2 Weeks without Internet

March 20th, 2009
 

We are busy moving house and this will mean 2 weeks without Internet. In Aachen they stopped our telephone subscription with Deutsche Telekom, and here in Belgium it will take 2 weeks before Telenet will come and install the necessary material. And suddenly it is so obvious that I'm addicted to internet. I'm really suffering from cold turkey, and I even had problems finding a place to write this post.
2 weeks without reading my emails, no more information on Wikipedia or checking the news, and even part of my social contacts will be on stand-by.
It is amazing how much my life is being influenced by internet. I remember some time ago there was a call to stop using Facebook for one day. I participated in that, and it worked fine. But 2 weeks is probably too much...

Looking for a service provider in Belgium

March 12th, 2009
 

We have been looking for a good service provider here in Belgium for our telephone, internet and television needs. Belgium is a special country, where different providers exist in different parts of the country. You will not find Voo in Flanders, and I doubt you will find Telenet in Wallonia.

Luckily we had some kind of shopping list, because otherwise it would have been impossible to make a selection. Every provider has different offers and it's next to impossible to compare them.
We first check the internet for information, saw some providers like Belgacom and TV Vlaanderen at the Food Fair in November 2008, and started making a list of all our needs.

For telephone we needed a subscription that would allow us to call all fixed telephone numbers for free, if possible also the European ones. Since my wife is German, she would like to stay in touch with her parents in Germany. Skype was an option, but since not everybody has skype or is available on the internet, we decided to look for a "real" telephone.

For internet we needed a quick wifi-connection, but no real heavey upload or download limits. We don't dowload movies, so that saves on the budget.

For television we first thought of getting just plain old cable television. I haven't had a television for 7 years now, so I didn't miss a lot and I'm quite happy with just 4 channels. But after seeing the quality and the offer, we decided to put Digital Television on our "nice to have" list.

After careful consideration and by talking to other users, we immediately removed TV Vlaanderen from our list, since they could not provide us with a full package. Belgacom was an option, but their difficult price structure and the bad feedback we received, made us choose Telenet. They have a Golden Shake offer that will not only give us digital TV, internet and free telephone calls to 35 European countries for just 58 €, but it also comes with a digital HD recorder of 320 GB. That should be sufficient.
We are now waiting for the people of Infrax to come and install the cable, and then we can go for it. We'll keep you posted

Buying illegal stuff on the Internet

You might have heard that we are using non-disposable, enviromentally-friendly cotton diapers. These nappies have many advantages compared to the disposable variants like Huggies, Pampers etc..

First of all, you can use them as many times as you want, thereby decreasing the waste mountain. Furthermore, if they ever get totally worn out, you can still use them as a good old-fashioned cleaning rug.

Secondly, they are of course much cheaper. Yes, you need to buy them at a higher price compared to a disposable one, but since you can use them over and over, the price per use is a fraction of a Pampers.

But strangely, this is where the problem of illegality creeps in. It seems that in many countries (for example Japan, but apparently also in France) used diapers are deemed "sexually tantelizing items", and are illegal on eBay and labelled "used underwear".

Luckily people in Finland aren't as narrow-minded as some other nationalities, so we received some good diapers from the wonderful land of 1000 lakes.