Divorce
Hanneke is here again, you know, my father’s girlfriend. She’s in the middle of her divorce. Her husband is being a real prick about it. It bothers me, brings back a lot of memories about the time my parents were in divorce. Not good for my humours.
Customers
I’m bothered by a test I did tonight with Monique. We went to some site to check how much we could loan together. It wasn’t much and certainly not enough to buy a house. I think I’ll need to have my own company for at least three years before I can get any sort of loan. I’m bothered by it, because I want to live with Monique as soon as possible. Of course, we can rent, but renting is more like a black hole-money pit than really building something. If we could buy something, it would be easier. On the other hand, renting is probably the only thing we can do for the first few years.
The biggest problem I face in these next few years is finding customers. I know we have a great service and we’re really good at what we’re doing, but I’m not a marketing-guy, however much I pretend to be one. Knowing that most customers will not be interested, I really need a lot of leads to actually make a profit. But where to find them? All the leads we have know are hard-earned and usually through some sort of relation. I’m not sure how to procede from here. What do I need to get some more customers?
The first thing I figured out myself is simply making sure we’ve got a handy brochure ready to hand to potential customers. One that actually tells what we do and why we’re better than the rest. And cheaper. Something we can use for networking, to send to potential customers. I’ve got one of those lying around, just a concept, but at least it’s something.
Worries, worries, worries. That’s the downside of owning your own company. But I’m determined to make this work. Very determined. I’ll figure something out. I’ll go to sleep now, though 
Happy customer means happy Tim
The customer I went to see this morning told me they were happy with the results thus far and are fully committed to this project. Makes me feel good. Peter did an excellent job, so far.
A book
Among my many projects, including the ones I mentioned here earlier, I’ve started yet another one today. I’m trying to collect all the documentation we made for customers and ourselves into one booklet. Most of it is already writtin, but I’ll need to rewrite it to be more general. If I actually get to finish it, it’ll be a great help in the future. Maybe I’ll even get it published
Tomorrow morning I need to be in Maastricht with a customer, showing them the program we’re building for them. I hope it’ll be good. Peter isn’t coming with me this time. It costs him almost a full day to travel back an forth, I’m not making him go through that, when he could better be programming. My sister borrowed the car the last few days, I hope she put some fuel in it…
I found a solution to generate PDF’s in the style I want, it’s not an easy thing, though. I’m using Lout now, since it at least has the features I need for the tables. It’s not working like I want yet, though. I’ll fix it.
On a side-note, I’ve been working most of the day on templates for the project we’re doing. Most functionality is now working, it only needs to be put into place. I think they will be pleased, before the end of the project. They asked us last week if we could finish it before the start of the next month, but today I called them to tell them that isn’t possible. Too many things still need doing and I’m not going to deliver hasty work. I rather extend the deadline a bit than deliver poor work. They understood and we’re quite cool about it. We now have about two weeks for the project to finish. I think we’ll make it.
The woman from the Dierenbescherming I talked about last Monday, called my sister today and told her she was very sorry things happened the way they happened, but she wasn’t qualified to handle a dog like Angel yet. So she gave us the number of a animal behaviour specialist and that’s it. Well, I don’t think dad will call the specialist just yet, so today I started using the Clicker for some Clicker-training. It didn’t go so well with Angel, but Aagje really loves it.
Had an argument about it with dad, though, when he tried earlier this evening to implement his own idea of Clicker-training by doing targeting on the Clicker. He hasn’t even read the books, but still he thinks he can do a better job then me. Well, I spent an hour this afternoon to read the booklet Hanneke brought last weekend and at least I know what I’m doing. He was just doing something that he thought would work. I mean, if he doesn’t want me to train with the dogs, he should say so, not disrupt my training with them with his own ideas of training. I’m pissed at him about that. Really pissed.
Most depressing day of the year
It was all over the news today, the 24th of January is the most depressing day of the year. At least, that’s what RTL Nieuws was telling everyone today. I don’t know about such “news facts”, they’re only mentioned because there’s no other, more pressing news. Something to lighten people’s spirits or something? I don’t know. I know it wasn’t depressing for me, very much, at least.
Yeah, today was the day I would go to puppy training (dogschool) with Angel. Well, since Kitty (my sister) goes there with Dark, she already announced the trouble we have with Angel, several times and dad repeated that when he entered Angel into the school. Kitty came to pick me up around 7.30pm and as we drove to Kunrade, she told me about what I should and should not do there. Since it’s a dogschool from the Dutch society for animal protection (Dierenbescherming), they disallow some things we take for granted. Like using a chain-belt (not sure about the correct English term for this one), which we use for all our dogs but they don’t want it used over there. Okay, I can live with that, especially since we’re training Angel. Aagje, the dog Monique and I trained together, needs a firm hand for control, but Angel needs a softer approach.
Well, if you know me, you know I can be quite arrogant when I think I know something about a certain subject. So Dad already warned me that I should do as they said and not go into discussion about things. So I promised myself I would do as he suggested. Boy, was that a mistake.
As we entered, Angel went totally insane. She kept barking and howling and pulling the leash. It was a sorry sight. But since I knew the trainers were warned, I figured they would come and tell me what I should do. More dogs were quite wild and noisy, and then the trainer gave her first lesson: “Try to silence your dogs, give them attention and pet them a lot.” I stood perplexed. Did she really want me to confirm to Angel that she was doing the right thing? Because giving a dog who is very obviously scared attention, is like rewarding her for the behaviour she’s displaying at that time. I swallowed and did as she told me. It didn’t help. (Yes, I’m going to a lot of trouble here not to add a “of course to that last sentence.) She only got worse.
Than the trainer told everyone there, while she looked straight at me: “If you can’t keep your dogs quiet, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave. Please try to keep all your dogs quiet, so I can talk without shouting.” I thought I was perplexed before, but this really got me frustrated. I mean, we told her we wanted to train with Angel because she goes balistic around other dogs, how can she expect me to keep Angel quiet? Wasn’t that why I wanted to take that course? Both trainers came over and gave me some more advice, but Angel didn’t have any attention for me at all, so it was a lost battle. They asked me to leave.
Of course I left, but I left furious. We told them several times that Angel was a problem case, why did they have to make her go trough this? Why have me come over when they’re not able to correct her behaviour, like we told them we needed for Angel? Honestly, I could’ve punched that woman in the face. First she gives me shitty advice about calming the dog, and when that only made it worse, she threw me out because she was unable to cope with it! The gall!
Bah, I’m getting mad just thinking about it again. Of course Dad as well as Hanneke and Kitty were also very irritated about that. The trainer told me she would call tomorrow. I’m very sure I’ll tell her how I felt being treated that way. Later, when I went back to pick Kitty and Dark up, I spoke a little bit with Kitty’s trainer and he obviously didn’t agree with the way the other trainer handeled this. He couldn’t say so, since she was his co-worker, but his tone and manner said enough for me. Ah well, we’ll see what the trainer has to say on the phone tomorrow.
So that was a bit depressing, but there also happened some good stuff. Like I went shopping with Monique again this afternoon, which is always fun. She forgot her dance certificate again (you know, the piece of paper we earned yesterday) and after I picked Kitty up at the dogschool, I brought the certificate over to Monique’s place. She later sms-ed me she really appreciated that, not because she wanted that certificate so much, but because she likes how I embrace each and every excuse just to see her for a few moments 
Also, for the first time in many years, I really talked with my sister again. About everything, the dogs, our parents, my mother (whom I haven’t spoken with in 9 years or so, but she still speaks with her), how we felt during the seperation of our parents, all kinds of things. It felt really good talking to my sister again in that way. She really is the only one who went through exact the same things as myself during those awful, awful years.
So except for being dissappointed in the dogschool, my day went quite well. Tomorrow I’ll be in Eindhoven the whole day, working together with Peter and Bart. That’ll be nice. But for now, time for bed.
Simple automatic PDF generation
It seems like an impossible task, generating a simple PDF on the fly. Well, maybe not that simple, I need quite a complex table in it, as I told you in a previous post. Bit it doesn’t seem to be that difficult, really. I’ve dropped TeX as a possible way to do it, since tabulary just doesn’t seem to work right. Bart suggested Report Lab, who have developed a PDF library for Python. A good one, as far as I can see at the moment. But still not easy enough to really create the PDF I want. I still need a bit of practise with it, though.
I’m thinking about notifying the customer that I may not be ready with the pdf-part by next week. I’ll have to discuss this with Bart and Peter first, though. Maybe they don’t see things as glum as I do. Delaying the PDF-part may be not really a problem, since people still get a HTML-version of the same info. Perhaps a possible solution for it, one that they can use in the meantime, is just printing the HTML. I’ll figure something out. Maybe tomorrow things will go faster, though. I’ll be working all day in Eindhoven with Peter. I’ll be more focussed that way, I think. We’ll see.
Dancetest, the result
For those of you who were expecting a post yesterday evening, sorry, I didn’t come around to it. Of course we’ve made it, although I’m not really happy with the scores we got. They probably reflect reality, but I still think they should be better for us. We got 7.5′s for all ballroom dances, 7.5 for Rhumba and Samba and 8 for Chachacha and Jive. Not bad scores at all, but I really feel the Rhumba and Samba should’ve been better. On the other hand, the ballroom-scores were much higher than I expected. Ah well, c’est la vie.
Next Sunday we’ll start with Silver Star, the next level in dancing. It’s going to be a fun group, I’ve noticed. Some people who we talked to quite often and who already did Silver Star wanted to do it again before doing the dance test and everyone from Silver we like go to Silver Star too. So I’m looking forward to that. I’ve already heard that the first lesson will be the complete new programme for Chachacha… We’ll see. It’s going to be fun, though.
Dancetest today!
Well, it’s been pretty quiet here, but I’ve been very busy. The main thing I did was practise for the dance test, which is today, in a few hours even. We’re ready, I think. Yesterday nothing really went well, but that’s usual, for us: The day before a test we’re not in a mood to do our best. We will not actually try to do our best today, either. That would stress us too much and make us look bad. The trick of dancing well is that when it counts, you dance just below your usual level. That way it’ll always look good. I’ll report later on how it went.
TeX and complex tables
Today one of our customers told us he wanted the programme we’re building for him to be finished on the first of February. Although we can’t promise anything like that (we have until the second week of February to finish it, that’s in the contract), we did told him we would try to do so. He’s not a bad ass, but he has customers who want to use the programme on that day. Peter and Bart are doing the really though stuff, and I’m trying to build a good solution to create PDF’s from the data that’s in the database.
The documents need to be in a really tight layout and PDF is perfect for that stuff. But there really isn’t anything in Open Source land that helps you build quick complex documents. I mean, all I want is HTML-like functionality and I’m done. Alas, although there is some work being done on the subject, those projects aren’t capabal of doing the stuff I need. So I tried LATEX.
I spend the whole afternoon looking for a solution, but it just didn’t come out right. You see, I need to have this, so I tried this code, but that gives me this result. Very frustrating when I can do it in HTML but am not able enough to do it in PDF. And the customer really needs that PDF-part. So I posted the message on Google Groups and am now waiting to see if anyone can reply to it and give me the solution. If not, the other alternative is to see if I can change the layout a little bit and still get a result that satisfies the customer. We’ll see, tomorrow.
Was only able to do 32 crunches today and had a bit of a slacky day. A lot of phone calls, though. Tomorrow will be a busy day, since I first need to go to Amsterdam and tomorrow evening I will be dancing again… You can notice the test is close by
Bart is doing way more work than I am, really. That’s gotta change. Thursday I’ll finally finish the pdf-thingy for B3 (yeah yeah, talking in riddles here, but you won’t die from it).
Crashing
Ah well, seems my whole day stood in the sign of crashing. First of all my OpenOffice crashed, after I opened a strange xls-file. It has never ever done that before. And I’m using OpenOffice for about two years now. Very peculiar. The thing is, since it hasn’t ever crashed before, I didn’t automatically save my document every 15 minutes… And I tend to keep OpenOffice open for several days at a time (I never turn of my desktop machine, too many automated processes depend on it) with the same document. At the moment I’ve been working for over a week on an offering at the darn thing crashed! The last time I saved was on the 14th! Three days of work gone! Luckily, I knew what I wanted to be in the document, so although it took me all day to get it done, it’s finally done now.
And then Monique and I went dancing again tonight. I went okay, except for that darn Quickstep (you may know it as a Foxtrot). Silver has a figure in it that’s called a ‘fish tail’ and it’s very difficult for me. First of all, it starts with a figure I know (left turn) very well, but danced at a different speed than normal. Normally a left turn is quick-slow-slow but just before a fish tail it’s slow-quick-quick. It really messes with the mind, such things. So when the teacher was looking, I failed to do each and every fish tail, but when Monique and I danced on our own a bit later, it all went fine! Darn Quickstep!
And the last crashing, my dad told me that Hanneke, a friend from the dog-club, will be over next Friday. Which is fun, we get visitors for the dogs every weekend. Although they usually go home again after a few hours… Hanneke will be staying until Sunday… She’s nice, so I don’t mind. Although it’s a bit strange to live with my dad when he has a girlfriend over… 
So crashing isn’t always bad
The dentist went okay. He decided he didn’t have the time to work on the filling, so he moved that to the next appointment on july the 1st. Hm, better put that in my agenda so I won’t forget it… Done! So I didn’t mind that change in plans, I was not really looking forward to that procedure. Maybe it would’ve been better if he did it last friday, but then again, maybe in 6 months time he has changed his mind
Yesterday Monique and I went walking with Angel, you know, the same dog I’ll be doing training with on the 24th of this month. Ten lessons and I’m hoping it’ll help her. I tried yesterday, too, though. Monique and I even had a fight about that. Angel has very low selfesteem, which isn’t strange, since she’s always being put down by Anouk and Aagje (you can see the dogs at my dad’s site). Well, Monique and I together learned Aagje her tricks. Aagje is a really easy dog to teach stuff, even though we were quite late to start with her training. Aagje just needs a firm hand, a real leader who holds the leach. If she knows that, she’ll do anything for the leader. I let Monique do most of the teaching, since she had never done that before. Of course, under my own supervision. Even though I’m not a dog trainer, I have been doing that for more than 10 years, so I think I know a bit about training dogs.
Aagje went quite alright. She’s not the best example of an obedient dog, especially since she still needs to check if the leader holding her leach is really a leader, and she’s simple got too much energy, but she turned out nicely. She knows when to sit, knows when to lie down. What more can you really ask? As I said, a firm hand works wonders with Aagje, because she brimful of selfesteem.
Since Angel has a lack of selfesteem, she’s much more difficult to train. Especially since she will try to attack strange dogs. We need to work to get her over that and I think the only way to do that is to give her a bit more confidence in herself when she’s put in a situation like that. That may sound strange, why would you try to give more confidence to a dog who tries to attack other dogs? But it’s quite easily understood, when you know a bit more about dogs. Angel is a kind of dog that’s known as a “fear-biter”, when she’s afraid, she’ll start attacking. Because dogs in the wild are dangerous when they’re attacking, it’s their instinct. So I think, if I can give her a bit more confidence in herself when she’s approaching other dogs, she might stop attacking.
Such things take time. Getting confidence in a dog is as difficult as it is to get confidence in a person. Maybe more so. When we went walking yesterday, I started doing that, talking to her, giving her easy commands, things she knows she can do well. When we approached another dog, I tried to give her some confidence by petting her a little, or giving her those simple commands again. Monique didn’t see any improvements, so she wanted to try the same technique we applied to Aagje. We argued about it, but in the end I gave in (I can’t deny Monique anything, I think) and I let her try it. She was firm with Angel and I immediatly saw the ill effect it had on Angel. She became very frustrated and scared, because she didn’t know if she was doing the right things and got punishment over things she didn’t understand. She didn’t react really bad, but Monique’s way wasn’t really improving it either. She just became more nervous.
So we argued about it, Monique and I, which ended in Monique telling me I should bring her home… NOW. So I did. But she still thinks I’m arrogant about it, because she didn’t see any improvements with my technique either. And I just can’t make her understand that such improvements will take a really long time…
The rest of the afternoon I worked. And yesterday night we went dancing in Klimmen. The ballroom dances went okay, but never perfect. Latin went really well, in my opinion. We had a nice time.
I forgot my crunches yesterday, and I still have to do my crunches today. I’ll report later on how many I did
Dentist
Bah. Need to go to the dentist today. Last time he already announced he needed to replace a filling. I’m definitly not looking forward to that.
I did 37 crunches again today. And the first thirty went relatively easy. So I guess I’m making progress.
Ah well, maybe tomorrow… Nothing interesting happened today really, so I’m shutting up now.I did it, I talked my girlfriend round. We’ll be doing silver again the next six months, regardless if we pass the test next week. Today we went dancing again. Monique came back from work early and planned her appointments for tomorrow as late as possible. She’s so sweet, she went to all that trouble just to make sure we got an extra dancing lesson today. It went very well, even! So it was worth it. Saturday the lesson will be in Klimmen, in “Zaal Keulen”. I’m writing that down here, so I know where I can look it up when I forget
I did 35 crunches again today. Hopefully tomorrow I can do at least 37 again.
Internet Kiosk
Today we got a request on how we would setup a low-cost Internet kiosk. You know, like an Internet café, only without the café part. A job we’re very interested in, since it’s just plain fun to do such a thing. The client already decided they wanted to go for a thin client solution. Which is good, since there’s a really good project, LTSP, which we can use to set this up. Since the client only asked for the ability to browse and do M$N, we can use Xfce in Kiosk-mode, together with Mozilla’s Firefox and AMSN to build a robust, easy to maintain solution! I’m looking forward to this already!
Why in English?
Elise asked me after yesterday’s article why I’m blogging in English and not in Dutch, since that’s my native language. Although my previous weblog was in Dutch and it would be far easier for me to blog in Dutch, people who know me well know my love for learning and blogging in English is a better learning experience. I’m trying to learn myself an English style, so I’ll be able to write some articles for English magazines. Maybe about Open Source or something. Also, maybe I’ll get a client from England or America, being able to write in English fluently and with a native flair would be a good thing, then. You never know when it comes in handy. Now you know. I will be writing some things in Dutch, though. I’ve been thinking about a short story for a few months now, I’ll do that in Dutch, since I’m not good enough in English to narrate in English.
On another note, 40 crunches wasn’t possible. With much effort I made 37. I did my crunches 30 minutes ago and I’m still feeling it
Walked with Dark again, since yesterday kinda rained away. It’s really fun, walking with a young puppy. You really get a lot of attention. We kept Dark on the leash the whole time, since the park was very crowded and although Dark listens very well, she still tends to loose us when there are a lot of humans strolling about. Especially since we usually keep on walking when she’s getting petted by other people (it’s a way to learn a dog she herself needs to keep an eye on the master). We saw a black Labrador Retriever puppy of fourteen weeks old. Very cute.
Tonight, at six o’clock, we’re going dancing again, just like last friday. I’m not especially looking forward to that and I think Monique and I sort of decided that this will be the last course we will be following. I will try to persuade her to follow this course again, though, since I think the second time we do it, it will go much better. I’m not sure if she’ll be persuaded, though. We have a lot of fight due to the dancing and I think we’re both a bit tired of those little rows.
On another note, apparantly the crunches are working already! My aunt told me today that I looked much thinner than the last time she saw me. Although I still weigh about 90 kgs, my belly apparantly looks better. I asked Monique if she saw the change too, already and she said she did, especially in my face. Ah well. I did 35 crunches today, by the way. Maybe tomorrow I can do 40
