// August 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // news
Het is niet de beste dag voor De Standaard. Het vastlopen van de onderhandelingen voor een nieuwe regering hadden eerder al voor een nieuwe DT-regel gezorgd, maar nu is men op de economie-redactie aan het sukkelen bij het omzetten van breuken naar percenten:
// August 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // news
Niet alleen resiagentschappen (herinneren jullie je deze en deze nog?) hebben last van d/dt/ddt verschijnselen… Ook onze bijzonder gerespecteerde Standaard ziet het niet meer zitten:
// August 21st, 2007 // No Comments » // picture, travel
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Originally uploaded by Koen – kblanqua
It’s been more then 6 weeks since I joined the belgian delegation to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Denver, and only a few days ago have I uploaded the pictures to my Flickr-page. Those delegates that do not have an account on Flickr, drop me a mail and I’ll give you a URL to access the pictures without.
Koen
// August 18th, 2007 // No Comments » // news, travel
We kunnen er uiteraard maar van dromen dat we langer mogen blijven, maar als het van de Portugese bagagebehandelaars af mag hangen zullen we iets later thuis zijn 
// August 15th, 2007 // No Comments » // Innovation, news, technology
Last week, I discussed here an article of Bart, to create a device to use our touchpad as a drawing pad. And see: Datanews announced yesterday the invention of the touch pad pencil. Unfortunately, no source was mentioned
// August 14th, 2007 // No Comments » // picture, travel
| Levada’s zijn voor Madeira zonder enig overdrijven de levensaders van het eiland. Een netwerk van door de mens aangelegde kanalen zorgt ervoor dat de vruchtbare grond op het eiland voldoende water krijgt om er gewassen op te kunnen verbouwen. De kanalen werden in eerste instantie door slaven gegraven en onderhouden. De rijke grondeigenaares waren de eigenaars van de kanalen. Zij beslisten daardoor aan wie zij water leverden (en tegen welke prijs). De kanalen worden, sinds ze gebouwd en gegraven werden, permament onderhouden. Sinds de overheid (niet zonder slag of stoot) controle overnam over deze bron van leven, is het onderhoud ervan ook in de handen van de overheid. Om deze levada’s te onderhouden zijn paden langsheen de kanaaltjes gemaakt. Via deze kanalen kunnen de arbeiders de levada bereiken om onderhoudswerken uit te voeren, om het waterpeil na te kijken en aan te passen door schotten te plaatsen of om de omgevallen bomen en struiken te verwijderen. Deze paden zijn een droom voor de wandelaar. Ze brengen je naar plaatsen op het eiland waar je met de wagen nooit zou geraken.Er bestaan inmiddels heel wat boeken en gidsen die de wandelingen langs de levada’s beschrijven. |
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| Wij hebben gisteren een wandelweg gevolgd langs de Levada De Norte, die in totaal meer dan 60 kilometer lang is. Onze tocht, die een goede
drie uur in beslag nam, bracht ons door drie valleien. Drie uur genieten van rust, profiteren van de frisse lucht die de geur van eucalyptus meedraagt, verbaasd zijn door ontmoetingen met geiten, salamanders, vogels en af en toe de onvermijdelijke andere wandelaar – meestal een duitser |
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Onderweg profiteren niet alleen de akkers van de landbouwers, maar ook veel wilde bloemen hebben het perfect naar hun zin aan de oevers van de levada’s.
De kanalen zijn smal en diep, om de verdamping tegen te gaan.
Niet elke tegenligger zegt “danke schon” wanneer je hem voorbij gaat.
En aan het einde van de wandeling, genieten op een terrasje!
// August 12th, 2007 // No Comments » // customer-service, picture, travel
Oh, have you heard the story that an unhappy customer will tell it to 9 others? As I think it is not more than fair to tell it when it’s really bad, I think the customer services experience that left us with a thrilled and positive sensation, deserves a place here as well.
This story is about our last stay in New York. We stayed at the W Hotel on Times Square.
The second day of our stay, V suffered from a major flue and a jetlag. She had to stay in bed while I had to attend some meetings. So we called housekeeping so we could arrange a fixed time to clean our room. After explaining the situation, the housekeeping manager came up to our floor and discussed possibilities with me. He showed a real will to help and accommodate as much as possible. The maid that cleaned our room really took care of things in such a way that V was as less as possible interrupted, but still serviced very accurately.
This same day, a few minutes after the cleaning was done, V received a phone call in the room from the room service people. They had been informed that she wasn’t feeling OK and asked if she would be helped with some soup and toast. This was exactly wad she needed at that moment.
It’s great to know that there are still some people in their job that puts the little extra in the execution. And that’s even more appreciated when one is suffering from fever in a strange hotel bed!
The W Hotel
// August 11th, 2007 // No Comments » // customer-service, travel
Most readers of the blog (and everyday there seem to be more of you tuning in here) know that I have a rather strong emotion against bad customers services. So I would like you to be part of my latest customer services encounter, as promised yesterday:
Preface
As we knew that we would have less than 22 hours between our arrival in Belgium coming from New York and our departure to Madeira and anticipating that fact that we would be exhausted by the jetlag and the flight, we decided to spend the night at the Sheraton in Zaventem. This way, we didn’t had to worry about dinner, could sleep as long as possible and be assured that someone would wake us up. We had done this before, much to our comfort.
The check-in
At check-in, we encountered the first issue: there was no reservation for us. The Starwood Preferred Guest program changed it website recently and checking on current reservations wasn’t possible. Fortunately, the lady at the reception was kind enough to understand the issue and to arrange us a room. Issue solved. During the process of checking in, we had the wake-up call (at 4 o’clock in the morning – brrr) confirmed. We knew that room service was available 24/7, so we headed to our room.
The key
I must have had some very bad vibes that day, because once we arrived at the room, the key would only show a red light when inserting it. After trying a few dozen times, I went back to the reception. The lady at the counter checked the key, re-initiated it and I was back on my way to the room. The key gave me the infamous red light again. So I managed to call the reception to get some assistance. Thanks god that our key worked after more than 100 retries, because the person that was on its way to “immediately” assist us, never made it to our room.
The red burger
As it was getting late now, we choose to eat light and to get some sleep. We ordered a burger and some toast. I’ve been cooking some burgers in my life, but I’ve never managed to get the same result as did the night cook at this hotel. The burger was black (looked and tasted like coal) on the outside and red (raw meat) on the inside. Can someone please inform the gentle staff at this hotel that taking a frozen burger on then overheated grill might return some unseen results? Anyway, I wasn’t overeating that night 
and it was getting too late to have another one ordered … so we went asleep.
The not so waking up call
At a certain point, I woke up and looked at the television set in the room, which carried a clock. When I realised the time mentioned was 05:06, my heart stopped beating. Our plane was supposed to leave a little after 6 o’clock. I pushed V till she was awake as well and in less than 15 minutes we packed, went down to the ground floor, collected our stored luggage and pointed at the check-in-desk in Zaventem. I’ve been irritated by some lack of service in the past, but missing this easy wakeup-call makes it in my top three.
The service after
After passing security in the airport, I called the reception from my cell phone to tell them we had checked out and that I was absolutely displeased by the lack of basic services. The experience was completed by the response I had on the phone after explaining why I was annoyed with Sheraton. The man on the phone just said: “Oh, you have checked out already. Did you have anything from the minibar, sir?”
This ultimate unexpected response left me baffled.
// August 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // news, travel
Oh yes, life can be hard sometimes. After my two last days of work in the big apple, the time had come to fly back to Brussels. One working day there kept me away from the start of our holidays. But it turned out to be some of the more stressed moments we encountered…
In the night before we had scheduled to depart from New York, a severe thunderstorm woke us up in the early morning. We didn’t payed attention to it any more, till our driver picked us up at the hotel to head to JFK. Even if we had like three and a half hour before the plane would leave, he started to give us excuses while it could be that he would not make it to the airport in time. To give his words a little more prove, he turned on the radio, were we heard indeed that New York’s traffic was not just jammed but that the city was (as the New York Times said it) “brought to its knees“. The driver managed to get us out of the city in under 45 minutes, and by using small roads in Queens where I never was before, we made it to the airport in less than one and a half hour. Most people we met at the airport had travelled over two hours and a half from Manhattan to JFK.
So, after we landed (later than expected) in Brussels, I rearranged my schedule to accommodate as much meetings as possible, without jeopardising the chances of (re-)packing luggage to get ready for Madeira. So when it all (hmm … read on) was packed, I looked at those tickets. 20 kilo seemed to be the luggage limit… Great, but that was a little (!) over the weight of my case at that time. So a repackaging effort started, while I left a lot of the more heavy stuff aside, to add it later. This heavy stuff, including my books, is still at home. I’ll have to take a few days off when I get back, so I can read all those books I hoped to get trough here…
The stories at Zaventem airport will be subject of the blog tomorrow or so. Stay tuned for another new low in services-industry performance!
But, right now we are enjoying a stay at this great island in the middle of the ocean. I’ll post pictures on the website and I’ll blog some more stories in the next days. In the meanwhile, we’ll be swimming in the ocean, picking up golf again after months of inactivity, and enjoying the mild climate here: all what’s needed to recuperate from the 36 stressfull hours of travel
// August 5th, 2007 // No Comments » // news, running
When I finished the Half Marathon today, it was time to rejoin my greatest fan, who at that time was back in bed in the hotel, suffering from a combination of jetlag, flue,etc… So I started looking for the best way to get back to Times Square. TheNew York Subway seemed like a great way to get back fast
So I went to the first subway station I could think about, the one next to Battery PLace. I had understood that Line 1 would bring me back, but I had no other information. So I asked two gentlemen, who appeared to be runners as well, in the subway. One of them turned out to be heading in the same direction as myself. So we started a longer than expected journey, visiting metro stations where we could not enter, as we had no card, metro station that were closed and finally a subway station tht had a train to bring us back and a ticket veding machine… (after 100 attempts to slide my card in the right pace, it finally accepted my 2 dollar…
So our journey gave us a little time to talk about running, about travelling and, about blogging. Where we would have exchanged e-mail-addresses a year or so ago, we now exchanged blog-urls
So now, while blogging my sucess in reaching the finish today, I typed in the URL and found the blog of a loving father that is running in an effort to raise funds for research on autism.As some of you know, my brother Johan had a specific form of autism as well. So, dear readers of my blog, if you feel this to be a right cause, support Rafael in its effort to raise 50 000 dollar this year. Read the blog and/or go immediately to the fund raising page
Success with the rest of your 10half marathons this year, Rafael!
Koen
Update: Continued here
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