Mike Elgon writes on his blog about the hoops he has to jump through to get a decent internet connection while traveling in Greece. The article is written in Ágios Nikólaos, here in Crete. Note that this guy does not travel for pleasure, he’s not a tourist on vacation. His tag line makes it...
Read more →My “short break” turned out to be a rather longish break. Everything went fine with the trip to Brussels. We had some problems at the car rental desk due to my credit card having extended it’s limit for the month (I didn’t keep track carefully enough) but after 3 hours of phone calls and...
Read more →We will be taking a short trip to the Low Lands as per tonight. I will (finally) attend a Zhineng Qigong workshop with Patricia van Walstijn in Nijkerk (The Netherlands). I’ve been looking forward to that for a long time. Back in 2003 I learned about Zhineng Qigong through a symposium that Yvonne had...
Read more →Oh my, I’ve gone all philosophical an moralistic on you in my last post. Never mind, let’s blame it on the weather. Or something. The thing that brought this along was a memory flash that I had, from a period some 50 years ago. I was in my first year at primary school in...
Read more →Everybody’s been talking about snow on the Intahrnet today. A friend from Belgium even sent me an e-mail this morning inquiring about the situation. Quite frankly, I had no idea what they were all talking about. Here, about 1 kilometer north of the archaeological site of Knossós and some 4 kilometers south of the...
Read more →Most of you probably know that I have been a big Apple fan for decades. My first interest was awoken while I was working at IBM in Brussels (1976-1981, big mainframes, big, big mainframes, water-cooled too), when I showed an article about the then popular Apple II to one of our technicians for whom...
Read more →Two weeks ago we had friends from Belgium over for their holidays. We had a nice meal together and in the course of the conversation the subject of money came up. When I told them what the average salary in Crete was, they were shocked to learn that I worked for the minimal legal...
Read more →…that I kept you up to date, wouldn’t you say? I’m terribly sorry if I had you worried for a while there, but I’m really fine. It was just writer’s block. Or something like that. You can call it procrastination too. I just couldn’t bring myself to writing. I had lost any and all...
Read more →Hmm. Well, that’s it. We throw in the towel. We tried very hard, but we have to admit that we failed. We knew upfront that it wasn’t going to be easy, but what really broke us was the enormous bureacracy here. The drop that made the bucket overflow was the whole ordeal of getting...
Read more →Back in January 2003, when I was preparing to drive off from Kleine Spouwen to Iraklio, I used a route planner on the internet to give me some guidance on how to drive to my destination. I don’t remember anymore which website I used, but it definitely wasn’t mappoint.msn.com. And a good thing too...
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