Branko's Weblog

I have been playing Charlie II, the sequel to Charlie the Duck, for almost ten years now, on and off, mostly off. My own highscore only progressed slowly during that time, a thousand points here, a few hundred points there, until last week when I realized that I can chain the effects of power pills.

Sometimes I really am that slow a thinker.

(Chaining power pills is something that is as old as power pills, i.e. at least as old as Pac-Man. In Pac-Man it’s just not that useful. Note that the high-score shown here is of the shareware version, which only has 6 levels. The full version has 18 levels.)

I haven’t been hiking much recently, and that, coupled with a lifestyle that keeps me seated most of the time, meant I have gained quite a bit of weight. So I decided to strap on the old walking shoes and look for Holland’s country lanes again.

Yesterday I went to ’s Graveland, where once rich Amsterdammers built their retreats. The grounds of some of these houses have been opened to the public and are now popular with ramblers.

The last photo is of the pedestrian bridge at the Bussum-Zuid railway station.

(In case your screen is too dark, the photo shows fingerprints in the familiar 9×9 grid of a Sudoku puzzle.)

Hm…, Mc Chouffe.

Stuff I acquired on Queen’s Day this year:

I’ll William Tell you one book among them: De Idioot. Intriguing.

I bought the two football comics, the five old books, and the Grisham for the total sum of 2.35 euro. The Hiaasen I got for free from a guy who was handing out books for free.

The other three comic albums and four books I got from the post-retailgastic dumpster diving.

The train from Utrecht to Schiphol Airport, a 20 minute trip. For some reason it always seems to be made up of thousands of cars, mostly empty.

Picture I took ages ago, during my military service. We were practising at a 15 km range in what otherwise was a very quiet place where wild boars loved to come.

Sometimes the heath would catch fire, and we would have to take out our shovels and extinguish the flames by hitting them.

The last time I achieved Inbox Zero was somewhere last year. You should think I would be able to remember the exact date, but there you would be wrong. Sure, it was a momentous occasion. So momentous in fact that for days I was wrapped in the sound of heavenly trumpets and glided through life without care for such mundane things such as dates, diaries, and indeed, ouch!, lampposts.

This week I am going to try it again. I say week because Inbox Zero cannot be achieved in a single day, and the reason for this is simple. Some of the mails that one finally gets around to answering will elicit further replies from their overjoyed recipients. I will do the large part of the work today, but real Inbox Zero will be achieved some time later this week.

Life is good.

Update 5 pm: I am down to 7 e-mails (from about 20). I assumed I had about 3 two-hoursers hidden in my mail: this turned out to be 4. (A two-hourser is an e-mail that promises about two hours of work doing stuff you long ago agreed to do before you can either bin or archive the mail.)

These are (unlike most of my shoes, as I found out today) models of my feet. I made them out of poplar plywood. One is marked L because the corresponding foot is called Lucifer. The other is marked R because that is the model for the right foot. (R = Right. Surely you don’t think I’d name my right foot? That would be insane.)

This is old stuff (about two weeks old). We no longer live the life of the Blizzard People.

(Amsterdam at Station Zuid/WTC, the rest is in Zoetermeer.)