POO Inc.

Would you ever call your company POO INC.? If you were an English speaking country you’d probably steer clear of such a name (although Pennland Poo Inc., a swimming pool company in Baltimore is apparently not bothered by the association of floating turds in their products).

The Dutch word for poo is ‘poep’. An equally cute word in my opinion and one I recently Googled when bored one afternoon (don’t ask). That’s when I came across the Physician Oncology Education Program. An important and serious site, with, amongst other things, informaton on early detection of colorectal cancer. I wonder if they have any idea of their program’s rather smelly acronym? They did take the trouble to register the domain www.poep.org which is probably worth a lot in certain porn circles nowadays.

Meanwhile, you can entertain educate yourself with the POEP Bulletin.

What’s My Name?

There has always been some confusion about my name. During my first few years people called me ‘Suzanne’, but when I moved to England in 1974 (aged barely three), it slowly turned into ‘Suzanna’. The three syllables work better in English in my opinion . I have always preferred ‘Suzanna’ and was happy to discover that my birth certificate states ‘Suzanna’ as my given name.

However, I recently came across my birth announcement card and to my surprise it named me ‘Suzanne’. So it seems that my parents started this confusion. In fact it was probably my father as he’s the one who (unfortunately) spontaneously decided to give me ‘Lauretta’ as a second name minutes before registering me as a new Amsterdam citizen in 1971.

Uncomfortable position

This is never going to become a pregnancy blog, but I do regularly check out certain sites to find out how the little one in my belly is progressing and wanted to share a picture with you.

Today is the start of week 19 and I found this picture of what the baby probably looks like now. Good god, I thought I was starting to get uncomfortable - the poor little blighter appears to be having a much harder time of it with its feet up by its ears. Looks rather like a very advanced, complicated yoga position.

Special Moment

Although we haven’t yet moved into our still-being-renovated house, Merel surprised me yesterday with a new little name sign for the bell-board of our apartment block. I have never officially lived together with someone, so I never shared such a sign. It really moved me :-)

So Do Cell Phones Fry Our Brains After All?

This is a very worrying little video (it’s really annoyingly filmed but gets interesting at around 30 secs).

Mr. Zwart

I got married a few weeks ago and am about to move house to live together with my new ’spouse’ Merel :-) That entails a lot of administrative paperwork regarding insurance, change of address and all that stuff. The fact that I married a woman while I am one myself never really struck me as odd until this afternoon. Well, not so much odd as “oh, our computer can’t input that”.

This afternoon I spoke to at least three companies and some of them had already been tipped that I was now married through the GBA computer (Gemeentelijke Basis Adminstratie a.k.a. BigBrother Inc.). But Merel had been invariably registered as Mr. Zwart. I guess Big Brother don’t know that much after all ;-) Some forms are not yet equipped to deal with Mrs and Mrs it seems.

However, the day care centres here are much more progressive than the insurance companies because when I recently signed up with one of them, in anticipation of our baby arriving in December, the form didn’t read Mother / Father but Parent 1 / Parent 2. That makes things much simpler :-)

Katy Perry

Katy Perry is being called the new Lily Allen, but I don’t really get the comparison. Their music is miles apart with Perry in the extreme, poppy, over-produced corner and Allen in the slightly more minimalistic, yet expertly-produced-by-Mark-Ronson corner.

Their lyrics have some similarites, both cutting and usually amusing, but I still think Lily Allen wins on that front. The best Perry has come up with is “I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf”. She caught my attention because of the titles of two of her songs: “Ur So Gay” and “I Kissed A Girl”. My hopes of finding a new lesbian alternative music icon were dashed though… it’s soooo mainstream and the she’s sooooo not gay. Why do I care? I dunno, I suppose I just like adding cute girls to the bandwagon or something immature like that ;-)

I kissed a girl just to try it,
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.

The beginning of the video reminds me of that Roxy Music album cover… Roxy Music ;-)

Tap your BPM’s

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote, but things have been incredibly busy what with moving house, renovating, working on a music documentary and loads more. But in times of stress, little old anal me likes to relax with autistic, repetitive things like Mahjong, Picross and widgets like this one from Flying Cheeseburger.

It’s a free Mac OSX dashboard widget which enables you to tap out the beats to your iTunes tracks. The widget calculates the BPM (Beats Per Minute) and you can add the BPM info to the track in iTunes with the touch of a button.

Now many of you may say that there is loads of other software out there which can analyze your music library and add the BPM info to iTunes much more quickly than this method - and you’d be right. But then I wouldn’t have anything to relieve the stress ;-)

Incompetent Companies

It really does seem like there are more incompetent companies out there than competent ones. I have recently been frustrated by a variety of incompetencies ranging from minor irritations to major problems with, for example, my website.

In the previous post I wrote about Hosting Zoom and how their service unfortunately declined rapidly since they introduced their so-called “Failover Hosting” some months ago. “Failover” sounds a little ambiguous, but I think it’s supposed to encourage a feeling of well-being and security in clients. Nothing could be further from the truth as Hosting Zoom over-sold space on their servers resulting in error after error and unreachable sites. That’s incompetent company number 1.

Then there’s a less serious, but still annoying issue I have with the bi-monthly Dutch technology/gadget magazine, Bright. I subscribed to the magazine soon after it first appeared, just over a year ago. Single issues purchased in shops cost € 4,99 and a I paid €25 for 6 issues in a year. However, they keep selling the magazine at a reduced price of € 2,99 in the shops now, so I worked out that as a subscriber I’m paying more. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be, right? On writing to them it took a few reminder mails to hear anything back and then eventually they offered to reimburse me € 5,50 so I get a year’s subscription for € 19,50. Very nice of them - only it’s been three weeks and they have still not reimbursed me. More reminders to follow I suppose.

Another little gripe would be Canon.. I’ll write about them in a separate post…

Canon Online Support Sucks

Another post in my series about incompetent or plain unfriendly companies. This time it’s Canon.

I have a Selphy CP710 photo printer (cute, dinky little thing). You buy complete sets of ink + photo paper to use in it and the default printing size is 100×148mm postcard size. That works fine. You can also purchase other cool paper sizes such as 54×86mm credit card size stickers (KC-18IF). I ordered a pack online from www.123inkt.nl which is a perfectly good company, by the way. But then…
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