Funny how some things completely elude you for a long time, then you see something that makes you think about it and suddenly you're thinking funny how this never came to mind before. We've all seen drunks on the streets, right? But have you seen a lot of women drunks? Why not, why wouldn't they be? Today I did see one, lady in probably her 50s carrying a small radio playing the Beach Boys' Surfin USA, with a bottle of beer in her other hand, standing in the street. Finally some progress for the feminist movement, this must be good news. Then, like a stab in the chest, as I walk on I see two more drunks. Male. Just when I thought they had a win..

Apparently the university decided some road work had to be done and now getting to and from the various buildings has become a problem, depending on rainfall as well as where they decide to excavate next. Little did I think of this today as I was headed for the Educatorium. On the way, there was a section closed off due to road work, with metal fences preventing any traffic. Today the fences were open on both sides, so I decided to go right through it. It was just sand on the asphalt anyway, I didn't give it much though. Almost at the end of the supposedly closed off area (where people walked freely), there was a section of asphalt missing, filled with sand. The gap was probably 1m long and I assumed it was just a thin layer of asphalt missing. As I ride over it, I see my front wheel sink into the sand, turns out it was a bit deeper than I thought. I was going at a reasonable speed, so when my front wheel finally popped out onto the asphalt on the other side, I had pretty much lost control of where I was going. Somehow I ended up crashing right into the metal fence, making a lot of noise. It was really weird, I'd never had anything like this happen before. I did a quick status check of the bike and everything seemed fine. Except the chain had come off in the front and tangled up around the pedal, so dragging it back in place got my hand rather black with grease. Later I would discover something happened to the gears, cause they now skip without warning.

I had a similar accident a few years ago, similar in that once again I didn't see it coming. I was in a hurry to get to school before they close at 11pm, I think I needed a printout or something. It was fairly dark, I was going down a steep hill and then onto a gravel road which again turned downwards. On the gravel, I made a turn and skid. It may have been October, we had had snow, but it had melted. Little did I know that under the dust where I skid, there was a nice layer of ice and there's no way I could have seen it. I hit my head on the ground, started bleeding and I've been much more careful on the bike ever since.

• Do you know how html forms work? Most people would probably say "no".
• But do you know how Google works? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that most people would say "yes".

Why am I talking about this? Because I just found a cool feature in Firefox that I didn't know about before. To give a little background first.. have you ever wanted bookmark a search result? But they're not usually "bookmarkable", are they? Well you can, if you know how. It has something with how searches (or in general: form submissions) are handled on the server side. If the form is a post, then bookmarking the url in the navigation bar won't work. If the form is a get (eg. Google), then you can bookmark the search.

So picking up user patterns like that is what makes good software and Firefox has done something to make searching nicer for us. The idea is very simple, but it's the kind of thing that is done easily in software which is inconvenient to do manually by the user.

Seeing is believing so try this one for size. Open http://www.imdb.com/ in Firefox [duh], right click on the input box where you type in your search words and select Add a Keyword for this Search.... I'm not sure which version of Firefox you need for this, but I'm on 1.5.0.2. You will see a dialog box that looks like this:

I have filled it in already, you can copy mine if you like. Now, in your location bar, type m paul walker and hit Enter.

See what happens now? You search imdb for the term paul walker just by typing m searchword in the location bar. What you've set up here is essentially a bookmark, with a keyword. The keyword is m, what you type in to run a search. It could just as well have been imdb or moviedatabasesearch, then again m is shorter, no?

Needless[?] to say, this isn't limited to imdb.com, you can use this function to create a bookmark for every search box anywhere and set up short keywords to run searches more conveniently. I didn't demo this with google because Firefox already has the google search integrated, but I think this is actually a nicer way to google than using the google input box.

Do you ever have those moments when you're doing one thing and suddenly you remember something completely unrelated and you're wondering "why did this just pop into my head?"? I was at Lidl doing the standard bi-daily grocery shopping and I see they have lots of bananas out, I check the price and it's neither very cheap nor expensive (€1.29/kg), so I'm thinking I'll get some, cause I have no other fruit in the house right now. Then I hear this voice in my head "GEORGE LIKES THE BANANAS!!!"

I usually have a lot of blog ideas when I travel. A lot of time is spent waiting, practically wasted, the mind wanders. I rarely make anything of it, it's not practical, but it does come to me more intensely than at any other time. Today, though, I didn't have to look far.

I arrive at Schiphol ridiculously early, two and a half hours before my flight. I guess I don't like to be late, but this was way far ahead of time compared to the margin I usually allow myself. I check in and line up for the now customary security screening. I don't care for this, I always have to take off my belt cause it sets off the buzzer. I put my bag down, it goes through the little car wash and I walk through the detector. Nothing. I see the guy in front of me being body searched. I've never been body searched before, but hey if this is what they have to do, what do I care. The guy seemed to enjoy it, took his sweet time, very thorough. I don't really care, but I imagine some people might have a bit of a problem with someone giving them a good head-to-toe rub down. Then I see the people behind me are not being searched, wtf? As long as it's the same for everyone, I don't very much care, but why did they single me out? At least 10 people passed through behind me with no searching. Well whatever, I wait for my luggage to come through, they're taking ages with it. Finally the lady holds up my bag, "whose is this?" It's mine. "Nederlands or English?" English. Then she mumbles something I don't understand. I stand there waiting, she's busy screening other bags. Wtf? After a while, a guy grabs my bag, walks up to me. "Could you open the bag please?" "You have a laptop in there?" "Yes, I do." "Can you take it out?" "Yes, I can." How courteous. I take out my laptop case. "Do you have scissors in there?" "No." I imagine at this point that as my bag came through, the lady who's screening them got a blinking red dialog box on her screen "scissors, 4 minutes to armageddon". I shouldn't have said it, but "actually I may have scissors elsewhere". I take out my pencil case, there are the scissors. The guy tells me I have to either check them in (bit too late for that, wise guy) or leave them. So they stole my scissors. Interestingly, the guy right in front of me also had scissors as part of a first aid kit and they let *him* take them on the plane. So I have to take out my laptop, they have to scan it again by itself. Apparently their scanner is so shitty they make people do this all the time now, yet another way to annoy us. So I get all my stuff scanned again, took about 20 minutes in all (not that I was in a rush, mind), finally it's all done.

All in all, I didn't really mind it, I had plenty of time and I was in a good mood. But then in Oslo they made take out my laptop *again* to scan separately (for some reason they can't reroute the luggage to domestic flights, you have to collect it and then check it in again *sigh*) and it got old fast. Still, I've never been given the detail treatment before and I don't know what set it off this time. I am certifiably Dutch and I'm white, I thought they only stopped Arab men with long beards? :confused: