Cogs can think.

Some people have ‘wtf’ moments, others have ‘aha!’ moments. I do have the occasional wtf moment, and my aha! moments are usually about three weeks later than average. In addition, I have a third type of moment, the ‘wait, what?’ moment.

I don’t like garden centres. Mildly put. It probably stems from my inability to take of anything green, and my fear of small moving things with legs. When I still lived with my parents, I’d get total passive-aggressive over any chore related to our garden, which, after years of trying to get me to do anything in the garden, finally made my parents stop giving me garden-related chores.

My mother’s birthday is coming up tomorrow (56), and she wanted something from the garden centre - a specific garden centre a few towns west from here. I had never been to this one before, and from the start, it looked a little different. There was something about the entrance that just made it unfit for a garden centre. I soon found out why: this was the Ikea of garden centres. They had set out a path from product group to product group, and you were forced to see and look at everything - the magic Ikea trick that makes you come home with three Lack tables, two Benno CD closets, and a Billy when all you set out to buy was a Billy.

My normal coping strategy for the garden centre visit didn’t work here. Usually, I just RUN RUN RUN, hoping to bump into the right product. When found, I RUN RUN RUN to the register, pay, and then RUN RUN RUN to my car. And cry. Not this time. I was forced to find my way through the maze, and contrary to Ikea, they didn’t have the sneaky shortcuts that make you skip sections. I. Saw. Everything.

And then IT happened.

I had already found my mother’s gift right at the entrance, and as I made my way through the maze, I saw a bunch if differently sized garden pots, in red - and then it happened. I had a thought. In a garden centre. I had a thought IN A GARDEN CENTRE. That’s so not right. I am supposed to be totally numb and mindless in a garden centre. That’s how god intended it, that’s the status quo. And I broke it.

That looks rather nice, I thought, I want that.

I wanted something from a garden centre. I held the red pot in my hand, and it wasn’t until I put it back down again that it hit me that I had broken the status quo. From then on, it all went downhill. I continued my struggle through the maze, encountered a pretty girl but totally ignored her in my slight panic. I arrived at the indoor section, only to encounter a whole section dedicated to red glass vases, dishes, and similar things that men shouldn’t have thoughts about. And again my thoughts were along the lines of I WANT THAT I WANT THAT.

The status quo has been broken. It’s not going to be long now. Keep an eye on your mail box, you can expect a wedding invitation soon. And a birth announcement. And then I come to visit you in our Opel Zafira with my fed up wife washed out in the passenger seat and three crying kids in the back. And a rental caravan for a vacation to France.

Wait, what?

…and I dried my watery eyes.

Speechless.

I still have all my Lego (in Dutch, we use the singular form), neatly organised by type of block, back at my parents’. When I grow up (…), and I have my own house, there’s going to be one room dedicated to Lego, and I don’t care whatever the fcuk the rest of the world thinks.

That’s one childhood dream no one’s going to take away from me. NOT EVEN YOU, FUTURE-WIFE.

According to several fashion journalists, this model is too fat.

Like I’ve said before, the fashion and modelling industry is one of the worst industries in this world, and as far as I’m concerned, my government imposes strict rules and guidelines that protect the health and well-being of the models. Any fashion house, either domestic or abroad, that violates these rules anywhere in the world will be declared illegal, and its products will be taken off the shelves, offices and shops closed. A friend of mine has experience in the modelling industry, and he’s pretty crystal clear: it’s poisonous.

I mean, I haven’t yet met any guy who likes to fcuk these bonebag models anyway.

The fashion industry consists of women and homosexuals. No wonder they haven’t a goddamn clue as to what true beauty is when it comes to women.

All I want to say here is that this is a pretty darn sad state of affairs.

Us OSNews folk deal with that stuff every day, but we don’t get to shut anything off. At one point, Aaron, you just get used to it. I’m happy you have the option to just turn it all off.

Happy coding!

I’ve been wanting this thing for a while now, and yesterday I decided to take the plunge and buy it: the Samsung DCB-H360R high-definition digital cable decoder - in black, of course.

It allows me to watch digital TV in HD (well, 1080i anyway), while also upscaling SD content. Image quality has certainly gone up on my Vizio 32″ HDTV, and the HD demo channel looks just absolutely stunning. HD is so damn vivid, it makes me wonder why not everyone is switching over. I immediately ordered the high-definition package over the internet (which gets you Discovery HD, National Geographic HD, and a few others) and I’m eager to see those channels unlocked.

I’m quite happy with the device - easy to set up, easy to use, and good-looking too. The only downside is that it only has 5.1 audio via digital (optical) audio out, or via the HDMI port. I would have preferred the option to have 5.1 output in the analog way, since my 5.1 Sony receiver doesn’t have optical-in (don’t ask me). Yes, I know, I need a new receiver.

For 170 EUR, totally worth it.

How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

Alice is here.

Twiek and Alice still need to learn to get along, but they’ve been making tremendous progress wich each other in just 24 hours. I’m so proud of Twiek, he’s handling these stressful times like a true gentleman; distant, but curious. Alice hisses and growls a little at him when he gets too close, but the distance-to-growl is getting smaller and smaller almost by the hour.

Alice comes from the farm, where she lived the first weeks of her life in a colony of mothers and kittens, near the cows, tumbling about in the hay, under the proper care of the lady of the farm. My apartment must feel like Wonderland to her.

I always saw a little Cheshire in Twiek.

I’m in.

Regarding OSNews… I became the managing editor (whatever the hell that means) of OSNews in June of 2005, so it’s been three years already. During those three years, I’ve published stories on a nearly daily basis, with only a few breaks here and there because I was away for the weekend or too busy with life beyond my laptop’s lid. I have my priorities straight, you know.

We also introduced some massive, massive changes. We released a completely new version of OSNews, with a completely overhauled website both internally and externally, and it took us a few graphical revisions to get it right - and I believe we are on the right track there. As far as looks go, I find the ‘new’ OSNews to be highly pleasing, comfortable on the eyes, readable, and free from clutter. Great work by mostly Adam, mystery designer Britney, and OSNews reader Kroc.

In addition to that, I personally made some hefty changes to our editorial policy. Most importantly, I introduced something we merely refer to as ‘new style’ items: items with more background information, more details, some context, and an opinion or two. Despite cold feet here and there concerning our readership’s response, they seem mostly positive. I’m quite happy with how that turned out.

A partially successful addition was Focus Shift, the OSNews comic. Quite a few people genuinely liked the comics I drew, but as was to be expected, quite a few hated them too. As some may have noticed by now, Focus Shift is no more - I liked doing it, but I simply lacked the time, and when it comes down to it, I obviously find OSNews itself more important than a comic. So, yeah, we shifted our focus away from Focus Shift (I owe you a punch in my face for that lame joke).

That’s all in the past now, so on to the future.

I have a certain vision in my head for how our editorial staff should function. I want to move away from the situation where OSNews was effectively Eugenia’s or my own weblog, and have a larger editorial staff where each member has his or her own speciality and areas of interest, so that we can offer more detailed and accurate stories. This will also allow for a more diverse stream of opinions coming from OSNews, which is something I’ve been really struggling with. Doing OSNews all by myself is doable at a glorified-RSS-feed-level, but with the new style items, my personal opinion just gets a little too obvious simply because there’s no counterweight. I want to combat that, and hence our quest to find more editors.

So, that’s how I envision OSNews’ future: multiple editors writing more detailed items about their personal areas of interest. Yes, that sounds a lot like Ars Technica. That’s because Ars Technica is a really, really good website. However, Ars has an entirely different focus than we do, and I believe that OSNews has a lot more opportunity to grow as sort of the “Ars of the OS world” than it has as the “glorified RSS feed of the OS world”.

However, we’ll obviously need everyone’s help to get there. If you believe you would be a welcome addition to the staff, let us know by sending an email to OSNews’ owner David Adams, or, when submitting a news item, try to write a bit more, give some background, make it a few paragraphs longer with links back to other relevant OSNews publications.

But most importantly, bear with us. Running a website about a field with so many personal opinions and conflicting interests is very, very difficult, and more than once have I failed to balance properly on the tight rope. Having more editors will certainly diminish my personal reflection on the news that gets posted on OSNews, and that’s a good thing for all of us.

Thanks for commenting on and reading OSNews.

It’s been a while, but I’m actually waiting for two games to come out this year.

Spore.

And Fallout III.

Thom_Holwerda: Dutch is like, take English, mix it with German, add some Danish, Swedish, French, and lots of Latin, then drink until you’re totally drunk so you get the pronunciation right, and then make all sorts of rules with millions of exceptions, and those exceptions have rules with exceptions, and those exceptions have exceptions with exceptions…
Thom_Holwerda: …and then you have something resembling Dutch.
pyCube__: Dutch is like a drunk Englishman trying to speak German… Or the other way around.