It's funny, the last months we had the these kind of news reports several times. And people starting wondering what the hell these pirates are up to.

In fact the pirating scene hasn't changed, I don't have anything to do with pirating now ofcourse, I no longer have that need as when I was much younger and the days of making copies of C64 games with your HiFi stereo or Amiga copy parties which lasted deep into the night. Back in then it was never a problem to get the latest and hottest release, just as today, sometimes the pirates had the games before the shops had them (including trainers!). In fact you could argue it was more difficult for pirates in those days because they did not have the internet, and games were spread by snail-mail, BBS and copy parties. Even at our young age we figured out a lot of those pirated games must have been an inside job.

So, what has changed? Well, the most important change happened in the industry. Games are big bucks now, and everybody is playing them. Millions are involved and when pirates go ahead and pirate games as they have always done, it is a potential loss of millions that were needed very badly to get the gaming company out of the development costs. Piracy has always been a major complaint and as the stakes rise so does the impact.

Piracy will never be stopped, and game producers will never stop complaining. I wouldn't be surprised if at one point the movie and game industry merged and then it could get real ugly for pirates. Not that I have a problem with that, not anymore at least. And I don't approve piracy either anymore at this stage. I just though it was funny how they tried to turn the news to the pirates while they did nothing new, but the business around it has just changed.

You are alone, in the dark, in an unknown room at an unknown place. Sitting scared in one of the corners of that room. You already tried to open the window but it is shut tight, no light comes in or out, the room is empty and nothing is available to smash the window and escape to freedom. Same with the door in the room, there are noises outside of people walking and talking, but they don't seem to pay attention to you, no matter how hard you scream or pound on the door. The light switch doesn't work and your only companion in the room seems to be a dead mouse. What happened, how did you get there, why you? Its cold and moist and they didn't leave you to much clothes and the heating system is not functioning either. suddenly the doors opens, a dark big figure walks up to you, it is difficult to see his face. It's me, I'm here to rescue you, so keep reading my blog :)

Did anybody see the birds? Of course you did, who hasn't. Pretty scary movie, and still hasn't lost much of its power. Remember this was made in the 60ties, but it remains a classic example of movies in its class even today.

You know what is more scary? The birds for real! That is exactly what we have here. At our lovely apartment. After moving in some 6 months ago, we are now under attack from birds. To make things even more strange, none of the other people living in this building have problems with birds (there are a total of 6 apartments here). Perhaps being on the top floor has something to do with it, I sure as hell don't know.

What I do know is that the birds won't leave us alone. I told you before about the heatwave we had around here during mid-summer. To let the heat escape we opened the door of our balcony, it sure cooled us down a little bit. But after a while strange things started to happen. The table would sometimes be messy, everything would be tossed around, first Nele though I was doing this (why should I? ;) ). One other day I found my swimming gear on the balcony, wtf? Next the key to the front door was gone (now we have to enter our home through the garage).

At one point in time, we found shit on the floor, at that point we knew, the birds! They are invading our home. Most of the time they were just eating stuff we left on the table from breakfast or something, now and then they also stole things: keys, swim gear (I don't want to know what they planned to do with that),...

From then on we close our door, but left the window open. This is one of those windows you can open just a little bit and lock, it's big enough for bugs to crawl through , but we found out they still came in! this time even into the living room. To make things even worse, they shit on the cough, the wooden living floor, the table and, oh, my super-expensive Jamo surround speakers, not one, but TWO of the 6 speakers!

No man or bird or living thing messes with a guys hifi surround sound cinema home theater!

After cleaning that shit up (you can take this literally), we just decided to lock up everything again, airtight. Do you think we are now bird free? Well they still come, and they are picking away at the wood of the window. I wonder how long they will keep this up, and what if they manage to get in again one day? I never knew birds could do all this!

There are a few things I like doing. Anything computer related, but also some sports like cycling. This is a tradition in our family which goes back some generations, my uncle and father both took on cycling at the junior league. Some weekends I make trips of +100 km just for the fun of it. Important to note is that I don't own a race/sports bicycle, at the moment I don't feel the need for an upgrade.

A few weekends ago while doing one of my tours again i stopped for rest at the parking spot of one of those nature parks. Although it was a beautiful day, almost no cars were on the parking lot, there was however this old couple walking their dog. The woman looked a bit out of this world, and wouldn't respond to anything the man was saying, Not that there was much communication between the two, it almost looked like each of them was located in another dimension, connected together, only by their little dog.

They stopped at one of the few cars on the parking, a grey-metallic Mercedes. The man opened the door for his dog and wife, and then entered the car himself whistling while he walked over to his side, fastened his seat-belt, talked to his wife some more. Suddenly he stopped talking, and nothing happened for over a minute, it looked almost like a photograph. He reached over to the his wife side put something that looked like a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot could be heard well outside the car, he bounced back into his seat and fell over hitting his head his steering wheel. I was shocked, not sure that what I just witnessed was real, his wife did nothing, she didn't move, look at her husband, nothing. An empty ice cold stare.

The shot apparently was louder then I suspected, it seemed a lot of people heard it too. Everybody looked at the car, somebody opened the door, somebody else was trying to get the lady out of the car. The dog ran away, it still had his leach on. I jumped on my bike and returned home, some things are just too weird and scary.

It's getting hot in here, must be something in the atmosphere.

We are in the middle of a heat wave here, and it is freaking hot! I barely have enough energy left for typing this little piece of text.

I'll continue after the temperature drops to normal levels.

The police was here just a few minutes ago. It's a long story and it involves some freak accident with our thrash-can.
First I must inform you that here in Belgium we keep our trash separated, we have 3 different trashcans. One for plastic or carton bottles and metal, a second one for vegetables, fruit and garden rubbish (called gft). A third one for everything else (oh yeah, we also keep our paper separated from the regular trash). If somebody knows other countries were they handle trash in the same way, I gladly would like to know.
Anyway, we don't have an idea how it happened or who did it, but a piece of meat got into our gft trashcan, this is not supposed to happen and because of the heat this summer, which sometimes rises above 30C this piece of meat started to decompose really fast, drawing all kind of insects to its vicinity. When it was time to put it on the street for pickup, worms were crawling out of it like it was a gateway to hell. It also made some very, very strange noises and weight extremely heavy. Let's not mention the smell, needless to say I did not open the lid to take a look inside (noway I'm touching a lid with millions of worms crawling out of it).
This evening I arrived home from work and found our gft trashcan opened on the pavement, luckily with no content, but there was a lot of blood everywhere. Though I didn't think much about it; who knows what could have happened during the day? the streets are full of danger. Well according to the cops, the trash-man is in the hospital after he had been attacked by a bunch of giant rats that were hiding in my gft trashcan. Apparently drawn by the worms and the rotting meat, I can only guess so much. When they emptied it the rats jumped out and probably thought they were being threatened and attacked the trash-man. He should be alright, though still in intensive care and will be monitored for a while as serious infections could still happen. The police wanted to know if I put the rats in the trashcan on purpose, they have seen it happen before they said! After taking my statement they left, I can only wonder what will become of this.

And at least a warning to all of you - Do NOT put meat in your GFT trashcan!

Today I must tell your about this guy at work. Seriously, I have to. He found out I started this blog (well, in all fairness I told him) and now he is checking this web space every single day until I put something about him here.

Anyway, todays talk is about Maurice. You know, we Belgians make lots of jokes about the Dutch, but this guy is the perfect example of a Nederbelg as he calls himself. Perfectly integrated, so much even he starts to joke and loath other dutch that cross his path. Great stuff, sometimes I have to run to the toilet not to wet myself while laughing.
Ofcourse the best part of the day is at 12 when we take out lunch break and head towards the nearest supermarket on foot. Since I started doing this I never had to buy playboy magazine again (hue, not like I did, but if I ever had to I wouldn't, agh, never mind). Enough sexual fantasies about the woman/girls that pass us to make a cripple man walk again.
Luckily some good things came from our friendship, as he introduced me to the wonderful world of the Dutch Cabaret. Now, don't fear, this is not some gay-dance-sing-thing. It is most of the time about having a good laugh. My personal favorites are; Theo Maassen, Bert Visscher, Najib Amhali, Hans Teeuwen, Eric van Sauers.

Maurice is the best of the Dutch, and ofcourse a full pacifist!

mrsad, sadplanet, oh boy, sounds like a real happy guy. Don't worry, these things have nothing to do with my state of mind or anything.

The simple fact is I used to have another alias way back in the days. however it was quite long and all those arcade and Amiga game high scores mostly only allowed you to enter 3 chars. well, I abbreviated my name to 3 chars and it became sad ;). The BBS I used to run was called 'cyberdyne systems', this was great, but later on when the shift occurred from BBS to the net I decided to get rid of the cyberdyne name and go looking for something else. At that time the Belgian band evil superstars was one of the hottest bands, together with dEUS. I liked the superstars more (although dEUS latest 'real' CD; the ideal crash is a class of it's own) and they had a hit single with a song called 'it's a sad sad planet', which would go perfectly along with my handle. End of story, nothing sad at all!

lyrics: I wish today was a very special day but once again sex got in the way. war is over and I feel lonely again. well it takes a few and then you've had, it it's a sad, sad planet, a sad planet wasn't it jesus who said it, it's a sad sad planet. she was working topless in a hospital. she was pretty and not feeling comfortable at all. hoping for angels it's such a bore. you're a wrinkled mutant before you get, it it's a sad, sad planet, a sad planet even if you're michael or janet, it's a sad, sad planet. (even the visiting aliens and their crew) say much ado and too many problems too. well if we'd only listen to our hearts there'll be only love left to boo, it's a sad, sad planet.

Great, first post. I always wanted to have a first post on slashdot (guess I'll have to settle with my own blog for now). There you have it, now you know for sure that I'm a geek.

I'm also a linux zealot, since about 1997 when i was still in school to study informatics. At that time i was already not using much of windows and had OS2 running on a 486 with 8MB of memory. In fact this was agreat environment for running my two node BBS on that very same system. My BBS was devoted to the demo scene and had a whopping 1GB of storage (spread over 2 disks I must add). Anyway, i have always been a CLI type a guy and spend the first year on linux on the console (X in RedHat 5.0 wasn't really good for anything at the time). I have a single boot machine, linux only.

Every now and then a game can really hold me in its grasps. For the moment this is Neverwinter Nights, i bought the pack including the original and first expansion pack. I think I'm somewhere halfway through chapter 2. This game really is nice, and we didn't have something like it on linux yet (FPSs-a-plenty though) so i ordered the last expansion from amazon as well.