What REALLY kills …

Here’s the final word on nutrition and health. What REALLY kills…

1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

3. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

4. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

5. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

(received this via e-mail this morning, just loved it!)

Lights Out!

For the first time in recent history, the whole of Dubai has experienced Power Failures. You read right, FAILURES!

At first I thought that it was just our village because they are extending it, but apparently the whole of Dubai suffered. I guess there are a quite a few hotel guests who are upset, due to the Air Conditioners and Key Card Systems not working, but let’s hope that it’s over, for today anyway:)

God Bless.

About the Verrips Family

We are a Christian family currently living in an apartment at Sahari Villiage, Ras al Khor, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Roy is an Information Systems Manager for the Grand Hyatt Dubai – Aside from spending time with his family he loves anything Linux if he can steal a few minutes a week enjoys reading, currently (still) the Chronicles of Narnia.

Angela works from home (i.e. is a housewife ) raising Nathan and Rachel – When the kids are asleep and if Roy is working late you’ll probably find here doing cross-stitch or reading Meave Binchy.

Nathan is three, going on five and loves to talk, dance and sing. At the moment his favourite DVDs are “Meno” (how he pronounces Finding Nemo) and “Thumbelina” – When he grows up he wants to be a Boo-tiful Butterfly. :-)

Rachel was born in March 2004 with a rather bad congenital infection, CMV (i.e. Cytomegalo Virus) – Are present her liver and spleen are distending at an alarming rate. This along with the cronic hepitites/jaundice she’s had since birth has dramatically lowered her life-expectancy. The doctors believe she will not see her first birthday.

We’ve lived in Dubai for just over 2 years now, but Angela and Nathan have spent about 10 months in total living with our parents (Don and Jenny Kirkwood) in Pretoria on two seperate occasions. 10 weeks in March/April 2002 while Angela got her driving license and I worked 24/7 opening the hotel, and again from November 2003 through May 2004 during a complicated pregnancy with Rachel, and an even more complicated first two months, mostly spent in hospitals.

We are a bible beliving Christian family who put God at the centre of our household. We still maintain spiritual ties with St Pauls Church, Arcadia, Pretoria South Africa where both Angela and I served as members and youth leaders, and where we were married.

During the summer we have been regular attendants at the United Christian Church of Dubai who meet at the Dubai Evangelical Church Centre in Jebel Ali.

The last quarter of this year will be a trying time for our family as we serve the Lord during a season with Rachel which is a lot shorter than we had anticipated – We pray and trust that He will continue to strengthen us in His mercy and grace.

Our God is an awesome God!

Yours in Him

The Verrips Family

Moved out Movable Type

Angela, Rachel and Nathan will be home in two days – I just can’t wait.

Other than that it’s been a weird day – I worked through the night ’till 9am this morning to resolve an issue and apply an e-patch to Opera 2.5.2 (patched from 26 to 30) – Still didn’t resolve the issue though.

Anyway, home by 10am and then to bed (Always strange sleeping during the afternoon) – I was woken up by a call at around 3pm so my prospective marathon sleep was interrupted. Anyway, awake now, so time to look at the ol’ website.

I’ve been running Movable Type 2.661 (MT) as backend for three months now, and I must say it’s not too cool. The only cool thing ’bout “MT” was the ability to post to the site directly from Stella (My P900 Sony-Ericsson)

For a couple weeks now there’s been a lot of “talk” on the ‘net ’bout how MT have changed their licensing and billing model and the winds of change started filling my sails. So when I stumbled upon what looks to be a pretty good back-end on Sourceforge called WordPress it was as if I din’t have a choice…

The thing I liked least ’bout MT was it used CGI to create it’s pages – WP does it’s processing directly in the php pages. I also am more comfortable hacking around within the php code than I within in the perl/cgi.

So I bit the bullet and surprisingly, only 4 hours later, I have a totally upgraded and fully imported site … A lot faster “switch-over” than three months ago when I shifted from Postnuke to MT.

I haven’t don’t all the hotlinks and about page yet, but the “core” is up and the thing that took me the longest to finalise was the tweaking of the style I found. There’s a lot of (free) style-sheets available for WordPress, ‘nother bonus!

I haven’t found too many plugins though, but I’m sure they’ll pop up soon enough.

Another mention is that I did all this using FireFox on Stella running Debian 3.0 Sarge. As can be expected the problem I have with Windows XP and listening to K-LOVE (drops connection every 30 minutes or so for about 5 seconds) didn’t happen once during my codeing/streaming audio session …

And I guess that brings my days of “living alone” to an end …

Praise God for the wonderful things He allows us to enjoy and do.

God Bless

Roy

About the Verrips Family

We are a Christian family currently living in an apartment at Sahari Villiage, Ras al Khor, Dubai.

Roy is an Information Systems Manager for the Grand Hyatt Dubai – Aside from spending time with his family he loves anything Linux and is currently enjoying reading The Chronicles of Narnia …

Angela works from home raising Nathan and Rachel – When the kids are asleep and if Roy is working late you’ll probably find here doing cross-stitch or reading Meave Binchy.

Nathan is two and a half, going on five and loves to talk, dance and sing. At the moment his favourite DVD is “Meno” (how he pronounces Finding Nemo) and he is a real big help with his new baby sister.

Rachel was born in March 2004 with a rather bad congenital infection, CMV (i.e. Cytomegalo Virus) – She spent her first month or so in hospital and has seen a lifetimes share of IV medication through her tiny veins although she’s now only just over 3kg (6 lb 9 oz) in weigh.

We like giving the things ’round us names: We refer to our car as Phoebe and our computer as Sarah – Roy calls his phone Stella (SonyEricsson P900 he sometimes uses to update this site or take pictures with for the Photo Albums).

We’ve lived in Dubai for almost 2 years now, but Angela and Nathan have spent about 10 months in total living with our parents (Don and Jenny Kirkwood) in Pretoria on two seperate occasions. 10 weeks in March/April 2002 while Angela got her driving license and I worked 24/7 opening the hotel, and again from November 2003 through May 2004 during a complicated pregnancy with Rachel, and an even more complicated first two months, mostly spent in hospitals.

We are a bible believing Christian family who put God at the centre of our household. We still maintain spiritual ties with St Pauls Church, Arcadia, Pretoria South Africa where both Angela and I served as members and youth leaders, and where we were married. We are presently members of Emirates Baptist Church International here in Dubai. Now that we’re all together again as a family at home, we look forward to serving Our Lord as He directs us.

.org vs co.za

verrips.co.za has become verrips.org … Actually both will pretty much deliver the same thing (as .co.za is simply forwarding to .org) but it’s a lot easier for us to say “verrips dot oh are gee” and be understood here in Dubai.

“verrips dot see oh dot zed aye” somehow always become “… dot see oh dot zee aye” and all the sees and zees get mized up.

A word of thanks however needs to go to Stephan Verrips, who originally owed verrips.org (and still owns verrips.com) and gracefully offered it up for our purchase … what can I say but Verrips’ are cool :-)

Good-bye PostNuke … Hello Moveable-Type

OK – New month, new website.

While I have the free time I have decide to “revamp” the Verrips Family Website a little.

First step is changing from php driven PostNuke to perl drive Movable Type.
Initially I chose PostNuke as backend publishing engine ’cause I php and mysql – I though given the time I could tweak it a bit (which I did) and then code a little of my own stuff into it … which I never did.

Time for something simpler, and although PostNuke wasn’t too hard maintain, it has to be said I was trying to use a full-scale Content Management System like a Weblog (a.k.a. Blog) – Enter Moveable-Type

So far things seem ok – I’ve migrated across and have all the data – Took best part of last night to “sanitise” it, as PostNuke seems to randomly add page-breaks. I also need to edit the links on the images as their URL’s were rather embedded into the PostNuke filestructure.

This is also the case with Gallery, which Angela and I use to show you all our Family pictures. The Gallery engine has been updated from something anchient like 1.3 to the new 1.4.2 which was released less than a month ago … Cool hey?

The look and feel of the webstie pages really need some work though … this will be the next step.

So far, so good … God bless and keep you all.

Site Migration Starting

Firstly, it’s been rather hectic of late – Apologies for not sticking to the original plan of updating at least once a week :o(

Anyway, even though I was at work today from 9 this morning ’till 11pm I still came home and spent 4 hours with Sarah (our PC at home) migrating date across from Postnuke (the current engine on this website) to Moveable Type. I decided on Moveable Type for the simple reason that Nucleus doesn’t support the Uploading App I have on Stella my Sony-Ericsson P900

Anyway, gotta get some sleep, but I’ll be off on Monday and will hopefully finalise the migration then.

God Bless

Roy

P.S. Man I miss Angela and Nathan – Only 6 more weeks to go!

1st on Google

We’ve been up and down in rankings for a sometime now, but for the last month the most powerful search engine on the internet,
Google has had verrips.org listed as 1st when searching for the keyword “verrips”

*smile*

7th on Google

After having our family site up and running for about five months now, and submitting it to Google about once a fortnight, we’re finally listed on the most powerful search engine on the internet!

Google.com has verrips.co.za listed as 7th when searching for the keyword “verrips” and 1st when using the keywords “verrips family”.

*smile*

Website Launched

Even though the site has actually been semi-functional for the last couple of days, we’ve only decided now to let everyone know about it

There’s still a lot of work to be done, such as arranging all the current photos in their correct order within the albums, and a whole lot of other photos we still have upload too.

We also want to post some more news items, and a few backdated ones.

But for the time being, we’ve got a start :o)

Please register. When you come back the site should recognise you, so you don’t have to worry too much about remembing password and stuff like that.
Love you all
Roy