Hi all,

Just a short post. I uploaded 2 new picture sets: my dad’s wedding and Finn’s fourth and fifth month.

Enjoy !

The month has flown by so very fast ! Lots of things have happened, let’s go over them in chronological order

First up is Techdays 2011. I actually wasn’t planning on going to this conference at first since I wanted to focus more on people management, but in the end the tech bug bit me anyways I saw some interesting sessions about Windows Phone 7, which I’m trying to do some development for at the moment to keep my programming skills up to par. So far I’m having fun with it but don’t have a lot of time to put into it unfortunately. But otherwise the conference was ok, I would say better than last year even. Scott Hanselman was epic as always

The following weekend we went to a baby party of Ella (daughter of Liesbeth & Enzo). It was a rather grand event ! So many people and so much yummy food ! They sure know how to spoil people

Next up, my dad’s wedding. It was a rather informal affair, which is definitely a good thing ! In the morning there was limo though to pick them up to go to the city hall where there was a short ceremony. In the afternoon they just put some tables in their little courtyard and people just came by. There were some people I hadn’t seen in a very long time so that was nice to see them again My siblings and I gave my dad and Christine a Thomas Cook Travelbox, a short city trip inside of Europe. Should be fun and I got to sponsor work a bit

It was a week related to weddings, in the weekend there was a party for my grandparents’ 60 year wedding anniversary. My cousin and uncle where there also and I don’t get to see my family at that side often so that was great to be able to catch up.

We’re almost at the end, the last thing I did that was cool was an awesome Supreme Commander 2 game last weekend with Arwen, Bouw, Kirsten and Benny. It’s been a very long time since a strategy game was such a close call but still a win ! It took us hours and it was great fun So much fun even that we’re doing it again next weekend ! Geeks for the Win ! Tomorrow I’m going over to Arwen’s again for a small barbeque … the weather won’t be awesome but at least dry Oh and while talking about the guys, we’ve also got our first appointment with a travel agency to have a look at our big USA trip in 2012, soooo looking forward to that !

Before closing I of course just have to talk a little bit about Finn as well, the little Lord Awesomeness ! He’s still growing very fast, he’s over 7kg already. he’s also moving from milk to vegetable and fruit paste and he loves it (even though he gets half of it all over him) ! He does have a bit of allergies but nothing that most likely won’t pass once he’s older. In a couple of weeks he will have to go to daycare once Katrien starts working again so that’ll be a big change, very curious how that will go !

I also have a lot of pictures to post (my dad’s wedding, party of my grandparents, Finn …) but I’m too lazy to do it now Maybe next time !

We’ll start off the post with some additional baby news. 2 new babies have arrived into the world ! Amaat Aldwin Audooren (son my of brother and Joke) and Bent Leuntjens (son of Tom1 & Wenti). The baby boom continues !

Talking about babies, Finn is growing very fast. I’ve uploaded some new pictures so you can see for yourself. You can see them here. Enjoy the cuteness !

I’ll quickly cover some other tidbits (don’t feel like doing a very lengthy post to be honest ).

I got a new cellphone, Samsung Omnia 7. A Windows Phone 7 device. I was originally going to go for Android (because as you no doubt know, Apple is the Axis of Evil) but the user interface and untidiness of the OS put me off a bit. So far I’m very happy with my Windows Phone 7 (it was also a lot cheaper than a decent Android device) but you have to take into account it’s still a version 1.0 so some features are missing or not completely finished yet. Still, the OS shows great potential and I’m happy with my choice so far

Next up, we planted a hedge. It’ll take a year or 3 for it to fully grow but still, it’ll be nice. It’s very warm weather at the moment and we planted it a bit too late, so let’s hope it survives

Well that’s it for now, laters !

Yesterday was an awesome day and I just had to write about it. Tom1, Tom2 & myself went indoor skydiving. Tom1 and myself’s birthday present to Tom2. It was absolutely awesome ! But it wasn’t easy though !
We each had 4 turns of 1 minute. My first turn was not so good, I was surprised by the speed of the wind and you automatically want to hold your breath. My second and third turn were pretty good though, I managed to find perfect stability. My last turn was a bit worse, I got cocky and ended up on the floor Tom1 got the hang of it the second he got in the windtunnel though, he was a natural. I definitely want to try it again !

Afterward we went golfing. The skydiving is just across the border with the Netherlands and they have a zone there with lots of stuff. Golf and skydiving are just 2 of them, there’s also karting, paintball, swimming, etc. A great place to spend the day !
In any case, we went to shoot some golf balls from a stationary position (I don’t know the official golf term, sorry ). We couldn’t go on the green though, you need some sort of license for that. Still we had good fun and made up our own little contest which Tom2 won with Tom1 and myself tied for second place. A great day !

Talking about birthdays, I had one myself I turned 31 at the beginning of the month. Unlike last year I didn’t throw a big party, but Valery came over to celebrate for a weekend (well that and to meet Finn of course ). We spent most of the weekend playing Pixel Junk Shooters 2, mini game on the PS3. Was pretty cool

Then let’s come to some bad news. Katrien had an infection on her shoulder and they had to cut it open (pretty much what I had several times in the past few years). It’s on her shoulder though so that’s at least better placed. Same treatment as myself, they have to insert some fabric in there every day to drain it. Hopefully it’ll heal fast. Apparently she had it for a week or so at least but was too stubborn to go visit the doctor, even knowing what those things did to me. The moment I found out I sent her to the doctor. Hopefully there won’t be a next time but if there is she’ll have learned something from this, I wish I could say she won’t be stubborn anymore about visiting the doctor but I doubt it Everything will turn out fine of course, it’ll just take a while longer.

But to end on a positive note, with Finn everything is going great still. He’s growing so fast ! He became 2 months old last Wednesday. But he’s still a model baby

Well I have to go, leaving for Ertvelde

Finn is now over a month old and so far things are going very well. We did have to go to the emergency room for Katrien’s headaches in the end, but they managed to fix it by injecting her own blood into her spinal cord … scary though. But the problems disappeared the day after so that was great.

Finn has been growing very rapidly (6 weeks tomorrow !), he’s already too big for his first pj’s. He’s been a very good baby, not too much crying and just general cuteness of course He’s starting to become very active, looking around all the time with his eyes. And he’s become great friends with Darth Fluffy, whom he shares the baby park with. We’ve had a lot of people visiting and bringing presents, thanks to everyone for that

I uploaded some good quality pictures here. Enjoy !

Other than baby news I can also report that I have my new computer, whom I’ve named Pulsar (after a Star Destroyer of course as the naming convention here goes ). For the geeks out there here are some of the specs:

- Intel Sandy Bridge i7 2600K 3.4 Ghz processor
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe mainboard
- 8GB DDR3 RAM (Corsair Vengeance)
- AMD 5850 graphics card (the only part that came over from the old pc)
- Antec P183 silent case and Antec CP-850 PSU
- OCZ Vertex 2 180GB SSD as application drive
- WD 3TB disk as data drive

It runs sooooo smoothly, especially thanks to the SSD. I’m NEVER going back to conventional hard disks. The multitasking makes such a big difference !

That’s it for now, enjoy the pics

Greetings readers ! It is with great pride I present my son: Finn Maximus Audooren. He was born on the 16th of January 2011 at 15:11. His stats at birth were 3.3 kg and 50 cm, so that’s really ok for being born 2 weeks early ! He caught us quite by surprise there, I personally was convinced that he would be born late (being a first).

The birth itself went rather fluently. Katrien’s water broke at 7 am but no labor pains yet. Those started at around 9 am when we arrived at the hospital, and since he was born at 15:11 things went pretty quickly for a first.
Unfortunately not everything went so great, the placenta didn’t come out by itself so they had to go in to get it out. And currently Katrien is still plagued by headaches from the epidural so we might have to go back to the hospital for that, we’ll know tomorrow.
Otherwise both son and mother are doing good though. Finn has been sleeping well (well as much as you can expect from a baby ) and he’s extremely cute. More news to follow no doubt

I’ll post some pictures next time, but for those who have me on Facebook, plenty of pics there already

2011 is almost upon us, time to wrap up 2010. I’m having 2 weeks of vacation which is pretty awesome. Good to unstress a bit and get ready for the next year. It promises to be a big one.

So far the vacation has been great: had soms LAN parties, went for breakfast in Ghent with Katrien in a fancy place, did some shopping, all good Next week I’m going to Holland for a few days. And tonight of course celebrating New Year, this year at Els and Kristof’s.

2011 promises to be an exciting year, mostly because of the baby of course. Very curious how that will go
There are some other things that get me pretty excited as well, being a gadget freak. I’m planning on getting a new computer (my current one is over 3 years old now, for me that’s a bit of a record) with my long awaited SSD. Also getting a new phone (bye bye crappy iPhone). All this probably doesn’t sound too exciting for most people but for me it’s like Christmas (come late in this case :))

Well, I’m off to enjoy my vacation some more, see you next year !

Welcome back !

Let’s kick of with the baby news. We just had a checkup and little Maximus is doing great, he’s now 2 weeks ahead of schedule. He’ll be a strong lad like his father ! We went to a session about breast feeding and will be going to a general session in a couple of weeks for all the other details. Only 2 months to go, time sure flies ! I bought a lot of cool stuff from ThinkGeek, I should have it on Monday. Awesomeness !

On the work front everything is still very hectic. But we migrated our website to the new platform this week without too many serious problems. Phew, very happy about that ! Still a couple of sites to go, but the first one should have been the hardest. Lots of changes there, my team is expanding rapidly, but I can only be happy about that.
Next week Kristof & Bart are going to Ukraine, this time I’m staying home and guarding the fort so to speak Looking at the temperatures in Ukraine at the moment I must say that I’m glad I’m not going, cold !

Talking about winter, the holiday season is rapidly approaching and I couldn’t resist again and had to make an impulse buy. The object of purchase this time is an Xbox 360 with Kinect. Now having all 3 consoles (PS3, Xbox 360 and a Wii) I decided one must go, so I’m selling my Wii. I got a good offer on it and will be selling it tomorrow.
To be honest though, buying the Xbox probably wasn’t the smartest decision I could have made since I’ll probably hardly play on it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome piece of technology, I just don’t think I’ll use it much. I tried to bring it back to Mediamarkt under their “not satisfied within 14 days you can bring it back” motto, however it seems it only applies to unopened packages … How you can know if you’re not happy with something then I don’t know. So looks like I have a Xbox 360 now, could still be cool once there are more games out for it, we’ll see
The smart decision would have been spending the money on a new phone I think, since my iPhone 3GS still has the reboot issues in the middle of a call just like 1000’s of other people and Apple is pretending nothing is going on, no more Apple stuff for me !

Yesterday I went out to dinner with Ilse and Nick, had been half a year I think since we last saw them. They bought a house not too far from here so that should be cool Next weekend I’m going over to Valery, I’ll take the Xbox and Kinect, maybe I can sell it to her

Just a quick post with some pictures. Facts 2010 was pretty good ! Mostly better than last year in any case, more roomy, more stuff to see. Not everything improved unfortunately, the Q&A sessions with the actors were held on the main floor (lots of background noise) with very limited seating. so that’s one thing they need to improve next year. I did buy some stuff though, 2 cool tshirts (Autobots and stormtrooper). I couldn’t find a fluffy Darth Vader for the kid though

The photoshoots were the best part though, I got a picture of me with Jewel Staite (Firefly and Stargate Atlantis), Robert Picardo (Star Trek Voyager and Stargate Atlantis) and the guys from the A-Team. Check out all the pictures here.

This is going to be a long one, many things to talk about in no particular order ! Ready … Set … GO !

We’ll start with what is fresh in my memory: BlizzCon ! For this year also known as DisappointmentCon. I bought the live stream, had some friends over, got out the drinks and snacks and waited with full anticipation for the big announcements … which didn’t come. At all. Now I realize that they had already told almost everything about Diablo 3 (except the last class), Cataclysm is public knowledge and they weren’t going to say much about Heart of the Swarm. However, they are working on a new game, couldn’t they at least do a suggestive poster or something ? Or give a release date for Diablo 3 ? Big disappointment and a bit wasted money on the live stream. At least my friend and I had a good time afterward playing some Starcraft 2 to take our minds of it, and Katrien had cooked an awesome dinner (and pie !).

Now that I’m ranting I’ll get it all over with so we can end on a positive note What is wrong with Belgium and baby stores ??? I’m sure I’m not the only geek in this country, do we really only have shops that sell baby stuff with bears and fluffy animals ? I want something fantasy / science fiction related ! A cute dragon or a funny wizard or something … That we don’t have the really cool stuff that you can find in the US on ThinkGeek I can understand (but still sad about it) but really, fluffy animals ? That’s all we’ve got ? Geeks unite !

Anyways, moving on. Today we’re going back to the baby store to pick out a present for friends of us who just had a baby. In the meantime we’ll look at some buggies for ourselves (really wanted the ATAT Walker one, but even if they did have it I think Katrien would veto it )

Last weekend I went to visit Valery. We went to the movies … twice (right after each other, we are so old school !). Legend of the Guardians and Despicable Me. Both were good movies, especially the second one was funny. Guardians was mainly very pretty, even though we had a small scare there that it started in Dutch but it was corrected thank god Other than that we tried out some new mini games on the PS3 and the new move controller. Fun times.

I also went back to Ukraine for work. And as usual the weather sucked, it really follows us around. Had some good times with the team though. We went bowling, which was great to get to know the new guys.
Talking about teambuilding, we did some of that with the Belgian Thomas Cook IT department as well. We had another LAN party at the Outpost. It was pretty good, Java team has some new great gamers, Vincent really wiped the floor with me in Starcraft 2

Tomorrow I’m going to Facts again (Science Fiction / Fantasy convention thing), should be fun. There are some people from Stargate coming, Jewel Staite and Robert Picardo (aka the doctor from Star Trek Voyager). Face and Murdock from the old A-Team will also be present. A good geeky afternoon

With that I’m going to conclude, baby store time again !