Archive: February 2006

The Lily Gallery website is currently undergoing a facelift and some streamlining. We will be integrating the member list with the general Danen.Org member list. I expect the odd glitch, but in the long run, when a person signs up on one site, he or she is automatically registered on the others. One of the other new features that I'm excited about is the ability to change the "style" on the site. We currently support a brown, a green, and a blue style. For now we will concentrate on making sure all pages are consistent, before considering other colours.
Check it out. Even non-members can change colours by clicking on the coloured dots at the bottom of the page.

The North American Lily Society Show and Convention 2007 will be held in Edmonton, and I will be responsible for maintenance of the web site. Not much to do yet, but I'm really excited about this show.

I came across an interesting report and although it is 3 years old, it is probably even more relevant today. Spam is getting worse and more hideous. If your email address is listed on a website, a newsgroup, or a public mailing list, you risk attacks of spam, phishing, identity theft and who knows what else.
Read the findings of the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report.

Found out about a new hobby from Marcel on UC radio, called spotting. Marcel explained his interest is in capturing conversations between F16 pilots.

What is spotting? I think it has to do with collecting aircraft, military and civil, both as a tail number entry in a log, as on film/slide/negative. A pretty wide definition, but I believe that everyone who has a more than average interest in at least one of those activities has the right to call himself a spotter. Only the details differ for each person.
Arnold Ten Pas

Do a Google search on "plane spotting" and you will find information on this new hobby.

I can remember when the police band on the radio was exciting...

Klondike Days is no more, it is now the Capital EX. Check out the new website.

We broke records again today. I noted a 10 degree Celcius temperature around 4pm. I sure hope we get some snow before we get that inevitable cold snap.

I see daylilies and garlic chives coming up already. This is the most unnatural weather I've seen in 32 years in Edmonton.

Our member accounts have now been merged with those of the Lily Gallery. That means if you register on one site, you have access to all of our sites (except recipes, that's a bit trickier).

Every Saturday morning we enjoy Dutch radio on 101.7 World FM. While you can't catch it live on the Internet, you can listen to the Audio Archive when it suits you. Between it and Uden Centraal I get quite a bit of Dutch programming.

To my sister, Leni, who turned 50 this year. :)

Rather gripping documentary "Murder Unveiled" this evening on CBC. The movie was inspired by the real-life events surrounding the murder of Jaswinder (Jassi) Kaur Sidhu. Last October, the courts in India convicted seven men of her murder. The RCMP is still investigating the Canadian connection. CBC Television's the fifth estate covered the story when it first broke and recently returned to India to find out what happened to Jassi's killers, as well as to Mithu, Jassi's husband. They also confronted her family in Canada - asking them to explain the 147 phone calls made by her uncle to the men who murdered her.

More on www.cbc.ca/fifth/murderedbride.

My wife posed an issue today. She got a reply from somebody she did not know. He said "you keep sending me emails that should be for somebody else". Turns out she typed an email address wrong at some point and Outlook remembered it. Now whenever she typed "Marv" in the "to" field, she got the wrong address in addition to the good address, but the wrong one was at the top.

So the message went to the wrong person...

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook has a number of files that can be deleted and the "to" options list will be cleared. Hopefully she will now pay more attention to the options, but if not I can always kill those files...

Met with my program nurse today. How come I got the oldest nurse? :)
Did not learn much new. Just confirmation of what I already knew. My goals of cutting down cholersterol and weight will help me in many more ways.
Next Monday is my stress test, so I hope to get a recommendation to go back to work part time. We'll see...

Happy 30th birthday, Vincent. :)

Had my stress test today, and Dr Fahoum will recommend to my family doctor that I can go back to work part time.
He took me off after 6 minutes because my heart rate was getting about 160/170. Not sure what that means for the exercise program, but I will find that out on Wednesday.
So far, so good. :)

Finally, my order from December 8 from Holland at Home arrived today. So our Valentine's dinner was "boerenkool stamppot" (kale with potatoes and sausage). Included were also some items not available here in the Dutch stores. Yummy!
Holland at Home also has an English section.

I am trying out a new editor for entering blog posts. It's called TinyMCE and can be downloaded for free from Moxiecode Systems. Quite nice, but have to do more testing. I may make it availalble for blog commenting in the future.

At the moment, it seems to be missing the ability to insert links. I have to dig some more into the documentation...

Had a class about "repairing connections" after the exercise class. To my surprise, 90% of the subject matter dealt with sex. It appears that 25% of the people who have a "heart event" never, ever have sex again...

Yet, heart patients can enjoy sex. Just follow some basic guidelines (common sense). Post a comment if you think I should elaborate. 

Finished my first exercise session at cardiac rehab today.

My THR (Target Heart Rate) is between 106 and 132 beats per minute. I did 126 (21 beats/10 seconds) for the better part of 40 minutes. 20 Minutes on a bike, and 20 minutes on a treadmill. They thought I did great for the first time, and I thouhgt so too.

Made a "from scratch" soup today. There is no way I can post a recipe. Started with a base from Holland and some Knorr packages (cream of potato and vegetable). Added a tomato, medium onion, celery, carrots, potato slices, garlic of course, meatballs (lean beef), and some fresh green beans.

A major ingredient was a can of navy beans. Those beans added body and taste.  The Knorr packages had loads of sodium, so no salt was added anywhere. Too bad they also had MSG. I would really like to find something that's not loaded with salt and does not have msg...

My doctor has agreed to go let me go back to work part time and signed off today. I will be working afternoons the next 5 weeks, and if all goes well, go back full time on March 27th. My rehab is also in the afternoon, so I won't actually be putting 3.5 hours every day. That's not such a bad way to start. Gives me more time to adjust.

Number 10
Life is sexually transmitted.

Number 9
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Number 8
Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

Number 7
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.

Number 6
Some people are like a slinky... not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

Number 5
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Number 4
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

Number 3
Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

Number 2
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006:
We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in Canada, but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.

I could not find Uden Centraal today, so I was browsing other available stations.

Found DRS2006 Webreceiver at http://www.drs2006.com/index.html (a free download) to be a nice way to organize my internet radio stations. Check it out...

Turns out web radio is much more useful than I thought initially, when I was a manager trying to control bandwidth.

http://www.drs2006.com/Webreceiver.zip

The lease for my Dodge Caravan is up in a few months. Been thinking about what to get next. A Durango kinda catches my attention. Not a cheap choice, but I don't drive many miles/kms so any vehicle should last me until I retire in 2012. After that, we'll see again.

What do you think? 

And I still have most of it...

Seen as a tagline somewhere...

Went to check out Uden's municipal website and checked lost and found. Items are listed by week, and EVERY week, keys and rings were turned in. I guess a lot of people don't lock their doors and gents take their rings off.

http://www.uden.nl/content.jsp?objectid=77

I thought was it time to organize my movie collection, so I went looking for software. Found some web based software at konni.com.

If you have access to a web server with PHP5 and MySQL, it's worth checking out. It can locate all the movie information from the IMBD, the Internet Movie Database, saving you a lot of typing...

Finally... We're getting some snow, much needed both for insulation and moisture this spring. So far not a lot, but it's a start.

While continuing my cardiac rehab, I started afternoons last Tuesday. I cannot say that it has been easy. I have been taking half hour to an hour naps every evening after work. The ladies at the exercise program figured my blood pressure was high before I started the exercises, so Wednesday they gave me a note for my family doctor which I dropped off, but no call from his office. Today my BP was a bit lower, I think because I drank less coffee. Something to pay attention to...

All in all not a bad week. I guess I will just have to keep listening to my body, as suggested by several friends.