Niels Christian's blog

For a long time (several months), I have wanted to switch my textpattern blog to a wordpress one. So I happily started installing wordpress and everything was fine. I had read somewhere that wordpress had an import function that made it easy to keep your old posts from previous blogs. That, of course, would be really nice.

After installation I found the function somewhere in the wordpress dashboard, thinking, yes finally I get rid of this messed up syntax in textpattern. But no. The function was bugged. So I was disappointed and thought that I could make the script my self, but quickly I realized how much work it actually was. I gave that up.

Time went on and I still wanted to fix it. Meanwhile WordPress had moved from version 2.3.x to version 2.5.1. Somehow the import function now works properly for textpattern databases. That done, only thing left to do was editing all the links and pictures and stuff that were written in textile (textpatterns own markup language thing). Doing that in every post and figuring out relationships between pictures and posts was a nightmare. Unfortunately some pictures were lost in this process.

I now happily write this post in this same, but renewed blog that’s converted into wordpress. The process has been cumbersome and given me some headaches on the way, but I am sure it will pay back, since the textile you had to write your posts in in textpattern was such a mess, whereas wordpress has very much focus on the usability for the blogger. Now when blogging is so much easier, I’m a happy blogger.

So, I just got startet in driving school. Since I never have tryed to drive(like in being __the driver__), I was not really sure if it would be difficult. Then, yesterday I was in the car behind the steering wheel for the first time.

First surprise: the car can actually drive by itself in the lower gears. I did’nt even have to touch the speeder. Though, it was funnier driving when I used the speeder.

Second surprise: The car wont start when the hand brake is in use. I’d put the car into first gear and tried to move, but just got nowhere. After a minute, maybe two, where I had started the car over and over again, I finally saw the handbrake. Gee, felt so stupid.

U-turn, slalom, parking and more, after all it was not that hard to do.
I quickly got a feeling of the car. Piece of cake, I thought. Now I just hope nemesis will stay out of my way.

Recently, there has been a lot of media coverage on stories that regard muslims. One story was about an art gallery in Berlin(Galerie Nord) that showed a picture of the Kaaba, with the title ‘dummer stein’. Note that the Kaaba is the holiest place in Islam. Well, angry muslims made the gallery owner remove the picture. The gallery closed the exhibition but today it was reopened.

Another story, its not that unique, but certainly, it does demonstrate my point. The dutch bank Fortis has removed the piggy bank, their mascot, so they no longer give those to children. The reason: they are afraid to hurt muslim peoples feelings by using the pig as their mascot.
Fortis is not the first one to act like this.

The point? Muslims tend to rule the world. If something doesnt fit to their culture, even though they live in a western non islamic country, they make it fit. They move to our countries due to war and other tragedic sad stuff, and the idea is to integrate into the cultures of their new countries. Somehow they tend to make us fit into their cultures though it should be the opposite way around.

This tendency may not be all that clear, not yet. But it will grow in the future and Islam will get more power within our so called ‘free’ countries, where we ought to say whatever we wanted to, without having the risc of threads. Thats no longer the situation. It’s a sad world!

Sometimes I like to fool around with graphics and designing tools. Recently I have drawn a tiger using Photoshop’s shape tools.
I like the result and I just wanted to show it.

Link to drawing
Link to original