Present Perfect

A day with the least to look forward to... Forced myself to see a bunch of possibly interesting bands but came out empty-handed. Took some time out to check on the webstreams my collagues were doing. Peter, Tinneke and I killed time in various way, including demonstrating the Befmatron, a new device soon on a home shopping channel near you.

Finally, it was time to watch the triumphant return of Soulwax, our best home town band. What, you don't know who they are ? Maybe you might know their alter ego's, the world-famous 2ManyDJ's ? I really liked their show, but I missed the show and fun from previous concerts. But hearing Stephen say, after playing a song where he screamed no-no-no yeah-yeah-yeah repeatedly, in a quiet calm voice, "That song was called No no no yeah yeah yeah", made me miss the typical flegmatic Gent sense of humor.

After the show I rushed to the CD stand to buy their new album. I love the artwork, great idea, nicely done, I won't spoil it by explaining what it is. Waited for Archive, who actually did seem to have some fans, and they gave a great concert. After that, watched a bit of Hundred Reasons who have grown to be tremendously better than last time I saw them, though still too shouty for my taste. Also watched a bit of White Stripes, which were as to be expected - you hear a guitar, a scrawny voice, and someone banging pots at the back in a sort-of-rhythmic fashion.

And after all of that it was time to get to bed and go back home ...

A day with the least to look forward to... Forced myself to see a bunch of possibly interesting bands but came out empty-handed. Took some time out to check on...

Day 2 kicked off with a great concert by De Portables, a band from Gent. A few of the members used to work at the same radio station as I did at the university, and the bass player is our favourite rock chick's boyfriend. They kicked off a rocking cover of Michael Sambello's "Maniac" with some bad news: Willeke wasn't there because she was in the hospital ! On the very day that her favourite singer - which I share with her - was going to close the festival... Ran into Geert, my technician from the days at the radio. He had been struck by a mysterious disease this year, but he seems to be on the rebound now and I'm sure a good healthy day of rock will have cured him even more ! Good to see him back.

Ran into lots of people I knew today, which was great. I hadn't expected to see so many.

By this time Jeroen and Annelies had also arrived, great to see them back !

Tried to avoid the Bloodhound Gang but failed because they were rescheduled, argh !
Enjoyed Elbow thoroughly, though I'd really like to see them play a complete show one day. Melissa Auf Der Maur was as cute as ever - even though these days everyone seems to agree with her being cute so that takes away most of the fun - but the music still sucked. Streets were good, better than expected. Bloc Party was a big surprise, fast and frenetic. Enjoyed half of Mark Lanegan then made the mistake to go see Blonde Redhead. And then it was time to see our national pride dEUS make their return to the stage. Bit of a letdown though - Tom couldn't say anything interesting between songs, didn't seem to really realize where he was, and it didn't seem like the band members liked each other very much. Playing was sloppy, mix was bad, ... Sigh. Let's just hope the new album is any good.

And after that, a few hours waiting for my reason for coming - The Twilight Singers. Rocking set, though maybe a bit too similar to the last time. Their cover of Bjork's Hyperballad (easily my favourite song by her) was great. And, thank heavens, Willeke had made it to the festival in time to see them, even though the doctor had forbidden here to come. You go girl !

Day 2 kicked off with a great concert by De Portables, a band from Gent. A few of the members used to work at the same radio station as I...

So, time for a quick recap.

Day 1 had me mostly walking around by myself - Wiebe had to work, and Peter and Tinneke were on their way but not quite there yet. Started off with Peaches, which was entertaining. Then came Keane, my favourite for the day. They were OK without being brilliant - maybe too much gesturing ? Skipped through Within Tempation. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone can take a so-called gothic band that manages to bring not one, but two, inflatable "marble angel statues" on stage serious. As much a joke as this was the next band, Papa Roach. Seriously, sometimes I feel like there should be a subject in school teaching the basics of music.

Anyways, I enjoyed the Delays, Phoenix (who were loud, rocking and right on targe this time around), Ash (who sang completely in tune this time around, with Charlotte doing heavenly backups), and Groove Armada (taking home the prize for best T-shirt). Faithless was OK-ish but nothing compared to their previous triumphs here in Belgium.

So far for day one !

So, time for a quick recap. Day 1 had me mostly walking around by myself - Wiebe had to work, and Peter and Tinneke were on their way but not...

Woke up late-ish on Sunday but not really. Johan, Wim and I had a movie afternoon planned at Wim's place, since he has the big projector and the empty wall. King Kong, Monster and Kiki's Delivery Service. I think I like them in that order, with the last one being the best.

Yesterday night we went out to dinner with Lotte, Lotte's mum and uncle, and Herbert Flack, a Famous Fleming :) Some absolutely excellent food at a restaurant called Limbo - we didn't hold back, and we still only managed to end up with 23 euro a person for the bill. Excellent, can't wait to go back...

Bought some ground wiring yesterday, need to find a free moment to install it.

Ran a flat tire with my bike today (I ride the bike to work these days since it's slightly less sweat-inducing than skating, but only marginally so). After some cursing I took the subway home. For some reason we have a spare wheel lying around, and it also happened to be a rear one, yay. So I swapped it out. Good to know my bike repair skills are still buried in my brain somehow. Now I need to buy some tools so I can repair the broken tire.

Sometimes life seems so simple here. If it doesn't work today, there's tomorrow.

Woke up late-ish on Sunday but not really. Johan, Wim and I had a movie afternoon planned at Wim's place, since he has the big projector and the empty wall....

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new IP address assigned every fifteen minutes. The net result is that both my IRC and IMAP connections are pretty much unusable.

Also, some machine somewhere was asking my DHCP server for an IP address every minute, always pretending to come in via a different nonexisting host.

Friday evening I wanted to try and fix this. I started by trying to find the rogue host. I couldn't find the MAC address in any ARP table, and I couldn't figure out if there was a decent way to ping MAC addresses.

In a short flash of lucidity I configured my DHCP server to give that MAC address an IP address, to see what happened. After some waiting, that worked, and it got an IP address for me. So the host was somewhere close !

After portscanning it and telnetting to it, I realized it was my old Compaq Router locked in the fake ceiling. Why it never showed up in ARP tables I have no idea, but there it was, the bastard.

Anyway, fixing that didn't really solve my ADSL problem. So back to that. Only then my main server started throwing errors, and then I couldn't log in anymore. Reboot the machine, hard disk problems. Lots of IDE timeouts, sectors unreadable, and so on...

Sigh. So I bit the bullet - I'll stop using the old machine - it had the irritating problem of not accepting hard disks bigger than 30 GB anyway, and the mirrors I try to keep locally for fedora.us and rpm.livna.org building have grown bigger than that. And to replace it, I used some other machine lying around that I know some people will hate me for.

Anyway, it took me until about five in the morning to save what was left saving, migrate configurations, test stuff, and so on.

Luckily, the day after we were expected at Julien's place :) I felt a bit tired the next morning, but Wim, Johan, Kristien and I left in my car around 1. I had chosen not to bring my laptop :)

The rest of the weekend was a mix of great barbecue, floating around in the pool, having fun, laughing, playing petanque, reading, talking, playing guitar, singing, and staying up late. I almost forgot about my server trouble. Almost.

Anyway, we had a great time, and finally headed back home Sunday afternoon. After which I went back to fixing up the server. And I'm still stuck with crappy ADSL, hurray.

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new...