In the electricspace

My first Bollywood movie

2010-02-28T01:33:00.004+01:00

After listening to dozens of Bollywood sound tracks I just had to see a 70s Bollywood movie. I chose for "Hare Rama Hare Krishna" because its status as a classic Bollywood movie, I really liked Asha Bhosle's song "Dum Maro Dum" and the link to the hippie culture in India (hence the title of the movie). Roughly said the movie is a sort of Indian take on "Hair".

The camera techniques were sometimes very awkward, acting was poor and the fighting scenes were amateuristic at best. But that just made it more funny. But the movie sometimes wasn't funny at all. I don't want to spoil it, but it doesn't have a happy ending and it even left me a bit depressed.

Here you can see the trailer and the movie itself online: http://www.jaman.com/movie/Hare-Rama-Hare-Krishna/0VwwklT_Qd8Q/
The movie has English subtitles, but in some scenes they talk faster than I can read, so I sometimes had to pauze regularly to read.

White noise on the internet

2010-02-11T20:23:00.003+01:00

This article is for all those wikipedia-fans that still believe that the internet will sort out the correct information automatically. I'll give a quick hint: it won't in many cases.

My wife posts regularly lyric snippets on twitter.com/lyricsbylenny. She always links to the full lyrics online. But it's sometimes hard to find a website with the correct lyrics. And that was the problem with "All of my life". Everywhere she looked she got the same error over and over again: "star and flair". But if she listens to the song, she hears "style and flair".

It seems like one website website or service spreaded the wrong lyric and everybody copied it. Because that's what we all do: copy. Sadly we don't have the time to check the data we receive. In this case it's a small benign error, but it's easy to see that such errors easily end up in the history books. It then will take a researcher to find out that something isn't true just because everybody repeats each other.

Lyrics websites are a nuisance anyhow, by the way. Many times I find content that's just dead wrong and full of incorrect spelling. I say: tear those sites down!

Another approach :)

2010-02-02T20:35:00.001+01:00

The Dixie Cups

2010-01-30T21:37:00.003+01:00

Last month I had much fun with The Dixie Cups. Classic bubblegum pop or in Dutch: bakvissenmuziek. They are most famous for their hit "Chapel of Love". Is it already getting spring or what? :)

I already knew that song and it was that song that lured me in to find a compilation of The Dixie Cups. I found some nice songs that are a bit quicker than Chapel of Love, but the lyrics stay sugar coated sweet most of the time. Check out:

I'm Gonna Get You Yet (great original 60s tv performance)
All Grown Up (Link to Amazon, press the button "Preview" to listen)
Ain't That Nice (Link to Amazon, press the button "Preview" to listen)
Gee Baby Gee

Some extra's:

You should have seen the way he looked at me (not a great song, but it is a original 60s tv performance)
A weird one: the ABC-song of The Dixie Cups

Compilation: collector items Vol. 3

2010-01-24T09:29:00.008+01:00

Download Collector Items Volume 3 (from mediafire)

Another year, another compilation. Each year I try to make a compilation of the best songs that I came across in the previous year. This year I couldn't keep it that short that it could fit on a audio cd. It's now 2 hours of music.

So, what's on it?
In 2009 I found some great music in the following genres:

Soul. The compilations of the label Numero Group proved to be a goldmine. Many songs are found through these compilations. They are full of good-but-not-so-famous vintage soul. Through the label I found great songs like these:
- Helene Smith - Thrills and Chills
- Shirley Ann Lee - There's a Light
- Young Deciples - Bang Bang Bang
- The Rolles - Knockin at the Wrong Door
American music before 1950. Through the year I found some good blues & country. One of the compilations that proved to be a nice source of good old music was "Pop music: The early years 1890-1950". You can find a lot of old stuff on my compilation:
- Little Richard
- Hasil Adkins
- Aunt Jemina
- Gene Greene (+-1910!)
- Bayless Rose
- Danny Kaye and the, oh dear, Andrew Sisters.
- Nugrape Twins
- 22
- Roy Brown
Non-western music. This year I made a point in finding world music that did not let you feel like a tourist. Cream of the crops is the Ethiopian Seyoum Gebreyes & the Wallias Band with the song Muziqa Muziqa. Ok, you clearly hear the influences of western music in the form of funk and jazz, but it's also clearly not made by westerners. And it rocks! Other songs are from:
- Lord Astor
- Lucho Bermudez
- King Fighter
- Abdel Hadi Halo And The El Gusto Orchestra Of Algiers
- Tefera Kassa & Imperial Bodyguard Band (also ethiopian)
- Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble (real russian folk before the sovjets replaced it with balalaika).

2009 was a good year to diversify my music collection even more and I hope you can hear that.

Download Collector Items Volume 3 (from mediafire)

Blog redesign

2010-01-10T21:16:00.003+01:00

It's not finished yet, but since it's in FireFox and Safari already better than before, I decided to put it online.

electricspace.blogspot.com

Pulling the plug and back to the music store?

2010-01-10T09:18:00.003+01:00

A friend of mine told me he did something special last year: he deleted his complete mp3-collection. Say what? Yes, deleted all his music on his computer. He told me he was fed up with all the crappy encoded mp3's. The quality of music on cd/dvd is good and consistent.

Another thing that bugged him was the sheer amount of music that is available on the internet, both legal and illegal. I must agree on that point. Before the internet you bought each month just one or two albums at most. You had something to look forward to. And you listened the complete album. Even if it was mediocre. You paid for it!

But internet changed the scene. Even with zero budget there is more to listen to than you can handle. It certainly changed my way of listening to music. In the pre-internet age I only listened to complete albums. Now because of the sheer abundance of music, the value and appreciation of a song is so much lower that I cannot listen to a complete album. I just want to save those few songs that I really like and go on to the next album to pick out the good songs.

Although I like the abundance of music, I must admit that I think I'm acting like a spoiled brat. I just don't have the patience anymore to listen to songs that aren't good enough. So I can understand that you want to turn back the time. Although it sounds temping, I'm not going to pull the plug. I like to stay in abundance for as long is it will stay that way.

Sound quality by the way isn't such a problem for me. The spirit of a song is much more important than the sound quality.

What pictures does a 3-year old make

2010-01-01T20:13:00.001+01:00

Isabel has her own camera now. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of pictures a 3-year old makes, you just have to see Isabel's Flickr page.

Musical heritage

2009-12-26T00:36:00.002+01:00

While busy with my annual compilation I came across music I found on musical-heritage.blogspot.com (as always: found through www.weirdomusic.com). It's a great weblog about world music with many downloads. So here you have my tip of the day :)

Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950

2009-12-24T21:11:00.002+01:00

A few weeks back I had much fun with the 2-disc compilation Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 that I found on Bravo Juju. The title of the compilation pretty much explains it all. Disc 1 starts with the "Washington Post March", which may scare you off because of it's poor recording quality and because, well, it's a march. But stay in there. The second song "King of the Bungaloos" already sounds a lot better.

Other favorites are:

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? - Nora Bayes
Black and Blue - Ethel Waters
Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man - Aunt Jemima
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition! - Kay Kyser & His Orchestra (who doesn't love a song with a title like that? :) )

Download from Rapidshare:

I'm back

2009-12-24T20:53:00.002+01:00

The last few years I gathered a multitude of accounts on social networks such as blogspot, last.fm, hyves, facebook and even twitter (just to name a few). Because with each social network account comes a blog, I had to a post for each and every social network. What a drag. Now I managed to collate hyves, facebook and twitter to my blog on blogspot.com.

To make a long story short: I saved myself some work so it's fun to start blogging again. I'm going to use my blog to post my latest discoveries in music, so be prepared :)

Shirley Ann Lee

2009-09-12T21:11:00.002+02:00

I found a great weblog called World Music (http://musical-heritage.blogspot.com) to find, well, all kinds of world music. There I came across an album called "Local Customs: Downriver revival". On the album I found a few songs of Shirley Ann Lee. It were simple, but beautiful gospel songs. Listen here to There's A Light by Shirley Ann Lee.

There was not much information about this Shirley Ann Lee. The artist page on Last.fm was intriguingly empty. Lucky for me some Michael Goldberg wrote some something about Shirley on his blog. There should be much more songs of Shirley Ann Lee, but have all been forgotten.

Until now. A label called The Numero Group is looking for great stuff to re-release and came across old recordings of a label. So 40 years after Shirley Ann Lee sang her songs in the studio, people come to her door to show her her own music on cd.

Her songs were not only saved from being lost in oblivion, she could also hear her own songs after decades. But they had to listen to it in a car, because she did not have a cd player in her home. It resulted in a cute youtube movie.

You'll probably thinking what's so interesting about it. There is much more in the world than that. Well, this is just a small story, but somehow it's very heart-warming to find that there are people that try to save music from oblivion. And the internet is full of interesting little stories. It's a good that I have children and a job. Otherwise I could easily fill my days with tracking down these little musical pearls and the stories behind it (and blogging about it).

three mattresses and a baby

2009-05-04T23:21:00.001+02:00

The extra mattress has arrived! That does not seem like a great deal, but this makes our co-sleeping very official: the whole Bos family sleeps in one great bed and had to buy another mattress since we are now with the four of us.

The extra space is especially handy with Isabel. Often when I wanted to go to bed I found her on my part of the family bed. If not, she would take at least as much width of the bed as possible. But to be frank: I hope they will stay in the family bed for a long time.

For those who are interested (or shocked) by co-sleeping some links from Ester:

Short tongue-tie

2009-03-25T21:58:00.001+01:00

We found out that Otis has a short tongue-tie. So we decided to cut it. This will be done tomorrow. Although we had taken a day to think it over and our doctor opposed to it, it wasn't that hard to come to a decision. What would now be a simple cut, would be a operation when Otis would be 11 years old.

Although it wasn't that hard to make a decision it won't be fun for Otis, so it will be a big day for us tomorrow. We hope that he'll be able to drink better after the cut. That would give Ester some more night rest. Although Otis had once slept 5 hours in a row, he didn't repeat that afterwards.

Ester

2009-03-15T21:51:00.000+01:00

Thursday evening Ester en Otis were back home. Ester is still physically and mentally tired of the child birth. Monday I will go to work for a few days, maybe a week. After that I'll take more vacation to support Ester.

For those who want to visit us: when everything is setteld we will choose a few days for visits, so our agenda won't be full of visits for the rest of 2009.

What I forgot to mention about Otis: There's also a company called Otis. It was named after the inventor of a safety device for elevators and founder of the company. It's the largest elevator company in the world. So if you are going to step in an elevator or a escalator there's a big chance you might see the name of our son.

Otis is born

2009-03-15T10:51:00.001+01:00

Hello y'all. Here's a quick post to tell you all that we've got a son. The delivery was long and harder than with Isabel. Unfortunately it ended with a Cesarian, just like the first time. Ester will be in hospital with Otis until friday. Otis was born on monday 17:08 and weight 3965 grams and really a cute little thing.

Now for the name. As you all now we always have fun coming up with a few names. His full name is Otis Nemo Atreyu. We came with Otis after watching a documentary about soul music. So a you guessed, we got the name from Otis Redding. Nemo does not refer to that fish or captain Nemo of Jule Verne, but to Little Nemo in Slumberland, a very old comic from the early 1900s. It's about a boy that had the wildest dreams and it made a lasting impression on me. Atreyu is the hero in the book/movie The NeverEnding Story, which Ester read and watched. So Otis second and third name are from youthful heroes from our youth.

Pictures of Otis on Hyves.nl

Pixel 2 em calculator

2009-02-14T23:07:00.011+01:00

Every website that I've built for the last months have been in em's instead of pixels. Well, not completely, just the font size and line height. The advantage is working with em sizes is that your font sizes are scalable in Internet Explorer. On top of that it's much easier to offer a website in another font size by changing the base font size of the body-tag.

There's only one problem. If you have to work with a design in Photoshop, everything is measured in pixels. You have to do some math to convert those pixels to em's. Now you have scary pixel/em tables, but that won't work for me. So I decided to use my ASP.NET knowledge to create a Windows .NET application. It's my first app (so be gentle with me) but it does the job. I wrote the program just for me, but since there are a lot more who make web sites in em's I decided to throw it on the web. So here it is:

Update: Version 1.1 of this tool is published on The Bright Lines.

If you want to read more about using about using em instead of pixels, I recommend the following articles:

Pfffff!

2008-09-09T20:17:00.001+02:00

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

2008-06-06T22:04:00.006+02:00

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?

2008-05-31T23:41:00.003+02:00

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!)

2008-05-26T23:00:00.005+02:00

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

I'm on a galactic conquest (multiple times)

2008-05-18T14:59:00.007+02:00

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

2008-05-12T22:47:00.003+02:00

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

2008-05-06T20:39:00.003+02:00

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

2008-04-20T00:55:00.002+02:00

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

2008-03-22T20:56:00.002+01:00

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

2008-03-10T20:53:00.000+01:00

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

2008-02-26T21:15:00.003+01:00

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

2008-01-28T21:16:00.000+01:00

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!

2008-01-12T09:21:00.000+01:00

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

2008-01-05T15:25:00.000+01:00

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.

iPod, the choice of composers :)

2007-12-26T22:21:00.000+01:00

couldn't resist to post this one.

Team APS

2007-12-12T20:03:00.000+01:00

My ex-colleagues posted the picture of the whole team on my last working day. That's great! now I don't have to upload it myself :)

http://apsadvertising.hyves.nl/photos/148682530/0/4M2I/

Cubicle wage slaves unite! :)

2007-12-12T18:49:00.001+01:00

It's not that busy on my new job at the moment, so I took the time to take a picture of my desk. Yup, it sure looks a bit like a cubicle. Only 2 more walls to go. Than it will be just a matter of time until Agent Smith will show up for another sequel of Matrix :)

Oh, and please take notice of that peculiar piece of hardware next left to my keyboard. That's my new gadget and a true companion each day in the train: it's the iRex Iliad. For those who are curious: here's the Iliad in action on YouTube.

But back to my new job: as I said it's not that busy for me now. The real work will most likely begin next week. Right now I've been more busy reading documents about how to make websites for the government and setting up a new, personal code library on my USB-stick. I must say: it looks promising. Well, I must say: as promising as all other programs that I installed on my 4GB USB-dongle. I really need it because I can't install anything on my computer. That's a whole step back from what I was used to...

Anyway: the interior of the building looks fair and nice. the exterior of the building is less fancy as you can see by the picture on the bottom of this post. I took that picture from the part of the building where the main door is located. By the way: it's a large building and a lot of companies and organizations reside there, so I'm not working behind one of these gloomy, pigeon-filled windows. Our windows look better than that :)

But besides that little thingy: I like what I see, the atmosphere seems fine and the companies' philosophy sounds good. I think I'm going to like this company (if I didn't already). Oh yeah, one big plus: 2 of the 3 colleagues next to my cubicle seem to share the same deviant musical taste, so I'm hoping to discover even more music!

ultrashort post

2007-12-04T18:51:00.000+01:00

For everyone who wants to know about my new job: I had my first day and it went well, but I got sick in the afternoon and had to throw up round 1700. This Tuesday I had a sick day. I hope to work again Wednesday. Really love to be in a big city again.

Chapter closed

2007-11-30T20:55:00.000+01:00

Well, that was it then. That were my almost 7 years at APS Advertising. Today was my last day in Heeswijk-Dinther. From now on I will travel a lot more miles to get to my new employer in Tilburg. Man, I'm dead-curious to know what I'm going to find there at Estate.

But that's for next week. This week I was trying to get as much data as possible in my brain transformed into text. That way I hope my collegues have at least something that will help them to understand what I created the last 7 years. I wrote a +-7500-word document and tried to cover as much as I could without getting too technical. I hope it will suffice. But hey, Esters' book is still 14 times larger in words.

At the end of the day there was a little surprise arranged for me: biological juices and vegetarian snacks. All food was prepared by a cook from The Hague. Got a book of my collegue who did my first job interview at APS. The book is about wall painting, since coloring walls is still a high priority at our place in the Fratershof. And there was of course a speech of my -now former- boss. It's always good to hear people say good things about yourself. Makes you wanna switch jobs more often :)

Saturday I'm going to buy a bike, Sunday I will put it in Tilburg and Monday I'll go to my new work for the first time. creeeeeepy......

Amidala's dead

2007-11-03T12:50:00.000+01:00

I just finished burying Amidala. She passed away this morning after a relative short period of illness. Our other rabbit that always has problems with her health, Leia, is still alive.

HELP: webdeveloper/ flasher needed

2007-10-25T17:15:00.000+02:00

OLD content! goto http://apsadvertising.hyves.nl for vacancies at APS Advertising.

It seems hard to find a good web developer/ Flash developer these days, so i'm now trying to recruit myself for this wonderful company called APS Advertising. If this looks just faintly interesting, just have a look at www.apsadvertising.nl and click on the "jobs"-icon.

we're moving

2007-09-20T22:39:00.000+02:00

for those who didn't reach the news (and i really write posts for you, folks!): we've got a house and we're moving (yeeha!). yes, after 3/4 year of searching we're done. we found it, we're going to live there and we're going to stay there!
we got a lot of help from our parents and we couldn't make our new home in order on time without their help.
saturday the 29th will be moving day!

Sorry, text in Dutch.

I bought Little Nemo!

2007-08-05T09:18:00.000+02:00

Well, Little Nemo in Slumberland to be exact. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against fish, but this is something completely different. As a child I found a reprint of an old comic. It was Little Nemo in Slumberland and was published in a newspaper between 1905 and 1913. Even though the comic strips were very dated it was still very entertaining and even fascinating. It's about a young boy that has these weird dreams and almost always wakes up at the end of the small story. Most of the time he tries to get to Slumberland but it takes him ages most of the time to get there because he wakes up all the time.

I included a few images to give you an idea of how special this comic is.

ps. for those who gave money for my birthday: this is what I did with it.

Last.fm: just what I was waiting for

2007-07-14T19:44:00.000+02:00

As most of you know: I've become an avid user of the website Last.fm. Last.fm is a website that keeps track of the music that you play on your computer. With that data it can do all kinds of statistical things, like suggesting other music I might like, introduce me to other people with similar musical taste and suggest concerts. Just to name a few.

The website is a great tool to find music and I'm searching and reviewing songs even more than ever before. Thanks to the wonders of p2p networks and libraries I'm able to get hold on virtually any music I'd like to hear. I'm lavishing myself in this lush musical environment, because you never know how long it will last. Either way: I've got already enough material to make an interesting compilation to follow up my Oblique Strategies Everywhere 2006 compilation cd.

The end of the internet

2007-06-23T00:42:00.000+02:00

Sometimes I wished it was true

The end of the internet

Things my kids won't learn in school

2007-06-22T23:51:00.000+02:00

Years ago when I learned that I didn't need to sleep 8 hours a day, I also learned that there are lots of important things you don't learn in school. So when I was Stumbling on the internet, I found this article: 27 Skills Your Child Needs to Know That She’s Not Getting In School (bloggers just love making lists) and it lists lots of stuff I agree with. Here are some stuff I really want to teach my children well.

Positive thinking. While critical thinking is an important skill, it’s also important to have a positive outlook on life. Sure, things may be screwed up, but they can be changed for the better. Find solutions instead of complaints. And most of all, learn to believe in yourself, and to block out negative self-thinking.
Now that's a skill I miss with a lot of people: the inability to think positive. I must say: I get better in that all the time
Motivation. Learn that discipline isn’t the key to achieving a goal, but motivation. How to motivate yourself, different strategies, and how great it feels to achieve a goal. Start them with small, easily achievable goals, and let them develop this skill.
Work is not dull. It's all in your head.
Passion. One of the most important ways to be successful is to find something you’re passionate about, and do that for a living. Your child won’t know the answer at a young age, but you should show her how to find her passion and how to pursue it, and why that’s important.

There is also some stuff I have get get a grip on myself:

Be present. For some reason, this extremely important skill is never taught to us when we’re kids. In truth, the younger we are, the more natural this skill is. As we get older, we start thinking about the future and the past, and the present seems to slip away from us. Some skills for living in the present would go a long way.
Enjoy life. Kids don’t have much of a problem with this, but some awareness of its importance and how to do it, even as an adult, would be helpful. Set a good example of this, and your kids will follow.
Find purpose. Whether this is a higher religious purpose, or the purpose of making your family happy, or the purpose of finding your calling, having a purpose in life is extremely important. Teach your children the importance of this and show how to do it yourself.
Develop intimate relationships. The best way to teach this is to develop an intimate relationship with your child, and model it with your spouse or other significant other (within appropriateness). Teach them the skills for developing these types of relationships, talk about the importance of it, and how to get through the bumpy parts as well. There are bad times in every relationship, but with the right skills of communication, empathy and compromise, they can get through them.

Butchered

2007-06-15T23:18:00.000+02:00

For those who haven't noticed: i had a few small warts on my hands. I tried to remove them multiple times, but wasn't successful. Since it's caused by a virus infection it should eventually go away when the immune system eradicated the virus. But I waited for a long time and nothing happened. So I went to the doctor knowing that removing the warts will not be painless. And man did that hurt.

Since the warts were relatively small the doctor chose for cutting instead of freezing the warts away. He gave me a way out to do only one hand or one finger, but I wanted them all gone. So I got 8 needles poked in my fingers (2 in each one). It was a bloody, painful mess, but I got rid of the larger warts. I just hope that the scars aren't that visible. I like my hands with those long, gentle fingers...

Organized. part 2

2007-05-19T20:34:00.000+02:00

I was forced by Ester to recall the visual of a previous article about Remember the milk. So here it is, approved by the millitant breast feeders cult:

Making waves

2007-05-17T22:57:00.000+02:00

The floor is Isabel's stomach

2007-05-11T11:20:00.000+02:00

As you can see on the floor: Isabel's not eating much now. 99% of all the food (I don't exaggerate) falls on the floor. Our rabbits are really glad with this habit and if we don't act on it, they will wait under the chair until there falls something interesting. This way we know that they like spagetti :)

Still in search for a new home

2007-05-11T11:16:00.000+02:00

For those wondering if we've found a house by now: no. We're still searching. Between changing diapers, we're still searching websites like Funda. Do we have a house we've got our eye on at this particular moment? Always some house, but it always turns out to be a disappointment. But I think we're getting there. I don't say that we will find our house this week (although it just might), but we're getting there. We maybe have to cut our wish list a little. Our wish list at the moment:

A better, quieter district (where parking your car in the middle of the street is not a ubiquitous habit)
A garden...
...and it would be nice if it's facing south
At least 4 rooms
A large living room
2 toilets
Place to park the baby carrier in the hall
A storeroom. Big enough to keep the vacuum cleaner there.

Shouldn't be hard, right? :) Well, I'm sure we will be able to find a nice home this year. We sure are fed up living in the Duivenstraat.

The sheep is shaved

2007-04-29T09:19:00.000+02:00

Sorry, no picture today but I shaved my head again. So no irritating long hairs in the way while eating or kissing the baby. And that are just 2 annoyances caused by long hair. This time I did the shaving myself mostly, instead of Ester doing all the work. Now she only had to fine-tune. Now I'm not that dependent of Ester I just might shave my head more regularly :)

Not willing to eat...

2007-03-11T18:45:00.000+01:00

We've started to learn Isabel how to eat. As you can see. We still have a long way to go. She rather puts non-food items in her mouth than real food. She even gives us the finger as you can see on the picture! If you're asking why she's not eating mushy stuff from a spoon: we're trying something different (duh!). This way the food is not forced on her and she's learning to chew.

But I must say: it's getting better since I took this picture. She eats tiny bits of apples and carrots, so she will have a full meal before 2017 :)

"Do you really think she has enough toys?"

2007-02-14T00:45:00.000+01:00

...and it has gotten worse since we took this picture :)

Organized.

2007-01-18T18:47:00.000+01:00

Did I said in my lst post that I'm getting grip of my time? Well, almost. I cheered a bit too early.

But what is getting better is my personal organization. I'm doing the Getting Things Done (GTD) time management for a few months now and it's great. There's a lot to tell about GTD but in short it just means that you have to put everything in a specific system. A very important part of that system are the checklists and inboxes. I did not realize that there is such a difference between using checklists en using checklists correctly!

The getting out it out of your brain and into a system gives a lot of peace because I don't have to think about all the stuff I have to do. It's now all organized in a system and I can do everything one thing at a time without being distracted by other "stuff". With that said: there's for me still much room for improvement and GTD doesn't help make a baby stop crying :)

The checklists are handled in my Palm, but for my work I use Remember the Milk to keep things seperate. It's one of those websites that are more an online application that a traditional, Web 1.0 website.

Back in the land of the living

2007-01-06T09:06:00.000+01:00

Just want to say that this blog is not dead. As you might understand: the birth of Isabel Sakura Ammilay Bos asked for other immediate priorities. I'm getting enough grip on my time to do an occasional post again.

Breaking the barriers

2006-08-08T22:51:00.000+02:00

This weekend I finally had my break. I had a new running record: almost 10 kilometers. Since I got trouble with my knees when running long distances, I never ran more than 5-6 kilometers. That's about half an hour running. This weekend I suddenly felt I felt could do more. What helped a lot was the fact that it was finally cold in the mornings after weeks of hot weather. Since this weekend was so successful, I'm going to try to add another kilometer to my route.

Ester's home again

2006-07-05T21:30:00.000+02:00

Just a fast post.

Ester's home again. She has to be very quiet and build up her activity. This should keep the contractions under control long enough.

No medication anymore

2006-07-01T14:13:00.000+02:00

Ester's off the medication. And she's not getting them anymore although she gets those hard bellies (cramps) again. The doctors don't think she will give birth right away. But our guess is that without the contraction stoppers to mellow the womb, the chance will be higher then before :(

It's getting better

2006-06-30T23:16:00.000+02:00

They checked Ester today and it's getting better. They couldn't detect contractions and the anti-contraction medication is cut down to the half of the initial dose. Finally some good progress.

I made dinner for myself yesterday and I'm still living :)

Ester's in hospital

2006-06-29T22:04:00.000+02:00

Seems like our life keeps is in the disaster format. Ester's in hospital. But if I can write about that on my blog, you know that whatever it was is under control now.

Ester had on the night of Monday to Tuesday painful cramps which kept her almost all night awake. The midwife checked her first thing in the morning. In the afternoon Ester was checked again. The womb had opened a tiny little bit by then and the cramps still hadn't seized. So she was sent to the hospital.

The next two days I was in a flux of going back and fro between hospital and home. Ester has to keep quiet and musn't do any exercise. She constantly gets medicine to stop the cramps/contractions and already had medication by which the development of the lungs of the baby accelerate.

I was hoping it would be just the initial 48 hours, but it still hasn't stabilized. Because of that she will still be in hospital for some time.

It is an insecure time for us. Ester's almost in week 34 (coming Tuesday). They then will stop the contraction stoppers and our baby might be born prematurely. It could also take to week 42.

Either way: there's no reason to doubt the baby will be in bad health. And that's most important.

Fire water burn

2006-06-18T08:51:00.000+02:00

Did we thought we'd have a normal day. We just got home from the supermarket and I wanted to build up the box for the baby, when I saw fire and smoke coming out of the window. Our Turkish neighbour's house was on fire. Like, serious on fire. We instantly closed all windows and I tried to fight the fire with my garden hose. My efforts were hardly enough to make any difference, but you do what you can. The leaves of some plants in our garden dried up and could be going to burn as well.

When the fire fighters arrived we were forced to leave our home. Giving us just enough time time catch our rabbits, put them in a travel cage and go to our other neighbour. We were lucky. The wind was not blowing into our direction. So our damage are some plants and a misformed drain pipe.

The strangest stories are going on when there's a fire. I heard from a friend of the old Turkish man that he was outside when the house started to burn. Other people said that he was trying to remove weed between the stone slabs in his garden with a gas burner. Strange story, but I must say that it is in-character.

While we were visiting our other neighbour for 1,5 hours with the rabbits still in the cage (almost a time record!), we heard that she's moving out in about 3 months because of her bad health. That leaves us with a totally different view on our neighbourhood in a few months with other neighbours on both sides.

Amidala's sick

2006-06-05T13:34:00.000+02:00

Yup, amidala's good for a blog entry. She refuses to eat hay, so we have to do what's possible to keep her eating, so that the flow of food through her digestive system doesn't stop. If it should stop, it would be fatal in a matter of a few days.
So we got up at night at a 2,5 hour interval. Trying to get Amidala to eat without force can take at least half an hour each time. Annoying her with fresh herbs and little tree branches. As you can see on the picture: our room is exploded with food everywehere on the floor.

Oblique Strategies Everywhere 2006 is out

2006-05-07T08:04:00.000+02:00

It took some time, but i finally "published" my compilation cd with some of my favorite songs and a lot of songs I discovered last year. It took me almost a year to complete the job (well, I didn't work the whole year on just that off course). The compilation consists of songs that I find one way or another original, without being too weird to listen to. Otherwise I could fill a compilation every month :)
So if you think you want the cd too (and you're not a stranger to me), just ask me. the cover will be lo-res though. I re-installed my Windows and saved everything except the Photoshop-documents for printing the jewel case cover :(

the picture of the cover was shot by me in Liege by the way.

My first exposition!

2006-04-27T22:57:00.000+02:00

Last weekend I exposed for the first time some pictures some pictures of mine! The photoclub in Schaijk had their yearly exhibition during a village-festival (braderie). It wasn't a large exhibition, but I still found myself thrilled to see my pictures hanging there, while people were watching them. It sure is something I'd like to try do some other time again.

I was already making plans to gather pictures to expose them somewhere sometime. Maybe I can hang some pictures of mine on the walls in the local hospital or whatever. At least I know now that I like to see my pictures hang in a public place. So if there's someone who needs to fill some public space: let me know! :)

Visitors could vote for what they thought was the best picture. I don't know who's the winner yet, but if it would be me, I'd know it by now.

I'd almost forget: there was also one picture of Ester hanging there! She voted on one of my pictures and I voted on hers.

Baby room in progress

2006-03-27T21:39:00.000+02:00

Pfff! It was some effort, but the work on the baby room is progressing. My parents were back in Holland for just 3 weeks and since my father is good at placing wallpaper, we waited to hear his advise on the room. Ester thought that we could glue the new wallpaper over the old one, but my father helped her and me out of that dream: the old wallpaper had a grainy structure and had to be taken off.

So we did although not very efficient. And after that we painted the doors and window and while I was ill I even painted the ceiling. Well, it's all not that hard to do, but we don't like it DIY, so this is a victory for us. And we did it without (much) complaining! Now we only have to let some people in that will put a floor on the planks and screw the IKEA-stuff into recognizable furniture.

My parents are off again to South Africa to warm up. They haven't really experienced a Dutch winter for some time, so they had a hard time getting used to the cold again.

Palm in coma

2006-03-15T22:04:00.000+01:00

Well, everybody knows that I like my Palm PDA. And I'm still happy with it after a year of intensive use, but now it'll have to be repaired. It won't switch on again. My Palm can do almost everything except sing and dance. It is my agenda, contact list, notepad, newspaper, mp3 player and even my remote control to control the shutter of my digital camera. I also read books on my Palm, but that was less of an success. The best thing to read a book is still a paper book. I hate to say it but it's true.

Anyway. I read the warranty conditions of my Palm and I saw something peculiar.

Exclusions
[...]
3. damage caused by accident, fire, power changes, other hazards or acts of God

What the hell do they mean with "acts of God"? I guess natural disasters, but then they could just write that down. I mean: I'm an atheist. Will I get a telephone call back from PalmOne where somebody on the other end of the line says: "Well mister Bos. We checked your warranty claim and ...ehrm... well, how will I bring this to you... We checked the divine database and it seems that you pissed God off. So the malfunctioning of your Palm E2 is no technical problem. God just hates you. I'm sorry."

Well one thing's for sure: God is everywhere. Even in a limited warranty statement.

Link dump #2

2006-02-14T22:07:00.000+01:00

Pfff! I am now tremendously busy with school, but I found the time to do a little link dump.

Google Quick Reference
Let's face it: we use it everyday. Why not delve into search techniques for just 5 minutes. I assure you that you will from time to time use other techniques than just cramming that text field with all the words you can think of to narrow a search down.
To assure you: It may be a large list of tips, but you'll only need the first ones mentioned.
Babynamewizard.com
Not only just interesting when you're looking for baby names. The names you find and the developments or declines they make through the years are both interesting and amusing. Now I know why I don't like the name "Walter": It's so old-fashioned.
Anyway: just click in the text field and start typing a name or just a few letters. A graph will appear immediately.
You need the Java virtual machine to see it.

Taking zen to the next level

2006-01-29T23:25:00.000+01:00

Zen meditation is all about being able to be in the here and now, without being distracted by jumping from one thought to another. The latter is what your brain is doing most of the time. If you don't believe that, try to stop your thinking for half an hour. And that's without sleeping off course!

Stopping the thinking, or at least tempering the mind is a daunting task and progress is made with baby steps. No, make that rabbit steps. At most.

Since our house is more than 50 years old, we still experience the fact that (sound) isolation was a low priority after WWII. That's not handy while meditating. I once heard a complete episode of the GTST soap opera from the floor below, while I was doing zazen (sitting zen)!

So then I'd start yelling "I'M GOING TO MEDITATE NOW!" to Ester on the floor below. Not a tranquil way to start a meditation session. So I tried the official way. I bought a (very) small zen bell. Well, it's more a kind of a bowl. And a small one too. I couldn't get enough noise out of that little thing, so I had to hit on it several times before ester heard me. Most of the time I hit it that hard that fell from its cushion. But then I discovered a new technique to hit it in such a way that it gives so much noise that you won't believe it's coming from that little thing.

Larger bowls are even harder to hit right. It's so easy to hit it too hard or too soft that you have to be concentrated when hitting a large bowl gently. Since you have to hit it 2 or three times you also have to make sure that the volume is each time the same. As you see: you can meditate with everything. Even with a very small brass bowl.

Photographic adventures in Belgium

2006-01-23T20:28:00.000+01:00

I'm not a very adventurous person, but since I've taken already a lot of pictures of Oss and the surrounding area, that I wanted to make a real photographic adventure now and then. This month I had my first in Liege, Belgium. And although it was a lot of driving and was bored after 4 hours of walking and shooting pictures, it was a success. Most of the pictures that I shot there and passed the quality check are now online on either flickr.com or istockphoto.com.

Strange thing that happened that day: After I parked my car, I went to a shopping mall to go to the toilet. When I was on the toilet in the basement of the shopping mall, the alarm went off and everyone was asked to go outside right away, preferably through the emergency exit. But nobody used the emergency exit, but went quietly to the main exit. When I was finally outside, while not even have buttoned all buttons of my trousers, I saw that there were already people going in again! So much for an alarm.

I earned $100!

2006-01-16T23:19:00.000+01:00

...and I got a sticker for free!
Yes! Finally my first $100 cheque. Earned by taking pictures and uploading them to iStockphoto.com. It took me from February 2005 to December 2005 to reach that amount, but the next $100 milestone can only get faster now.

For those who don't know what iStock is: it's an online databank with photographs and illustrations for sale. People like desktop publishers can purchase a few pictures (mostly $1 to $3) for a very reasonable price. 10% is for the photographer and that percentage will grow as the sales grow.

I celebrated that occasion with a photographic trip to Liege, Belgium. More of that later. For now, I'm still amazed by getting a cheque from some Canadian company (I thought Vancouver-based) that I only know by their website.

I bought a salami!

2006-01-10T22:13:00.000+01:00

Great news! I bought a salami! And let me explain right away why: Unlike Ester I only want to eat meat from animals that could lead a happy, 'normal' life. On top of that I do not want to be a very strict vegetarian, because it's just not that black and white. But because Ester does the cooking and has resentment against all kinds of meat, I don't eat meat that often. Once a year is a lot.

That situation is ok with me. The only thing I sometimes miss, is chicken paws and salami sausages. Since I do not like to cook, the only thing I wanted to try was a biological salami. Last week I found it in our little reform supermarket. And I can say you: it tastes deliciously! Real Italienischer salami. With Schweinefleisch. Go figure...

Some pictures of New Year's Eve

2006-01-02T23:59:00.000+01:00

Just some pictures I shot at Paulien's place on flickr.com.

Children with fireworks

2006-01-02T22:29:00.000+01:00

December was -as always- a month of fun. Lots of social events and the o so needed time to relax. There's one thing that's always bugging me though: New Year. Or to be more precise: fireworks.

Now you may think it's stupid to be scared of fireworks. Well, I'm not afraid of fireworks but of the people who use it. In particular the children. And these children can be sometimes so young that they shouldn't play with fireworks no matter what. I mean, I've seen in our neighborhood children at the age of 8 playing/throwing with fireworks! That's why I try on the last day of the year to be indoors as much as possible. When I become a dad, I'll try to make sure my children don't get fireworks.

When I think of fireworks and children, I always have to think about the 'funny' story in the local media a few years ago. It was about a boy that lost a bit of his fingers because of fireworks. He said that some older kids had thrown fireworks to him, while he was playing. I knew the boy vaguely, because he lived in my neighborhood and I reckoned that he'd rather be a perpetrator type than a victim type of person.

A few days later a local newspaper issued an interview with the father of the boy. He was very angry about the fact that the people who had thrown the fireworks to his son still were not found by the police. I don't remember exactly what he said, but in my memory he complained about how the hell it was possible that children can play with fireworks and on top of that long before New Year's Eve.

A few days later after that it finally came out that the whole story wasn't true. The boy had to make up a story because he had to go to the hospital, so he had to give his parents some explanation.

So although I'm afraid of children (younger and older) playing with fireworks, I should pity them the most.

Link dump

2005-12-25T23:31:00.000+01:00

Since I have nothing to say in particular about Christmas I'll share some interesting sites with you:

cuteoverload.com
Cuddly, fluffy, small animals. apparently too much for some people to cope with.
Kippensoeplied of Studio Brussel
It's a song for a good cause, but the lyrics are too strange to be true:
I translated a little bit of the lyrics: "although man has to fight sometimes / some times a tear falls, a curse / man could not be a man / without chicken soup"
Click on the link and hear the song! Off course: as a vegetarian I do not condone these lyrics.
5-1-2005: apparently the word 'chicken soup' is part of an on-going hoax of a certain dj playing on that station. he has a game on his show where a listener has to call somebody else and let him/her say the word 'chicken soup' within 1 minute, without directly asking for that.
Good song in an advertisement? Find it at ster.nl
Mesmerized by the impressive commercial of Sony's Bravia (you know: zillion colored balls bouncing down the road) and by its music? You can find title and artist of all songs used in commercials broadcasted by the STER on their website.

21st century folk ball

2005-12-10T23:11:00.000+01:00

Yes, I went to a folk ball a week ago. We may live in the 21st century with cell phones, broad band internet, pda's and 5.1 dolby surround sets as modern status symbols but believe it or not, there are still young people that come together and do traditional dances. Mirjam, a girlfriend of mine, took me with her to cafe Wilhelmina in Eindhoven, where they do every month a folk ball.

Mirjam said the number of folk balls are growing. The folk ball in Eindhoven was for a long time one of the few in The Netherlands. Some people traveled for an hour or two to just dance in Eindhoven. Cafe Wilhelmina was sometimes so full that there was almost no room left to dance. Nowadays there are more folk ball-locations, so it's less crowded on the dance floor in Eindhoven. Unfortunately that means I could not blend in the crowd and hide the fact that I can't do traditional dances (well, to be honest: any type of dance for that matter). I learned a lot that night, but not without making a complete fool of myself. :)

Luckily I'm not unique in being a complete outsider. That's why before a band starts to play, it will always explain some dances. This can take an hour and a half or so. After that the lessons are over and the band just starts to play without any explanation of what dance you should do. You have to look at others to figure that out. Luckily Mirjam will recognize the type of dance that should be done with the song in a blink.

I learned about 6 dances that night. Some of them had to be danced in a group, some only with a dancing partner. Although it's a lot to learn for a beginner, the dances are not that difficult. Take the "Heksencirkel" (witches circle) for instance:

You all take each other's hand and form a circle
You all walk to the center of the circle and back
You all release your hands
The ladies dance/ walk to the center of the circle and back, while the men clap
After ladies returned, the men do the same, but have to do that without any clapping of the ladies. To compensate for that they give themselves a high five in the center of the circle :)
The men take the ladies at the right of them, do a little swirl with them and walk a bit along the circle
Repeat the procedure until the band is sick of it :)

The fun part is that every time you do this procedure, you switch dance partner. That way you dance with a lot of different people.

All-in-all, it was fun to do and I think I will do it more often.

6 kilos of chocolate arrived!

2005-12-09T23:15:00.000+01:00

We finally received our 30 bars of Tony's Chocolonely chocolate. This means we now have a chocolate stash of 6 kilos(!) It costed around 70 euros, including delivery, but the most important thing is that Ester can now eat chocolate again for a long time.

Why do we want to buy such a large amount of chocolate online? Well, Ester is not eating chocolate for I guess a year now, because she does not agree with the way it's produced. Cacao is produced in different places in the world, but almost all the cacao is mixed, before it is bought by the big chocolate producing companies. The problem with it is that you cannot easily omit cacao originating from a particular region.

That is what should happen with cacao from the Ivory Coast (Africa). A lot of cacao is harvested in criminal way. Some farms use children as slaves on a large scale. All chocolate products of large companies ad Mars and Nestle are for some percents made with cacao harvested by slaves. This was shown in the tv-program "Keuringsdienst van Waarde" and is being a item in almost all episodes of the program ever since.

The journalists of the program have talked with people from the chocolate industry, but couldn't convince them that they should demand cacao that wasn't produced in a criminal way. Since the chocolate was partly made by slaves. So one of the journalists, Teun van de Keuken, tried to take this to court. He was eating chocolate while knowing that at least a part of the candy was produced with slavery. That's against the law, so he wanted to be prosecuted. That didn't work; he wasn't found guilty. So after some attempts to raise public awareness for this issue, he started selling chocolate bars, made with cacao that was not produced in Ivory Coast and so should be safe.

The minimum amount of bars we could buy via the internet was 30. Initially we thought that was too much, but then we realized that we could give it away to people as a present. At the same time this way we could promote the Tony's Chocolonely chocolate bars.

You can see all tv episodes of "Keuringsdienst van Waarde" with an item about chocolate in it online. Or buy the chocolate bars yourself. You can also look for the few offline selling points.

So munch away!

No need for a tv guide anymore

2005-12-04T17:54:00.000+01:00

Finally! I came across a website with a good online tv guide. There are a few tv guides on the internet for The Netherlands for a long time now, but I could not find one that's user friendly and easy to use. Now I found it on the most obvious place: on the website of the public broadcast organization: gids.omroep.nl.

I've never seen this function on that website before, although I have visited it from time to time. Omroep.nl is at least certainly not promoting that tv guide function.

Although I like that online tv guide, I think it still misses some essential features.

You have to view it on a browser.
"Duh!" you would think, but the internet is more than what you see in your browser. There is more than one way to publish information. If that tv guide had a syndication functionality based on XML/RSS, I could load today's potentially interesting programs into my pocket computer, thus reading the tv guide everywhere I want.
The website does not remember some choices.
Every time I visit the page I see the default tv guide. That's OK for your first visit ever, but I configured a filter for that tv guide on that site, so I have to switch every time manually to the filtered tv guide.
No special functionality
The online tv guide is simple and works like a charm, but it's simplicity is also a problem. The site could do so much more than it is capable now. That's a pity, because the online guide can be potentially so much better than a paper one, when the developers make extensive use of cross-references, user profiles, filtering (like searching for different keywords), syndication and so forth.

Exercising is insane?

2005-11-29T20:20:00.000+01:00

I'm very glad that I repaired the front tire of my bike, so I can go to my work by bike, although most people are very surprised to hear me say I'm going to work by bike. Why do think people that's so strange? Well it's almost december and it takes almost 2 hours to go back and fro every day.

Now maybe you're thinking "well I don't do that, but it's not out of the ordinary!" I quite agree, but apparently this concept is not part of everyone's mindset. Especially since the big snowstorm that resulted in largest traffic jam in The Netherlands ever I see a lot of suprised faces when I tell that I will take my bike. Well, whenever there is not too much rain at least.

I have Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) in my hands and the best way to keep it under control is to sport. At least as long as I'm a web developer. Whenever I can't go by bike because of bad weather I will try to run for half an hour instead. I must say: it was hard for me when I got RSI, but because of that I lead a more healthy life and have the motivation to keep it that way although it is hard sometimes to live up to that strict regime. It's paying off.

And I understand that many people don't understand what I'm doing every working day, but I also know that something serious must happen to find the motivation to exercise.

test

2001-01-26T22:15:00.002+01:00

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