Category: 101 Happy Hotelier

All you may want to know about Happy Hotelier and his blog

Kudos to the XMas Chef

X-Mass-Chef-P1050817
Yesterday I got an e-mail from a very dear long time friend who invited me for a male only drink between 6.00 pm and 7.30 pm to celebrate his birthday.

I went. There he was. Gray hair and thin to the bone.

We hadn’t been able to catch up for a couple of years while he was being run over legally by the company he used to work for together with the help of a Dutch prosecutor. All legal battles finally lost. The whole story is worse than Kafka. What happened with him proves to me to that Dutch government changed the law after 9/11 too far. Through these changes the Dutch legal system is becoming very much alike the legal system of a Banana Republic. What happened to him basically can happen to everyone.

Lost top job, wife and all possessions.

A Dutch chef of fame lent him his bar for the venue. With a couple of bottles from the supermarket and home made snacks he was able to entertain the friends who didn’t turn their back to him.

Kudos to the Chef who gave him back some of his dignity by this gesture.

Season’s Greetings

Saesons-Greetings-_MG_2835a

With all the snow of today and a just married couple stuck in our hotel because of the snow, I thought it an excellent moment to make my own Season’s Greeting Card for all my readers.

Merry Christmass and Happy New Year to you all

From the Garden of Haagsche Suites

Update: At 3.00 p.m. the couple was collected by one of their family members. Unfortunately their after wedding brunch had to be cancelled, but on Tuesday they will be heading for sunny South Africa. I envy them.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 21, 2009 at 12:56 am

In Action at the 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards Gala

Happy Hotelier in Action at 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards

The guy, Roelof de Vries of 360 Foto, who took the amazing dizzying 360 Degree shots from which I took this cutting was standing next to me when I was taking photos of the 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards Gala.
Probably I was standing in his way while wondering about him using his tripod, until I saw the result over at the Dutch Bloggies site.

I had a special interest to go and see the Awards, because it was only 5 minutes away from where I live and work in The Hague. It was sponsored by The Hague. But most importantly my significant other blog Chair blog had made it into the final 5 from which the jury choose the winning blog in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs of the Dutch Bloggies. I must admit this nerd was a bit excited albeit skeptical.

Here is the complete Awards List at Dutch Bloggies. I do hope they complete the short lists of all categories.

The Winner NRCNext.NL of the over all award choose this photo as their award portrait.

NRCNEXT NL Wins 2009 Dutch Bloggies over all Award

And my direct competitor and winner in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs, Mick! choose several among which:
Mick!

I’ve given priority to uploading my photo stream and have now to run to do some hotel duties before I can flesh out my observations.

In the meantime do head overt to my Flickr set 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards in The Hague and please do help me people tag those Dutch Blogging Nerds.

More to follow!

Bits and Pieces

I’ve Transferred the links I missed from the old server for the second time to here. After my ISP crashed two or three times I’m glad today there were no crashes.

I’ve deleted most content from the old server now. Finally I can concentrate on other things than going backward and forward. Especially on the enormous backlog of posts I want to publish here.

Nobody tells you that when you export and import a WP site the photos you’ve uploaded get resized. In itself that is not so much of a problem, but but but, all of a sudden I find photos in duplicate triplicate or quadruplicate, depending on when uploaded and at what size put here in the blog…when I moved to Thesis I was glad to be able to post photos of 600 pix width rather than the old 460 pix width that I used….and now all of a sudden I am using far more space on the servers than I used to do on the old server….darn another cleaning job to do.

I’ve been under the hood of the design and have removed the background photo of the garden, because I found looking at the blog as a whole it distracted too much from the photos and the content. In addition it seemed to load from the server as one of the last items which made loading annoyingly slow.

I’ve changed the logo to one that is simpler and where the name of the blog is a bit better visible and without the tag line

With the 1.6 Thesis theme it is very easy to change fonts, sizes and colors of characters and colors of backgrounds. All in all the design is a bit cleaner now.

The next step is to bring the links and archives to a separate page and bring back the number of posts to 5 rather than 10 on the landing page and remove some widgets as they slow up the site. But then I would like my pagination back.

Stay tuned.

Apology for my ISP

If you tried to visit me today, there is a chance you did’t get contact. All servers of my ISP Yourhosting.nl were down between 2.15 pm and 4.31 pm. I’m sorry. Also I have to rethink my move from my prior provider to this provider….Last time this happened (when I catched them) was March 6

Here is the screen shot from the announcement in the Dutch language:

Your-Hosting-Down-Nov-23-2009

They claim always accessible in their footer or do they mean always up? Well today we missed 2 hours and 16 minutes. Added to the 7 hours of March 6 that makes 9 hour , 16 minutes of a total of 8,760 in a year. Not very significant, but very annoying if you are in full editing mode.

On the positive site is that they now have a twitter account that responds. My prior ISP has several twitter accounts that don’t respond.