[K'nex] Intruder

I started working on a block brake system for k'nex a week ago, and I decided to build a coaster around it, a small one.

I will post a few pictures with some explanation.

The brake is closed


The Brake is open


A sexy view on the drop and supports


The other half


And an overview


I enjoy building this one!

Hurray!

I just reached 1000 page hits today!

Let's celebrate with a new blog post tomorrow since I haven't updated in a while!

Coaster

I entered a competition on a coaster site, we have to build an Intamin Blitzcoaster like Maverick.

I don't see it as a competition anymore since I really happy with my design, I rather have a nice coaster and not win, than rush it and make it ugly. I'm half way through supporting the lot, which is already taking up 2 days.

I got a couple of pictures from old to new.















I really like the supports so far, they are quite realistic, and the color scheme is great too.

Cooking with Max (more like freezing though)

ICE CREAM!
I'm making ice cream at home, it's really "fon-to-due".
So I bought me 2 liters of yogurt, a melon, cream and a couple of lemons. When I got home, I grabbed my old blender and started pouring in the ingredients. I did put in a little bit too much lemon juice though, it's a little acidic at the moment, but it tastes really fresh though which is nice when they days are getting longer and when the temperature starts rising. I need to stir it every 2 hours for +/-6 hours. This will stop the crystallizing of the water and yogurt. The last thing you want is concrete ice cream. The melon ice is nearly done, but the banana doesn't really want to solidify. So I have to stay up late to stir it till it's done.

I'm pretty sure you all have water running down your mouth because of this delicious ice cream I'm making. So I won't hassle to give you my recipe! And here is a little fun thing for you dutchies! I will post it in dutch too, only on a rare occasion though!

Here we go,
The English version:

What you need:
-little box
-Fruit (Any fruit really I'll use melon for this recipe, it's a bit of a guess to get the right quantities, 1 melon to 1 liter of yogurt would do. 2 or 3 bananas to 1 liter of yogurt.)
-Yogurt, (1 liter)
-Lemons (1 melon per liter)
-Cream(100ml), the one you can whisk for whipped cream. (Not really needed, just a nice addition)
-Sugar, lot's of it. (By guess really, depends on how sweet you want it, I used +/- 7 spoons for little over 1 liter.)
- Bit of water, not needed, this will give it more sorbet-ish taste.
-A blender

The actual work:
Step1: Cut the fruit to cubes. And squeeze out the lemon juice.

Step2: Poor in yogurt in the blender, be careful not more than half of the blender's capacity. Now add the fruit, not all at once since you most likely will have to blend multiple times because it doesn't fit all at once. Also add a little bit of water and half of the cream. Add half of the lemon juice and a few spoons of sugar +/- 3.

Step3: Blend it all down till you have a smooth mix without any chunks.

Step4: Poor it in the box.

Step5: Repeat step 2, 3 and 4 till you got your desired amount.

Step6: Put the box in the fridge and give it a whisk, now the fun part comes, you will HAVE TO stir it every 2 or 3 hours till it is completely solidified! Don't forget your ice cream or you might end up with frozen a block of concrete that tastes like fruit!

Step7: When it is completely solidified, Enjoy!

NOTE:The thicker the layer in the box, the longer it takes to solidify.
(I didn't test it with chocolate yet, but I guess it would work too.)





De Nederlandse Versie:

Benodigdheden:
-Een bakje
-Fruit, kies maar uit, ik gebruik meloen als voorbeeld. De hoeveelheden zijn niet precies en komt grotendeels neer op gevoel. 1 meloen is genoeg voor 1 liter ijs. 2 á 3 bananen zijn genoeg voor 1 liter ijs.
-Yoghurt, (1 liter)
-Citroenen (1 citroen per liter)
-(Slag)Room (100ml), hoeft niet per sé maar is wel lekker.
-Suiker, veel suiker. Ongeveer 7 eetlepels per liter.
-Beetje water, echt niet veel, hoeft niet maar dit zorgt ervoor dat het meer sorbet-achtig word.
-Blender

Aan de slag:

Stap1: Snij het fruit in blokjes en pers de citroenen uit.

Stap2: Vul de blender tot de helft met yoghurt, voeg het fruit toe, niet alles in 1 keer, je zal waarschijnlijk meerdere keren moeten blenderen. Voeg een klein beetje water toe en wat citroensap. Schep +/- 3 scheppen suiker erbij.

Stap3: Blender het geheel tot er geen stukjes meer in zitten.

Stap4: Doe de mix in het bakje.

Stap5: Herhaal stap 2,3 en 4 tot je de hoeveelheid hebt die je wilt maken.

Stap6: Doe de bak in de vriezer en roer het nog een laatste keer door. Nu het leukste gedeelte, je MOET elke 2 á 3 uur roeren tot het geheel helemaal gestold is.
Vergeet dit niet, anders eindig je met een bevroren blok steen met een smaakje.

Stap7: Als het geheel uitgehard is, Eet Smakelijk!

Letop: Hoe dikker de laag in het bakje, des te langer duurt het voordat je ijs klaar is.
(Ik heb dit nog niet getest met chocolade, maar ik denk dat dat ook wel lukt.)

Enjoy your ice cream!

Back in Action!

Finally, my Internet works properly again. For some reason I couldn't login to my blogspot account thus being unable to post a new entry, but here we go.

I got a whole list of short entries here so let's get on with it:

-Since my last entry I received a lot of marks for the tests I made during testweek.
The lowest being a 7.3/10 till now, unless German is worse, but I'm not sure about that mark yet.

-That being said, I'm glad to announce that my mate Robin is talking again! Congrats dude!

-Alex finally bought a band shirt and he is now part of the "club"

-I coded some more in Lua and added and cleaned some code.

-We need make a presentation for Chemistry and it has to be done before Tuesday. We really are gonna rush tomorrow since we are far from finished. We were supposed to work on it last Saturday but my friend decided he would go help setting up a party for his grandma... He could've called me for friggin' f*ck. I was waiting all day for him to show up until I took the initiative and called him. If I'd known this before I would have worked some more for Klien! So I'd like to thank Bram for preventing me from earning money!

-Me and a couple of the girls are going to see Slumdog Millionaire. Most likely next Friday since we are all off then.

-Last but not least I'd like to dedicate this entry to "Lonnie" or also known as Lonneke because she "asked" for it. Also Patty for discovering my blog.

The End.

Testweek is over, so back to regular bio-rhythms. But first I'm gonna enjoy a "long" weekend, I was home early today and Monday I got the first 2 hours off, as usual.

Tonight I'm going to the theater and tomorrow I'm going to Patty since she is giving a late-birthday party.

O shi- I still need to buy a card, I'll do that first when I finish writing this entry.

Rest of the week will be coding in Lua, learning Lua, trial and error and lots of testing.
I also "converted" my code to the new WIP gamemode base (fretta) that is being developed.
It increased my productivity by quite a lot, in 2 hours I got it converted and even fixed me the laser-swep. (I still have no clue how to make effects, so I looked at other people's code and used it as an example, well at least I got me some effects!)

Lua

I'm the progress on learning Lua is slowly advancing, I have the derma panel set-up + the player loud-out.

It's all basic stuff right now and for the final gamemode is far from finished, right now I want to get my swep to work and I got 1 guy helping me, though I really have no clue what everything does, so I am looking at examples a lot.

The hardest part is getting a good weapon HUD and fixing the Laser effect.

Wish me luck! :-)

It has begun...

Testweek started today and as far as I know I'm doing a pretty decent job.
Physics wasn't that hard and History was just a plain boring test.
So wish me luck for tomorrow, Geography and French!


I also started to learn to code in Lua. Right now I'm working on a gamemode for Gmod and I'm "finishing" of the basic team set-up. After I'm done writing this I'll start working on the Vgui/DermaVgui panel to choose a team. After that I'm gonna see how far I can get with my laserswep.

Also, funny stuff, I've been trying to figure out why I got an error on my scripts.
Apparently I confused a ":" with a "." and broke the entire script. I just fixed it this morning :)

Take it easy on me...

I just received a message from my friends that one of them is in the hospital since yesterday.

I hope he doesn't mind me writing about him on my blog, or I'll just delete it right away.

So basically what I know is that he went into a shock during chemistry and was taken to hospital. For some unknown reason he can't talk. It really worries me.

"Robin:
Mate, get well soon, I hope to visit you tomorrow with the rest of the girls. You are first on my list, but I can not visit you after I have done my job.
Get well soon, we all hope the best.

Kind Regards, your pall, Max."

Tomorrow, and Bass.

Tomorrow I will go shopping with a mate of mine, since he just convinced his mom he could buy a bandshirt. I'm pretty sure he was just waiting to see how people would react when I would wear one.
No negative comments straight to the face, but knowing girls, they are talking about it without me knowing. So message to all of you:

"BUSTED!!"

I really love my Arch Enemy bandshirt, once you got one you want more, and so do I, that's why I bought a Nightwish bandshirt too. People like this one a lot more for the reason that it doesn't have a huge skull on it, but just the simple text "Bring the Dawn" and a picture of a blue-ish moon and an Angel on the front.


At school we have been practicing for Music class for a couple of weeks now.
We are going to play "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix. It's a lovely song, the music, I don't fancy the lyrics.
We need to perform a song with a band. So we got Alex playing the Guitar, Paul on the drums and Olivier on the Keyboard (chords) and me playing the bass. We tried practicing during lunch almost every day. But sadly, there was going to be a concert at our school, and people who were practicing for that took priority. So we had basically 2 days we could practice as a band and so we did. It sounds pretty well for now, it's just that the drummer has trouble keeping the same fast paced rhythm, his arms keep getting tired. Monday we got to perform it and I'm pretty convinced we will score the highest mark, because we always asked our teacher if we could practice during lunch (effort). And secondly because we already started learning our parts early on, other groups only got their tabs last Monday.

I'm going for a 8/10 but I think we can score an easy 9/10.

Stuff I've been doing over the past week.

1. Not post regularly on my blog.

2. Shopping with Pleuni, I bought another bandshirt.

3. Break the headphone's cord from my MP4.

4. Buy a new headphone.

5. Homework.

6. Inhale lots of dust and toxic vapors from the paint.

7. Write an article for the SSC-Magazine edition No.2

8. Work and pre-pay a couple of hotels for the "Germany Trip '09"

House refurbishment.

Mess mess mess. Nothing but it.

The new ceiling has been laid. More like hung but whatever. They put on a coat so it is flat and matches the other room's height. The walls still aren't done, and the worker isn't coming back till Monday. If everything goes to plan it should be done by Tuesday. That is another 5 days of no dining table, no TV, no Printer and A LOT of dust. I have to keep putting my shoes on and of before going upstairs if I don't want to ruin the stairs.

So, I guess I will have to sacrifice my PC a lot since it is the only one with Internet on it. (Besides the laptops)

Anyway long story short, it drives me crazy, I can't wait for work tomorrow and afterwards hanging out with Pleuni.

Extreme House Make-over (Kinda)

Boy I hate my house right now.
Mom decided it would be a good idea to redo the walls. So all of our furniture is wrapped in plastic foil and the TV is unplugged, not to mention the Wii.
I have no space to do homework what-so-ever. So I am packed up in a 4x3 kitchen with a table in it which takes like a third of the space. Yesterday my mom decided we would lower the ceiling in the main living room so it matches with the extra room we build a couple of years ago. (We build it because my Dad sat in a wheelchair.)
So now they are drilling holes (Yes even at 8 PM!) and lowering the ceiling.

I tried sleeping this afternoon, but they already started back then. I couldn't sleep even though I was very tired.

Luckily we still have Internet at my PC and my laptop, but I won't let my mom use my PC. Whatever I don't even have a text-editor on it besides notepad and notepad++

Meanwhile I try learning Physics, and enjoying the band I just discovered: "In Flames"

Oh I also scored a 9.9/10 for Maths!

Binary Watch.

I just learned binary, at least the number part.
And I instantly got hooked, those watches are so much fun! You have people looking at you, how late is it? You take a look at LED's and you tell them the time. Can it be any simpler? (Yes actually but can it be any more fun?!)
They cost quite a lot... But I hope to get it for my birthday!

Watch out, there is a new GEEK on the loose!

Slumber Party!

What is a vacation for me if I can't see my friends?

I slept at Anna's yesterday together with the other girls and 2 boys. It's always so nice there, everyone is nice to each other and we always have lots of fun.

We watched a couple of movies, first "Not Another Teen Movie" and after that "I am Legend". Time flies and soon it was 3.30 AM when we decided to go to bed. We prepared our beds and kept chatting at the girls room. When my "room mate" decided to go to bed, the girls wanted me to stay, so we kept chatting about movies and stuff for another 15 minutes 'till I decided I'd go to bed too.
I slept pretty well, until I woke up at 7 AM because of a friggin' car alarm! My room mate woke up too and we looked at each other for a moment. Both thinking the exact same: "GRRR CAR ALARM!"
We fell asleep again till 8 AM and then at 9 AM we decided to see if the girls were awake already.

Most of them were, so we chatted for a while and then we had breakfast, with American Pancakes!

Also I got my butt kicked by Anna at "Super Smash Bros Melee".
So much fun!

Bandshirt.

It's early in the morning now, 8.51 AM and I'm pretty tired, but life has to go on, and I have to work today, I skipped doing the advertismentpapers on Friday now I have to do them today. *gasp*

Yesterday was pretty cool, I decided I wanted a new pair of jeans, black of course with chains and that kinda stuff on it, y'know like Goths and metal heads have, I am a metal head after all!
My mom was not amused when I told her this, but after lots of whining and trying to convince her it has nothing to do with "NeoNazi's" she finally gave in, but I had to pay for it myself.
So I cycled to Anna's house and picked her up and together we cycled to meet up at Pleuni's house. We chatted about us never seeing each other because neither of us takes the initiative to call or e-mail. We stored the bike's in the garden and continued on foot.
First we were going for a new bag for Pleuni. Lot's of different models and after some time we found one. Then we went for my jeans at "Cupido Fashion" it's a pretty, 'dark' shop with all the masks and music, I like it!
Too bad they didn't have any cool jeans, but then I noticed bandshirts! Cradle of Filth, I like them, but the supply was pretty limited. Nightwish, not too much choice either. Then I spotted an Arch Enemy bandshirt, from the album Doomsday Machine. Alex is gonna like this, I bought it! Check it out here!
Anna got a little bit hungry so we decided to eat at "La Place" Apparently Pleuni has a trauma for escalators so we used the elevator instead.
Soon an elevator arrived with a young woman and her little children. One of this kids touched the door as it opened, and his fingers got stuck in between the little gap the door slides back to! I didn't know what happened, so I stood there, WTF? Until I suddenly realized shit happened! I didn't know how fast I had to throw away my bag and start pulling on the door to free the little child's fingers. Those are pretty tough, I had to put my feet against the wall so I could pull harder. But soon after his fingers slid out and he was free to go. Poor little child, the woman didn't know how to thank me. But hey, being the hero of the day feels good!
Oh the meal was pretty good too, apple pie for me with some coffee.
Anna needed some paint, so we bought that and we went home.

When I arrived home I showed the shirt, my brother started laughing at me and my mom was kinda shocked because of the massive skull.
My other brother, I think, wasn't amused either. What's the big deal? If I feel comfortable in it, why can't I wear it? They are laughing about it now, but hey this is not going to be my only bandshirt!

Holiday and Numbers.

Finally, Holiday just started for me, but for most people it's already over, Ha...

So I'm gonna work on my coaster, live stream a lot of it (You can find it here. Tomorrow I'm going to my mom's school for "Carnaval". (I hate it, but hey a day at that school is totally awesome!) I'm gonna finish my website as far as possible and game, I am also gonna paint for art class. What are you gonna do in your Holiday, or if it's already over, what did you do?

Numbers, I love numbers but don't you have a number you encounter everyday?
My number is 37, when I look at the clock it's xx:37 when I watch how long a song is playing on my Mp4 or PC it says 37, When I do maths I get the number 37, I just got my paycheck and I get paid €4.37 an hour. Insanity!

Do you have one of those numbers too? It's pretty scary if you ask me. *shivers*

Music, Maths and what more?

Yeah totally awesome, we need to pick a song for music class at school and play it with a small group. We chose "Hey Joe" from Jimi Hendrix, and I get to play the bass line! So I'm kinda desperately finding someone to borrow me a bass guitar otherwise I am stuck with my semi-acoustic one with a shorter neck. I can practice the bass tabs on that too, but the real feel is so much better!
I'm not sure how long we have to practice it, but we are trying to get access to the classroom during breaks. I'm lucky I play a lot of instruments, so if any of my "Band members" are in trouble I can give them a short course on how to play a part and so on!
Let's hope we can pull it off.

So Maths, it's so easy. I got a test tomorrow and I barely have to learn for it, I tried a couple of the 'hardest' exercises, but I had no trouble making them, so I am pretty confident that I will get a good mark. The only thing that bothers me, is that they always find a way to make it a lot harder than you expected it to be, either by making really hard exercises or making it really long so you get short on time.
I'd get a good mark, pretty sure about that ;)

Also, a friend of mine kinda started a war on who would get the most blog hits, and he is on the lead, laughing in my face because I am doing all the "publicity-stuff" Obviously he didn't notice that if you read my blog at hyves it doesn't register a page-view, thus leaving me behind. So it'd be cool if you helped me out and just go to www.gimaxweblog.tk to watch it next time, haha.

To everyone at Hyves.

I will not post on my blog in Dutch!

Reasons:
1. This blog is linked from www.gimax-maxlaam.blogspot.com using a .tk domain at www.gimaxweblog.tk This means that you are not the only one who reads this blog.

2. I am linked to an English gaming community, meaning that they (can) only read English.

3. It's a good practice for myself trying to write proper English sentences and train my grammar.

4. It's good practice for you too, seeing how bad the pronunciation from the Dutch in general actually is. And it is also a nice way to expand your vocabulary.

5. English is my second language I taught myself. I never learned for my English tests in a serious way. And as long as it lasts I am not planning on doing so either.

Saturday and webspace, a quicky.

I will be helping at school at the Physics class with a friend of mine. Showing demo's to future students. And try to convince them that our school totally rocks.

I also managed to get a webspace with unlimited space from an old mate of mine I met online at a gaming community. It's hosted at an US server, but that shouldn't bother us too much.

Let's round it up real quick, I'm tired and it's already past midnight, blèh!
I will not give the link till I finished up the homepage, which is far from actually.
Creating an interactive website is not as easy as it looks!

Groceries

I do the groceries with my mom every now and then.
And I usually don't bother about other customers but today was different.

2 Little girls I think they were about 11 or 12 years old were there buying a couple of energy drinks and a bag of crisps.

They constantly shouted through the shop and in stead of saying mouth they said gob and other words like that being very rude.
Starting a childish argument about a finger not being your hand (which it is basically part of, so WTF?)

Seriously what's going on with today's society? Children at the age of 12 don't need energy drinks. They should be taught how to behave in public, like not shouting and not using those kind of words.

Worst of all, me being part of the youth of modern society makes me feel guilty too, of course I use those kind of words too, but not in public, just to friends and people I know will not take it too serious. Second I never shout in public.
What's wrong with the good old days you showed respect to elderly people?
Why is suddenly everyone addicted to energy drinks. Then why the hell are those young children using it? They got loads of energy for them selves, oh wait, they don't because suddenly everyone is obsessed with PC's and social networking.

Yes I know this is linked to hyves, but at least I do not use it 24/7 like most people do, and you know who I am talking about. I got hyves to stay in contact with my friends, why do I suddenly have a shit load of people on it I don't or barely know?

I am as guilty as the rest except I am not ADDICTED to social networking. And this for me makes a huge difference, gaming is addictive too, but when done right you can have fun and talk to people at the same time. I got loads of people I usually game with, we don't share personal stuff but we do talk about stuff that happened to real life, it's like a debate. I agree it is not as good as real life contact, but I got friends there too so I can't say I am an unlucky person.

Some stuff.

Hey fellas,

I really do apologize for not posting everyday, but sadly, other stuff has to be done too, so I hope you understand I try to post everyday, but if I don't you know I've been busy.

So here we go.

Yesterday, the first day after the outbreak week we started with Physics, sadly our teacher was ill so we could have stayed home for another extra hour. Then, our French teacher was ill too, so we didn't have any lessons at the 7th hour. What a nice day, haha.

Today our French teacher was still ill and we should have had a test for it today, lucky us, POSTPONED. They also managed to move our last lesson of the day to that hour, so I am home early, enjoying little pizza sandwiches ;)

The 6th hour (our last one) was history we also postponed a test there till next week, hurray! But it was a really nice lesson, we didn't need to make any homework and we only had to listen to our teacher explaining stuff about the Soviet Union and the US and how Cuba got involved with this all. For some reason it reminded me of those online colleges you see on youtube, they are fun and teach you quite a lot. I started thinking of filming it with permission once and maybe upload it with subtitles in english. Just an idea and it will never be worked out.

Second I got a question of my cousin, "Can't you post something in Dutch sometime?"
Easy answer: No, reason behind this is that I want the English blokes to be able to read it too, remember this is not just linked to hyves. It is a stand alone blog you can find at www.gimaxweblog.tk it is also linked to a gaming community and most of the members are English there. In the futute I will also make my own website and link it to that too.

Another thing, I believe my sponsor worked out the problem with the webspace, I got a message with the stuff needed, but I can't figure it out, I guess I'll ask him tonight.

My bad, other shiz.

Weekends, haha, you always forget to post something.

Anyway, I've been working all night to make a basic website setup, I already found a sponsor for a webspace, but he couldn't create an account for me for unknown reasons so he mailed the customer support.

A girl-friend of mine needed help with building a website for school. She needed help with CSS, so I decided I'd give it a shot and see what I could do.
It's really sweet and once I master this and fine-tune my XHTML I'd probably have to learn Java or something like that, haha.

I'm making progress on the website, even though it goes really slow. I only fixed the front page so far, but it's not done yet. I'm probably going to make a basic lay-out for now and mail the files to my girl-friend and see if she can do something with it. I'll back up some files and use them for my self when I get this done, I'm planning on making a download page for my Nolimits Coasters, and maybe even a place to show off my K'nex coasters.
For tutorials on HTML an CSS I strongly suggest www.w3schools.com

Oh I nearly forgot this, I'm planning on recreating Formule-X from Drievliet. It's a launched X-coaster and it's really sweet. In fact I already built the launch and I'm close to finishing the loop (which is an ff-ing pain!) I think the only hard part I might run into is the barrelroll. It's pretty hard to get those to be smooth.
The speed probably won't be realistic, for 2 reasons. I got limited space if I build a 4 feet high loop I will have to scale the rest up too (Space!). Second of all, I'm only using 1 car with a customized chaindog, and I only stretched the launch till about 1/3 of the entire length and it already made the loop.
This is going to be a fast coaster, but oh boy will it be sweet once I finish it!

One last note, not to get your hopes down. I will NOT make an onride, for 1 simple reason, I noticed on Tachophobia that in the last corner the car pulled quite a few g's and distorted the camera for a split second. Now a launch takes about 0.5 seconds if not shorter but that's enough to seriously damage my camera.

School/Weekrecap

Sorry for not posting yesterday, I just didn't have the time for it.

So let's make a quick recap of the entire week shall we?

Monday:
I had French "Taaldorp" Which I have no clue about if I did it well or completely screwed it up.
We ate a burger at the local Mac at 10 AM.
Had a samba percussion workshop, kinda blew my eardrums too.
Afterwards had a workshop Salsa Dance and danced with 6 girls.
Went to P's house and we had a little walk through the city and went to the movies afterwards.

Tuesday:
We started with some math, just for fun.
Watched the movie "Juno" about a girl who gets pregnant at the age of 16.
At 1 PM we went ice skating.

Wednesday:
We had the NLT project, we learned something about blood spatters.
And we also learned how to extract the DNA from an onion.

Thursday:
More math and also went to "Kamp Vught".

Friday:
English "Taaldrop" (Epic fun, me and my friend had to do a couple of role plays and we were on a roll, joking a lot, but it gave us a good mark for creativity.)
GPS tour, we got a GPS device and had to follow the way points and eventually find a treasure, nobody found it btw. (We were at the right spot but apparently the treasure was stolen.)
German "Taaldorp" Boy did I fuck it up. I was tired too and I looked like I had been smoking pot...

Thats basically my whole week, I can't say I'm all that excited about it.

Meh...

Guitar, School and Painting

Yesterday evening I found the chords of Canon in D on Ben Allen's twitter, I started looking up the grips and in no time I was playing it at a slow pace, but at least I mastered 2 baret chords!! I got the grips, the only thing left is speed and getting my fingers on the right position a lot faster. Anyway, thanks Ben!

Today we had a NLT project I was talking about earlier, it kinda sucked to be honest.
I don't fancy working with cows blood at 8.30 in the morning.
We had a big break when we finished the first part, and because it is Wednesday they sell hotdogs at our school. Totally worth the buy, 2 sausages on a piece of bread with sauce of free choice, only €1,65.

Then we started on the second part, isolating DNA from an onion. I worked together with Alex, and we collected a fair amount of DNA from the onion. For some reason it felt like it was burning on the skin, but it might also have been an illusion, I'm not sure, at least I don't have any serious burn marks on my hand, so I guess it was just my head.

When I got back home, I turned on my laptop for some music and decided it would be a good idea to finish the color examples for art class. So I did quite a lot on that too, but It's nowhere from being finished, and I only got till next Wednesday.

Ice Skating

Yeah I'm sorry I didn't blog yesterday, I won't go into details but I didn't feel like it at all. Second of all I think I will keep Sunday as a resting day and not blog either.

Anyway, I used to go ice skating a couple of years back every Friday. But that was only for 1 year. When I first stepped on the ice today I felt very insecure thinking "How could I have ever liked this?" I didn't like it at all, the slippery feeling, those stupid skates I had to rent, who were too small and very uncomfortable.

The only thing I worried about was falling, until a friend of mine pointed out you have to bend your knees a little, and it helped a lot. I didn't fall once and soon I was already having a fair amount of speed.

But still I couldn't enjoy it, the skates were so painful I had to take a break after every lap I made. I was glad when they started refreshing the ice at the middle, gave me a good reason to step off the ice and get me a hot coco.
I decided I was hungry too so I ordered a sandwich.

We decided to sit next to a couple of classmates but I couldn't get stuff out of my mind and they pointed out that I was staring a lot...

I was glad that we could leave whenever we wanted after 2 PM. Oh boy I was glad to cycle home... I fell asleep on the couch till about 5PM when we had diner, I did some schoolwork and now I am here. Typing on my blog, being completely bored and shit is fucked up in my head...

My job

As some of you might know I got a job and I love it.
I've been working for a cleaning company called "Klien" (For the English blokes pronounced as "Clean")for at least 1 1/2 year now. The name comes from the English word "Clean" but written like we pronounce it in dutch. We clean apartments and back in the old days we also did offices. We work with students and teens ranging from 16 to 30. (Few exceptions made)

I started there at a very young age, normally they wouldn't have accepted me, but they were short on employees. Besides my brother asked if I wanted to come work there, at that time he was in charge of a couple of "Projects" as we call them in a certain area.

So I said yes almost straight away, how can you reject a job that pays €4.43 per hour at the age of 14? You can't, it pays heck of a lot more than working at a local supermarket.

At first it started of very rough, I expected my project to be in my brothers area, but it wasn't. I got into the messiest area of them all. The one who was in charge of it got fired not long after. I also had a hard time keeping up with the speed, normally you get paid 3 hours and that is the time you should be able to clean the project. It took me 1 1/2 hour to clean the first stairwell. I had to do 4 off them.

Soon I got the hang of it and I reached the 3 hour mark. I still wasn't satisfied because it was a very boring project to clean, 4 identical stairwells. I asked for a transfer and I got through. I'm still working at my "new" project and I love it. I loved my job so much that I started working more and more. And soon I earned over 100 euros each month.

Things have changed during this time, an Inspector decided he would stop and my brother replaced his spot. My other brother I didn't mention before used to be a regular employee but ranked up and replaced my brothers spot as an "Project leader".

Basically my 2 brothers are in charge off me, and it's going really smooth.

If you are dutch and live around Breda, I strongly suggest looking at our website. It pays a heck of a lot more than working at your supermarket thats just around the corner. It's a really fun job, you interact with the "Clients" and during Christmas and new year they give you tips.
Today I got invited to drink a cup of coffee which I rejected just to stay polite, even though I could have used one, It was cold and I was only wearing my Fleece-Sweater and Polo.

More school.

Today I had a chat with my nephew, who is also an art teacher at our school and is involved with the ZEP. I ask him if he had a chat with my coach yet, he said he didn't so I explained him the lot.

He said there would be no exceptions but he would ask if there were some tickets left (like they usually have for the people who didn't have the opportunity because of illness etc.) He said he would e-mail me if he could get me one.

A truck arrived with the seats, which appears to be pretty big. And they already placed quite a few.

I also received a new roster for that will replace the old one after the Outbreak week. And it's crap. Just like my previous roster I have no lessons on Monday for the first 2 hours. Instead I get a nice 8th hour so I will be home late. For the rest off the week I got the first hour off on Tuesday and Friday, but Wednesday and Thursday are full 7 hour days, and that sucks. I really liked having an early weekend on Friday only having 6 hours. But that dream is roughly interrupted.

I can only hope they screwed something up and redo our roster.

Mencia ZEP.

If I only knew it was so big.

I didn't bother when they sold the tickets 2 weeks ago, I never thought it would be so big.

ZEP is a cultural evening for and from students from my school, there is a big stage and multiple students perform an act. And I had no idea what it was, reason? I'm new on that school.

Today a truck arrived with trusses, moving heads, lights and scanners. I mean, what the fuck? I thought it was just a stage with a couple of spots, but moving heads and scanners? This must be big!

So I had a chat with my coach (My art teacher), he helps me with school and stuff so I feel comfortable (I am new remember.) We have a chat every 2 weeks and today was one of them. I told him I didn't expect it to be so big, but there were no more tickets. Since he is pretty much involved with everything that has to do with the ZEP, he told me he would see if he could get me a ticket, I said it wasn't necessary until he offered me a spot on the second floor of the hall next to the performers. I'd probably be there all alone since I don't know much people, so I am not sure if I will go or not.

(I feel so dumb for not buying a ticket.)

Those days...

When you are home alone need to do maths homework and are chatting with friends and do not know what to blog about. I hate them.

Then you also need to learn your french test and physics test and the only good thing is that you eat pizza, but that dream gets disturbed by the fact that there is nothing interesting on tv.

Yeah, hopefully I got something worth blogging about tomorrow.

I am Jesus?

Apparently so...
I've been compared to multiple celebrities because of my long hair, my mom usually calls me Andre Rieu.

I went to a Halloween party as Jesus once but I didn't expect what happened today.

An 11th grader stepped up to me and my friends, knelt down in a praying position and said. "May I be your apostle my lord?" Then he ran away and me and my friends really didn't know what to say besides "What the f***?"

It probably was some kind of bet he made with his lame ass friends, I hope he enjoys his Coffee.

Lol.

School rant.

School is cool, I don't hate it, but I hate it when they change the roster.
Today we received the roster for coming week.
Next week is "Mencia Outbreak" and I can't really say I'm all that excited. The activities are cool and such, but I honestly can't be bothered about it.

Yet I am so glad I chose the N&T profile, basically includes Physics, Hardest maths, Chemistry and a few other classes I am going to follow next year.

If I chose another profile, I would have had to do some kind of roleplay about the UN, and I hate speaking and presenting stuff for a larger mass. So I chose another profile, and now I have to test DNA and blood groups, absolutely awesome!

On Monday we are having a workshop about "Samba Percussion" and a workshop
"Salsa Dance" The second day we are going ice skating which I have mixed feelings about, I don't like cycling to the other side of the city just for a couple of hours fun. We also get to see a movie which I predict has something to do with "Kamp Vught" which was a camp that held Jews in the WW2. We are also going on an excursion there.

I think the last day will suck most, we got something called "Taaldorp" Basically means you have to have a conversation with your teachers in 3 different situations, a restaurant, a clothes shop and a tourist information office. I'm not worried about the English one, but I am about French and German. To be honest, I absolutely suck at German, My French is OK but it takes me quite some time to construct a proper sentence. So back to studying I guess.

I think the best thing of this week will be my date with the girl I like. (let's hope she doesn't read my blog :P )

[Edit: She already did, shes absolutely fine with it.]

Theatre and lights.

I love going to the theater, no wonder my mom bought us a a subscription to a theater nearby, we were allowed to pick a couple (8?) shows from the coming year, we already had quite a few.

I like the plays in general, but I am still amazed by the lights. Just as any other kid I got a couple of those "disco lights" for my birthday and such.

Lightning isn't as easy as it looks, and that is what I found out last year just before summer break.
My mom's colleague asked if I wanted to help at a school play, just the technical side, sound and lights. We still had a few months before the actual play, and that was when I learned working with DMX.

DMX is the international protocol to control lights, t exists out of numbers from 0-255
0 being off and 255 the brightest everything in between is a dimmed light.
It is wonderful and you can't only control lights with it, but also scanners and moving heads.
Now moving heads are quite expensive, scanners being less and my mom's colleague had just bought a pair of them. Scanners are great, but the problem is that controlling them with sliders on a showmaster panel just doesn't give the accuracy you need to use it as a moving spotlight.
Instead we used it to reach areas normal lights couldn't get, little shows before the play and after gave us a the ability to entertain the crowd while the actors dressed up.

The play went great, it took us a full week to set everything up in the hall.
The most time taking the wiring. We only had 4 dimmerpacks which resulted in some nasty maths and buying new DMX cords which cost us quite a few euros.
The problem was that we only had limited cords to link the lights to the dimmerpack and it's always handy if you can have the lights "grouped", in the way of, having a couple of the same spots in a row on the slider panel. We couldn't use soft-patching either, so we had to do everything the hard way: Trial and Error.

Then a second problem occured, the lights, who were hung up on a long iron beam only secured at 2 points, started to sag.
We fixed this by using little chains and trying to suspend it from them. Worked like a dream.

Then the hardest part of all started, we had 5 hours to fix the lights for all the scenes, programming them on the showmaster. Only because we completely forgot how to programm "steps" it took us another 30 minutes plowing through the manuals and doing a little test.
We ran out of time and the poor actors could go home 1 hour later than we planned. And still it wasn't done. I believe we fixed the last 3 scenes only 2 hours before the first show. We had little time left and thats what we used to programm little pre-shows. The comments were amazing. The show was a succes.

I'm addicted to theatre, I think, and I judge a big part of the plays I go to on the lightning.

So what I was wanting to say is that, I don't have the money to buy DMX in real life, so I simulated it in a game called Gmod.

I started of doing a basic slider set up.


And then I started to make it a little more advanced, still using the same technique but I found out a masterslider can be very usefull.


And then a couple of weeks ago, I decided I would have to hard code it. Which I did, I used a chip that manipulates given inputs and so gives other outputs. I also made a scanner for it.


The biggest change is that instead of using the 255 units I only used 30.
255/30 gives a whole new ouput, less accurate but you won't notice the difference if you do it right.

I suck at making promises .

Didn't I say that I would make a blog post atleast every week or so?