Today our friends Axel & Beike came over…all the way from Indonesia!! Wow!
Great to catch up with them and it’s just perfect to see them, after we went visiting them in Libya last year…and after they got married in October 2006…hehe, maintaining a social life with friends ain’t all that easy for expats! 
Our best friends in Norway, Willy & Katka, got their second son yesterday, his name is Andre!
We went to see them in the hospital tonight, Andre was really sweet (as in not crying ) and truly a beautiful baby boy.
Hehe, it’s the second baby in a week time…2008 is becoming a real baby-year!
Being in the hospital reminded me; The Netherlands seems to be one of the very few countries where children are born at home…it’s always interesting to hear the surprise in peoples voices when you tell them that most of the children in NL are born in the parents bed.
Guess what? I own an iPhone!! Yay, it’s a total geek fest out here!! 
Of course it came with the latest and greatest software on it (v. 1.1.3), for which a jailbreak has been released last weekend, just in time dudes!
I followed the instructions from iPhone Atlas…easy, complete and it did the trick for me!
So, step 1 is done!
Am now waiting for the software unlock (or other information related to a SIM unlock option).
Anyhow…the iPhone is myPhone, I *LOVE* IT!!!
He wrote the Pivot-to-WordPress import script I used to migrate and thx to the useful information in his comment I was able to get the links to all my images up again using this script, yay!
I just started to change the image links manually (aaahhhh!) so, the comment came at the right time…thx dude, you saved me an hour or 2!
The .com-blog is up! It turned out to be very easy to set up WordPress (the 5 minute install indeed), however…importing my older (Pivot-based) posts turned out to be a bit harder…:(
The easiest method for importing is to use a RSS-file containing all posts. Unfortunately the server of my hosting provider didn’t allow me to get all my 800+ posts into one RSS-file (the server wasn’t able to allocate enough memory to do so?!?), so I ended up using a script I found while poking around the Net.
The script did most of the work, so far, so good…some things are still broken though; links to older posts, all images, and I can only embed YouTube videos when using the classic theme. The much nicer Kubrick theme breaks cause the width of the page is not wide enough to support the vids.
As you can see, I’ve got some work to do on the layout, so I’d call the site still in beta.
I will manually cross-post on the .nl and .com blogs until everything here is fixed.
Everyone knows I *love* my cats…if only I had a piano, they would rock da house!
As mentioned yesterday, my sister (Martine) was due to deliver any day…well, she ‘decided’ to pick her own Birthday as THE day!
Yesterday evening at 20.30h she and my brother in law (Arjan) got a baby boy, named Tygo! Everything is good with mother and son…and father…and grandfather/grandmother (this is a first timer!)…:)
Long live Skype, as I was able to see the baby live last night, wow! I’ll put up a picture later.
Sjeez….I am uncle Raymond now!
My sister has her Birthday today, 30 no less…as ‘we’ say in Norway: Gratulerer med deg!!
She’s also (very) pregnant and due to deliver any day…the doctors calculated the baby to come on the 25th, that IS tomorrow! Wow, I’m gonna be uncle!!
OK, thanks for all the advice and tips; I made up my mind and have decided to go with WordPress as blogging tool for my .com domain!
Basically I feel like learning something new and since WordPress has a lot more features and development going on, it will bring me more.
To be honest, the main reason I choose Pivot back in 2005, was the fact that I didn’t have a MySQL database in my hosting package…and I am WAY too cheap to pay extra for something I think should be standard!
Well, I’m not leaving Pivot entirely (yet?), but am interested in getting cross-posting working for both domains, so, between Pivot and WordPress that is. I should have the time coming weekend to work on things and go live!
My baby is flying to Houston coming weekend and….might come back with an iPhone!!! That would be soooo cool!
If things go as hoped, I expect the phone (sorry, the iPhone!) to come with the latest and greatest software (v 1.1.3, released during last weeks MacWorld)…that means I’m up for two challenges:
1. jailbreak it; in order to use all its functionalities except the phone
2. SIM unlock it; so I can use it with a different carrier than the U.S. based AT&T
All information I found on the net so far shows that the v 1.1.3 jailbreak is done, but will only be made available in February. 
The SIM unlock might require some additional hardware, but I expect that software solutions will be available soon…right, developers??
Am wondering if I could downgrade the software to the previous version (v 1.1.2) for the time being, it would make things a lot easier!
Woo-hooooo, am thrilled! (yeahyeah, I *do* realize I sound like a geek hehe;))
Here’s another ‘cultural difference’ between The Netherlands and Norway;
In Norway most water taps in public buildings (toilets of bars for instance) use a mixer tap with a single valve, allowing you to mix the water temperature as you like.
In The Netherlands most of water taps in public places are just single taps, supplying only cold water.
I often see the mixer taps in Norway (in houses too) set in the middle position, providing a nice mix of warm water.
So, people here wash their hands generally with warm water, while most people in The Netherlands wash their hands with cold water…hmm, could it be that Norwegians warm up their hands this way in order to protect them from freezing off in the generally colder temperature in Norway??
Hehe, and I thought I emigrated to the land of tough Vikings!
In 2005 Steve Jobs delivered a commencement speech to the
graduates of Stanford University…it’s less then 15 minutes and I recommend everyone to take this time and listen to what he has to say…trust me, you will learn from it.
…everything happens for a reason!
The transcript of this great speech can be found in the Stanford University News Service Archives.
Mark Twain: "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
TGIF!
Am pretty knackered after an intensive week, but still have some energy left to go to the Balkan Beat Party tonight in Oslo!
It’s becoming very popular and I’m sure it’s an interesting experience when Vikings are mixing with people from the Balkan, topped off with a cheesehead twist!
Hey, hey…it is party time!!!
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