FilmFestival Rotterdam, pt. 1

Went to the International Film Festival Rotterdam today, with 3 Spanish (speaking) friends, to watch the Argentinian movie Bombón, el Perro (Bonbon, the dog). Getting coveted tickets for this festival was even more of an ordeal this year than ever before, on which I could write another entry, but these ones were arranged by a friend of my friend.

Before the movie started at 17:30, we had “lunch” at 15:30, and since the Argentinian restaurant Los Toros / Los Argentinos hadn’t “initialized” the kitchen yet, we went next door first, to an Irish Pub (!) on the Lijnbaan, where the Irish / British bar tender had not mastered the local language yet. What a surprise. After this, the Argentinian restaurant, with (probably) Surinam waiters, were up to speed, so we sat down on cow benches and consumed a big steak. Must have been the first time in my life I’ve had steak in the middle of the afternoon. However, 2 of the others who whadn’t had lunch, since they had their first movie at 11:30, must have been starving.

While the Festival is held at a dozen different locations in all theatres in Rotterdam, this movie was playing at the Luxor theatre, where I’d never been, but which turned out to have huge rooms, where you could easily have a Broadway show. Not that I’ve ever been to one of those. Although for people with long legs, the seats near the top would have been an issue, the “two persons seats” were nice without annoying an armrest in the middle.

The movie itself was hilarious, a 53 year old car mechanic, who had been layed off, is given a huge Argentine Dog, and picks up his life with all kinds of exciting activities, revolving around the dog. The underlying theme was a bit sad: unemployment, in the Argentinian region of Patagonia, with beautiful (if desolate) sceneries. Before (and after) the movie, the director himself, Carlos Sorin, appeared on the stage, introduced and interviewed by an American translator. After the movie, they appeared again and took questions from the audience. Quite nice!

After the movie, we tried to get last-minute tickets for another movie, Paradise Girls, but we were probably way too late, because even all the “re-distributable” tickets (of people who canceled, or didn’t show up) were sold out. So instead, we went to a Chinese restaurant for an “after-movie supper”, consisting of mango puddings. Yummy!

To be continued…

Domain offline

Today my *.net domain registration expired. Although I’ve tried to transfer it to another registrar, this has so far been unsuccessful, since the original registrar contains a reference to the owner (i.e. me) with an old e-mail address which stopped working 2 years ago. Unfortunately this old registrar (www.firevision.net) is not replying to any requests of mine to change this detail.

So, until I get this issue resolved, I’ll only be reachable under my Yahoo.SE (yes that’s Sweden) account, or my employer’s account.

Boekenfestijn @ Ahoy

Went to the big Book Fest Boekenfestijn in Ahoy and met up with some friends there. Since the security people didn’t trust my bag (or my face), I had to leave the bag in the cloakroom, but as I found later, it would have been a burden anyway. Then the fun started. Armed with a wheelie basket, we paced through the aisles looking for interesting bargains. After about two hours, my biggest finds were:
- Learning Spanish Quickly and Easily, with 4 CDs + a 288 page book
- a paperback ed. of the Da Vinci Code. Practical for the train.
- a music DVD of a piano recital by the Hungarian pianist Zoltan Kocsis
- Perl 6 essentials
- Van Dale Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal, on CD-ROM
- a Routard travel guide to Canada, for FREE (visitors who had a coupon got to choose a free book from a separate counter)
Altogether, I got 12 items for about EUR 45. That’s less than 4 EUR per item!

Below is the list of other things I got:

Maria Full of Grace

Saw Maria Full of Grace, a very impressive Colombian movie about a 17 year old village girl in Colombia who works in a flower factory. When she is fired (well, is treated so badly she decides to quit) and also turns out to be pregant, she is lured into getting a well-paid job as a “mule”, swallowing several dozen cocaine pellets and smuggling them to New York. As you can imagine, this leads to a high amount of (often unbearable) tension. But. this movie is also unique in that it shows the perspective of the drug traffickers: their social backgrounds, family relations, and the ruthless organized criminals who take advantage of them. Yet, there is also a tone of hope at the end of the movie, which I won’t spoil for you. The main character is played very convincingly, especially for a debut role. Highly recommended!

Easy as Dell… NOT!

Or maybe the title should have been: UPS = Unbelievably Pathetically Stupid.

As mentioned in my New Year’s Plans, I’m in the process of trying to replace my Mom’s 8 year old Gateway2000, a Pentium-I at 166 MHz.. During the Christmas holidays, they had a nice offer, with some discount, free double memory, and free shipping. So I went ahead and ordered one of the cheapest system. According to the Dell site, it was likely to be delivered on Wednesday. Midday Wednesday I found out from the UPS site that it wasn’t going to be delivered until Thursday. Also nice that they don’t tell you which part of the day, like morning / afternoon, it will be delivered, so you’d have to take a whole day off. Anyway, on my weekly afternoon off, that I had moved to Thursday to wait for the delivery, it turns out that they couldn’t find the streetname. Apparently someone at UPS was too Unbelievably Pathetically Stupid to interpret
CLARIET KOKVAN ALPHENSTRAAT
as
CLARIET KOK-VAN ALPHENSTRAAT
Actually, it was someone at Dell who had removed the hyphen, because initially it didn’t fit into the database: the last digit of the house number was chopped off.
Could it have been some stupid database programmer who thought: 30 characters should be enough for EVERYONE?? I guess it is enough, if you have an American streetname like “6857, 23rd Ave”. Even if your house number would be 8374568347568 (anyone know how American house numbers are made up? I never understood this, and neither did the cousins I asked)

Update Jan. 6: due to some miracle -probably finally a real person at UPS as opposed to computers, looked at the address and found out the correct streetname- the PC was delivered after all, at my parents address. Hurray!

New Year’s Plans

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this!
May the new year bring you health, wealth, luck, and love…
(actually, I don’t find the the wealth and luck that important, compared to the other two, but my Chinese ancestors / relatives do, and phonetically they fit nicely into the list)

Since I once resolved not to have any new year’s resolutions, the list below is not one of those. I do however have some plans for this year, which can be grouped into the following categories: