As of today, your most favorited blogger is back.
I went AWOL last week, to rest a bit and generally do a whole lot of nothing.
So I did, and today I returned to the daily business of travelling to and from Nieuwegein. I’m really nearing completion of the thesis, so I’ll be posting updates soon!
About 40% of my visitors (and not including me) to my blog agree: FireFox is better to browse. At least, it is used in 40% of the times people read here.
This leaves 60% of the readers using Internet Explorer (IE), where about a quarter is using ‘ye olde’ IE6 and more than half the amount of the IE-users is browsing with IE7.
While IE7 is finished about a year ago, the development of IE8 is nearing completion. For all of you who do not web-dev: IE sucks and is not standards-compliant. This is the case for IE5 through IE7, of which the latter is not neccessarily the worst as one of its goals was to better adhere to the web standards as defined by W3C (which it currently does not 
).
A recent blogpost on the IE8 developers-blog has raised a lot of scepticism among webpage developers and html-coders as Microsoft intended to make a standards-compliance mode an option.
As IE8 is capable to pass the infamous ACID2-test, the intention was to make this behaviour not the standard behaviour of the browser, while the standard-rendering engine of IE8 had to be backwards compatible with the errors and bugs of the previous versions of IE (of which IE6 has the worst reputation).
Luckily, the so called meta-switch has been abandoned, and the developers have decided the backwards-compatibility modus is to be op-in, and the standards-compliance modus is the standard rendering engine of IE8.
The tech-talk put aside: with the new version of Internet Explorer on its way it seems as though IE an Fx will be rendering webpages nearly the same.
This is good for coders, as the quirks of a specific browser do not have to be taken into account when developing a web-page, so there’s only the need to maintain 1 version of the page. yay!
There is a point in your life, when you and your partner decide you want to be together each and every day of the week, or at least as many days of the week as possible.
This decision often is referred to as ‘living together’, which is the decision Kirsten and I made a little while ago. Yesterday we went out to see not one but three real estabe brokers to check out a house we’ve spotted.
It turned out to be great, and we even put in our offer to buy it from the current owner. I’ll be clinging on to my phone the entire day today, anxious as I am to hear from the selling party. I’ll be posting updates soon, I hope. 
Update 09:45: The current owners have counter-offered a difference of €9K5, where we started off at a difference of €12K. We offered a difference of €7K5.
Update 15:30: Owners re-counter-offered a difference of €5K, we offered a difference of €2K5, with the note it’s the final offer. Playing hard this time!
Update 03-17 @ 12:00: The current owner has agreed on the last offer, and this message has been confirmed around 17:30 on the 7th. Yay!
Each and every day there seems to be news about Geert Wilders, his Islam-critic film Fitna, "Boerkinis", troublesome (islamic) allochthonous youth and more.
One could say it’s the Islam, or rather the fear around it, that’s keeping the reporters and our politicians busy.
To start with Fitna, the recently completed but still unviewed critical film about the Islam and the Koran by Geert Wilders is stirring up dust since plans to make it were unveiled. There have been protests in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, a detahwish has been proclaimed by a religious leader in Iran, and even people have been killed in the demonstrations against the film. Why, I hear you ask? Apparently because of the inability of the inhabitants of the country in question to protest without killing some of the people marching on their behalf. But that is not at question here. Fact is, that Wilders has agreed to showcase the film one day prior to its public unveiling to our National Coordinator Terrorismprevention, Joustra, one the sole condition it is not to be banned after that.
Why even bother to showcase it at all before its release? To give the NCTb a head start of one day in coordinating the actions necessary to prevent terrorism?
Furthermore, the cabinet and its ministers are nearly daily criticising Fitna, or warning the maker about the social concequences his film might have. Last week, Balkenende has warned Wilders that the response from our country might be more violent than expected and he has advised him not to release it if it will trigger such responses. Pieter van Geel (leader of the Tweede Kamer fraction of the CDA) and Maxime Verhagen (CDA) both have urged Wilders to take his responsibility and not release the film at all last Thursday.
Wilders himself responded, as can be suspected, with the words: "Jullie kunnen de pot op".
The politicians are so busy trying to stop the film because it would trigger radical actions from the islamic community in our country that they are overseeing the damage they are doing to our country as it gives a really bad image towards other countries.
The question remains what would have happened when Fitna was not given the attention it has gotten recently.
One could only imagine what would’ve happened with the Iranian government threatening to boycot us, the religious leaders in Afghanistan who would thus not call to murder all infidels and those opposing the Koran. I know it is a long shot, but my guess is it would not have been like this. Rhetorical and polarizing: at least my question is not being criticized by the government (yet).
I would like to thank Timmey and Claudia for the nice evening last Sunday, we’ve had a great meal and a lot of fun playing pool so we should do something like that again!
Next time @ our place?