I don’t know if you noticed, but on the right pane (or at the bottom, if you read this blog on a PDA or other small web-device, or not at all if you only read the RSS / Atom feed) you’ll find three quotes. They are “dynamic”, so each time you return to this side, you’ll see three new quotes. Sometimes you might even see the same quotation listed twice. I could change the way, the quotes are listed, so there wouldn’t be a risk of showing the same two or three times at once, but with over 1200 quotes to pick from, you have to be quite lucky for that to happen anyway. Yes – I’ve just added a quote to the list, and noticed that there are now 1205 quotations in the database, just waiting to get the chance to show themselves to you!

I’ve never meant to get as many quotes as possible. I have only added quotes that I liked: funny or intelligent or both.

The very first quote (added 19 May 2005):
  Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
  (Douglas Adams)

The latest quote (added today):
  I feel like a tiny bird with a big song!
  (Jerry Van Amerongen)

104 million years ago – I think it was on a Wednesday – a small dinosaur did something, all animals do from time to time: it “dropped the remains of something that once was food”.
A few years later, the dinosaur died. No monument was raised in its honour. Maybe the dinosaur even turned to dust before it could be dug up by a palaeontologist millions of years later.
But it still did manage to make a long lasting sign of its existence: the before mentioned turd was somehow fossilized. I’m not going into detail on how soft stool can turn into stone – mostly because I don’t know. But the “stone” was found, and identified as a coprolite from a small theropod.

Today the world might look a little different, but it’s the same story: you really don’t know what traces you may leave behind. Maybe you get famous for doing something useful, or maybe you just get known for making crap. 😉

I don’t know if I have been out of luck lately, or computers simply aren’t what they used to be (and probably never were). But it seems like I’m unable to find a computer that actually works!
Some time ago I bought a portable computer. Some computer repairman has seen it more than me, and it’s still not working as it should. The repairs have made it work a little better (from “not at all” to “somewhat”), but it’s still a piece of crap. Don’t ever buy computers marked “Vega+”. Nothing good will come from that!
I mostly use a stationary computer (portable is fine, but I like to have a permanent computer corner and keep the rest of the place a computer-free area). So I have now bought a new computer to take over for my very old and slow one. Or at least I tried to. After three days of setting the new computer up, and installing a lot of programs, the hard disk (hard drive) died.
Sometimes I really hate computers! 🙁

  In a New York Minute
  Everything can change
 (Eagles)

This is one of my favourite songs about how fast things can change – for the better or worse.

Some years ago, I was home with my grandmother and -father. I went out in the kitchen to make us some coffee. When I was almost ready to serve the coffee, my grandmother came out and told me to call an ambulance – my grandfather was suddenly feeling unwell. Twenty minutes later, he died at the hospital.
He was old, but in very good health as far as any of us could tell. It happened like a bolt from the blue.

Almost two years ago, an acquaintance of mine was hit by a car while riding a motorcycle. He could easily have died that day. Instead he has to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. It only took a second to change his life forever. That is not fair!

I live in a peaceful country, but when I was very young, I sat in a train maybe 200 meters from an exploding bomb. Nothing happened to me, other than the surprise. But later on, I saw in the news that a person who had the misfortune of standing close to it, died at that explosion.

Luckily, a lot of good things can happen too in just a moment, making you smile though you didn’t plan to be happy that day. 🙂

When I take a photo of two snails, or a hoverfly, I try to show how fantastic this world can be. There are so many fantastic details we often tend to overlook. And the world is still fantastic, if you look at it in full.

I try not to plan my life in details, because one moment can change everything.

  In a New York Minute
Everything can change
  In a New York Minute

I haven’t written here for so long. Not because I’ve been travelling to exotic places or anything like that. Nope – I’ve been working! These days it seems like everyday is a workday for me. 😥

From time to time I make a backup of my blog. If anything goes wrong, it gives me a second chance to make it work again. Until now, however, I haven’t had much use for those backups – and often wondered if I would be able to restore my blog if it had a meltdown. Now I know the answer to that question.
I tried to add a link to the right pane of this blog, and thought it would be easiest to just add it manually in the php-file – resulting in a defect blog. I still don’t know why that happened. I have never worked with php before, so I have probably goofed something up. Or not – the Webhotel went offline (not just my site – the whole Webhotel) seconds after I added the link, so maybe it wasn’t me at all – or maybe it was because of that link, the Webhotel went down?
I really don’t know what happened. But I do know that I could have had a major problem getting this blog working again without the copy I made few days ago!

So make a backup of your weblogs (both files and database) and other stuff that you care about! You may need it someday! 🙂

What an absolutely fantastic day! Trees turn green, birds are singing, temperature is rising and the sun is shining from an almost clear blue sky. Not as clear as yesterday (when I took this photo), some small clouds tells me a story about rain tomorrow.

Btw. “Super green” are taken from the pretty fantastic film The Fifth Element, with a story almost as strange as something Enki Bilal could have come up with. Hmm, in just one sentence, I went from green leaves to a French cartoonist who combines elements from ancient Egypt with sci-fi. I’d better stop now, before I mention another movie with the same elements: Stargate – oops too late. 🙂