Recently some stuff in my life changed. I am creating more time to spend with my wife, who is finally here. This is the reason why I decided to look for someone to take over management of the fifo.nl sites.
Tasks will be:
- maintaining the WordPress and MediaWiki installations, keeping plugins up-to-date etc.
- keeping an eye on the syndicated blogfeeds (check for errors, update url’s etc.)
- ??
- Profit!
Not a lot, really.
Details can be discussed over IRC (in privmsg plz).
I have re-thought the fifo.nl avatar system a bit, because people were requesting either an option for self-hosted images or otherwise manageable. I have come up with the following solution:
- check gravatar for a user-manageable avatar
- else fall back to the fifo avatar system:
- check for a local avatar
- else check if there is a URL to redirect to
- or else display the "unknown" avatar
If you set up a gravatar URL, claim your fifo userid so you can benefit from this, or ask me to set your email address for you.
Sometimes, my Macbook’s audio will start jittering when under high CPU load, and that jitter will not go away even when I lower CPU usage.
The trick to deal with this is to lower CPU usage (a good way of monitoring this is iStat menus by iSlayer) and plug in a headset. This way, the audio drivers seem to be resetting and the jitter is gone! You can unplug it after that.
Last night I have been busy to enable an OpenID provider service on fifo.nl based on the blogroll user database. The Provider URI is
http://fifo.nl/<username>
or, if the relying party in question is being a bitch about delegation,
http://fifo.nl/author/<username>/
Logins are provided by macTijn. Delegation is an option, however, this is untested.
Also, I have enabled OpenID-based logins on the wiki. It would be nice if people could claim their fifo.nl username and use it to connect to their wiki login.
More information on OpenID can be found at http://openid.net/. More information on the implementation of OpenID at fifo.nl will be available at http://fifo.nl/openid.
Yesterday, while waking up, I got the best christmas gift anyone could have ever given me.
I was planning on spending this day by myself, because my friends were all at family gatherings, and as you might know, my wife was going to visit her parents in Detroit. The initial plan was for me to go there too, but after losing my job I had to cancel.
Miriam, who was staying over after baking pancakes on christmas eve, went out to walk Jael. When she came back, I was out of bed and basically nerding around.
I heard the front door open and figured it was Miriam with Jael. So I turn around to see the biggest present anyone could have ever given me: my wife Robyn, standing there with her bags, telling me she’s going to stay here until January 9th!
Robyn’s parents booked her a flight to Amsterdam instead of Detroit.
This truly is the best christmas ever :)
Major thanks go out to Miriam, Peter and Marloes for getting me to stay home :)
Today, the Dutch version of the international Metro newspaper is running a special on Coming Out-day, which is tomorrow. In this special there is an interview with and about me, but also about Robyn. Article screenshot here, digital newspaper here (PDF alert). All in Dutch, sorry if you aren’t ;)
As my previous post mentioned, I got married :)
Getting married during the Amsterdam Pride was a mind-altering experience for the both of us, it was that awesome!
I got to meet my in-laws. I couldn’t have wished for friendlier people, they are so amazing. Robyn’s father has mostly the same taste in foods, her brother is a mac-fanboi like me and they are all great people. I love them.
Also, something that made me really nervous was the introduction of Robyn to my family. My mom, dad and brother got to meet her only a week or so before the wedding, and it clicked instantly!
We went to Paris for our honeymoon. Just 4 days, but it was amazing! What a beautiful city. We’ve seen a lot too! We went to the Louvre, and I saw the Mona Lisa. This was a big thing for me, since it was on my life’s todo-list. Also, climbing the Eiffel tower was on there. And we ate there too! We also visited the Père Lachaise Cemetery, where we saw the grave of (among others) Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Our hotel was just a 5-minute walk from there, so that was quite convenient. We also saw the Arc de Triomphe while walking down the Champs-Élysées, and we went to visit the Notre Dame.
Unfortunately, Robyn had to go back to Portland, OR to finish her law degree. We only got to spend 2 weeks together as a married couple, but she will be back next year, for good, and we will both live in the Netherlands. In the mean while, I will fly across the ocean a couple of times for holidays etc. and in the meanwhile there is Skype :)
I’d like to thank our friends and family who were there to support us. Thank you for believing in us, your support really means a lot.
I’m in love. Genuine, head-in-clouds, head-over-heels love. I could not have imagined this would happen, just over a year ago.
My partner, Robyn, is sweet, lovable, cute and beautiful on the inside and out. She’s from Portland, Oregon, USA, and in just over a year she totally conquered my heart. This is why we decided to get married.
We planned a July wedding. July 12th, the day we met last year, to be exact. Then fate came by and brought us a unique opportunity.
The I do IAmsterdam project is a project to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the foundation of New Amsterdam (now New York). In this project, 5 American/Dutch couples will be married by mayor J. Cohen during the Amsterdam Pride on August 1st. This will take place on one of the boats in the canal parade.
As you might have guessed, we’re one of those couples.
We don’t have all the details yet, but as soon as I have them, they will be on my Facebook page and my Twitter-stream.
I want to thank my family, my soon-to-be-in-law-family and friends for the huge amount of support they keep giving us. Without them, we probably wouldn’t be able to do this.
some links:
I have changed my blog software to WordPress, for a couple of reasons.
I have been working with WordPress for quite a while now, since fifo.sh is a WP-site.
As I was using my home machine (which has a 450 MHz CPU or so) to host my blog, I couldn’t really use WordPress, since it would have been slow as hell. So instead I chose Google’s Blogger service, which can upload static html via ssh or ftp and has template support. I created a separate user “blog” with scponly as shell, and set up blogger to upload using that user’s credits. For pure blogging, this actually works nice, and since I serve static pages via lighttpd it wouldn’t use much CPU or memory.
Now, Blogger is quite ok, if you just want to do blogging. and nothing else. But then again, Blogger doesn’t offer customized URL’s for permalinks, or the option to add dynamic content, like RSS feeds, to the sidebar. Ofcourse you could hack that using a modified template and server side includes or so, but that’s just not an option for some people.
Anyway, I’m quite content with it, and it beats MovableType…
I haven’t blogged in a while, so I figured it’s time for a little update.
Love
I’m very much in love. Too bad she lives in the US of A, it’s quite far. I met her in Amsterdam while she was over for a 2-month course on law, last summer.
Holiday
I have been on a holiday to that same US of A. Portland, Oregon to be more precise. What a lovely city. In fact, I think I found my place for my future America-plans.
Birthday
I successfully completed the 28th year of my life. As I think this is not a significant enough birthday, there won’t be a celebration. Presents, however, are always welcome. I insist that you will not sing ‘happy birthday’ for me.
Guitar Hero
I have bought the full Wii Guitar Hero: World Tour set, and that calls for a party. This will be held on December 27th. Please see the GHWT-Avond wiki page (Dutch) for details.
That’s all for now. HAND!
