Rein's Cookumentaries and other Stuff

I learned a new word today: Favicon.  Wiki tells you all about it.  In short, it’s just a “Look at me, I’m your favourite website!” thingie that appears in front of the url in the web adress bar.  Of course I had to have one.

But what?  It being only 16 by 16 pixels, you can’t expect to put part of the Sistine Chapel on it   So I opted for my old time favourite, the little rabbit I’ve been drawing everywhere since I was a (very small) kid.  Yep, I was a tagger avant la lettre   Can’t see it properly you say?  Well, here it is, ten times bigger.  So when you see ‘Knijn’ popping up, you know I’m around too

Meet Knijn, our official favicon for the site! Hasn't changed in 45 years, wish I could say the same

Nic Balthazar, one of Belgium’s leading film makers, has made a clip to draw the attention to the need of having a proper law concerning emmissions in Europe. Now it’s up to us to badger the politicians until they do something about it. The site, www.thebigask.be tells you all about it (in dutch) the banner underneath leads you to the english site and here is the film itself, in english to keep it international, but you can also view it of course, in dutch and french – this is Belgium after all

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kRP5x2MsAw]

Caution

Originally uploaded by Reinhilde.

*sigh*
It’s there, we’ve reached a half-century. The neighbours snuck the warning sign in this morning. Proceed with caution!

In dutch we have an expression “Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend” (It’s better to have a good neighbour than a far friend) but it’s only by standing by your friends – even if you only know them virtually – that the world will be a better place.

Wes and Niki in happier days

Only a few nights ago I was chatting with Niki, she told me she needed to go to hospital for check-ups. Now, only by chance, I see at another friend’s blog that things are far more serious. I would like to draw your attention to this, those who know Niki and Wes will surely help, others who don’t know them, please read the post and follow your heart. Just a good thought towards them will help already.

Thank you.

For years now I have been clicking daily on the Hungersite, but now I also found another worthy cause. Yes, I’ve read the FAQ, checked 101 different ways and as far as I can judge, it’s an honest cause. It’s on Facebook, it’s on LiveJournal, it’s on Yahoo, it’s even been endorsed by Neil Gaiman…

I’ll grab a piece of text from Jane, who made me aware of it…

A young woman in the USA is trying to raise money for necessary medical procedures, but she’s not doing it by soliciting donations or asking people to buy anything… she’s taking advantage of the file hosting service megaupload.com’s reward program… a real, actual program that gives people cash rewards for using their service, presumably as a means of stealth advertising. Simply put: enough people download a file that she has hosted, and she gets a nice chunk of change. “This program states if I get 5 million downloads, they will pay me $10,000″ she says: obviously impossible, but she’s trying it anyway. I like that.

The file? Nothing arduous, onerous, or dangerous… a plain text file, as in, *.txt, which anybody can tell you cannot contain or execute a virus. If you save a virus as something.txt and try to open it, you’d just get a bunch of gobbledygook in Notepad. I’ve downloaded it myself, and it’s nothing more than a simple text description of her plight and her plan. One download per day, per IP address.
If the USA had a health system that worked, she wouldn’t have to do this. But it doesn’t.

More links (I didn’t want to insert them in the above text, so you wouldn’t go off clicking before you read everything )

Jane’s Multiply where I found it

The site where it’s all explained (you get there also by clicking the picture above)

The FAQ page

Erin’s LifeJournal page

The Download LifeJournal page

The Facebook group

The Yahoo group

Neil Gaiman’s page

the Hunger site

Right, that’s enough reading matter – now go off, insert that click button on whatever page you can to make the world aware of it – and especially, don’t forget to click it daily!

Happy pig

Originally uploaded by Reinhilde.

Maybe it’s unusual, but I added Nelleke, the happy pig from the Kinderboerderij Mikerf to the pool of the recently started Passionately Pink for the Cure Flickr group.
This in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness, as told in their blog. Contrary to what they say there though, you can now upload as many pink pictures as you like. In only a few days there are already 3130 members and 10696 pictures in the group and they’re adding on and on by the second So, what’s easier to donate to charity than adding your pretty pink pictures to the group pool?
Go find your pink pics and join us!

day 243: proof that people grow to resemble their avatars….

Originally uploaded by estherase.

Esther is one of the people I got to meet on the net after I moved back to Belgium. Then I found out she was living almost around the corner where we lived in the UK, d’oh!

Thanks to her I got to know more about London in these last three years than I did during the decade I actually lived there. Luckily we pop over regularly, because the kids visit their dad about 4 times a year. As Est loves chocolate, I try to bring her a box once in a while – and she lets me browse through her library and so I discovered Jasper Fforde and Dirk Gently for example
I think it was even her example that made me take an account on Flickr (my first year was a gift from another good friend!) and I’ve never done a better thing
Go and have a look through her stream. She’s got the most amazing view on ‘ordinary’ things, she makes me look at the world with a different slant and I love it. Her ’365 days’ series is a beauty – once in a while you just have to laugh out loud, really, just like when I saw the one I post here. I just had to blog about it, it’s too good not to share

You rock, Est, and with pics like this you make my day!

poem on the Schelde

Originally uploaded by Reinhilde.
I just have my first picture ‘published’ on the web
Well, the first one I know of, as they asked me very politely if they could use it. As it’s my city featuring, how could I refuse?
It’s on the ErasmusPC site, the international network for cities and culture.
Ha, all of you who laugh at my Flickr addiction! Look who’s laughing now! ;D