Too bad I have this awful crick in my neck which has been killing me all week and does not seem to get any better. If I have to look the other way, I must first rotate my body as a single unit, as if my head has been fastened to my torso with a long thick screw. I hope I don't have herniated neck vertebrae, but I'll stop complaining for now.

Whatever it was, the thoughts and emotions had been building up inside of me for years. Hidden experiences and awful secrets that I had not dared to reveal. Not until now for some reason.

It just all came out with crying and angry words of despair.

What these thoughts were exactly at the time is not clear to me. However, the emotions of tragedy were very believable. Even in the waking state they bite strongly within me. But are they real, were they real?

I believe that this has something to do with the recent sixty year commemeration of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Something on the television, some collective remorse.

Some unconscious element of humanity which is seeded deeply in each and every soul whether we want to admit it or not.

All of a sudden my browser froze up and nothing happened anymore. As it turns out, I had unknowingly introduced a nasty bug into the fancy web application I was working on. This resulted in the dreaded 'deep recursion' error which can be triggered to raise its ugly head by something as innocent looking as this:

As you can see here, it is important that one NOT forget the !$recurse or it's dooms day all over again. Be careful, it's a dangerous and unpredictable world out there.

Someone told me the other day in passing that the noble pursuit of perfect communication is in fact a fruitless endeavor.

Alright so I finally managed to upgrade my web server to FreeBSD 5.3 after putting it off endlessly and gathering up enough courage to do the unthinkable.

So far this is what is all running there:

• www.kiffingish.com
• www.kiffinsblog.com
• www.kiffin.nl
• www.kiffin.org (soon to come)
• www.cyber-gish.com (soon to come)

Is this getting a bit too exaggerated or what?

Every Saturday morning, the weekly issue of the Donald Duck comic strip arrives through the mail slot. The thin magazine plops ever so gently to the floor barely making an audible sound.

In my imagination I had wrongly assumed that the east European city of Bucharest was some drab, greyish, run-down, east-block place still recovering from the chains of an opressive dictator.

So is there anyone out there who can tell me where the heck this place called B. is exactly?

Why my life of trying to catch up with the inevitable is not so inevitable at all:

"In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead..."

See
Deconstructing Infinity: An Analysis of Zeno's Paradox for more information.

Alright so I figured I would try to prove myself as a full-fledged FreeBSD guru kind of guy by doing this:

After more than twelve hours my poor laptop is still gobbling up all kinds of stuff, compiling. linking and installing who knows what.

That means that I will have to be patient and hope that all turns out alright in the end.

Why is it that when a total stranger starts talking to you out of the blue in a friendly manner, that your first thought is "who is this guy and what does he want?"

An interesting article appeared on the Citizen Tribune Web site today and I am mentioned a couple of times believe it or not.

It goes something like this:

This international effort is really great where people around the world unite and are donating so many millions of dollars for those poor victims of the awful tsunami.

If you have ever (seriously or less seriously) wondered why atoms take the trouble at all in the first place to create the person you are, then I am sure you will be interested in the following statement, to quote:

The Dutch tradition on the first day of the year is the so-called New Year's dip in the North Sea.

Brrrrrrrrr...

No one in their right mind would have expected anyway that I would have a spectacular run on the very first day of the year. No stellar performance, but good enough.

Consider it wake-up call to the coming year in appreciation of what has been and what will become.

The time of 26:55 was not a record, but for this year it was the slowest as well as the fastest time I have run.

From now on it can only get better.