Last weekend, on March 19, 2016, the author of these lines has qualified for the first dan Aikido Aikikai.
Shodan: 11 years on the way
Dream Theater presents The Astonishing in Theater Carré
The band Dream Theater is absolutely legendary. They are considered the founders of the progressive metal genre, and each of them alone is equally legendary. If you doubt that, just watch their Instrumedley video; not many musicians in the world are capable of playing something like that.
The band was presenting their new album The Astonishing in the Theater Carré in Amsterdam on February 23rd.
Austria, Sölden, snowboard
A Winter Evening with Stream of Passion — 2015
If you think I pay too much attention to Stream of Passion, I can tell you I’ve seen a man on the show for whom that show of the band was the 94th.
Moreover, with the ticket price of €14 it would be stupid not to go.
The first snow!
Today, January 17, 2016, the nature has made an unexpected move. Last night a very thin layer of snow lay on the ground, for the first time in this winter.
The Aristocrats at De Boerderij
My personal concert season open by the Nightwish fellas is at its climax.
I was fortunate to see a very popular (yet kind of underground) band called The Aristocrats on December 9th. The band is playing some mindbogglingly complex tunes ranged from Jazz Fusion to Heavy Prog.
On the subject of running
The year is coming to an end again, with so much left to run. I can’t repeat my 2013’s record of 800 km this year—in 2015 I’ve only run some 600 km. Not because I’m lazy, but due to being more active in aikido.
Houten’s “bike avenues” are great to run on, also because there are not so many bikes using them at the time when I’m running, that is in the evening and during the weekend.
Nest Protect 2 review
Intro
There was a moment when my smoke detector, which is as old as the house it’s in, had to be replaced.
And I did that with pleasure, because at that moment it started chirping regularly in a very annoying way. First once every five minutes, a bit later once a minute. And that would not be a big issue had this not been happening at 5:00 AM. And, of course, the chirping was so loud that no human being could ignore it. Just like in that scene from “Friends”.
Nightwish, Arch Enemy, Amorphis at Heineken Music Hall
The monument of Elfstedentocht
Every winter an average Dutch casts glances at the thermometer, hoping for a real cold to come.
The cause for such a strange wish is called Elfstedentocht, or the Eleven cities tour.
yktoo.com 2.0
It cost me quite an effort to make myself migrate my website to Yii 2.
And now, after about one and a half months of evening work (with breaks for workouts, birthday celebrations, recovering from insomnia and things like that) I can proudly present yktoo.com version 2.0.
The website has been built on Yii framework 2.0 and Bootstrap 3, with a handful of extensions. Thanks to Bootstrap the website is built on the principles of responsive web design. This should make the pages look reasonably well on a broad range of devices, from mobile phones to desktops.
The structure of the website has also been revisited: the blog feed is now right on the home page, and other sections have been moved around too. Due to that your RSS reader might show the last posts once again, sorry for that.
Dodgy kiwi
A year ago I posted about fruit groves in Houten. Last summer brought a sudden news on that topic.
A decade ago our neighbour has planted a kiwi tree. The plant has been growing into our two gardens, but has never given a single kiwi fruit. Until the last summer, that is, because mid-August we’ve spotted the first fruit ever! Too bad for our neighbours, it was a dodgy one, as it’s growing on our side of the fence.