Ronald van der Wijden

Phew! I finally got around to a much needed upgrade of my WordPress installation; since my hosting provider upgraded to PHP5 a while ago things looked a bit off in this neighbourhood.
Primarily, post order turned from descending to ascending, placing the oldest post on top.
Baroo?

So, it was due time for an upgrade. The previous version of my installation was 2.0.2, and the current one is 2.5.1 (2.6 in still in beta). In the past, upgrading usually was a walk in the park so I wasn’t too worried; nice job for a sunday afternoon, right? Well…
Mostly due to my own clumsiness things didn’t go quite as smooth this time around: on extending the config file with some new statements I accidentally removed the database prefix one, causing WordPress to miss my existing database altogether and install a new, empty one, so no posts and the default theme. Yikes!

Luckily, after re-starting my heart I realised my mistake, added the prefix statement back in and all was good again: my theme was back and so were the posts, this time in the desired order. Success!

Hopefully this will be a good starting point to reactivate this very much dormant blog, with more attention to my slowly–very slowly–growing model railroad interest.

Up ’til now, the complete lack of posts must have been obvious; the main reason for this is my shift in interests and the general lack of time to focus my attention on anything but work and staying alive (you know, breathing, eating…).

Among the victims has been the world of web design; I almost completely stopped keeping up with that and what little free time I have to spare nowadays is taken up by model railroading.

I decided not to kill off this web space just yet, but unless I find a good alternative use for it I may still do so: after all, it’s not like it’s free or anything!

For those die-hards that haven’t already given up on visiting here altogether: if it survives at all, this site will likely see a major shift in focus, probably towards model railroading–if I ever find the time to actually do something with that…

Yesterday, to my joy I found the latest addition to my book collection in the mail: “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird, published by Sitepoint. Since I’m not a designer, and likely never will be, it’s books like these that at least give me some basic knowledge on how to do simple design work; also, the more I know about this subject, the more I can appreciate the wonderful work proper, trained, skilled designers create.

I’ve been rather busy lately, but if I can squeeze some time out of my busy schedule I look forward to curling up on the couch with this one.

A while back (a long while back…) I wrote about my thoughts on building a small light railway/tramway layout. After some research though, suitable rolling stock and track seems not to easy to come by. Also, the possible themes looked like they lacked a bit too much challenge; I mean, I don’t have high demands, but a layout needs to at least offer some entertainment.

So I’ve been rethinking the whole issue: when space is limited, chosing a smaller scale is another way to approach the problem. N scale (1:160 or 2mm) has been around for quite some time and availability of scenery, rolling stock and track material is rather decent.
Not like it’s anywhere close to what’s available in H0, but still.

Now, traditionally I had something against N; I found (or at least thought I found) the models lacking in detail and the technique and reliability unsatisfactory.
Ever since I gave it some more attention though I found models nowadays leave little to be desired: even on closeup shots you really have to look closely to distinguish N from H0 (the clunky couplings are usually a dead giveaway, unfortunately).

So I decided to give N a try. Over the past weeks I’ve been scoping out model shops in the neighbourhood, been looking for suitable models, thought about which track I wanted to use; there is not much choice in that department, but Peco UK supplies a very attractive fine version that is still compatible with standard (NEM compliant) rolling stock.
I already have a rough sketch for a theme and track plan; the moment has come to flesh out a more detailed plan of the layout and tracks.

More on this subject when things progress.
Yeah, I promised that before and failed; I’m sorry, I’ll try and better my life.

2006 has been the year of unusual weather in Holland. Did the year start with a relatively cold, wet and late spring, juli offered two consecutive heat waves with record breaking highs for several weeks. August, normally the “real” summer month around here, was wet and too cold; oktober and november again were unusually mild, extending the summer and pushing back the autumn.
After a short cold period, even december was too mild, and 2007 started with spring-like temperatures, throwing off many early flowering plants and causing them to bloom far too early.

Although the experts don’t exclude some proper winter weather lateron–febuari and march are often the coldest months, and even april can still be rather chilly–at the moment it seems like we skipped winter altogether. What do you mean, global warming?