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Validation, a fable about the magic of free parking, a nice lovestory…one with a SMILE! 🙂

I (finally) got my new laptop today, a Dell Latitude E6400, and indeed, I spent most of tonight playing with it! 😉

It’s unfortunately no Apple Macbook Pro 🙁 (silly company policy) which already (!) turned out to be a bad choice…I’ve been able to lock myself out of the OS!! Indeed, I am not able to log in to MS Winblows via the fingerprint reader which I enabled as the only way to log in. I figured that using my fingerprint would be a pretty neat, and fast way to log in (swipe your finger and you’re in!), avoiding the ‘cumbersome’ standard Ctrl-Alt-Del method. It worked like a charm at first, but after the laptop unexpectedly went into standby (thx again Microsoft…), the fingerprint reader stopped working (it says ‘Device closed’ at the Login window) and I got stuck, since I don’t have the option to manually type in my password…WTF…and DAMN!

There seems to be no other option than to bring the laptop back to IT-support tomorrow morning…I hate that!!

Malcolm Gladwell: “We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”

What better way to spend the Saturday then buying furniture? Well, it’s actually not too bad if you also find what you are looking for! 😉

The house is quite spacious, so the furniture could be pretty big; THE couch is 3.4m x 2.7m and THE dining table (with THE chairs) is 2.2m x 1.1m…yes indeed, this means that most of the furniture is IN (and to be delivered in 4 weeks), yay!

Besides the fun of shopping at IKEA (?!? ;)), it’s actually a lot of fun putting the goodies together; tonight I have been playing with a bookcase.

I’m always amazed with the very efficient packing and ease of getting the job done, it must be fun to work at their engineering department!

Reuters: “Russian soccer fans have been told to drink whisky on their trip to Wales for next month’s World Cup qualifier to ward off the H1N1 swine flu virus, the head of the country’s supporter association (VOB) said Monday.

“We urge our fans to drink a lot of Welsh whisky as a form of disinfection,” VOB head Alexander Shprygin told Reuters.

“That should cure all symptoms of the disease.”

It’s nice to realize that I am immune to H1N1… 😉

I took 1.5 weeks off from work to get everything arranged for the move out and in, today was my last day and all is well; most of what needed to be done, has been done thanks to Marko, Muriel, Robbert, Suzanne, Rob and Stefanie…thx friends, we couldn’t have done this without y’all!!

Rob and I spent the day putting the sauna together and cleaning the rain gutter (niceeee job! 😉 ). Weather finally cleared up and we concluded that this place is PERFECT when it’s sunny (we actually also concluded that it’s perfect when it rains, and in some months we’ll probably conclude that it’s perfect with snow too! 😉 ).

Rob and Stef left tonight which means that now all our (dutch) helping hands are gone.

After we dropped them off at the airport, we went out to do some furniture shopping and found THE couch, THE dining table with THE seats, YAY! Chilled a bit at IKEA coz we can’t get enough of it! 😉

Michael Patrick King: “Seasons change, so do cities. People come into your life and people go, but it’s comforting to know: the ones you love are always in your heart and if you’re very lucky, a plane ride away.”

It was smart to take some days off this week, there’s still SO much to do in the house…luckily Rob and Stefanie are still here to help out.

Most of today was filled with making the skirtings on the new floor…yeah, there’s a bit of progress everyday!

I mounted the satellite dish today; pretty easy as I have done it before (and I still work in satellite communications 😉 )…Google Earth helped out again to find the direction to the satellite, quite handy!

Jeez, what a day yesterday! Moving is always a bit chaotic and hectical, but it was all worth it. We had a successful handover of the old house to the owners (I’ve never seen the house so clean, thanks to all out friends!) and all our stuff made it to the new place, most of it still unpacked in the garage… 😉
We had a great first night, everyone slept like a baby (being completely knackered 😉 ).
We took it relatively easy today, went swimming in the lake nearby (just 300m), enjoyed the sun and opened the BBQ season on the new veranda, yay!
Willy and Katka invited us for some Guitar Hero tonight, great to set the mind to something else…hehe, I’m gonna ROCK! 😉