Exercicing foreign languages in Brussels

If you are living in Brussels and get bored chatting on the net with people living in countries you'll never visit anyway, there is a great opportunity you're missing: you can join le "cercle polyglotte de bruxelles" and meet lots of people speaking Dutch, English, Russian,German,Spanish, etc....and chat with them (in real life!), while having a good drink !
These chat sessions aren't like classes at all, it's just chat sessions organized by a private club (but their entrance fee doesn't look like they are one - it's really cheap) targetting an audience with at least a fair knowledge of one of the aforementioned language. Up to now, I have been attending these sessions only once but the amosphere was really laid back, yet productive.
This club hold sessions once a week in Etterbeek, near La Chasse/De Jacht. It's quite easy to reach with public transport or by car if you live in the south of the capital.
If you are solely looking for a chance to speak Dutch (and only Dutch), you can also try a great initiative called Babbelut. It's another (free) chat group and it's held every week in various areas of Brussels , check their website for more details. I usually attend the group in Ixelles and it's also pretty cool .

Back from the city of lights

As mentionned earlier on this blog, I went on a trip to Paris..by accident, this trip took place while riots were happening in Paris suburbs'.
During my short trip, I was really stunned by the city's pretty face, and even the few locals I talked to were really nice to me..I even had the chance to see the president from a 10 meter distance of so - there was an official ceremony taking place in honor of General de Gaule - so what ?
At first sight, everything looked really great, but I really had a strange feeling: How was it possible that some youngsters living so close to this wonderful city were so desperate that they would set their neighbour's car on fire, or still 'better', their local kindergarden?
I had some kind of an explanation when I took the underground late in the evening to catch my train at the Gare du Nord: I experienced a problem with a young guy, while the station was full of police and soldiers..and the guy told me 'anyway, I've got nothing to loose'. I managed to exit from this situation with no damage, but I really understood Paris's suburbs is a timebomb, close to explosion...How do you stop people who think they have nothing to loose ? Surely not by delivering the kind of political mismanagement the way the last governments did..It's really time for a change..give these guys some hope..happy people don't burn cars.

Helping scientific research with your PC

Today, while idling on the internet between two cover letters, I discovered a really great project: The World Community Grid is a non-profit project involving circa 100,000 volunteers, each of them contributing to healthcare scientific research in an original way. It's quite simple: Each volunteer installs a free software using idle computer resources to process scientific data, which creates a huge amount of cumulated calculation capacities available for scientific research.
Maybe some of you were already familiar with this computer network concept since with the Seti@Home project, with their quest for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If you value the life of 40 millions fellow human beings living with HIV, it's worth giving a try to the World Community Grid's new project: FightAIDS@Home. The project's title is quite self explanatory.