nownownow Savvy media-whore that I am, I’ve leveled-up and claimed a nownownow profile. “Cool! Love it. What an amazing design.” — Derek Sivers As part of signing up1, the Q&A went something like this. Where are you? (country / nearest city / state) Answer Luxembourg / Luxembourg / Pedantry When you live in Luxembourg, the answer is that the nearest city can only be Luxembourg. This is because there is only one city in the whole country, and for reasons lost in the mists of time, the name of the country and the name of the city are the same. Land Grab Due to a bit of a disagreement between Belgium and The Netherlands, Luxembourg lost a bit of land to Belgium a few years ago: it was 1839, you can blame the Treat of London, and because Luxembourg the Country was under Dutch rule at that time they couldn’t do much about it, not that they would anyway because they were just a bunch of farmers at the time. This is how Belgium got Arlon a swathe of land that they call Luxembourg. The road signs are confusing enough (all signs point to Luxembourg), and that is before you engage the linguistic problems due to the fact that nobody knows what language to speak (French, French with a Belgian accent, Luxembourgish with a Belgian accent, Luxembourgish, German, French, etc.). To this day the Belgians taunt the Luxembourgers because the Ikea store sits on their side of the border and the staff seem only to understand you if you speak Belgian French to them2. What do you do? Answer I juggle bits and bytes into code, meld them with thoughts and words, and spend too much time building an artistic machine where the machine is the art Why do you do it? (just 1-3 sentences) Answer Because I can. Intrusive Thought I wonder if an automatic content warning will appear because of a period at the end of a short (three-word) response? Recent thought, epiphany, or interesting idea Answer We all took a wrong turn in 1989. I have a love-hate relationship with HTTP, HTML, and all that followed. Recommended book or article? (title and author) Answer The Many-Colored Land by Julian May Rationale It was a tough choice between May’s The Many-Colored Land and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I don’t think May gets as much attention as Pirsig. Also, chronologically speaking, I read May before Pirsig, even though Pirsig published before May. As always, discovery matters. $LastModified: 2026-08-03 17:54:21Z (Mon, 03 Aug 2026) $ Are you forced to send a PR over github (which is the hoop for joining the XXIIVV webring) or codeberg (for the 512kB-club) or some other kind of codeforge because every developer on the internet assumes everybody else is one too and uses these forges too? Nope! You drop Derek an email and he sends back a link to a website where you can do things. And this is where it gets really refreshing: it is a silly little website (in the nicest possible sense of the phrase) providing an idiot-proof form-driven way to enter or update your answers. ↩︎ The weirdest thing is the way the Belgians pronounce the 7x, 8x, and 9x numbers. None of that soixante-dix (70) and quatre-vingt-dix (90) nonsense, they go septante and nonante, but shockingly embrace quatre-vingts for (80) like they are French underneath. Meanwhile, the Swiss French do the whole huitante (80) thing just to be bloody-minded (or octante in some of the valleys where the bloodlines got too thick); the Belgians completely ignored this very sensible approach because they holiday at the sea-side and not up the mountains. The sea-side, or la Côte belge, is rather nice, and everybody there speaks Vlaams apart from the French-speaking Brussels bourgeoisie and visiting Luxembourgers. Heel verwarrend, zulle? (which makes Dutch ears bleed). ↩︎