Xavier Defrang

If you like the ligne claire, you only have one week left to visit the Ever Meulen exhibition in Leuven.

I'm so glad I spotted this a couple of days ago on the door of Plaizier.

I'll stick to vegetables and soda, thank you!

Lesson #12: How To Pay A Tax You Are Not Supposed To Pay Because Of A Mistake You Haven't Committed

Preliminary: commit the crime not to work for the Almighty Welfare State and run your own business.

1. Stop your business dating december 31st of year Y
2. Get the first notice for a tax (that you're not supposed to pay in the first place) relevant to the Y+1 period at your previous address and do not get notified
3. Get the a second notice for that very tax (that you're still not supposed to pay in the first place) and still relevant to the Y+1 period, this time including a penalty fee for the delay
4. Email your local tax administration that you are not supposed to be burdened by this tax anymore
5. Wait 1 to 4 weeks
6. Get answered by snail mail, important points are:
   • according to the database of the responsible administration, you were still registered as a business january 1st of year Y+1.
   • if a mistake has been made in the update of their data, you must notify the aforementioned administration to fix it, but you're still due to pay the tax
   • don't even think about it: it's too late to provide the document which proves that you are not supposed to pay the tax.
7. Pay ^*

Belgium: It's as simple as that!

^* Because going on a Oklahoma City scale rampage just doesn't feel right... ;)

This Joost Swarte exhibition seems worth a trip down to the Kingdom of Structural Unemployment...

I thought that the anticlimax of the current campaign for the federal elections would be a Celebrity Jeopardy! between rival news anchors turned voice magnets politicians.

But once again the PS has just beaten everyone in the communication department, this time with an absolutely pathetic viral website.

This FUD inducing piece go as far as to ask us, poor voters, if this is really what we expect from politics. The short answer is: no, it's not.

But what else can you expect when the average french speaking belgian politician is barely able to speak with complete and intelligible sentences?

The Diegem folks must be in a profound state of distress to reach such a low... After giving away cash to a bunch of obedient (and supposedly popular) bloggers, they are taking their guerilla marketing to the empty streets of Flanders office parks...

I was at a customer's when a Windows Vista branded SUV stopped on the parking lot and 3 promogirls lead by a guy dressed in a Mounty uniform (yes, like Peter) stormed the place to give away some candies (in surgical quantity) and promote the world's ugliest graphical interface to a 16-bit operating system.

Too bad for them, all the company desktop computers were Macs... so they took their gas guzzler to the next corporate building... just a few meters away. No comment...

I'm very curious to know how many people actually went to a store and left 500€ on the counter for a boxed version of Vista Ultimate. Last time I checked, they were not exactly flying off the shelves. All the people I know who installed this thing rolled back to Windows XP within days or even hours. One went as far as to say that we were back to Windows 95...

Tonight, most of Belgium has been hoaxed by a fake breaking news program claiming that Flanders had unilaterally declared its independance.

Considering the stupidity of our politicians and the rage going on in the streets, the backlash for Jean-Claude Defossé will probably be rude. It's high time we show the man our support!

Thanks Colin for the button.

In other news, 80% of the french speaking Belgian population seems to have the IQ of a mollusk.

Congratulations to Belgium's Ministry of Finance IT department which made it to the Daily WTF. I guess that's not everyday that one overestimates about €900 millions. When the bug was discovered, the upcoming october 8 poll certainly did not helped the communication between all the politically appointed managers supposedly in charge...

No one can blame them as the poor fellows must be overworked since Belgium tax burden keeps increasing. Somebody please wake me up when this country nearly looks like the worst place in Denmark or Sweden...

Not that I care about lame online contests but I thought it would be fun to probe the actual expertise of the self-proclaimed web specialists running the damn thing.

It took approximately 10 minutes to write a bot that votes for the only blog who deserves it. This script issues a valid vote encoded into an URL and hides behind the Google Translate cluster to pass through the IP address check. Now that's a 2.0ish mash-up, isn't it? ;)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'cgi'

def who_gives_a_shit?
  (1 + rand(5)).to_s
end

params = {
  'votepushed' => 'votepushed',
  'survey' => '496',
  'answer1' => '2',
  'answer2' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer3' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer4' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer5' => who_gives_a_shit?,
}

query_string = params.collect { |k, v| 
  "#{k}=#{CGI.escape(v)}"
}.join('&')

survey_url = 'http://www.lesoir.be'
survey_url += '/special/persoweb2006/results.shtml?' 
survey_url += query_string

proxy_url_path = '/translate?langpair=en|en&u='

proxied_vote_url_path = proxy_url_path + CGI.escape(survey_url)

Net::HTTP.get_print 'www.google.com', proxied_vote_url_path

I'm not affiliated with Mehmet or any other contestant whatsoever. I won't even run this script to fake the vote, I don't care. I just did this because:

1. It's fun and easy
2. It demonstrates what an online vote is worth when it's not so well implemented
3. I'm a bad boy :)

I think I do really love doing useless things.

The fascinating and heartbreaking story of a man helping his wife to die.

Belgium still has a long way to go in terms of right to die. Isn't that the most basic freedom a man deserves? When will people be finally able to walk anytime in an hospital and just call it quit?

I'm back from a few days off at the Vlaamse Kust. I haven't done much but kicking back and relaxing with friends. I did however a couple of absurd yet sociologically interesting excursions. I paid a visit to the Mecca of Flemish nationalism — which looks like a cheesy level in RTCW — and the nearest ville de province at a driving distance just to get a little taste of France... Holidays always leave a bittersweet taste of Houellebecq poetry in my mouth...

It's now high time I start to plan my next trip to Poland, via Berlin. Let's add already the new DDR Museum to the must-see list.