore the rest. There's simply no time to indulge into everything. This prioritization is quite pessimistic though. When people do something grand, others either put themselves down (I wouldn't be able to do that), or get jealous. A far smaller group is actually inspired by grand performances and strive to reach something similar. When something bad happens to people however, nearly everyone feels threatened. They could think it could happen to them (floods, fires, kidnappings, but also scam artists, high taxes, car accidents or noise violations).

Human nature is to judge the risk of something bad happening to themselves far higher than the risk of something good happening. People are driven to do everything in their power to survive, purely on instinct, but few are driven to make a quantum leap forward past that stage.

Lazy bastards.

Selective hearing

This week I've been asked the question what my strengths were. One of those I've mentioned - from the top of my head - was being able to stay objective and calm longer than other people I know or work with (although if you saw me driving in the car, you would probably not share that opinion about me).

Staying objective and calm to me has nothing to do with a higher level of tolerance or inner peace, but more with distilling precisely that information which the broadcaster wants to spread. In my experience people rarely put into words exactly what they mean, because they tend to leave pauses in their sentences, stall to search their vocabularies, think about things again, speed up, slow down and so on. Whatever people want to share, is rarely what they say word for word.

Problem is, the audience doesn't take enough time to distill the deeper meaning from whatever is said. Therefore they fall into misinterpretations and in addition they fill-in whatever gaps exist with whatever they think is meant and stop there. The end result is that the audience gets angry because whatever was actually meant, did not match what they think was meant.

Objectivity and calmness comes from being able to accept that whatever is said, is not completely literally the message conveyed. People are fallible, people don't know, people lie. Accepting this fact allows you to be cautious and to truly think about the message. Eventually you get the closest to the original meaning of the messenger.

I'm not saying I'm a good listener. I'm actually quite dreadful at it. Listening is just as fallible as speaking. But I pick up on key words, ask the right questions to confirm any information gaps I may have, and I maintain a healthy neutral stance.

I can predict people's intentions quite well this way, and therefore never really complain. How can you complain if you are right?

WTH was Zidane thinking?

All the speculation can end... Zidane truly orchestrated the end of his own career to the last second. The headbutt he gave to Materazzi, and the subsequent red card and sending-off were all his intention. He did not snap, it was a perfectly executed, deliberate action to avoid a situation he was not prepared to endure, i.e. losing the World Cup final to the Italians.

Think about it, his best teammates had already left the pitch (Henry, Vieira), and he was left with young guys he didn't really know well, maybe even like. When the final whistle would sound, all the world's cameras would focus on his face, trying to capture the final moment of his career, in tears. Everyone wants to see the best player in the world in total desolation. Nothing attracts more viewers than someone else's misery, and this would have been one for the ages.

But Zidane is not a puppet of the masses. He is truly a genius, far more intelligent than anyone in football in the past fifteen years (except for Dennis Bergkamp perhaps). He does things his way, and that includes how leaves the game... correction... how he chooses to leave the game.

Of course he got provoked. He probably even was insulted. But he already knew what was going to happen. He had already seen the future. Zinedine already saw Italy win the World Cup 30 minutes later and celebrate at his expense, and that hurt him to the core of his being. And instead of languishing in his fate, he sought to do something about it. Materazzi gave him the opening. And Zidane took it: the footballing equivalent of hara kiri.

Now, even in disgrace, Zidane goes out as the king of football.

No tears.

No pity.

Adieu Zizou.

World Cup Final prediction

The head says: Italy

The Italian national team seems stronger than the French, proven by the two-hour onslaught they endured in the semis against Germany. Frankly Les Bleus looked rather tired in their own semi final, as if time is finally catching up to these guys (average age is over 30). Both teams are struggling up front I think, but I had no expectations about the likes of Toni or Gilardino, opposed to Thierry Henry who is by consensus the best player in the Premiership for the past two seasons. More Italian than French players left a good impression on me: Cannavaro, Zambrotta, Camoranesi, Pirlo (at times) easily go over. Only Ribery and Zidane were impressive on the French side.

The heart says: Italy

I like Italy better than France. France is enjoying its last moment in the sun, the generation that won the 98 World Cup and the 2000 Euro Championship is winding down and don't need to win the cup again to prove a point. Only Zidane I grant winning it all.

The gut says: Italy wins 1-0

The Italian defense should beat out the best the French have to offer. It's not going to be a flat-out defense-first game, but scoring should be very difficult for either team none the less.

Fashion hypes and styles that need to end NOW

• Large sunglasses (when you look at pictures of your parents from the seventies you laugh at them for putting these atrocities on their nose; why would it be in any degree acceptable if you wear them now?)
  
• Mullets, wet look, out-of-bed look (why is it more acceptable to spend more time on your hair, to make it look like you didn't spend any time on your hair at all?)
• Nerdy thick-rimmed glasses (these were never good-looking in the first place. They are only acceptable now because the people who wear them are usually well paid, and have character because they don't really care what other people think)
• Polo shirts with the collar worn up/folded (you spend loads and loads of money on clothing that comes out of the factory as if you slept on your shirt for two days)
• Women's high-heel cowboy boots (nothing SCREAMS slut like a good pair of calf-high, cowboy boots; also you can only get away with it if you're between fifteen and seventeen years of age, which kinda defeats the purpose)
• Flower dresses (please refer to my first point; women who've got the body for it are exempt from this rant, but if you're not... you just look old-fashioned)

My Genetic Music Make-up

You can tell how people are by looking at their bookcase, and the books that they keep. I guess the same goes for music as well. if you went into my CD collection you'd find rock music, pop music, trance music, rap music, music by bands, music by solo artists, music that's funny, music that's somber, up-tempo music, and so-on. It's all over the place, so one could say I have no discerning taste in music.

Now the Music Genome Project is a nice initiative to collect information about music, and identifying as many attributes as needed to find a common thread. These attributes could be something like vocal harmony, melodic phrashing, or key tonality. If you get all these together every track reads off its unique combination of characteristics, like a human genome. Hence the name.

Pandora Internet Radio is based on this Music Genome Project. Now the thing is, if you provide Pandora a sampling of music you like, it will find similar music in its growing database of music. And it's really good too. Even if you provide just a couple of tracks you like, that's enough information to get introduced to music you've never heard of before, but will likely like very much. Thing is, the common thread is not genre, or artist; it's going to be based on all these attributes identified and rated. It makes up for some initially weird combinations, that actually work well.

Anyway, try it out for yourself. Sign-up, submit some music you like, or grab one of my stations to see what I'm listening to (as anniversary bonus they are listed on the right); see for yourself what your music taste is really like. Be warned: Broadband internet connection is kinda necessary...

Madness of Age Ratings

"The game Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is too violent and contains sex; therefore it should not be sold to minors. The movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back contains references to drug use, fellatio, and blasphemy and therefore should not be watched by anyone under eighteen. The movie Natural Born Killers incites youths to kill and maim, and therefore must not be distributed at all..."

I really don't get all these judgement calls about what someone should be allowed to see and what is not. I really value the power of my own judgement, taste and common sense, although I must admit the lack of control, lack of common sense and high degree of stupidity in some other people is quite baffling.

I'm pretty sure 80 percent of the general population is able to discern quite well for themselves what is tasteful and what is tasteless. I'm also sure that they can strike a balance between knowing when to butt out and when to intervene. These are the people that don't need to be treated like a child. These are the people who are able to tell reality from fiction. They don't need to be protected from bad influences, because they already can for themselves. Patronizing them only serves the opposite effect: they rebel.

Being told what to do when you don't feel like it's justified, is mightily insulting. When age rating systems stop being guidelines and start being dogmas, that's when our society is in trouble.

Portugal-Netherlands final thoughts

• The ONE game Johan Cruijff is not there, and Holland gets defeated badly. We should blame Jordy Cruijff for planning his wedding during the World Cup, so that his father couldn't be there in the stadium, so Netherlands couldn't draw on the presence from its finest player ever... Come on Jordy, why are you such a spoilsport...
  
• One of the last camera shots of the game: a Dutch supporter crying on the balcony, arms draped over the railing. Behind him is a shot of a glass barrier... completely shattered! Wonder what happened there...
• One of the rules of thumb I use during a game: if you hit the crossbar/post when you're tied or behind, you don't win. Case in point: Cocu's volley at the crossbar early in the second half. It's a matter of fate.
• So the officials get blamed for letting games get out of control... FIFA shouldn't give them so many things to remember in the first place... give yellow card for celebrating goals with shirt over the head... give yellow card for picking up a ball and carrying it four feet... give red card to player yelling at Blatter... look the other way when Switzerland is offside... make sure Brazil gets to the final, no matter how badly they play... etcetera, etcetera

Stop the group processes!

Impressive characters and commanding institutions have the ability to attract huge followings. Sometimes joining up requires very little effort, but there are instances where people have to give up something to be able to join. It might be a matter of principles, or a matter of cash, or something even more serious.

People simply have to join groups, follow leaders, belong. People need a sense of connection to other people, or else the loneliness would make them crazy. People need direction and stability to get themselves forward. Finally people need to feel safe, and there's definitely safety in numbers when you're part of the same group.

The danger in this is that one's responsibilities are diminished opposed to the purpose in the group. For fear of getting kicked out of the group or punishment, people may be dismissive regarding obvious weaknesses in the group. The very reason for the group to exist, is also its biggest threat: the inherent unwillingness to change and adapt to survive. Groups tend to reduce individualism to the point where it breeds only yes-men, followers and zealots.

The notion of people having original ideas, being unique characters and being a role-model is thrown out of the window in groups. That kind of defeats the purpose of building groups.

What's the main thing I want to say... groups are very much a part of our society. We don't survive without them. But we should be so strong that we know to own up for what we believe in, even if it is opposed to the group. We should take responsibility for our own actions, not hide behind group processes. Yes-men don't deserve any accolades.

A wallet full of ambitions

Way back I measured success as being extremely, wealthy rich. I still want to do a lot to get there, but my ambitions have their limits I realize. They stretch to the point where I am still confident about myself, comfortable in my surroundings and challenged just enough to not get complacent.

I realize other people have different limits set, up to the point where they objectively go farther, harder and faster to their goals, and with more dedication. Or the other way around, people who have more modest goals, and thus spend less time and effort to achieve them.

The degree of success thus has another dimension; how much can you achieve, given the ambition level you have? I guess the more you get and the less effort you spend, the better off you are, and thus the more successful.

I fully adhere to the notion that you need to spend something to get something. There’s always a cost involved. You don’t get something for nothing.

Whatever you are spending, whatever you are willing to spend, is key here. You can trade sleep, free time, morals, ideals for achievement of your goals. Some are willing to spend less, others more.

People with lots of talent can be more efficient, than people with little. Your currency so to speak depends on how you define yourself as a person. I personally emphasize being able to justify my actions to myself. I can play politics, but I keep it business. I can spend lots of time at work, as much at least as my body will let me. I prefer to think on my own, and be creative, rather than being thought for. I give proper respect to people who’ve helped, and inspired me. I don’t tell everything, because to reach a goal I am fully aware that sometimes silence and ignorance are more constructive.

These are my ground rules. Within these boundaries I have my wallet so to speak.

The Streak is still alive

With the Hurricanes winning the Stanley Cup, the streak of correctly predicted pro sports finals runs up to four. The Gut Rules!

However, the streak will likely end tonight when Dallas hosts Miami in the NBA Finals. The Heat lead the series 3-2 and can win it all in Texas.

Ah... a 4-1 record predicting matches ain't bad I guess.

The end of the traffic jam

If TomTom wanted to, they could end all traffic problems, without so much as an extra satellite up-link. All they have to do, is make sure all their devices are linked to their central GPS system, and collect everyone's routing information. Then at any given time they could send everyone to their respective destinations, working out the optimal path for the entire flow of traffic. This means two people starting at the same point and heading to the same destination within the same timeframe, could be doing completely different routes.

That would radically shift our responsibilities; TomTom would tell us and in fact control us where to go. In that case, we have two choices: go along with the machine, or just turn it off.

A Good Thing

It is a Good thing in this time of casual relationships and divorces, that getting married is still held in high regard.

It is a Good thing that people can cease to be cynical and make something work, despite all the temptations and distractions around them.

It is a Good thing to say I Do

I didn't want you to know that

Have you noticed how much control you have in e-mails? You get to order around anyone just by putting them on the recipient list; you control who knows what by leaving them on or off it as well. Not to mention blank carbon copies and or mailling lists, where you control if people can contact each other as well. Ah... the power of the address list. A literal who's who in the universe that is you.

Sometimes who receives a particular mail, says far more than the actual message contained within.

Bad for your health

The first thing I see when I step out the door, is a snackbar

The downfall starts here

Two vents that were thought to be somewhere else...

Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out!

 This is the view you would get, if you would run out of my living room right now. 

NBA Finals 2006: Heat vs. Mavericks

And wouldn't you know it, two finals series running at the same time! This time let's look at the NBA finals matchup.


The Head Says: Dallas

• You can't really go wrong with the Mavericks. They've been near or at the top of the power rankings since start of season, and they managed to beat the strongest team of the regular season (San Antonio) and the best offensive team overall (Phoenix) to reach the finals. Despite Miami having two studs in the finals as well, it seems very much like it's Dirk Nowitzki's time to shine.
• I do think personnel-wise things are heading Miami's way: with Shaq, Dwyane Wade, and Gary Payton, they've got three Hall of Famers, and with Alonzo Mourning, Antoine Walker, Jason Williams some solid (former) All-Stars in the top 8 of the roster
  

The Heart Says: Miami

• Personnel-wise I like Miami better. Shaq is still the overpowering Diesel, Gary Payton is still my all-time point guard, and Alonzo Mourning carries a soft spot for anyone. Dirk to me unfortunately is just another German, despite being the best his country has come up with since Detlef Schrempf.

The Gut Says: Mavericks in seven

• The two stars of this series are going to be Dwyane Wade and Dirk Nowitzki, no question. Wade has risen to the occasion and is the perfect complement to Shaq's power, not unlike the Lakers dynasty from 2000-2002. But I think the Mavs are going to make it. It's going to be close, but their regular season form is too much to be denied.

Stanley Cup Finals 2006: Hurricanes vs. Oilers

Who do I pick winning the Stanley Cup this year?

The Head Says: Edmonton

• The Oilers finished off the Ducks in the Western Conference finals in five games, so they had some time to twiddle their thumbs, as the Eastern Conference finals wrapped up a week later. The rest I think is welcomed by the team, although much of their momentum they had during the playoffs is now strongly diminished. Edmonton is still the only current format eighth seed to reach the Stanley Cup Finals, and defeated Detroit, San Jose and Anaheim to do it. Especially if you beat the Red Wings, you get bonus points from me.
• The Hurricanes' goalies are very young, maybe too young. The two-headed monster of Cam Ward and Martin Gerber did well this playoff season, (well, Ward did anyway) but they still only combine for 4 years of NHL experience. Carolina switched them around a couple of times, which does not instill a great deal of trust in your defence. I understand the current trend towards positional competition within teams to get better output, but it seems overrated to me.
• Carolina has seen better offensive output than the Oilers across the entire season, but Edmonton had better defensive stats, and better performing special teams. Edmonton goalie Dwayne Roloson is also this playoffs' leading goaltender.
  

The Heart Says: Carolina

• Carolina was a team I followed closely a couple of years back, when Jeff O'Neill was still playing there. I guess that doesn't really apply anymore, but there's still plenty of people with the Hurricanes to like. Eric Staal and Erik Cole finally came of age this season, firmly supported by veterans Rod Brind'Amour, Glen Wesley and Bret Hedican. Personnel wise I like these guys better than I do the Oilers.
• I can't really root for Edmonton here, as division rivals to Colorado...
• ...on the other hand the Stanley Cup should go to a franchise that has hockey in its heart, to a country even that has hockey in its heart. Edmonton fits that description far better than Raleigh.
  
• Having an eighth seed win the entire thing makes for a better story and DVD documentary.

The Gut Says: Carolina in six

• Remember last year? Katrina? Gulf of Mexico? Oil platforms going out of production? The Hurricanes will cripple the Oilers.
• It's a matter of sharing the wealth. Edmonton already has its fair share of cups thanks to some guys named Messier and Gretzky. Let Carolina have one for once. You already had Tampa Bay get its grubby mitts on Lord Stanley's chalice for nearly two bloody years.
  

The Eye of the Beholder

I don't agree with the notion that people get more peaceful and calm as they get older. Instead people seem to be getting shorter fuses. They may not explode with as much force and intensity, but they burn a great deal more often.

People also get angrier about more meaningless things as time goes on. At first it's important stuff that upsets you (being discriminated against for example, is quite serious), but later on you might blow up just because your neighbour's apple tree is hanging five centimeters over your hedge.

I thought that I would gain perspective as I grow older. I start out thinking and caring about kiddie stuff (like toys, crushes, school), and then I gain more and more experience in many different areas (responsibilities, love, jobs, traveling, success and failure) and start picking out the important things from the unimportant ones. Eventually I would get truly enlightened, and be able to differentiate significant from insignificant. I would know which things deserve my attention and which do not. I would know what I should be upset about and about what I shouldn't have to worry.

However, this is not reality unfortunately. People get angry about meanial, petty things, and sometimes they are even proud to admit it as well. At times they even have their priorities on backwards. I - for example - am extremely riled up about my 'limited' income. Yet in the grand scheme of things, the importance of my monthly salary ranks at about the same level as navel lint.

Depending on each one's perspective, meanial things can become quite important to the beholder. And that seemingly gives anyone the right to nag about them.

Exam fright

Here’s some advice when you’ve got exam fright:

• Never say never
• Use tension to keep you alert
• Know when to relieve tension
• Focus on one task
• Plan ahead
• Separate emotion from the questions
• Put effort in
• Be reasonable
• Share support

Raceday

With both the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix and the Indy 500 this Sunday, once again it is RaceDay. Some thoughts about the events leading up to this day:

• so Schumacher got caught with a schwalbe. He didn't have to do it that obvious, but I guess no real harm was done. The officials put him back, give it a rest already.
• so what if Danica may be the next Anna Kournikova (as in good-looking, but few - if any - sports victories). Let her do all those photo shoots and interviews, and leave her up there with the other guys. She's still way faster than most other drivers out there.
• Rubens Barrichello - Formula One driver - wears Tony Kanaan's - Indycar driver - helmet, and vice versa. Hehe... funny. Especially considering they're thousands of miles apart.
  

How do you know you don't like it...

Here's something I would like to call "let's try not to say this anymore, okay?"

It's a funny thing you advise someone "how do you know you don't like it, when you haven't tried it", if you want to convince him to do something or experience something, which they wouldn't do otherwise. The thing you want someone else to do, is either:

• something you already did (once) before
• an experience you'd (secretly) like to have yourself (and you want a guinea pig)
  
• an experience you'd like someone else to have (regardless if you had or not)

In my experience, people may or may not have a good reason not to want to do this thing in the first place, and they may or may not be aware of this. Often it's just a reflex, a feeling. Depending on the situation, people may have to be convinced to do something that could ultimately be of benefit to them. A good example is overcoming a fear of flying.

But arguing that previous experience is the only way to determine your preference, and using this argument to convince someone to do something - no matter how well meant - is an extremely evil thing to do. It's the same as claiming that experience gives you the right to stick your nose in other people's business.

It is simply not true that experience breeds preference. People have got this thing called fear, and it's real handy in prolinging life on this blue little planet. It prevents people from doing stupid stuff, like jumping off tall buildings without having a parachute (I'm sure it's extremely exhilarating, but I'm pretty sure I don't like it, and I won't do it). Of course, sometimes fear is so strong it also prevents people from achieving above and beyond, but that's beside the fact.

Previous experience does not suddenly give you the ability to influence people better. Previous experience is a bad predictor for liking something or not.

In other words, you need to come up with more valid argument if you want a non-smoker to smoke a joint.

A scary observation

• I drive my current lease car since the summer of 2003
• During that time, I've driven nearly 40.000 km per year
• I visit the gas station for a full tank of gas on average 44 times per year
• My car has a 50 liter tank, which I roughly fill up each time
• Since 2004 prices for a liter of diesel fuel have risen nearly 20 percent, from under 0.90 EUR/l to 1.07 EUR/l today.
• A full tank of gas costs on average EUR 41 back in 2004. Now it's EUR 49.
• On a yearly basis fuel prices for the car have risen EUR 350.
  

Conclusion: I am very happy my fuel costs are paid for by my employer.

Clothes make the man

I'm pretty sure nobody at the Eurovision Song contest saw it coming. The past years some showy Eastern European chick usually wins, with either an up-tempo dance song, or a music track that highlights the vocal range of the singer.

And now these guys win. I'm pretty sure everybody thought "hey, which song did we remember best this evening... oh yes, those scary looking guys from Finland. Let's give them 12 points. I wanna see those suits again."

Sick and tired

I usually associate hospitals with old people. They've been around longer, so they would have a higher risk that something medical happens to them.

But in the oncology department it's baffling that you see people from all walks of life, in all stages of life. Young people, tweens who are supposed to be enjoying the best years of their lives are just as present here as retirees and grand parents. I'm sure I've seen some semi-famous politician in there as well.

Some are under obvious chemo, others you would not notice or suspect they are. And when I'm sitting there in the waiting room, my mind can't help but wonder how they ended up here. How long ago? How serious? Were they shocked when they found out?

And yet I never get to know completely. Some of them might surrender some information, but it's rather circumstantial. Of course, you can't just ask bluntly.

It just goes to show:

• cancer comes in all shapes and sizes
  
• it makes no distinctions
• and for each his/her own

Arsenal - Barcelona final score

Some observations about the Champions League final:

• I've heard referee Terje Hauge was not selected to go to the World Cup. Now we know why.
• Almost like WWE, the crowd's heat in Paris was amazing. They really teed off on anything they didn't like (as in the referee and his assistants)
  
• If you are going to be an asshole and beg the referee for a card (just like the Barca players did just before Lehmann was sent off), you actually deserved to lose, you bunch of ungrateful, short-sighted cry babies...
  
• ...that's something the NFL does so much better: penalties can be declined if the alternative outcome works out better (such as 11-on-11 and a goal up, versus no score and an opposing player sent off).
• That was a nice touch to have the Barcelona club anthem play after the match.
• Ronaldinho always smiles. Always. Except for last night after the final whistle, strangely enough.

Arsenal - Barcelona Prediction

Well, just a quick one for this time, since I haven't really followed Champions League this season, up until the last few rounds. Thankfully the teams both sort of appeal to me, so that led me to make a prediction about the match:

• Barcelona wins
• Bergkamp stays on the bench in his final game
  

Get Ready To Discriminate

Racial differences have also been a source of some of our biggest battles. Always, from ancient times to present day; at every possible scale, from nations to households. It can be relatively harmless (jokes, segregated parties, and prejudices); or it can turn to riots, violence, and full-scale battlefields.

And it is so easy to assign all kinds of bad things to the others. Easy and lazy. It is much harder to look inward and see where you go wrong. It’s easy to hide behind arbitrary and abstract excuses like lack of respect or freedom of speech. It’s also much easier to just blame the one big group, rather than (fairly) singling out those who should be singled out. And to top it off, we have never made ourselves inferior to others: We have a survival instinct. We gladly step on each others toes. We’re not going to give in or give up.

Racism is relative I say. It used to be a tribal thing to not like the neighbours. Now we’ve gone to group tribes as races. I’m still waiting for the moment when some guys from outer space start thinking Earth is a great place to own, and thus decide to wipe us out, just like in Independence Day. Maybe then we might upgrade from intercontinental to interplanetary racism.

We have to be strong. We must strive to be stronger than we are now. Look inwards and be fair to ourselves. Don’t look for excuses. Assign credit and blame where it’s due, not just blindly pitch it in a general direction. Look strong AND show humility at the same time.

We have to make divisions between people we like and can relate to, and those with whom we can’t. Our world is too large to understand otherwise for our feeble minds. That does not mean this division is based on race. It is also not based on culture, or religion, family ties, football team allegiance, sex, interests, or character. It is based on all these things and none of these at the same time.

Feverish

You know the World Cup is coming, when:

• when you make dates or plan meetings, you have to pay attention to when your team plays
• when you actually know the dates from top of mind when your team is actually playing
• people start planning their daily tasks in such a way that they can leave early to watch the game
• people start wearing their national team colours more often
• people save up their cash to spend in match pools
  

(For Holland, the dates are 11 June, 16 June, and 21 June.)

Animal Pragmatism

What does it mean being ‘pragmatic’? I hear it being banded about so many times, it’s ridiculous. “Ooh, that guy is very pragmatic.” Or: “c’mon you have to take a more pragmatic approach to this issue.” In some industries (i.e. mine supposedly) being pragmatic is great. It's high praise to be called a pragmatic person, and these people are respected, revered and well-liked. Not to mention that projects actually get finished, and you have the sweet, sweet illusion of expertise... The way the term pragmatic has been used in my business, it emphasizes kicking ass, taking names and getting things done.

The dictionary says about pragmatism the following: the compromising of one's ideals to better deal with the specifics of a situation. That doesn't sound too positive (especially if you're an idealist). A pragmatist doesn't necessarily do things by the book, or follow procedures properly, if it gets in the way of the goals they want to reach. That might get him in hot water with people who value order, formalization, protocol and so on.

Indeed the respect, the reverence only comes when a pragmatist reaches a certain standing in his career. If he's still below that, he's just a hacker, a loose-cannon, an unreliable and blunt nobody. In fact at that point a pragmatist is more an opportunist, whose success is not known to be useful to anyone but himself.

But as a pragmatist rises through the ranks, and he has enjoyed success more than most, respect and trust are gained. His bluntness is seen as honesty. What people found unreliable in him in the early stages of his career, are seen as evidence to his reluctance to play politics. His unstructured way of working seems to prove his skill to separate important from insignificant issues. Ad infinitum...

All this serves to prove one thing: once people reach a position of power, their undesirable traits are suddenly forgotten or argued away. Ugly becomes a unique presence. Nervous tics become eccentricities. Curses and swears are now deemed colourful language. A person who just mucks about on the job, becomes a pragmatist.

Quantity over Quality

I do think there's merit to Darwinistic theories. It seems natural to me that strong genes survive and weaker ones eventually find their demise. For example a gene that gives you just one thumb and one finger is not very useful if you operate heavy machinery. So that's why you see so little people in construction with those.

But I see that evolution in the human race apparently is a game of chance. It doesn't actually work to have people with strong genes exclusively mate with other people with strong genes. The percentage risk that the children of said parents have very good genes is high, but it is by no means a guarantee. Parents' good genes may even work against these children, as their inherent weaknesses are expanded as well.

This article illustrates that in fact, highly desirable mates often make the worst parents, and the quality of life for the children suffers accordingly. It also explains why even the ugliest and undesirable people can mate supremely attractive people; and why even complete homebodies and other people who are not active in the hunt can make a families and procreate.

So I've got nothing to worry about.

My Favorite Euphemisms

You want to say something, but you cannot say it out loud, because it might generate arguments, force undesired behaviour, or actually hurt people and the like. Ah, the power of the euphemism is great, and if used correctly can be of use to you, little grasshopper. Here's a couple of examples:

• Girl replies to good (male) friend's request to go out once: Let's stay friends (as in: you're never going to get in my pants, buddy)
• Managers who end e-mails with: Thank you in advance (as in: do it, and do it now)
• Company taglines: People are our most important asset (as in: we're going to make some very unpopular decisions soon)

Also check here for more euphemisms, albeit in a business setting.

Rush Before the Summer

Lots of social calls have been planned up for the coming two months. In fact, as soon as the calendar turned May, appointments were made, promises were cashed in, and in some cases long-running requests were finally answered. It's the rush before the summer: visit everyone, get everything done, get the latest updates before we all run off into the summer.

Why is this? I have several explanations:

• we can't be sure of everyone's vacation planning, but we're pretty sure you're not gone yet; now's a good time to get together (with little risk that we're going to get jibbed)
  
• in my case at least, vacation money has rolled in, allowing me to finally pay off that debt; unfortunately nowadays even the simplest social gathering requires cash to spend, if only for the gas to put in the car.
• we've made it through the rough winter period, and now spring comes around. It makes us happy and it makes us wanting to show it to everyone. The weather is nice, let's go do something.
• I guess it's a rule of fours also. Every four months we have gathered enough new stories to share with our friends and family. We will get another one of these periods after the summer vacation, and again around the end of the year.

So. It's been busy, and it's going to get busier still.

I told you that wasn't a good idea

I'm starting to understand why people don't think voting makes a difference. For instance, I vote for one party, but the other party wins the election, and they get to form a government. They put people that I didn't vote for in ministries and legislative institutions, and they make decisions that make no sense. Specifically the ministry of traffic: last year they decided to lower the maximum speed on bits of freeway around certain cities in the Netherlands to 80 km/h (from 120 km/h).

They throw away a lot of tax money working on a traffic control system that's always broken; instead of shortening the traffic jams the lower maximum speed extends them; instead of improving the quality of air around the freeways the lower speed makes it even worse.

And here's the kicker... they finally own up to their mistakes and pull everything down again, putting everything back to the way it used to be. All I know is lots of tax euros down the drain for zero result.

Now, I'm not that naive to think that my favorite political party would do a lot better (because, hey, it's still politics at the end of the day). But I'm confident the risk of them doing so is far lower.

However, I'm even making a stronger point of NOT voting for the other guys. How much clearer can I be? I told you guys that wasn't a good idea, I voted against you, and you still went out and did it.

In this sense, voting does seem like a waste. You can't stop people from making stupid mistakes. That in itself is human. However, you can't stop stupid mistakes that others make, drag you down either. And this is frustrating.

There's only one way out. I you want something, you got to get it yourself. You have to be behind the steering wheel. You must be in control.

Surprise! It's Me!

I don't cease to be amazed about what happens to people I know from way back in the past. I've known them, I've spent time with them and suddenly ten years later they're something completely different.

There's this one guy who is now a campaign manager for one of the Netherlands' most prominent politicians; back in high school there wasn't a single person in the entire year who was sent out of class more than he was. Of course now his demeanor comes in handy in his work and current role. And it just doesn't end with this: people who were the biggest party animals in high school (middle school even) got married and now have 2.4 kids. They are homemakers now. In the past ten years we've seen people turning to religion, who were not religious in the first place; turning away from religion when they very much so initially; guys who were dead set to move out of the country only to come back again, tail between legs and all.

Which comes to show: everybody in our generation is going through the same waves and each of us has to deal with the same question how to make sense of life after - in casu - high school. That may or may not have to do with how anyone has presented him- or herself in the past.
For a lot of people - myself included - life pretty much gave them what they asked for and invested in (...so far). But the others mentioned before changed course, backtracked and did something else, which we of greater distance would call strangely out-of-character.

And that doesn't make sense, because it does make perfect sense to them. I guess everyone has the natural reaction to be surprised by something unexpected.

This is of course speaking from the perspective from someone who has stayed doggedly on course since kindergarten.

Some observations about women

I'm sure these statements were made in jest, but they were so off the wall, they worked:

• In any enclosed space where at least one woman is present, it's always too cold or too warm
• If a man makes friends with one woman, three more become his enemy
  

(thanks D.F.)

Will over Common Sense

I am a great believer in the power of will. The biggest achievements in life are often the ones done by people with the will to move past boundaries and limits and prejudice. People can actually do more than they think they can, but it takes a strong conviction to push through all the physical and mental constraints.

Now I also believe you can go further than is actually wise. The power of will is not equal to wisdom and can in fact cancel it out. There's a very fine line between being willful and being stupid.

Or actually, it's called stubborn.

Guess which I am.

I have a job to do, but why?

In my business I do jobs for people who are either unfit, too busy or otherwise unable to do the jobs themselves. This job could entail something like building a system, or shaping a business process, or organizing a group of people. Of course it’s not just enough to do the job, you have to be successful in it. Thankfully there are a lot of ways to go around doing this.

The customers I’m working for obviously has to be comfortable how I do my job for them. They would have procedures to do so, or a have a particular organization in place that I would have to adhere to. Some even follow a methodology, or a framework, or guidelines. It can be enforced with tools, bylaws, legal proceedings and so on.

Some customers have got nothing of the sort, and are only interested in getting things done. In fact, I would then have total and complete freedom how to handle the job at hand. Given enough experience I could even impose my own way of working on the customer.

The perception of a job well done and the actual outcome can be very different from each other. Even more so in my line of work, where few, if any standards are universally applied, and where the industry is far from reaching maturity. Everyone and his uncle has a different path to success and it mostly depends on how well you fit the job, the environment and the situation how well the result is received. There's the habits, the unified process, rapid development, feng shui, tao management, waterfall project management, prince, and about a dozen others.

What I’ve seen so far, it apparently is not natural for people to work effectively. Working effectively takes up energy and attention, which people would rather spend on things they value more than work, crazily enough. Every theory we’ve come up with, every framework or proceeding gives people incentives to complete a task effectively, or directs them into an effective, or more productive mindset. These are only slightly less demanding than religions.

So why aren't we effective people from the outset? Why do we need to be told, enlightened (sometimes reminded) how we should be doing our work? Why is it against our nature to be successful, productive and dedicated?

Closing the deal

At business school negotiation techniques was an elective, filled with theories and excercises about game theory and the like. Unfortunately everyone knows about these, so there's no advantage to be gained from following this course now.

I've found the most successful negotiations are highly personal and tightly-bound to context, environment and situation. It's just a matter of what you can get away with to determine if you had a good deal or not. Generally everybody feels fine if they spend less of what they have and get more of what they want. There's really no strategy to that, so it all comes back down to the tactics.

The objective success of a deal is thus the degree to which you got what you wanted opposed to all other alternative outcomes. If your goal is to do exactly that, then here's some tactics I found which work:

• Negotiations grow gradually more personal, the longer and the more conflictuous one gets; it also means that parties get closer to their limits, and they no longer see solutions within scope; use this knowledge to profit from.
  
• Everyone knows and expects that all parties know the rules of engagement, zero-sum games, negotiation etiquette etcetera. People who don't know, are supposed to be taken advantage of. However, if you keep handling the rules haphazardly, but correctly, you keep the other parties on their toes. Eccentricity breeds uncomfortability. Uncomfortability becomes a commodity in the negotiation, which you can take advantage of.
  
• Understanding the opposition is paramount. Sharing goals is much better than fighting for your own. Also, parties who are each other's worst enemies will go to the ends of the earth to mess each other - and their negotiation - up. (Just look at the Middle East) And that means that everyone will go much further in a destructive direction, than they would have during a cordial negotiation.
  

Liar Liar, Pants On Fire

Some people strive to be as honest and open as possible. Others, like me I guess, strive for diplomacy and tact. This makes for quite different approaches how people handle issues in life. Let me explain why I swing the way I do.

It takes very little to humiliate or insult a person, or at the very least make him/her uncomfortable. Sometimes a mere utterance or a simple gesture is enough. I take it the risk of saying something humiliating or insulting is bigger if you are really open and honest. To keep the peace I'd rather be diplomatic and tactful. Less things to fix, means less time wasted in my account.

With diplomacy comes the unfortunate consequence that you have to be frugal with information. You have to be careful what you say, who you say it to and when. Sometimes you have to hide your thoughts. Sometimes lying is involved. It takes a lot of energy to pay attention to all this. It takes a lot of energy to keep track of all the lies.

I guess the downside is here, diplomatic people are deemed less trustworthy, which undermines the entire deal of showing tact in the first place, keeping the peace.

Which works out better? Being honest or showing tact? I guess it depends on how well you go with the flow. There's a very fine nuance between the two approaches, but the contrasts are fundamental, and the tactics ultimately used are wildly different. I think honesty gets you a lot of places, but honesty will polarize people faster as well. Diplomacy by its very nature handles everyone the same as much as possible, and that is closer to where I am at.

Governments vs Corporations

Don't get me wrong... I feel for the guys and girls at Nedcar who are in serious threat of losing their jobs very soon now. I am sad for the Netherlands losing another thousand or so labour places to the far (cheaper) east. Not to mention the personal losses people would suffer...

But come on... picture the CEO of Mitsubishi coming over to a rather small country just next to Germany. He hears he's meeting with the Prime Minister of that fine country, so he prepares himself thoroughly, shines his gold Rolex wrist watch, combs his hair (badly by the way, by the looks of his television interview); and then he meets Balkenende... this is what the CEO must be thinking afterwards:

"ARE YOU BLOODY SERIOUS? THIS IS THE PM OF YOUR COUNTRY?"
(Or something similar in Japanese.)

Can you blame Mitsubishi to just think: "piss off, with your expensive good-for-nothing car factory and your goody-too-shoes Harry Potter-look-a-like; I'm taking my business to those farmers in China." They are not taking us seriously. At all.

It's not like Balkenende can threaten to attack the Mitsubishi head office with his fleet of F-16s, just like G.W. Bush and Iraq. Balkenende can also not just deny Japanese companies access through the Netherlands, because it will hurt us just as much as it will hurt them.

This is a perfect example why you need a charismatic, strong, attractive and eloquent figurehead to be spokesperson for a country. Now all we have is a Japanese company mocking us, taking away our jobs, and we've got nothing to show for it.

Things I think about this Easter

• Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success (Oscar Wilde)
• When you are in the business of selling things, use someone from the opposite sex to the customer. Works like a charm.
• Mockery is an important social tool for squelching stupidity (Scott Adams)
• Excitement, respect and justice are the three aspects that I want, demand and expect to get from whatever I do; however they do go back to one single motive: I invest time and energy to get and to receive. Quite selfish.
• Why do I have to be a coffee connaisseur just to order some espresso from the internet? And what does the color light blue have to do with a Brazilian coffee bean?
  

Beliefs

We do have questions about life. Why are we here? What are we supposed to do here? What happens after we die? Why does a cat always land on its feet? Some of us have found the answers to these questions in love, family, money, or work or something else entirely. Others have turned to religion and found what they sought over there.

It is quite natural to have these questions, even more so to be curious about the answers. Our time here is limited, so there’s a certain urgency to get these things out of the way. Religion, any religion, gets us there faster.

I do sense that the troubles we have nowadays come from trying to convince people that some answers - or means to get to them - are better than other ones. Again this seems to be an inherent characteristic of us humans. Our time is limited, and we don’t want to spend it all sampling all the different alternatives. Also we don’t want to be tempted by the alternatives, so we tend to block them out or otherwise disqualify them in a manner palpable to us. Given any question, everybody can come up with an answer. Everybody can dispute any other answer.

I personally cannot be bothered searching for all the answers until I found the one truth. Yet I would go for something that would be satisfactory, and be done with it. Furthermore I don’t need anyone else to share such a thing with me. You’re welcome to join, but you can also have your own way. At the moment I do not have need to be shown a more satisfactory way of life. Maybe I will never have. Anyway, if I want your input, I will ask.

Generation Indifferent

As far back as I can remember my classes in high school were... uneventful. They were eerily quiet whenever the teacher asked a question. I guess there were maybe two or three people who always gave the answers (these are the guys/girls who always had the highest grades), but most people were silent. I guess I was one of them.

It's not that we were not smart, we all got through our mid-terms and tests and exams. Some of us even got the highest grades; I guess for most people in my class, it's not that we were afraid of the teacher or our peers. However I do think, I do believe my classes were very indifferent. We didn't care about our classes; it was something to get through until we got to do something personal. The teacher was someone who we tolerated, much less listened to.

In France the government nearly installed youth-labour laws that would make it easy for employers to hire and fire under-26-year-olds. Nearly, is the key word here, as the people revolted, rioted and got results. The law was nixed. The government was forced to listen to the people.

I don't see it happening in the Netherlands. If the classes I've been in are symptomatic of our current generation, then the government will have little trouble pushing the most innane things on us. And we will be too indifferent to do anything about it. In fact we would complain, and nag and sulk like little children... but ultimately we do nothing.

I don't think I should have the right to complain about something I didn't get, if I don't ask for it, or do something to get it. For me it's don't ask, don't get. So here's to me taking charge. Here's to other people picking up the gauntlet. The pond might be little, but big fish always look good in them. They're the fat golden ones swimming around calmly in the middle. That's a nice place to be.

Oh no I think I failed... oh no I didn't

I guess worrying about your mid-terms, and then eventually passing them comfortably doesn't really make you more popular.

You also hated the guy who you just know learnt his ass off all night for the exam, is making everybody nervous with all his cautious predictions, and then you find out he scored 96% of the questions correctly, right?

Making poor project estimates doesn't really endear you to clients and managers.

Telling everyone you're sick, but still getting a personal best, doesn't always make you more popular.

I guess in the end, to err on the safe side is the slowest way to failure.

Welcome to the new century

In celebration of hitting the century mark, I checked out Google Analytics to see what the most read articles were and here they are:

• Bistromatchic Dinner Party
• Things I noticed in Toronto
• More Google
• Winning with Grace
• Bulletproof
• Represent your talents
• Personal music tastes
• Philosophical Question
• Cosmetic store allergies
• Argumentation gone awry

If I were traffic and mobility minister

If I were traffic and mobility minister I would pass the following legislation:

• In case of a head-tail collision (i.e. usually tailgating), instead of the back car bearing all of the blame, all the blame will fall squarely on the car in front.
  In case of a collision between two cars side-by-side, the car on the left-most lane takes all the blame. This will discourage people to drive on the left lane so much, and especially drive slowly on the left lane.
• However the cost of damages as the result of any collision where speeds have exceeded the limit, is not insured, similar to the situation in Germany. Then the rules as they exist now return to effect.

The basic idea is to promote a smooth traffic flow, keeping slow traffic where it belongs (i.e. not on the left lane); at the same time, we don't want to promote street racing and in fact it is your own damn fault if you get into an accident because of speeding. And if you get others into an accident because of your speeding, you should by all means be forced to pay for damages of all parties.

Successful And Happy

As far as I can see, degree of success is less the achievement of goals, and more how much time, attention, money and other stuff you can legitimately claim from other people for something you do, provide or are. You make a good product, more people will buy it from you. You put on a great show, more people will spend time out of their day to watch you. You have a great story, more people will listen to it. The idea is getting more of what you want than others who are doing the same.

You still need to determine what it is exactly that you want to claim and how you want to do it. If you're in love, you are only successful if you actually get the attention from the one you're in love with (instead of anyone else); If you are looking to get famous, you might consider a movie career rather than garbage collection.

While success in this sense is externally driven, happiness is something personal, internal... and independent. Being happy is a state of mind. Sometimes it's even completely irrational. It can have something to do with meeting goals or being successful, but the absence of either does not preclude happiness. You can be happy without being successful; you can be successful without being happy.

If you are both successful and happy, consider yourself fortunate. Can't really say I've seen it much around me, for extended periods of time. At the moment I consider myself pretty average in both respects, and I am not too sure whether I should emphasize one over the other, or go for broke on both... or just leave everything be. The latter seems the most relaxed option, but relies heavily on luck (and possibly fate)... and I'm simply not the gambling kind of guy.

Insights of a sports spectator

Soccer doesn't do it for me anymore. I've already experienced the greatest emotions (UEFA Champions League '95 and '99), and that can never be improved upon. (Ok... a World Cup victory this summer would be nice); That's why I don't follow Formula 1 or Indycar as religiously as before; the drivers at the top nowadays don't interest me in the least. I'm completely indifferent whether or not Kimi Raikonnen or Fernando Alonso win a Grand Prix or crash, and if Michael Schumacher retires or not.

For a sport to be successful, it needs to have the following:

1. strong emotional payoffs for players and the crowd
2. believable and appealing participants/characters
3. appreciation for history and story telling

Especially that first point, emotions are what makes watching sports worthwhile. The players and the story are just there to build the emotional gravity. It's what sells tickets, attracts viewers and raises the loudest crowds. If a sportscast doesn't grab your attention anymore and puts you into a rollercoaster of emotions, you stop watching. If a sport doesn't have anything more to offer than what you've already experienced, you stop going there.

Sports spectating can be quite emotional if you're totally into the sport, the players, the occasion. You can get shivers down your spine when your team or they athlete you're rooting for wins the World Title, the Superbowl, the World Series, the World Cup, the Olympics, beats a world record, or has a personal best performance. It doesn't even have to be about victories either... personal losses like Ayrton Senna's death in 1994 still spooks the bejesus out of me, as did Greg Moore's in 1999.

The American professional sports NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and the NHL, still have a lot of emotion and grandeur to offer that I've never experienced, there's some players and teams I still root for, and the media and the respective leagues have got the ability to turn an ontherwise meaningless match into a historic bout. You can partly attribute that to the Americans' obsession with statistics.

Purely based on the criteria stated I should call the WWE a successful sports league... and that isn't really true. Don't get me wrong, I find great value in watching, hearing, feeling 50.000 people get on their feet, when the underdog finally wins the big one; one of the old favorites makes his run-in, when a superstar's theme music starts; when he hits his finisher or does his signature poses... Yeah it's scripted, but the wrestling moves hurt just the same. But this scripted nature makes it more of a soap opera or a stage play masquerading as a sports event, despite the intentions of the hardcore fans and WWE itself to convince us otherwise.

I am a sports spectator because I will never be there on the field, in the ring or on the rink at any significant level. I don't have the physical talents, and I haven't invested time in training any one discipline. Still I want to experience part of the emotions and I don't really mind which sport (or sort-of) I get it from.

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April Fool Joke

This has to be a joke: our local garbage collection service distributed a flyer stating the following:

"this week maintenance work will commence on the sewage systems below your streets. It may be possible that any plumbing inside your homes will be affected and sewage waste may spray back. Please adhere to the following: between the hours of 07:30 and 17:00 close the lid of your toilet and place something heavy on it like a stack of books. Use towels to block drains. Try to avoid hanging over sinks between the hours indicated above (etcetera)"

And when they actually get to do all the maintenance work, all they do is stick a hose down a sewer opening and leave it there for two minutes.

April Fools indeed.

Without victory there is only doubt

My most dominant motive has to be being right, and being proven right in the end. I happen to be extremely competitive when it's about things I value highly, like my way of life, my ideas, how I handle things. I will never submit that my ways in those areas are wrong. That doesn't mean I always need to win... no, wait, actually it does...

How I go about things involves taking a balanced stance. I do things differently from the mean, but I'm not polarizing too much. You could say it's weak not taking a formal stance. But again I'll do everything to win, and this for me is the best way. I feel I win a lot more battles, or rather a lot more battles fall in my favour because I have a balanced attitude.

And I am taking a stance, a stance of balance. My way is best. A balanced attitude happens to coincide with a lot of other people's attitudes, so I am in an ideal position to share, integrate and harmonize. Always wanting to be right forces me to be balanced, to be objective and to be fair.

My leitmotif is thus the source of my greatest strength, but also of my greatest weakness. Always wanting to be right makes me force the issue more often than I should. I refuse to take a loss, even when it's wiser to do so. I will go on longer, even if it's obviously not healthy. And going on too long eventually results in either phyrric (often more damaging than losing) or moral victories (only losers claim them)...

In essence all I claim is that wisdom does not determine being right. Achieving victory determines being right.

My appartment in progress

...apparently we're going to meet the other appartment owners very soon now... wonder who'll be joining with us... 

Daylight Saving Time

Have you noticed that everyone seems a little out of sorts the past few days? Everybody's tired, has no energy, and very little inspiration. I say blame Daylight Saving Time. Why for chrissakes would anyone eat an hour off the weekend? I thought there was a study about the effects of Daylight Saving Time on the productiveness of office workers, but I can't remember what the results of that study were. At least nowadays there's a discussion whether or not

• daylight saving is absolutely necessary
• it is possible to move the switch to somewhere in midweek instead of on Saturday night

I don't see a lot of trouble with either option. For a couple of years now the tactic I use is to go out at night past the moment DST kicks in: I don't really miss that hour of sleep and Sundays I'm completely knackered anyway.

Swear me you never swear again

I don’t agree with the union against swearing and cursing. When I do something stupid, when I see something idiotic, or feel pain, sometimes the only thing that does justice to the situation, the only thing that’s fitting enough to finalize the situation, is a good hearty FU.

Some people get offended. That is not my intention of course, although sometimes my anger takes over and takes hold. And at that moment, a simple oh geez, good golly just doesn’t cut it. Or at least, it doesn’t for me.

Cursing and swearing is a release. A very powerful one at that. Part of it has to do with its bad nature. We’ve been taught that cursing is bad, and you should not do it. And that makes it part of the attraction. It is a discovery of boundaries of sorts, and serves to strengthen its powers of release.

Cursing and swearing is taught. It al relates to context, association, need and effect. I doubt we would have this rant if people cursed using acceptable, non-insulting vocabulary that has the same effect. Although maybe the very act of a curse is to be socially unacceptable. It’s supposed to be frowned upon. Swearing is supposed to insult, to hurt. It is a tongue lashing in every sense of the word.

Every situation must close at exactly the right tone and measure. For every event, there’s a fitting counter. Taking into account the context, the audience, the situation at hand, swearing may be correct. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that it is necessary. A better person, a calmer person would probably have not been in this situation, and thus doesn’t need to swear.

I have a freedom to feel and to express. This includes completely running my mouth if I feel like it. Just like with any other great freedom, it comes with great responsibility. I am unfortunately not strong enough to just take everything in stride, let me admit that. But sometimes a short five-minute outburst is better, than smashing all the cars’ windshields in the parking lot with a baseball bat. I have some self-restraint, but it is definitely not infinite.

Bulletproof

Sometimes you make mistakes that are easily fixed; sometimes you make mistakes you can't undo; and sometimes you make mistakes that were supposed to happen.

Imagine some other guy needs to work overtime because of a mistake you make. Therefore he was not there to see his wife having an affair with her best friend. Therefore the couple wouldn't have fought loudly and violently, prompting the neighbours to call the police, making them miss a burglary going on across town, where unfortunately a man would have been fatally shot... you know, all the stuff that tends to happen in soap operas.

Or imagine that a mistake, albeit a serious one (like one that might have caused incorrect invoices to be sent), was mitigated by another mistake (the mail server crashed). Then you can truly say, you've dodged a bullet.

Now to paraphrase Mel Gibson in Signs, you can look at it two ways... it could be a sign, evidence that someone is watching out for you. It was fate. Or it could be just pure luck. Apparently, if you see things in the latter way, faults are just tragic and absolutely needless, and this breeds fear. However if you see things as if mistakes were meant to be, it breeds hope. It gives certainty that in fact you are not at fault for mistakes.

Rather than taking either approach, I tend to believe the following: most mistakes do not occur because people are incompetent at their tasks, but because people do not get to the right place, at the right time, under the right circumstances. It is easy not to make mistakes when everything around you works perfectly, when everything is specifically dedicated to get this task done. However, even the best will drop a few, when all hell breaks loose.

It is only the truly great who can be flawless even in the most difficult of circumstances, because they can get to the most convenient places at the best possible moment. These are the people to whom the following quote from The Matrix applies:

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.


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The Next Generation

Nostalgia is a beautiful thing to make money from. The stuff you've liked and enjoyed as kid, is coming back today - at highly inflated prices. The wrestlers I used to root for, are coming back as legends. Old shows I used to watch on television are now available on DVD boxsets. I can't even tell how many times they've rehashed toys like Transformers, He-Man and GI Joe by now, and don't get me started on all the covers artists make on old 70s, 80s tracks.

The big thing is that kids under eight years old now are getting to discover our old favorites. It gives us twenty-somethings something to talk about with them. We relate better to them about these things, opposed to us with our parents... at least I can't remember that I've ever discussed the intricacies of Super Mario, or the philosophy of the Autobots and Decepticons with my father.

I think it's a good marketing trick to rehash all the cool stuff from twenty years ago for the market today. It's essentially killing two birds with one stone: you (re)capture the fans who were kids then, and now have jobs, families and hopefully wider pockets; but you're also introducing yourselves to a new generation of fans and generate revenue and demand in that respect as well.

All this gives me plenty of conversation material with my friends' kids (and eventually my own kids). That has to count for something.

Who was that guy?

Gradually I'm moving into a phase in life where I meet people from the past, whom I haven't seen or spoken to in some years. I take pride in keeping track of most people I like (and even some who I don't like), but sometimes people fall through the cracks. They're the guys and girls who you meet on the street unexpectedly, and extend their hands toward you to shake. They're the ones shouting out your name, and - when you turn around - whom you feel ashamed about that you can't get their names right away as well.

...well, ashamed is a stretch... I have to admit I get that feeling less and less. People will just have to get along with the fact that I meet and speak to literally hundreds of people over the course of the years, and not everyone will be memorable. It's the same with me, I shouldn't expect anyone to remember me in any meaningful fashion, unless we've laid the groundwork for that (because for example we're friends).

It just so happens that people will have an easier time remembering my name and my face, because a) I don't have a common Dutch name and b) I don't look like a typical Dutchman (or Asian for that matter). So it happens that people whom I have never spoken to before, can remember me even years later.

Of course, if that happens, it reflects good on me. I'm always humbled and honored that people who - seriously enough - don't have any reason to, remember my name and who I am. Just don't feel bad that I sometimes cannot do the same.

Complete the set

I still have some pictures leftover from last week, so here's... some of them.

Everyone all smiles

Aww how cute

The Wedding Planner's Hardest Job

Getting people to agree on a party, an outing, a gathering is wicked hard as we get older. Usually we've got responsiblities coming in between like work, kids, girl-/boyfriends, families, other engagements and so on. Add that we also tend to become more protective of our interests and our time, and we've got a knot that most of us are unable (or unwilling) to untie.

The friends and family you keep close to you will be the ones that fulfil your interests, or share them. When you try to book an outing between people who don't (i.e. work related, bachelor(ette) parties, house warmings, dinners, mixed societies), attitude tends to get in the way. Other needs start to take precedence. You get defensive, you get evasive, you get offensive all at the same time; and the end result is disaster.

I appreciate everyone's interests and their efforts to protect them, but the spirit of the gathering should have some calming, mitigating influence on everyone's moods. Some outings have no greater goal in mind, and each person's freedom to decline/change the outing matches accordingly. Other kinds of outings however are run for a specific purpose, and that affects everyone involved.

Everybody should still look inward and determine which interests mean more to him or her. But I feel I do have to leave a meaningful message behind that everyone should take into account. To paraphrase a colleague of mine: the best nights out are the ones where everyone just goes with the flow. This way you fall flat on your face sometimes, but you always gain valuable experiences... and sometimes you're pleasantly surprised.

Justice for all

With Milosevic dead the question whether or not justice can be served, will not be answered. For many his death is seen as the easy way out. And yet, if the tribunal had judged on his death sentence, the end result would be same.

Justice is so hard to judge correctly. Always highly individual, always time-constrained, always valid but in a limited context. What one deems a fit punishment, another finds too light. Even the most stringent laws cannot cover all bases, and it seems that everytime some form of humanity (or a damn good lawyer) will make for some kind of exception.

Personally I look at each event on a per case basis. Sometimes ridiculing and sarcasm fits the bill, at other times kicking ass and taking names for years to come is the only thing that satisfies my feelings of justice. For me Milosevic is not and has never been a significant factor in my life, so I'm inclined to think good riddance. I'm sure that people for whom he was, might just have the itching feeling that they didn't get to exact their vengeance.

Taxpayer Frustration

Okay, let's establish that I strive to achieve more with my buck as possible. Nothing comes for free, so some things need to be done and need to be paid for, as in taxes. I am all for paying taxes if you are able to, but only if they are useful taxes.

So for example anything to do with cleaning, road maintenance, police, building beautification I will happily pay tax for. I won't pay for stuff like that "I heart 80 km/h" campaign. That was just idiotic, unnecessary and ineffective.

And now you have to get your income taxes filled-in. First the government lops off an amount of cash off your salaries, and seemingly randomly assigns it to a bunch of policies, insurances, funds and specific sub-taxes. And next we have to tell our tax offices that we want that amount back, and more even. So we come up with all kinds of (fictive or real) justifications: mortgage, disabilities, educational services and so on. I do believe that everything we come up with to get our money back is just as random as the government's means to get it in the first place.

Life was much simpler when all I had, all I needed were my Matchbox cars.

Bistromathic Dinner Party

I've recently hosted a nice quaint anniversary dinner for friends, and one of the gifts I received was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One of the concepts introduced here is the Bistromathic drive, which basically is a fictive engine technology that bases itself on irrational mathematics during dinners. Why irrational? Try to calculate, predict or otherwise know beforehand:

• How many guests arrive at which moment
  
• The number of guests joining dinner
  
• The amount of cash actually paid for the bill

All points apply for this dinner. A completely random number of guests arrived at the designated time. Some arrived earlier, others later. The number of chairs I reserved at the restaurant was incorrect at the moment of reservation. That I knew. But what I didn't expect was that that number even changed about ten times in the last three hours before dinner. Finally the actual money amount for this dinner was completely fluid, despite having pre-selected a number of dishes.

Apparently trying to accurately predict all these numbers requires an intellect that far exceeds that of people like Einstein, Bohr, Hawking. It requires the calculating power of a computer so great, that according to the Hitchhiker's Guide it can propel a starship across the universe in no time at all.

Or you could just relax, sit back and enjoy the dinner. Just like these people:

• Cool
• All Smiles
• The Four Horsemen
• Boyfriend/girlfriend
• Another boyfriend/girlfriend

Democracy for consumers

I tend to agree with the statement - to paraphrase Winston Churchill - democracy is the worst kind of government, except for all others. Today is another day where this applies... I used my vote in the municipal elections, and feel it is slightly wasted.

The thing is I hate being subject to the whims and the stupidity of the majority. We've had that four years ago, and we're still paying for it. And I grow to hate that fact more and more everytime.

I've started to see myself less as a voter and more of a consumer. Just like we are able to choose (and pay for) our cell phone provider, internet provider, gas and electric company, our football team, car brand, we should be able to choose the government that represents us. I'm fully aware I need to pay taxes for the police,roads, the defense, infrastructure and so on. I'm fully aware that some business like pulling resources from the land, buying and importing goods takes effort that I would like to see others (and not myself) perform. And yet I shouldn't have to be subject to whatever the majority thinks is good for me. If things are not as I think they should be, I should be able to drop them and pick other options.

Maybe in the future (say a century or three) our allegiances to a government can switch as long as they serve our purposes. The most successful governments will be the ones being able to service the needs of the most people. It can be about ideologies, quality of infrastructure or beauty. What it certainly will not be is about nationality, or idiot voters. People get to decide what's best for themselves, without anyone to blame for bad decisions but themselves.

Appartment in progress: part 3

That's a rather garish yellow on the window sill... That's not the final colour is it? 

Slippin' 'n' slidin'

Stuff you can't do with a car during a blizzard:

• Brake (unless you decelerate with the clutch; by the way I think I broke mine)
  
• Steer: when you go left, you go straight; when you right, you go straight; when you go straight you go sideways...
  
• Accelerate
• Park: you can't stay still long enough to park in any meaningful fashion
• Overtake
  

Basically, all the stuff a car is supposed to do to get from one location to another.