XL-Network's blog

New site for FrozenImage

Lately I've been busy creating new websites. A while ago I renewed the Ulteam website. And last Wednesday I put the my brother's new photo website, called FrozenImage, online. The problem with the current website was that the webhoster was getting rid of PHP 5.2 support and the site could not function with PHP 5.3 without a major upgrade. That's why I built a completely new website.

Northern Velomobile Ride 2012

Today was typical velomobile weather. Wind and rain. This is the third time I ride this tour. In 2010 I rod a borrowed bike and last year the starting place was at my house. This year we started in Ravenswoud, a 40 kilometers ride. After a cup of tea and something to eat each of the 27 riders got in to their bikes and we headed for Marum. We were visiting Akkie and Willem for some vegetable or mustard soup. Yummie!

Gyas Winter Competitions 2012

Last Sunday my team competed in the first competition of the year, the Gyas Winter Competitions. A race over 3 kilometer and it had to be covered as quickly as possible. We could start first with our 8+ in our block. That's good, because you don't have any trouble with other boats and the waves they make. Just after we started a experienced 4* team caught up with us, but fortunately we could stay ahead of them by 10 seconds.

Patch work

A week later then planned, but here is my story about New Year's Eve and what happened next. It was a busy weekend with a afternoon of rowing on Saturday. First I rowed from 11 AM to 1 PM and after that I coached a ladies team from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM. Everything went well and the weather played nicely. Afterwards we drank a cup of tea in the club house and then I climbed into my bike to go to my youngest brother and his wife in Stadskanaal. I've cycled the route before so I could almost do it blindfolded. And that's a good thing as it gets dark very early in the day.

New site for Ulteam

A number of weeks ago the old website of our theatersports club Ulteam went down because of the amount of spam and other junk that hit the site. I've been asked to arrange stuff (like the website, the wiki, the domain and hosting). That's when I decided to create a new website and wiki. The website doesn't run on a very old version of Joomla, but is running on the newest version of Drupal.

The Rudder King 2011

A bit over a month ago the lustrum committee of our rowing club got the idea to praise the steer. He (or she) has to sit still for two hours. Rain, hail, wind and all other kinds of discomfort is part of their job. En for what? To lead the rowers in a straight line and to coach them. That's why the people of the lustrum committee thought it would be a good idea to create a award called The Rudder King.

XL goes XS

Yesterday morning I drove to Groningen to park my car at Anton L. his place and take the bike and go to our rowing club. I would be steering a women's team at 9 AM. But just before I arrived at Anton's place I got a phone call that it was canceled because of the hard wind (later there was given a rowing ban because of the weather). So we could go to Dronten early for a QuestXS test ride. But first it was time for a cup of tea.

Cyclists Rights

The Cyclists Rights began with a single post on Twitter. Response grew quickly and within a few hours there was a list with eleven rights. These were published the same night at the on the website FietsersAfstappen as the Universal Declaration of Cyclists Rights version 1.0.

Not again / suicidal

Saturday morning last week I was on my way to our rowing club (as usual). At the intersection (see two clips below) it's always good to pay attention. The car could just get though and I didn't have to brake a lot. Yesterday morning was a different story. This guy didn't look at all and on top of that his side windows are all fogged up which impairs his vision.

The guy below was curious if I wanted to kill myself, because I was riding in on the main road instead of the cycle path (I presume).

Guinea pig

Yesterday I received a nice tough guy hat from rij2op5.nl (bike 2 out of 5 days to work). On twitter they had a action where if you followed their Twitter account and retweeted a certain message, you could win the wicked hat. Normally I don't participate in these kind of actions, but promoting cycling to work did pay of for me. Last week I heard that I was one of the two people who had won a hat that day.