Pfffff!

Sometimes it just not your week. I've got mine now, although it's a long week. About one and a half week ago my computer decided it wasn't compatible with a Windows update (well, that's at leas my conclusion) and kept the CPU at 50% at least. No chance to uninstall the update. After some research I decided to once again (3rd time this year!) to re-install my Windows.

After got over that, it was time for the whole family to get sick. Bweeech! Monday I did nothing but sleeping or watching Teletubbies, Tweenies or In The Night Garden with Isabel. I'm getting slightly better now, at least good enough to work and I hope I'm rolling at full steam next day from tomorrow.

Isabel is getting cuter everyday. Since her 2nd birthday she even lets us hug her. Victory!

IKEA stainless steel scissors part 2

I just had to laugh my ass off after I've seen a search result that had a link to my article about IKEA stainless steel scissors on the top! Funny what a little bit of search engine optimization can do sometimes :)

And you know what's so funny about it? If you make a link from your website to this article about the IKEA scissors, you make it rank even better. Your link becomes a vote of some sorts.

Results on Google.com:


Results on Google.nl:

Graffiti or not?

I keep a close eye on the StumbleUpon blog of Ricardo, a friend of mine. A just had to laugh about this picture. It looks like graffiti, right. Well, it isn't. At least not in the traditional way. He's cleaning! Apparently the police don't know if it's a crime or not.

IKEA stainless steel scissors (yeah, right!)

I think these scissors are barely a month in my possession...

I'm on a galactic conquest (multiple times)

With all the large 3d-games out there, you forget it's all in how the game is set up, not always how it looks like. Take the game Galcon (short for Galactic Conquest) for example. The graphics are simple, even the whole game concept is simple. But that's perfect for me. I don't have much time, so i can dive into a multi-player game quickly without having the commitment to be online for at least an hour. Perfect.

Screenshot of Galcon:

Blog redesign

The blog is undergoing a redesign. As of now it's still unfinished but you should already get an idea of how the blog is going to look like.

Anime weekend

Well, I'm back from a whole weekend watching anime (=Japanese animation) in Almelo. I should say up front that I'm not an anime expert. I mostly tag along with a friend of mine who is much more knowledgeable in that genre.

Anyways: it was fun. Not in the least because of all the cosplayers (costumed player); visitors that dress themselves as an anime characters. You can see some cosplayers if you follow the link at the bottom of this post.

The best anime series I have seen was Dennou Coil. A summary from Wikipedia:

Dennou Coil is a Japanese animation science fiction series depicting a near future where augmented reality (AR) technology has just begun to enter the mainstream. AR is combining the real, physical world with the digital world. In the series this is combined with special glasses. The series takes place in the fictional city of Daikoku, a hotbed of AR development with an emerging city-wide virtual infrastructure. It follows a group of children as they use AR visors to unravel the mysteries of the half real, half Internet city, using a variety of illegal software tools, techniques, and virtual pets to manipulate the digital landscape.

Example of Dennou Coil on Youtube

It show some interesting UI (user interface) stuff like virtual displays emerging out of thin air or pet dogs with status bars.

Another one was Lucky Star, although that was particularly hard to comprehend because of the speedy conversations. A summary from Anime News Network:

Portrays the lives of several school girls attending a Japanese high school with a very loose humor tone. The main heroine is Konata Izumi, an athletic and intelligent girl who, despite these attributes, is not in a sports club, and her grades remain low. Her laziness at school is due to her love for anime and video games, and she is not interested in much else.

I had much fun when they discussed eating techniques in Lucky Star. Well, the whole audience in fact :-)

And finally: the pictures I took on Animecon 2008.

Three cheers for the Intermediair

Yes, the good things in life are for free. Like the magazine Intermediair. It is free because it solely lives on advertisement space with vacancies for higher educated people. And although it's free it still has quality. The journalists over there have something I like: they don't let themselves get carried away by the "fast news". And by "fast news", I mean news that isn't interpreted, but only reported. I associate that with copy-paste articles from news agencies, hypes and interviews with "the man on the street".

Take for example the Tibet-issue that's in the news lately. You could call it a hype, but that's not the right word for it, because Tibet deserves to be in the picture. The only thing that bothers me is the good-bad, white-black, German-allies kind of reporting. The Intermediair didn't spend much words on it, but it pointed to some not that known facts:

- Tibet was between 1720 and 1911 an autonomous region of China. The Dalai Lama was relatively free in his decisions, but every Dalai Lama had to be approved by the Chinese government
- After the fall of the last Chinese emperor, Tibet one-sidedly declared itself independent.
- The Dalai Lama ruled as a god slash king. Most Tibetans were more or less owned by one of the many monasteries in the country.

Bet you didn't hear that in the media, right? Does it shed at least a bit of a different light on the Tibetan issue? With that being said: I still think the Tibetans should like any group of people have the right of autonomy. But please, don't make the Dalai Lama a saint or the Chinese devils. Life is more sophisticated than that.

By the way: you do know that concentration camps aren't a German invention, but British, right?

South Africa update 2

Another South Africa update

Last monday I walked onto the mountains near Gordon's Bay. Not typically South Africa, but always fun to be at the top of a mountain top. After that I finally managed to get prepaid internet on my PDA. Man, I love it! I want to have that too in The Netherlands! Hyves is a bit hard to do with my PDA, but with e-mail I react that fast that I probalby give the impression that I'm not on vacation at all :)

Anyways: after that has been sorted out, I went with my mother to the childrens club. Black children from the not-so-rich-but-better-than-township neighbourhood can come there to do some activities. My mother had a painting activity. The children had to paint a foam star. They were content with that and they worked concentrated for an hour or so.

Tuesday we went to Cape Town. First to the Dutch library to return some books. After that we went to the Waterfront, a renovated harbor. It's very much aimed at tourists, so it's mainly shopping. Not really my cup of tea. After that we would have gone to the Table Mountain, but that was most of the time in the clouds. We don't want to risk that we don't have a view, don't we? So we picked a casino instead. We came in a hall with hundreds upon hundreds of gambling machines. No happy faces there. So I did some video gaming in the childrens corner :)

Wednesday we went to the country for a few days. We had a lodge near Bonnievale. I was lucky: the weather wasn't that good. Otherwise you would melt away :) Through the days we visited a few villages there. That was fun, especially on Saturdays. That's the day the workers on the farms go to the villages to do shopping for the whole week, so it's very crowded then. Most of them are brought there by their bosses because they don't have a car of their own. So everywhere you see pickup trucks with bags full of groceries and other stuff. Some people are waiting in the back of the pickup trucks until they are brought back to the farm.

Photogallery of South Africa on hyves.

South Africa update

For those who are interested a short South Africa update:

I'm here for almost a week now in Gordon's Bay. That's in the vicinity of Cape Town. Before I had one foot on the ground, I already have seen the townships. Those shacks are that close to the airport that you can take a good look just a minute before the airplane hits the ground.

The most important thing I have done until now is standing on a surf board. I took 3 wave surfing lessons and it's fun! Most of the lessons were given by a guy who is not only a wave surfing coach but also a priest who preaches in a baptist church!

Of course I already visited Cape Town, but I still have to go to the Table Mountain, an important plateau that's visible from any place in the city. I also visited Stellenbosch, a small city with a university that's safer compared to other cities, like Cape Town. My father bought a bike there. Together with the bike he lent from someone, we can now tour around with bicycles. The only problem is that Piet from the shop did not tighten all the screws, so we had some problems in the first tour :-(

Yesterday I visited a kindertehuis and a church. Both were in a township. Ans yes: those black churches really swing. :-) After that back to the shopping mall and then back to Stellenbosch again to fly with Mike Taylor in his plane. In an hour we visited Cape Town, Robben Island, the bay area, Strand and of course StellenBosch again. After that I was tired and had an headache. So I have to slow it down a bit.

By the way: the local radio station here sounds sometimes like the music on weirdomusic.com :-)

Genealogy made simple

I don't consider myself the type of person that would spend much time on genealogy, but I was always curious about geni.com. I heard about it on a podcast of an American Israeli and he had real fun with it. Just add your name and a few other relatives with some email addresses to the tree and off your family tree goes! The invited people can add more data about themselves and add other people further away in kinship. All the way to London and New Zealand in my case.

So finally I created a family tree. My family tree is now filled with 81 relatives and still branching out and growing in all directions.

Try for yourself. Maybe you'll discover we're related somehow :)

Anti-fur

I got this link through someone in Hyves. At first it looked like a hoax, but sadly this seems to be genuine. Although I wished that all maltreatment of animals would stop, this should be stopped first. The video behind this link is not for the faint of heart. Really.

www.furisdead.com/feat/ChineseFurFarms

"Code Complete" completed!

Whohooo! Time for a little party! I finished that 900+ page "Code Complete"! Now that I go by train to work I always have at least 5 hours a week to devote to reading work-related stuff. This will be just the first book of many to come :)

Moved to a new house just in time

It looks like we didn't move to our new home too early. When we were moving, there was already somebody shot dead in a street near our old home. Now I read this article in the Brabants Dagblad. From the picture in the article I conclude that it must have been just a few houses away from our old home. At max.