English

I’ve been tremendously enjoying the stuff Jan Chipchase writes on his blog both current and digging deep into his archives 1. A dream job if ever there was one.

Back from holiday, the surf was mostly flat but a good time was had, judging from the pictures on Flickr 1.

Talking about catching waves, I had been annoyed majorly by the uselessness of Safari not incorporating any decent URL shortcut function 1 without either a paid for extension or a dreadful input manager hack.

The summer may not have brought the best weather but still good times are around. This week finishing off some work before we’ll be going on an ill-prepared week long surftrip somewhere along the French Atlantic coast.

Reboot 10 is over and in my experience they simply get better every year.

By the time this post has been published I will be on a train on my way to Schiphol to fly to Copenhagen to attend the 10th edition of Reboot 1.

The Dutch government is thinking of increasing the VAT from its current 19% to 20% at the end of this year (source). That may seem like a lot, but for instance in Denmark I believe it stands at 25% and Denmark is a pretty nice country.

Yesterday we had an afternoon of workshops in an unconference style event at the office. A full registration of the event with video and slides will be published during the course of this weekend, but unfortunately most of it will be in Dutch.

It’s been a week but I’ve just gotten around to processing them after the event. Here’s a small selection of capoeira pictures:

The barbecue (and the alcohol) also make for some interesting group pictures. There’s the traditional group with everybody on it:

Today was a day of many happy occasions. The Dutch national soccer team utterly crushed the reigning world champion 3-0. And Steve Jobs held his annual WWDC address announcing a 3G iPhone for the masses.

Last week we had the batizado for our group with people coming in from Amsterdam, Norway, London and Portugal just to celebrate this event together. The batizado with associated parties and barbecues is a highlight of the year and this year proved to be a great amount of fun.

“Mooi Weer Spelen”1 is the title of the annual street theater festival that takes over the city center of Delft. This year, I’m living in said center and it’s much easier to see the events.

“We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America.”

Via Miguel de Icaza 1 een kort filmpje naar een boek van Naomi Klein gemaakt door Alfonso Cuarón over de Shock Doctrine. Hij staat op YouTube maar neem geen genoegen met die kwaliteit, op de site van Naomi Klein staan links naar hoge kwaliteit versies in Quicktime en Windows Media.

As was mentioned earlier and has been due for something close to a year this blog is closing in its current form and moving on.

I went to the Web 2.0 drink hosted by Tijs and René in the Hague tonight and I talked a bit to various internet sorts and got exposed to a whole lot of Jaiku.

I must say I’m pretty thrilled that our little mashup was mentioned on stage at the Future of Web apps.

I am considering discontinuing this blog here and concentrating my English writing efforts on our new and soon to be launched weblog Four Starters.com.

I told Cris that now he’s a London resident he should not miss the number one geek/tech event in the area: Barcamp London.

The wireless internet at university is so flaky, it makes me want to cry.

I’ve been taking a peek at the CSS layouts at Dynamic Drive and especially at CSS Fixed Layout #2.1 and I’m slightly stumped.

After the random shutdown episodes of the past my Macbook now has entered the more sophisticated era of nonrandom shutdowns.

SoundManager 2 for JavaScript is a neat little library to fill in one of the blank areas of JavaScript/DOM development: decent sound output. It is very cool that it’s there, but it’s a shame that it has to use Flash to do the playback because browser sound playback is so dismal.

I had predicted it to be an Asian country like Singapore or something to first establish an embassy in Second Life. It seems that Sweden got there first (the CNN piece linked is quite ok).

For another maddening detail in the horrid world of PHP.

I went to LJS this Saturday to switch my black streak leaving Tucano sleeve for a new one.

Two guys from capoeira have the same new Samsung phone. I saw them this week while they tried to figure out how to display a picture when you are called by somebody. They couldn’t make it work.

I used to play music in my room on my Marantz (Eclipse SR-110 & CD-110) system with a nice set of Infinity (Reference 31) speakers. The sound was great. You might think this a bit excessive, but I got it at the bargain bin at Correct.

The iPhone may be a distant dream, we did have a lot of fun at the keynote party at the studio of the One More Thing guys (link to the pictures).

I am trying to import a database to the MAMP install on my Macbook using phpMyAdmin’s import tool. Trying to do this yields:

Just was at the Studio Statensingel attending the One More Thing Macworld Keynote Party. Pictures up in a bit.

Just got my 4GB 120x Transcend CompactFlash card in the mail. Being able to take 459 RAW pictures is quite a difference from 1GB.

I’m playing around with Flash a bit to try and make a dedicated player for last.tv.

I’ve seen it happening multiple times already but it’s always pretty funny when a blogger has posted something and afterwards they think it’s too controversial or that they have misstated something and they revise their posts.

Just did a fresh Wordpress install for last.tv and man! those guys keep up the good work.

I updated my essential software list. Some additions and some removals, but nothing really shocking.

It seems our mashup Last.TV is starting to lead a life of its own. After the final event, I spent half a night bringing it up to par functionally and feature wise so we have a tolerale offering right now, but some tweaking still remains to be done.

We’re over the first rush but still… Eelke and me won the “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?” mashup contest with our Last.TV concept.

Sole redeeming quote in an otherwise vacuous article with vague predictions:

Eelke and myself were competing in the mashup contest “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?” (trans. Are you better than Microsoft?).

I’m moulding some of my ideas of recent and not too recent into a deck titled “Social Networks as Online Panacea”.

I was expecting one package but I got two. So I thought the Threadless guys had messed up somehow.

There was a Delft-wide power outage this afternoon at around noon. This is the reason my server at home went down (and took this blog with it). It was fun to see everybody around me get up in frustration while I could keep on typing on my Macbook’s ‘UPS’.

Words cannot express how much I am loving each and every post on Matt Webb and Jack Schulze’s blog: Pulse Laser.

When I was sitting in the train my Macbook became unusably unstable. Some stuff had already dight the night before, but it was still playing music and Safari was still running so I forwent the reboot.

I have spent today at GrowthTalk and will be spending tomorrow brainstorming concepts at Innovation Playground.

In the USA the shift in Congres means good tidings for the tech industry. The Democrats are going to move forward on unwiring, H-1B visas, Net Neutrality and Privacy.