Mom, can i have some Reebok Pumps please?

Mich and i just had a coffee /smoke break, and we were discussing the pros and cons of being a single child (as i am) as opposed to having siblings (like mich).

We came to the unanimous conclusion that being a single child rocks.

I tried to argue that being a single child was ok, but very lonely since you ended up growing up alone (which leads straight to multiple personalities). I would have loved to have had a bro or sis, (to beat the hell out of the bro, and kick the shit out of the sis' boyfriend), just so i wouldn't have had to play everything on both sides of the board. Conversations like this were common in my room at the time:

Dimitri: "Hey man, you want to play checkers"
Dimitri2: " Sure bro, I'll be red"
Dimitri: "No i want to be red, and i get what i want because i'm an only child"
Dimitri2: "Screw you jackass, go SABO. I'm having the reds."
Dimitri: "I don't want to play with you. You suck"
Dimitri2: "Right back at you buster."

On the positive side, you are the center of attention, and you get pretty much everything that you want, well, almost everything. I mean I didn't always get what I wanted, but in 90% of cases, I got the damn Matchbox car if i really wanted it (crying, yelling, pouting, anything would work).

Now there is something I never got and always wanted being a teenager. I mean I could have gotten them, but my dad's job didn't permit me to get them. Here it is: Reebok Pumps.

You remember these right? Every kid had them, and they were the ultimate sign of middle school coolness. All the cool kids had them, and of course all the dorks (as I) wanted them, so they could get one step closer to that impossible dream: being cool.

Well here's the deal. Why couldn't I get these? Why wouldn't my parents buy them for me?

At the time, my dad worked for Adidas. I had 25 pairs of trainers in my closet, but none of them were Pumps, and that sucked!

In addition, i was not allowed to wear anything but Adidas, that was it. I couldn't buy anything that wasn't Adidas. Any Nike shirt or Reebok accessory was forbidden. The problem is: at the time, Adidas was not cool, it was boring, passé, it had joined brands like Converse, - the definitely NOT cool shoes. I was not only laughed at for being fat, I was ridiculed for having dorkish shoes...Of course a couple years later, when my dad didn't work for Adidas anymore, and I had grown 15cm and couldn't fit in any of my 25 pairs of trainers, Adidas was the shiznit - everyone wanted them.

So yeah, being a single child rocked, but I still have a regret - not having those pumps. Overall though, I can't really complain, i mean life wasn't too rough for me as a child...plus, whenyou have a schyzophrenic half to play with, who needs siblings?

I need to help this person in the Ivory Coast

Dear Readers (or non-readers)

It has come to my attention that this young lady needs some help, so i have decided to help her out.

Here is the email I recieved:
----------------------------------------
Aisha Kone,
Cocody Abidjan,
Ivory Coast (Cote D'Ivoire)
E-mail: konea@latinmail.com


Bonjour,

C’est avec un plaisir que je vous écris, mais je ne
vous force pas à le faire pour moi

Je suis Aisha Kone. j’ai 19 ans , je suis la première
fille de Monsieurs et Mme Kone
Mon père était un homme riche (vente de cacao) en COTE
D’IVOIRE

Mon père s’était rendu en France pour ces affaires et
il est mort mystiquement sans Qu’on ne sache les
vrais raisons de sa mort le 12 FEVRIER 2002 et pour
finir on S’est rendu compte que c’est notre propre
oncle qui l’a tué .

J’ai perdu ma mère quand j’avais 4 ans ce qui fait que
j’avais tout l’amour de mon père . Avant la mort de
mon père le 12 FEVRIER 2002, il appelle son secrétaire
étant à l’hôpital Et lui dit qu’il a déposé la somme
de 2.500.000. US dollars dans une première banque à
ABIDJAN

Etant toujours à l’hôpital , il dit à son secrétaire
que l’argent qui se trouve à la banque porte
Son nom et il charge son secrétaire avec une lettre
pour la remettre à son avocat , puisque Tous les
documents se trouvent avec lui

Actuellement je suis à l’université , j’ai 19 ans et
je ne sais pas comment faire par ce que je veux
transférer l’argent en EUROPE à cause des problèmes
politiques dans mon pays .

Je voudrais que vous me veniez en aide .
Je voudrai vous posez quelques questions .
1.Est ce que vous pouvez m’aider comme étant votre enfant ?
2.Est ce que je peux vous faire confiance ?
3.Et si on arrive à faire le transfère sur votre
compte la bas combien de pourcentage voudriez vous ?

S’il vous plait considéré ma note et faite moi
parvenir une réponse
Merci pour votre attention
Mlle Aisha Kone.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Get a fucking hint man, this shit does not work, stop spamming us you fucking idiots.

Go stick a banana up your poohole.

Warm Regards,

A picture's worth a 1000 words..

Mich found this little beauty. Exceptional shot, I must admit.


We're thinking about finding this lady and picking up a couple shirts - these will be collector items in a couple years.

Great news

Two absolutely magnificent things happened today:

1. EU rejects patents directive. Bloody marvelous, if you ask me. Don't know why it took them 4 years though.

2. London wins Olympics 2012 bid. Wonderful, we won't have to deal with an even more overcrowded city, and stupid tourists.

New Mobile - Bye Bye Orange/Itineris/France Telecom

Got myself a new portable device ( which is always loads of fun) because by crappy Samsung T100 died a horrible death last week... so I decided to change the whole subscription - called up Orange to kill my membership, and got the best service i have ever gotten of them. On saturday afternoon, i went over to a Bouygues shop and got myself a new subscription with a Nokia 6230i for 49€. Due to a promotion they were having, I got 40€ off, so the phone ended up costing me 9€... Although i didn't particularly care for a phone with a camera (I think it's just a damn gadget), the damn thing has one, so I put it to use.. here's one of the first pictures. I thought it deserved a warm spot on our blog.

Serbian - "Parce que je le veux bien"

It's Friday, and I just got home from hell^H^H^H^H ehh.. work..

What better way to relax, after a hard day - than with a delicious home-made Serbian Ice Tea ? Well, I can't think of a better way. So without further ado, I give you "Michael's end-of-the-week treat" :



Tomorrow, we are throwing a small bash for friends (and Dimitri) - I'll probably end up stone-drunk, AGAIN.. oh well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks - isn't that what they say ?

Bottoms up - see you on http://ghetto-net.blogspot.com tomorrow..

SOCKS and friends

So you're sitting at some random cafe, having a cold beer - whilst surfing your favorite porn, using some semi-public WiFi access-point, in the vicinity of your local beer pusher. How to login to a non-https site, without all the other suckers around you sniffing up your password ?

Quite simple actually, you'll use ssh(1) and it's local "dynamic" application-level port forward - ssh will simply act as a SOCKS server.

On your laptop (running some sort of Unix - obviously), do the following:

ssh -v -D 8989 -N user@host

-v: Verbose mode - in order to see what the is going on
-N: Tells ssh, not to execute a remote command (optional)
user@host: should obviously be replaced by credentials and a box, you have access to.

Next, open your browser (Firefox, obviously) and go into "Preferences" and open the "Connection Settings" dialog box. Click "Manual Proxy Configuration" and enter "localhost" and "8989" under SOCKS.

Voila, you are surfing through the box you port-forwarding to - and traffic between your laptop and your remote box is tunneled through ssh.
Obviously, the traffic from the remote box, to the site your are sending your HTTP request to is not secure, but that's another story.


You can most likely do the same with a windows box, but I'd be fucked if I know how - go ahead, and google it.

Monsoon - Paris Style

I must say we had a greatly entertaining day yesterday.

The day started off with a bit of golf at 12 (I wasn't really awake before then anyways). The weather was FAN-Tastic (35° C, not a cloud), and we were enjoying every bit of this delectable moment.

Then all hell broke loose.

At around 3:45, Clouds started coming in from the SW, big clouds. Within 40 minutes, we had gone from full sunny daylight, to almost pitch black darkness. You know when day becomes night that shit is about to hit the fan, and it hit that fan real hard.

At around 4:30, this is what paris looked like:

The clouds opened up, and we got hail and heavy rain for around an hour....


It goes without saying that Météo France didn't know about this'light drizzle' before it was in sight (literally), and therefore didn't really warn anyone.

We lost power for about a minute, so did our local McDonald's, and all the traffic lights in the area went out of service, reaking havoc everywhere.

Overall I tend to love chaos, so I was loving it from the start. I would have loved to have seen a cow go flying by like in Twister, or see some cars (with their occupants) being thrown around, but i guess just seeing people panicked and scared is pretty cool too..

Guess what? 'They' say that we should have a storm today too.. sweeet!

In the sign of golf

This week, has really been in the sign of golf - and I've got a feeling that so will the weekend.


Dim and I, are now zooming out to the driving-range in our lunch break. We've discovered, that have exactly enough time to shoot 1,5 bucket, and make it back to the office in time.

On Wednesday night, be went out and practiced bunker shots, and putting as well. It's good fun, and gives us an opportunity to profit the great weather.


Btw, it's nice to see that Blogger has added an image hosting service, so you can upload pictures directly to your blog.

Fete de la Musique - Paris, France. June 21st 2005

Well here you have it, another successful "Fete de la Musique". We walked around the Latin Quarter of paris from 8 to 2am, listened to A LOT of loud music, drank A LOT of beer, had A LOT of fun, but didn't have enough merguez sandwiches for my taste. In any case, it was a blast!

Fete de la Musique

Well, well well... it's that time of year again. The annual Fete de la Musique bash is tonight - for the love of god is blows my mind, why this event is not scheduled on a weekend - cause, you *know* that everyone will get shit-canned tonight.

I'm not a huge fan (like everyone else), primarily because of the whole transportation issue. It is impossible to bring your car, and the metro/bus system will be flowing with vomit and fucked up folks. Getting a taxi is less than likely..

I checked out the program for tonight. Not too much that peaked my curiosity, unless you're in to new-wave-tree-huggin' fusion music. Oh well, there's always cold brew and plenty of merguez around - so I guess it won't be a lost cause.

Firefox extensions

Over the next couple of months, I'm going to blog about my absolute favorite Firefox extensions. It might be useful for some people ;)

GreaseMonkey
One of my most recent extensions (and already one of the most useful). GreaseMonkey enables you to "load" any given piece of DHTML while loading a page, hence enabling you to change the behavior of the page. Fx. a small script is Linkify (if you have GreaseMonkey installed, you can right click on the link and press "Install User Script"). Linkify well crawl through all the contents of the loading page, and change all URLs that do have an <a href=... tag - so that you can click on them.

There are hundreds of ready-made and ready to run scripts available here:
GreaseMonkeyUserScripts

The Dim-needs-a-golf-license-but-is-too-broke Fundraiser!

Hello Dear Friends,

I am writing you about a very serious subject. It takes up a vast part of my life and is of utmost importance to me. Of course I am talking about golf. I love it, everything about it. I love hitting the living crap out of that stupid little ball, I love breaking tees, I love hitting 'warning shots' to the group ahead and see their pissed off faces when my ball lands 20 yards in front of them, I love caddies, I love the childish way us men buy our clubs like boys with new toys, I love the cold beer after finishing up a round. I'm sure you've understood, I love golf.

Here is the problem. I can't play golf. I mean I can play golf, but I can't actually go out on a course and play a round, because I do not have a Federation Française de Golf license. I am confined to the premises of our local driving range in Rueil-Malmaison, hitting basket after basket of wasted balls, balls that go up and land, but have no meaning, no "raison d'être*" I do not have a license because I do not have the money to buy one, not because I am cheap, but simply because I am broke.

Hence my request to you, my dear friends and virtual companions. I need to gather 43 € (yes, ONLY 43€!) in order to buy myself a license, and an additional 30€ to play my first round. Any help from my beloved entourage** is welcome. Please contact me if you can help me in any way, or go to the FFG website and buy my license for me. You can also click on the google banners on the blog, hence making us some money. This is my goal in life right now.

You can make my dream come true.

Thank you


Dimitri
(golf-ball-wacker-guy)


*"Reason of being", in Swahili.
** "entourage" means: "the fuckers that hang around with me, or have the luck of knowing me.

Store Wars

For once that vegetables are good for something...

A buddy of ours sent this link to us yesterday- it's too good to not be posted. I admire the ingenuity of the people who made this little film - absolutely amazing, and hilarious. I'm still not going to give up meat and cheap industrially produced vegetables though.. screw that!

AdSense

Yeah, I've put a google text-ad on the sidebar. I invite you all to go click on it, so I can buy more alcohol.

In the hope that I can soon retire, and live (like a king) on my banner earnings alone.

New clubs

Yesterday, Dim and I had the exquisite opportunity to try out our newly acquired clubs. It was good fun, and one of those moments where the "ordeal" is well worth the while...

Dim picked up a Big Bertha 4 iron, with a regular flex graphite shaft. Quite interesting, as we normally play with steel shafts. Here's the clubface:

I picked up a Big Bertha Warbird 3 Wood - also with a regular flex graphite shaft. Very nice indeed:

Both excellent clubs, that gives you a joy - whilst hitting the living crap out of the ball.

The Concorde Lafayette Panoramic bar

Well that's a view in a half! Yesterday, after a long night of Serbians, a keg of beer and various other beverages, mich, myself and our ladies went to the top of the Concorde Lafayette building at Porte Maillot for some coffee.. I must say that although a Grand Crème is 6 euros, it's well worth it considering the view. I recommend the Panoramic bar on the 34th floor - well worth the dosh.

Hello Piratebay!!!

Haha, you devils you!! Piratebay is back online, bigger and better than ever. They even have different languages and everything now. You tricksters you. Well, back to downloading stuff....

Bittorrent replacement

The government (and their friends the lobbyists) are finally catching up with the popular BitTorrent p2p filesharing application. BitTorrent depends heavily on "tracker" sites that will show you the availability of torrents. As many (read: all) those sites are being shut down by the authorities, it is becoming increasingly difficult for filesharers to find the torrents.

Enter Rodi.

From slashdot:

Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU). Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C. Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.'

Bye Bye PirateBay

Well it finally happened. The PirateBay website was finally brought down by the Swedish anti-piracy authorities.. I guess they made fun of the legal letters one to many times....