Photography taken by Dina Ansari

I had a pretty good weekend (despite the Arsenal loss) which was on the Sunday anyhow so my Saturday was completely unspoiled. Long and lazy… perfect .

Saturday I woke up pretty effing early for a Saturday. But I still had
Supernatural Season 2 to finish. This took quite a while, and since I bought the real dvds from Amazon (no pirating for me, no sir) I had the extras to watch afterwards.  So after watching five episodes, I then watched the  commentary of the antepenultimate episode (check me out, didn’t even look that up ) and the gag reel which made me like Sam a little bit more. Although he’s still kind of a whiny bitch.

All this time I had the Report of Death to do for work hanging over my head. In fact it’s still there now tapping my head every so often, yet here I am writing about the very weekend that caused non-completion of the report. Although the typing makes it look like I’m working really hard hehe.

Anyway, I’d been invited to go bowling and laser tag, or Q-Zar as its apparently called here; pronounced Quizar. I was totally thinking of not going because of the report of death and the rain. I’m like those witches in the Wizard of Oz hehe —>

Also I was feeling super-lazy. But eventually I got my lazy self up and running helped along by headbanging to So What by Pink and other poppy-pretend rock songs hehe and braved the weather in the name of Carpe Dieming.

Suffice to say, bowling and laser-tag was awesome!! I totally felt like Barney Stinson, except kids in real life are much better than those lame-ass kids on HIMYM and they kicked my ass. I got shot 13 times!! But I shot people 18 times so hey. I was trying to shoot those evil kids but they really were just too good. Next time… I was also wearing white, clearly a rookie mistake. Next time I’m wearing all black and putting them football player black marks on my face.

Bowling was also pretty cool; my first time and I started out quite well. Spare first round and nine pins in the second. But ALAS! It was all just beginners luck, and I went on in the next few rounds to get 5, 4, 1 and even 2 misses – when you dont hit any pins. I don’t know how I didn’t come last haha. Thanks to the Nokia 2600 with the bowling game (think its that one anyway), I knew all the bowling rules and terminology though… haha

Still I’m gonna practice though, I HATE LOSING!! GRRRR.

Sunday was more of the same, started watching Supernatural again from Season 1 (again) because my internet sucks and  trying to stream anything with that connection should be one of Dante’s Ten Circles of Hell. Managed to watch one episode of Community though, its pretty funny. Actually worked on the Report of Death,before my internet crashed and burned… Slept.

And now its Monday and here I am writing about the weekend. Which is really kind of meta… Wait until tomorrow when I write about today where I wrote about the weekend… SUPER-META!!

Office Playlist: R. Kelly – Slow Wind. The Windows Media Player plays this song EVERYDAY, sometimes even when it’s not in the playlist hehe. The shuffle sucks almost as much as Winamp. Boo Microsoft.

And WordPress smileys are ugly.

Gotta go, Report of Death is calling…

2023′e kadar AB üyesi bir Türkiye görüyorum

Newsweek dergisinin sorularını yanıtlayan Dışişleri Bakanı Davutoğlu, Türkiye’nin 2023′e kadar AB üyesi oalcağını düşündüğünü söyledi. Cumhuriyet’in 100. yılında sanki Yüksek Hızlı Tren açılışı gibi AB kapısının kurdelasını kesecek. Türk dışişlerindeki olumlu gelişmeleri tirübünlere oynayarak sulandırmış sayın bakanımız. Bence Davut’un torunu 2023′te ancak aşağıdaki fotoğraftaki Avrupa Parlamentosu’nun arkasındaki parkta yer alan basketbol sahasına girer.

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Sir Paul McCartney urged world leaders to alter their food policies

Cutting out meat consumption on one day a week can have a major impact on reducing CO2 emissions, Sir Paul McCartney has said.

In an interview with Parliament Magazine he appealed for “people power” to make the difference in the fight against global warming.

He says halving UK meat consumption would do more to reduce emissions than halving the use of private transport.

Sir Paul will take his “Meat-free Monday” campaign to Brussels this week.

The estimated effect of the reduction in meat consumption, by Compassion in World Farming, is central to Sir Paul’s campaign which began last June and will continue on Thursday at a European Parliament conference.

The event is also being attended by UN climate change chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

Read the full  load of Sh*t from the BBC

Dan made a stew that I would typically not like because I never really like lamb, I kind of think it usually tastes like feet, but he got it from this great place at our farmer’s market called Mint Creek farm, so I was committed to giving it a shot. He still won’t eat mushrooms, but whatevz, I guess I’m just more apt to push myself out of my comfort zone than he is. Anyway, this stew kicked ass. I really enjoyed the lamb, and am a big fan of tiny potatoes and tiny brussels sprouts in a stew. Here’s what he did. Based on this one whole foods recipe.:

2 pounds lamb stew meat, cut into cubes
Sea salt and ground pepper
flour for dredging
4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 cup Summit Winter Ale (or other wintery dark beer)
1 1/2 cups chopped whatever onion
1 1/2 cups chopped carrots
3 cloves chopped garlic
2 cups beef broth
1 1/2 tiny cute potatoes the size of my thumb
1 1/2 cups Brussels sprouts, small or mini, we got some from the farmer’s market and it came on a stalk
2 tablespoons thyme leaves (leave them on the branch so you can yank them out)

Season the lamb chunks with salt and pepper and drag them through the flour so that there is a nice coating on them. Add some olive oil to the Dutch oven and brown your lamby chunks on all sides, then toss them in a bowl. Snack on a few while you’re waiting for the others to cook.

Deglaze the pan with the whole beer and reduce it by half. Add this mixture beery delight to the bowl of meat and let it sit.

Now that your dutch oven is empty again, add 2 more tablespoons of olive oil. Over high heat, add onions, celery and carrots. Season with salt and pepper. After about 3 or 4 minutes, add garlic and allow vegetables to soften slightly.
Add beef mixture back to pan along with beef broth and return to a boil. Cover with a lid. Simmer for 45 minutes or so.

Add the brussels sprouts and potatoes and simmer for 45 more minutes. Keep checking on those brussels sprouts though, because if you let them cook to long, they’ll smell like farts. Stick them with a fork every once in a while to check their tenderness. Nobody likes farty sprouts.

Don’t forget to make some barley. It’s 2.5-3 cups of water per cup of barley, cook for about 35 minutes.

There is a new information from Sweden, Åsa Torstensson from the Swedish Government will meet the United States representatives on ACTA transparency. She is the Swedish minister for Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communication, and Sweden is still presidency of the European Council. We rebuild kindly translated the substance of her message for non-Swedish speaking parties:

There is a shadow on the world, a shadow of secrecy surrounding the ACTA treaty. We are concerned that this treaty will have severe consequences for the future of the Internet. But there is no need to fear, only to rebuild and patch the errors that appear in politics.

Towards the end of this month, Swedish Minister of Communications Åsa Torstensson will travel to Washington DC to convey one (out of several other) important message from the European Union and Sweden. …

Åsa Torstensson will also meet with the president’s advisor Peter Cowhey (Senior Counselor to the US Trade Representative) in order to discuss the new trade agreement known as the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), which is currently being negotiated. Åsa Torstensson will present the opinion that the negotiations process should be opened up, so that interested parties and groups are given the opportunity to submit more detailed opinions about the contents of the negotiations and draft documents.

Let me add that 1st of December Art 15 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU is set into force. In my German language “confirmatory application” for an ACTA document access to the European Council I argued recently that this takes effects for the ACTA document access regime as well.

I continue to advocate the following doctrine:

If the EU-Commission (DG Trade) is unable to comply with Art 15 (former Art 255) citizen rights then the Commission lacks authority to negotiate such legislative and regulative matters with these third nations. It is upon the US and other nations to agree on a transparency regime compliant with Art 15 citizen rights.

It seems unacceptable to me that documents are provided to few American professional lobbyists but not to European legislators (despite repeated requests) and European citizens which enjoy a right scrutinize such documents of legislative nature.

Dün cep telefonu ile geçen aylar boyunca çektiğim fotoğrafları flickr‘a yükledim. Analog seri biter bitmez onları paylaşmaya devam ederim. Bugün yine Avrupa Birliği Parlementosundayız. İç avluda… Skateboard (kaykay) yapanlar için güzel bir yer burası.

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Cold, rain. One afternoon in Brussels. Before Christmas. 2009.

İsviçreliler yarın, “Minareler yasaklansın mı?” sorusunu yanıtlamak için sandık başına gidecek. Minare demişken Belçika’daki islamofobi’den de bahsetmek gerek. Ben bahsetmeyeyim siz buradan okuyun. Dinle ilgili herşeyden tiskiniyorum. Ben geçen aylarda dolanırken bir trafik işaretinde gördüğüm bu sticker ile Belçika’daki şehirlerin islamlaşmasına karşı olan bu gruptan haberdar oldum. Tamam başta Antwerp ve Brüksel olmak üzere şehirdeki müslümanlar pek de güzel bir izlenim bırakmıyorlar ama bu şekilde bir tutuma girmek de fazla abartılı gibi.

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Winter Wonders just started yesterday here in Brussels. Today I walked around and tried to capture some first impressions. this is a remarkable ‘toy’. Very arty and surreal as everything Belgian tents to be. Viewable until the 3rd January 2010. The event takes place at the Grand Place in Brussels and around the Bourse, the Place Sainte-Catherine and the Marché aux Poissons.

merry-go-rounds

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Cirque Royal (Brussels, BE)

Weekend (Thursday – Monday) in Brussels in March 2010!

Concert tickets for March 19th already secured! Accommodation secured!

Looking at photos of the building/venue of Cirque Royal it’s a historic beauty that alone! Then experience some more of beautiful places and environments in Brussels with surroundings! Meeting lots of friends! Sharing concert adventure together! All of this is really something to look forward to, specially those days the blues get you ;  )

Thank you, Milow for bringing us together =D

After the breakfast, we visited R’ Lab. In fact, No, R. preferred we do not. So, I checked my mails and took the subway back (25-S). Simple good bye. Nothing can’t be special all the time…
Computing is great !
… When every bug is fixed.
Tracking bugs is fun. I installed Ubuntu, Octave, gcc, compiled my old routines in Matlab… And finally get my first fatal errors. Everything is written, so I can reproduce it. It is about my mex files and instantaneous firing rate evaluation. In the afternoon, I received an Email announcing a symposium to be hold in Paris and organized by my friend David Hansel. Of course, I’ll be there!

so there we were, three tourists from the philippines: one a seasoned traveler and the other two on their sophomoric venture outside the walls of las islas. 25 euros poorer, we did see what brussels had to offer in a couple of hours, one of them the amazing atomium–a 165-billion-times magnification of an elementary iron crystal.

built for brussels’ world fair in 1958 (expo ‘58), it was supposed to not last this long but it did. in 2006, it got a much-needed face lift.

read more >>

It’s been an exciting day. We cut our weekly staff meeting short. We gathered around our computers shortly after midday to watch the press conference that saw the announcement of the proposed make up of the new Commission. Some we knew, some we didn’t. From our MD to our intern, we love this kind of stuff. We duly dashed off notes to clients. Climate Action Commissioner and DG  confirmed. French get Internal Market. Transport to Kallas. Obscure DG ENVI unit transfered to DG SANCO etc.

However, the communication emanating from our office that probably caused the activity today was our tweet on the official biography of the new Irish Commissioner – Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. We tweeted on it as it shocked us to read that the new Irish Commissioner had chosen to set the facts straight about her relationship with another Irish politician, Charles Haughey, in the bio that accompanied her announcement as the Commissioner-designate for Research.

In the office we couldn’t believe it. Why on earth would you want to repeat such an accusation, even if untrue, in your official bio? Did Brussels really care? Would the Irish press really focus on this? We discussed what we believed the strategy behind this bold move could possibly be. Surely they couldn’t believe that a premptive strike on an old story that no-one in Brussels had read anyway was the right way to go? Did the Commission-designate care so much as to insist that this statement was inserted in the bio?

Well, no. The answer would appear to be the bio was in part a cut and paste job from her wikipedia entry, rather than an original piece of work. (Thanks to @ako9000 for the detective work). If you’re looking for the bio, it was here. This evening it’s not online due to technical errors…

It goes to show a few things. Firstly, if you’re writing a biography of a Commissioner-designate you probably don’t want to lift it from wikipedia. Especially if wikipedia repeats salicious and untrue details about your new Commissioner’s private life. Wikipedia may be a good starting point for research, but it aint necessarily the truth. Secondly, you can seek to insert balance into a wikipedia article, but balance is not necessarily a good thing. The fact that wikipedia says an accusation was made but it’s untrue does stop the accusation from being repeated. Finally, twitter can be a powerful tool to spread news – however pointless – quickly. Within seconds of our tweet, our own followers had retweeted and theirs had retweeted again. 174 followers had clicked on our tinyurl within an hour of our tweet according to hootsuite.com

James

I started to work on my computers aiming at Octave installation under Ubuntu Linux, but I had first to configure my i-Phone sync…
At 18:30, I went to R.: Subway-25-71. We ate some tagliatelle with a courgette, onions, crème fraiche. TV. Love.
What a night ! -unforgettable!

Últimament s’han obert un nou ventall de possibilitats a la feina…un personatge que vol restar a l’anonimat m’envia (de fet, li enviava a un altre personatge del mateix estil i ara també en sóc jo destinatari) les notícies de esports, economia (bé, aquí hem de millorar) i TIC que apareixen cada dia a El País, en un document word. Sembla ben bé que estiguis llegint una altra cosa; bé és cert però, que tampoc tinc masses problemes a la feina per llegir el diari.

Divendres, sopar i festa suposo. Primera trobada de MCDP’s fora de la nostra estimada terra catalana. En kako, i el seu nou amic/company de pis, em faràn una visita per tot el cap de setmana, doncs segurament es quedaran a veure també el barça-madrid. Per els que no sabeu coses d’en kako, doncs tots coneixem la seva incapacitat en explicar les coses per escrit, comentar que ha trobat ja un lloc per escalar, que el pis està molt bé, que ja té també equip de futbol, que s’ha apuntat a classes de holandès, però en canvi té més problemes en trobar classes d’anglès, doncs es veu que li demanen que parli anglès per entrar a les classes. Per tant, en un moment de visualització extrema, la meva humil persona va idear una gran proposta: posar cartells a la universitat on oferís classes de castellà a canvi de classes en anglès.

Per Brussel·les bastant bé tot; vaig tornar de Praga dilluns, dimarts celebració per la victòria del barça, dimecres descans, i ahir vaig anar a un concert de música búlgara. Avui tot depèn del Sr. Rovira, i les seves ganes de merder. A mi la veritat, no me’n falten.

Aspectes a comentar: per un cantó el tema de la nova casa. La noia que està vivint fins ara, em vol vendre els seus mobles per 400 euros (a ella li van costar uns 570). Què en penseu? El tema és que no he anat a ikea a mirar preus, però crec que més o menys se’n va a aquest preu…aquest cap de setmana potser vaig a una botiga de mobles de segona mà a veure preus també, i així puc decidir. Sempre li puc fer a més, una contraoferta.

Segon tema, el meu futur. He trobat un postgrau de la UOC que està força bé. Seria per començar al març, però encara m’ho haig d’acabar de pensar. El fet positiu és que el podria fer per internet, i per tant, no dependria de saber on estic l’any que ve. En seguirem parlant no us preocupeu. Un petó a tots. Cançó: Chicago, de Sufjan Stevens.

Edito: Bloc censurat!

Robin Sclafani, CEJI Director, speaking at the Town Hall

The CEJI course on combating religious discrimination finishes tomorrow – what a blast.  An extraordinary bunch of people involved in so many different organisations, groups and movements.  We shared tagine and couscous after a certification ceremony at the local Town Hall in Brussels.

CEJI and our course is based in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode/Sint-Joost-ten-Node, which describes itself as:

The smallest commune in Brussels also happens to be the most densely populated.

Although small, this commune is full of striking contrasts. The international-class hotels on Place Rogier/Rogierplein, the tower blocks of offices on Place Madou/Madouplein and the little Manhattan of the North rub shoulders with neighbourhoods where the mainly Turkish population has recreated the chipper, bustling atmosphere of an Eastern city.

Ruth on the last evening

The Mayor’s representative reminded us of Martin Niemoller’s poem – and particularly of our responsibilities as educated people and intellectuals to keep raising awareness and to keep fighting injustice and discrimination.  In our privileged position we cannot say we didn’t know.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

There are always hopes at the end of weeks such as this that people will stay in touch and be able to support each other, but a reality check means that this takes time and effort and people quickly get caught up with their lives back home.

Europeans from four countries

My hopes include exchanging ideas and resources on Faith Literacy UK with those who are involved in other countries.

I’d also like to keep in touch with one of the participants who is keen to develop links between the academy and local communities – just as Wandsworth Community Empowerment Network is doing with the Open University and (funding permitting) University College London.

Mark and Adrian

Maxine & Luc

Best of all, it would be good to meet up with people again.  There are plans for a summer conference in Switzerland which sounds unusual – I’m up for that.

Ruth and Luc, the wonderful people guiding us through the material, have somehow managed to keep a very disparate group together and learning from one another all week.  Dank U & merci bien.