Dreams Unlimited©

Diary

archives

A list of recent thoughts, things I saw or things I spotted on the Net, things that excite me (Uuh, baby!) or upset me, stuff I hate or love or in any other way find worth the trouble of blogging right here for your entertainment or interest and my archive. ;)

	Tuesday, April 29 Partyflock Connections #Posted by Dreams on 12:06 This is sooo cool! A party site that I subscribe to, Partyflock, has gotten me on the VIP list for tonight pre-Queen's Day party in XL aka Kremlin aka Marcanti plaza in Amsterdam! I can bypass lines and have official permission to take pictures there that evening. (Now I reeeealy wish I had my own Canon EOS 10D... :( boohoo) The pics will be shown on the Partyflock site, of course, and the club owner wants the rights to use the pics for publicity purposes. PF said that that was no problem, but they want them to include source references, if they do. So if they ever decide to use one of my pics for flyers, posters, etc. they will (or should) mention my name! Woohoo! That's soo cool. They probably never will, but still... :D Excellent, PF! Thanks Karian!
	Monday, April 28 Mozart's "The Magicflute" #Posted by Dreams on 00:21 This Sunday, I went once again to the opera "The Magicflute" by Mozart. It's the one and only opera that I can go to. I don't like the others, it seems. I've tried... but no. This one is brilliant. I used to listen to it as a kid, used to sing along with it and even with the Queen... all the way up to the high C! And then my voice broke! :) LOL Anyway, went to it 3 times before and this time it was in Amsterdam again, in the Stopera in the Muziektheater. It was amazing! Very good, excellent singers, great voices, very cool show and awesome decor. Take a look at the pictures I took, to get an impressions albeit a very thin one... The U20 sucks for this kind of shots... :( Oh well...
	Saturday, April 26 Deeper thoughts... #Posted by Dreams on 11:01 Have you ever had the feeling that you existence is puny? That it's so infinitesimal and merely a ripple in time, a spec of sand on a beach? Well I do, and I just did... I was watching Discovery, about the expedition to dig up a mammoth from the permafrost in the polar region. The French expert was aided by locals there. They have lost their ability to write but their knowledge of the region is encyclopedic! They navigate effortlessly where the team was using GPS, radio and compasses. The natives were able to point out to them the exact spot were they had been months before... in the middle of a desolate, frozen, white plane! The team leaves by helicopter and they follow in their sleds... to arrive a few days later. Can you imagine? Is there anything about this time or our world today that you know so intimately??? In so much details? I don't think so, and I for sure don't. It just makes me sooo humble and I feel like I should try and contribute something to humanity, to add something to the greater good of mankind. Lately, man seems so stupid once more. The war in Iraq etc. Whenever I watch historic events like WWI or II, or the Egyptians or Romans... I get the feeling of "aaaw, the poor innocent people. they knew so little and tried so hard". As if they are kids and we are now grown-ups watching them play in a playground. But if you look at what is going on now in world events... it's almost exactly the same things!!! 5000 years of evolution and major civilizations, democracy and science... and we are still fighting stubbornly over petty things like resources and money. :( sigh shaking my head What is the point? Why don't we ever seem to learn? What will it take...? That I wonder about on this grey, rainy Saturday in The Hague..............
	Thursday, April 24 Inventing Success #Posted by Dreams on 23:52 Ever had a great idea that was sure to change the world, solve hunger and give peace as well as iron your shirts and make coffee in the morning? Bet ya didn't have a good go at it and just forgot about it because it would be too much work trying to get it out there... If so, then read this article about turning ideas into commercial products or at least mark your invention so that yo ucan get credit where credit is due in case someone else runs with it... :) Excellent read, although bit American. So take it with soem grains of salt. ;) Thanks to my friend Gerrit for pointing this out to me...
	The Matrix part 2 and 3 in IMAX! #Posted by Dreams on 11:54 There is a God and God likes to watch The Matrix too! :) Imax announced that parts 2 and 3 of The Matrix will also be shown in IMAX theaters. That's common language for "blowing your socks off". IMAX is a huge screen of like 30 meters or so (100 feet), that is curved an fills your entire range of vision. So you're guaranteed to be immersed. Add to that large speakers that pack a whole lot of "uumpf" and you get an idea of The Matrix in an Imax theater will be like! :) "The Matrix Revolutions" will open November 5th (in the US)... Counting down... 675464541...675464540...675464539 second to go
	Wednesday, April 23 Email Address Encoder #Posted by Dreams on 16:33 Email Address Encoder let's you encode your Email address in HTML. What this does is use ASCII codes, basically, in normal HTML. Your adres looks normal to humans, but robots and spiders that scan your HTML pages for Email addresses only "see" the codes. And they can't use them (so far...) :) Brilliant! So if you have webpages and like to include your Email address on them but hate getting SPAM... use this tip!
	Why Am I Getting All This Spam? #Posted by Dreams on 15:03 Wondered why you've been getting all this apam? Read this article and learn! A MUST READ for everyone that's out surfing regularly and leaving marks, signing up for things or registering for stuff. Scary...
	Tuesday, April 22 First beach club of the year #Posted by Dreams on 14:10 The season's now officially opened! Last weekend, actually on Monday, I went to the beach with my friends Juli, Saskia and Harrald to enjoy the sunshine, the good life and the beach. We had a great time, enjoyed nice food, a nice waitress (after some bad beginnings) and later my friends from work joined as well! After lunch/dinner, we went and played some frisbee at the beach. While the winds were still chilly as it got later, the exercise made up for that. Very nice! In the evening, we went from the Zuiderstrand to the Noorderstrand, to go sit around a bonfire at Mekka. But since it is still early in the season, there were hardly any people and helas no bonfire. So we went to de Karavaan instead... See my gallery.
	RSSify your Blog #Posted by Dreams on 12:33 The spin-offs and add-ons just keep coming...! LOL This one is cool too, although BloggerPro solves this for you automatically. However, for the regular blogs, this is great!
	Creative Commons Deed #Posted by Dreams on 12:30 Here's another one...Creative Commons Deed is a legal framework for copying, sharing or (re)distributing content from others' blogs... Cool! I guess it doesn't really mean a lot for me blob or yours, but what if you maintain a blog about/for your company? Then it gets more complicated, doesn't it? :) Nifty!
	BlogChalking #Posted by Dreams on 12:27 Man this blog thing is huuuuuuuuge. I had no idea, and I'm pretty well-informed! (I like to think so...) There are so many add-ons, spin-offs and additional things you can do... Take a look at BlogChalking, for instance.
	It's not fair... boohoo #Posted by Dreams on 11:12 I was so excited to read that Disney/Pixar are releasing the newest computer animated feature movie "Finding Nemo" on May 30th... remember? My friend Martin found out for me that it's scheduled for release in the Netherlands on... November 27th... Boohoo :cry: What have I done to deserve this...? :( The good news is that I'll prolly be making a trip to the UK on/around October 3rd!!! ;)
	Sunday, April 20 Grub's Distributed Web Crawling Project #Posted by Dreams on 17:40 This is from Slashdot too. It's one of those typical why-didnt-I-think-of-this things. :) Grub takes a new spin at the search engine thing. In a previous blob, you read about how big Google is, in terms of number of servers. Grub intends to take a shot at an even bigger level, by letting the search engine be fueled by a distributed network of PCs, such as yours and mine. :) Much like Gnutella, Napster or Kazaa keep track of files in a distributed manner, Grub lets each individual machine index a part of the Internet and collates the result in an index. SETI@home and other initiatives have also used this approach to either analyze vast amounts of data on users' spare CPU cycles, or crack DES encryption keys in a brute-force attack. Guess it's time to load yet another spare CPU cycle client. I'm starting to run out of spare CPU cycles... :) Soon I'll need a dual-CPU machine just to keep up! :D
	Saturday, April 19 Paintings... #Posted by Dreams on 19:00 A good friend and former colleague of mine from KPN Research, Gerrit Visser, had a (grand)father who recently died. It turns out he was a gifted painter and the family decided to let his name and work continue despite the passing of his physical self... They put up a website with pictures of (some of) his paintings and his atelier. I think that is great idea, for one, but I also like his paintings. Take a look and judge for yourself...
	Friday, April 18 Invited: Tiësto #Posted by Dreams on 20:56 Last Saturday I went to Amsterdam once again for see the best DJ in the world, at this moment!!! DJ Tiësto decended on the Panama Club for special, small scale, trendy, cozy concert (Invited). I havephotos online. The place was kinda smokey, so there aren't that many, but hopefully you get an idea of what it was like. If you wer there, hopefully itll brign back AWESOME memories of the night rocking to the tunes of the master!
	WFA mappack #Posted by Dreams on 20:52 Weapons Factory Arena have released the first mappack for v3.5b. Go get it!
	Thursday, April 17 R&OS origami cd wallet #Posted by Dreams on 15:26 You have got to see this...! If you sometimes burn your own CDs or give home-made CDs to friends and need to make a nice cover for it, list the songs, titels, etc... You need to take a look at R&OS Origami CD Wallet creator! Fill in the blanks, select a font, copy&paste from cddb or elsewhere and hit return. Wait a second or two and voila, it creates a PDF file for you to print, cut and fold. :) BRILLIANT!
	I'M SO EXCITED!!! #Posted by Dreams on 11:43 Disney's releasing Pixar's latest awesome, breathtaking and tantalizing CG full-length animation story "Finding Nemo"!!! Woooooohoooooo! "To get their feet wet, the film's crew became licensed scuba divers, installed an aquarium in the office, and watched hours of The Blue Planet. After all, Nemo needs to make a splash." May 30th it is released in the US, so that means a few month later in Europe... Boohoo :( :cry: Now if only I could somehow make it over there between those two dates... :D
	Prepare to Meet Thy Doom #Posted by Dreams on 11:34 Wired has an interview with John Carmack on 3D engines, DooM, Quake and the latest child of his imagination: DooM III. It's one of te biggest anticipated computer games out there today, but we'll all have to sit tight until this Fall, at the earliest. That is, unless Microsoft gets its way and DooM III will never make it off the %&?$&% Xbox format. :( Now that is reason to decare war on someone if I've ever seen one! ;) As if...
	Wednesday, April 16 Update Weblogs by Mobile Phone #Posted by Dreams on 11:53 Heise Verlag, an excellent German publisher of computer magazines (c't, ix) says that the German weblog site 20six let's its users update their webblogs aka blogs using only a mobile phone. Users send texts per SMS or MMS to publish new updates. They can also include ringtones and even photos, all without an Internet connection. The service is free and only requires the user's provider to have enabled Email and/or MMS servives for that user. A user requests a PIN code by EMail and uses the PIN together with the message to send. Blogger already annouced a while ago that you can call your blog by phone and have an mp3 encoded audio blog posted to your site.
	Mozilla browser and mail reader #Posted by Dreams on 11:18 Remember I told you about the new roadmap of Mozilla? No, well check the archives! Anyway... Mozilla has officially renamed the stand-alone browser and mailnews reader. Formerly known as Phoenix (browser) and Minotaur (mailnews), they are now called Firebird and Thunderbird, resp. Some friends of mine already use Firebird to surf, and they're happy with it. I use mail heavily as well, so I'm gonna wait with switching until Thunderbird becomes a bit more stable and well tested.
	Tuesday, April 15 New pictures from Les Lilas #Posted by Dreams on 12:12 Isa uploaded all the pictures she and Rob took during the ski/board trip to Morgins, that we took in Febuary of this year. Better late than never, I guess! :) But there are a lot of great ones from the party we had in the hall and on Marcel & Jacques' room. She also took a lot of pictures from the snowboard lessons Martin and Rob gave. So if had those lessons, you might wanna check out the gallery. (If you've already seen the older ones, jump directly to the 10th gallery).
	Monday, April 14 Bring a PDA to your next pop/rock/dance concert!!! #Posted by Dreams on 17:28 "For a long time, live recording has been consigned mostly to the realm of DAT recorders, Minidisc recorders, or laptop computers. On one hand you have subpar sound quality, on the other you have a bulky rig with a big 'steal me' sign attached. Thanks to the folks at Core Sound though, mobile recording is about to take a huge leap forward with their PDAudio project. By using a hardware card that allows recording via S/PDIF onto Compact Flash, you will be able to use your iPaq or Zaurus alongside a decent A/D converter to portably get field recordings at up to 24bit/192kHz." Now, when I go to a concert, they'll check me for drugs because they're illegal, for phones because it's annoying, for a camera because they don't want illegal photos of rockstars (ie. who owns the rights to someone), no food or drinks because they we want me to pay outrageous amounts for the food they sell there, no weapons because I might kill or injure someone and no PDA because I might be recording bootlegs! Can I at least still bring a date? Or are they afraid I might have illegal intimate contacts with some of their guests? Jeeez...
	"No, Ted, How Big is It?" #Posted by Dreams on 17:17 Always wondered how big the server park of a search engine is? How many RAM does a server that runs Google or AltaVista need? How big's the RAID-5 array for the Yahoo directory? Well, this Slashdot article on Google's role in Internet advertising reveals some of the numbers for you! You'll be surprised! Trust me!
	IBM To Publish Java Office Suite #Posted by Dreams on 17:01 [Source: Slashdot] IBM is said to bundle a Java-based server-side Office suite with its web server product and portal WebSphere. With StarOffice, OpenOffice and MSOffice, this now gives you 4 choices for an Office suite on your PC! :) That is not counting Corel's Wordperfect8 for Java, which is said to be a decent alternative for anyone on serious Unix hardware (i.e.Solaris users). Also, considering that you'd get a free server-side Office suite bundled with a pretty decent webserver and portal software, and therefore save costs for getting MSOffice for all your employees, this might not be such a bad deal. Everything, of course, depends on the suite being able to at least read 95% of existing Office documents... that remains to be seen.
	KPN Research Reunion #Posted by Dreams on 12:40 Last weekend, I had a reunion in Groningen, with all the people that had ever worked at KPN Research there. On January 1st, KPN Research was sold to TNO to continue its work under the name TNO Telecom. To celebrate the ending of an era, Petra van Raad and a few others, organized a reunion in de Meerwold, the former training center for KPN there. It was a lot of fun! About 180 people showed up and we didn't do much except to tell what we were doing now, where we had been and how things were going. Many people had kids by now, got married in the mean time and so on. Not much but still very nice to see all the old familair faces again after so long. Some of them, I hadn't seen in 5 years or so! :) You may also want to check out my other pictures from KPN Research!
	Thursday, April 10 Welcome to the world of Wolford #Posted by Dreams on 14:57 OK, everyone has fetishes, I think. They can be simple, like sunglasses, (un)shaven men's faces, wet clothing or wet hair. Or kinky, like S&M, dominance, tying people up more or less. Or bizarre, like adult babies, pony-thingy, etc. My fetish, if you don't mind reading this about me, is lingerie and latex. Latex because it is shiny, body hugging and has that wet-look that drives me crazy! :) Lingerie is a more broad area. Strings, nice bras and matching panties, panty hoses, bit of lace here and there, colors, quality stuff... You get the idea. There is one brand, that no matter what it makes, drives me absolutely insane!!! :) It's Wolford. I climb walls when a woman wears this! It makes fingers itch, toes arch and sends shivers down my spine! On the one hand I want to admire her, adore her and simply take in the way she looks in Wolford (un)clothing. On the other hand I just want to rip everything to shreds and improvise from there on! hehe :devil: Look at these images and hopefully you'll understand: There is only one drawback to Wolford... it's as sinfully expensive as it is breathtakingly gorgeous! Oh well, win some, loose some. The trick is to spoil her rarely, but do it exceptionally well when you do! :devil:
	Isa's Baby... #Posted by Dreams on 10:49 Haha, Isa is starting to get tired of the baby. :D It's 7 months now, or just 8. It seems women always get that feelign at this time during the pregnancy. Can't blame them, don't want to, but it's funny. Just when the going is gonna get tough, they have had enough. :) LOL And in Isa's case, it may get worse yet because she's so small and the baby is kinda big. They figure an 8 pounder. Considering I was only 6.5 and Isa herself 7 pounds, that makes the baby a new record. May he'll be an internaltional basketballer or she'll be a famous high jump athlete. Or just a big fat bully that everyone hates! Hahaha LOL In that we'll blame Rob. Those genes of ours are fine, can't be anything wrong with that now can it?! :) Just hang in there Isa... Relax, no sweat. Approximately 7 or 8 billion women have been going through this before you will and most of them are just fine. {hug}
	Wednesday, April 9 The Recruit #Posted by Dreams on 18:16 Going to see The Recruit tonight! Kinda excited! I'm curious to see how it turns out. It could just be a shallow action movie, or it could be a bit more. I guessing the former, but you never know. IMDB says: `"James Clayton (Colin Farrell) is one of the top prospects in the new crop of CIA recruits. His intelligence and unconventional attitude attract the attention of veteran Walter Burke (Al Pacino) who squires him through the Agency's difficult training courses and helps him to quickly rise through the ranks. Clayton is then given a special assignment, to root out a suspected mole that has infiltrated the Agency."`
	Tuesday, April 8 The Matrix Reloaded #Posted by Dreams on 15:57 One of my favorite movies of all times (right up there with 2001, Bladerunner and 2010) is said to premiere at Cannes on May 15th! World-wide release is set for May 25th... Pffffew, can't wait! Gimme now! Gimme now! Gimme now!
	Information process patents in the U.S. and Europe #Posted by Dreams on 15:31 First Monday has an interesting article on differences in the US and European patent system, or should I say, patent thinking? Fact is, at work we get those US patents on business methods and it's really silly if you see them. You have no idea, especially when comparing them with a regular application! :D LOL So I back the EU standing on this. But if we can come up with some objective way of patenting a good idea, even though it may not be very technical btu has enough technical effect, then I see no reason why not. But until then... Here's the abstract: "Patents on software and business methods appear to have a pivotal position in today's economy, yet they have remained a policy backwater in which scope of patentable subject matter has expanded without legislative input. This is changing as Europe struggles with patent reform. A push by the European Commission to validate and promote software patents has been opposed by many companies and professionals, and especially the open source community. In this process, it has become clear that Europe opposes the broad non-technical patents on business methods that are now available in the U.S., signaling a major rift in international standards of patentability. Recent hearings held by competition agencies in the U.S. show severe problems of overpatenting that extend beyond software to much of the ICT sector. These problems have been ignored by the Commission, which despite a pro forma effort to address economic issues, clearly feels more comfortable framing the issue in legal terms. In outlining what a properly developed policy framework would look like, the paper stresses the need to understand why software is different from other technologies, why the disclosure function of the patent system is failing, the build-up of risk and uncertainty and its effect on industry structure, and the international political economy of information process patents."
	Blair: Iraqis to run new Iraq #Posted by Dreams on 14:23 [From CNN] "The new Iraq will be run neither by the U.S.-British coalition nor by the United Nations, but by the Iraqi people", British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday. However, the United Nations should have a vital role in the country's reconstruction, he told reporters in a joint appearance with U.S. President Bush at Hillsborough Castle. "The key is that Iraq in the end should be governed by the Iraqi people," Blair stressed. "Our forces will not stay in Iraq a day longer than is necessary." Thank god! Coz this morning I read in a paper on the tram (Metro) that Bush thought they had to govern Iraq for a while... Yeah, right! Sure, and you're gonna do that, aren't you? Because with your intimate knowledge of foreign politics, Islam and other cultures, that is just right up your alley, isn't it? :p Hell, if I'd be an Iraqi and woke up one morning to find Saddam gone and Bush now in charge, annoucing that the war is over, let's rebuild the country together, I'd go right back to sleep and try to pretend it's just a horrible dream! :( The dork!
	Absolute Original Ecards and GreetingCards #Posted by Dreams on 11:27 Petra showed me a site that will let you send Ecards using your own photos! Exactly what I had been looking for and thinking about doing/making. Bummer for me, but good and easy to use. Go to the site and click on the 'Personal' category. There, you can upload an image of use a URL to fetch an image of your own to be used in the card. Sweet, Simple and much more effective! :) Recommended!
	Monday, April 7 Geek Purity Test Results #Posted by Dreams on 17:48 Couldn't resist... :D Here is the result of your Geek Purity Test: `You answered "yes" to 49 of 129 questions, making you 62.0% geek pure (38.0% geek corrupt); that is, you are 62.0% pure in the geek domain (you have 38.0% geek in you). Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 34%, based on a comparison of your test results with 141774 other submissions for this test. The average purity for this test is 80.4%. The first submission for this test was received December 31, 1995.` OMG, I'm not that geeky, that's the good news. However, I'm 20% more geeky than most people who com here! Shiiiit!
	Nerd test - armory.com #Posted by Dreams on 17:39 LOL :D I did a nerd test, after a friend of mine did it too... She scored a mere 23%, so I was confident. I scored a respectable 53% nerd and 40% weirdness aka uniqueness. I forwarded it to Martin, because I thought he should be more nerd than I am... (I mean that in a good way, in contrast to most people. Nerds usually respects or evy other nerds. :D ) Anyway... Martin scored 54% nerd and 42% weirdness, so I must bowe to my master... Let the record show...
	Hypernova Blast :: Astrobiology Magazine #Posted by Dreams on 16:33 This is soooo cool, don't ask me why. But the shear magnitude of these things just awes me (Yes, that's English:)). Two billion years ago, in a far-away galaxy, a giant star exploded, releasing almost unbelievable amounts of energy as it collapsed to a black hole. The light from that explosion finally reached Earth at 6:37 a.m. EST on March 29, igniting a frenzy of activity among astronomers worldwide. This phenomenon has been called a hypernova, playing on the name of the supernova events that mark the violent end of massive stars. [...] "During the first minute after the explosion it emitted energy at a rate more than a million times the combined output of all the stars in the Milky Way. If you concentrated all the energy that the sun will put out over its entire 9 billion-year life into a tenth of a second, then you would have some idea of the brightness."
	Dinner Party season now officially open! #Posted by Dreams on 12:15 I'm so happy to report to you that the season for Dinner Parties has officialy been opened this weekend, yesterday, by my friends Petra and Mirella!!! Still recovering from Saturday's concert, they came to my place after we'd all finally gotten up and out of bed around 2pm. I was gonna finish working in the garden, repot plants, etc. But it all went differently. Oh well... Instead, I had a nice brunch behind my computer with coffee, tea and chocolate croissants as well as Petra (who brought them). We did some quality geeking on the computer, eating, browsing, surfing my galleries, listening to music and downloading new music ;) until Mirella came at 5pm. Leaving the girls behind my computer, I prepared dinner and the season was opened! During dinner, we listened to Everything But the Girl, 10000 Manicas, James Taylor and Norah Jones. Ahhhhh, what an evening. The only thing missing was a setting sun and the smell of honeysuckle in the air, spread around by a gentle breeze. (Now you know why they call me Dreams!)
	Sunday, April 6 Trijntje Oosterhuis #Posted by Dreams on 15:24 Last night, I took to friends Petra and Mirella to a concert of Trijntje Oosterhuis. She used to sing in a band called Total Touch and was really popular here in the Netherlands. Now she's solo and has changed her style a bit. She's more jazzy, less popular and commercial. And she's much better than she was! I knew the girls would like to concert and decided to invite them. That was a good idea! :) Trijtje's concert was awesome. Music excellent, sound great, we had seats right in the middle of the floor and slightly elevated over the crowd in front of us. Perfect! I tried to capture the mood of the show, because I was too far away and had the wrong camera to take pictures of her or the band. But the lighting was amazing and I hope you get an idea of what it was like. If you like it, I HIGHLY recommend going to see her theatre show. It's worth it!
	Saturday, April 5 nesting behaviour #Posted by Dreams on 16:13 It's weird... Spring always gets my hormones going. Of course, that's not really weird, strange or uncommon, but with me it starts early Febuary. :) It drives me crazy! I can't look at girls or women and not think about sex, almost to the point of irritating myself! And I hate it when that happens! ;) Then, when it finally does become Spring, sun shines, temperatures go up, hormones cooking by now... this nesting behaviour starts. I pay attention to what I wear, what I eat, about my face, my hair... I wanna buy new clothes or shoes, and so on. Yesterday, the last straw was drawn! I remodelled my livingroom! This has gotta stop!!! I can't take it anymore! This morning, I got up and went in the garden and cleaned the garden out. 8 bags of garbage are going out next Tuesday! And tomorrow, a friend is coming over with more tools and we're going to go buy stuff for the garden, repot my plants and prolly enjoy a day of hard work! Tsssssss, I understand me anymore. :( It's a sad day in Chrisdom. What has the world come to... :( War in Iraq and Chris is loosing it... "It's the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine" :D
	Friday, April 4 Remodelling Dreams Residency #Posted by Dreams on 22:22 Did a little remodelling in my house tonight... My chairs finally arrived this week and big cardboard boxes had been standing patiently in my room! I had a huge dining table but no chairs... :) Now that they came, I had to rearrange things because it would be too tight. I've uploaded some pics of the final layout. Don't mind te mess, there cables everywhere because I had to unhook absolutely everything that had to do with audio or video in my room! :( But it's worth it.
	Thursday, April 3 Live Performances: Harry Sacksioni & James Taylor #Posted by Dreams on 14:17 I've been goin out A LOT lately, it seems. Dance parties left and right, movies, dinner, concerts. So it's time to share some of it with you. :) My friend JP pointed this out to me today. Harry Sacksioni's 5 Great Guitars is touring the Netherlands. It is supposed to be an awesome show with 5 of the best (acoustic?) guitar players in the world together on stage. They are Harry Sacksioni, Jan Kuiper, Eric Vaarzon Morel, Zou Diarra and Digmon Roovers. I would really like to go, but can't, but didn't want to keep others from going. So here I am telling you about it. If you go, let me know how it was! Yesterday I went to a concert by James Taylor in Heineken Music Hall (HMH) in Amsterdam. Amazing!!! Awesome! Brilliant! Excellent! Suuuuper!, are words that come to mind! :) Martin, his roommate Femke, and Petra and I went there. Petra didn't know him at all before, the rest of us are long time fans. But I knew Petra would like it, so I got her tix as well. And I was right! :) The evening was wonderful. James sounds just like on the CDs, the band was magnificent too and the lighting was outstanding as well. Maybe it's weird that I like the lighting but it's something I've always wanted to do. Here, they they contributed to the overall mood of the stage, matched the music and added to the effects. They also had some spotlights that (manually?) got brigther or dimmer when the person in it, sang or not. Coool! And they played some of my faovrite songs, so I was moooore than pleased! He played for more than 2 hrs, gave 3 encores and still it felt like he was only just playing. Soooo sad that it ended that quickly. Now maybe I'll get the DVD and relive the show... ;)
	Mozilla Development Roadmap #Posted by Dreams on 11:28 My favorite browser-maker people have released a new Mozilla Development Roadmap for Mozilla. They are going to dump the "all-in-one suite" idea for a more mix-and-match product with the web browser (Phoenix) and the mail/news client (Minotaur) being seperate components. Woohoo! Way to go! Mozilla is an open-source browser made by group of people on the Internet. It is 100% standard compliant and was written from scratch several years ago. It was plagued by take-over issues when AOL bought Netscape, as well as big performance and stability issues. But now it's great and blazingly fast. It's the browser for geek by geeks. That's all. Gives complete control over who get to write cookies and who not, which images (read: ads) to display and which not, and so on. Recommended!!! (Download here)
	Top 100 hoaxes #Posted by Dreams on 11:17 April Fool's Day passed and someone got you real good?!? Planning to take revenge but kinda don't have any inspiration nor ideas? Look no further because on Slashdot you can read about the Top 100 hoaxes of all times. Go read it and maybe you'll get some ideas as well. gna gna gna ]:)
	Tuesday, April 1 Meeting people #Posted by Dreams on 22:16 Met a few people over the Internet recently... They feature me on the home page of Smugmug, the place where I host my pictures. I send them a lot of feedback and at some point they asked if they could feature me. WTH, so I said yes. That gives me many hits, apparently. So now I talk to some really good photographers... Hi Tena! Hi Chrissy! Hi Gale! What's also good, is I get to ask other people about their cameras and get some useful information this way. Because otherwise I'd really not know whether to pick a D10, D30, D100 or SD9... See my favorite site for digital photography, for more info on those models.
	Andy's anagram solver #Posted by Dreams on 17:02 Cool, Useless tool of the day: Andy's anagram solver (AAS). Brilliant! Fill in words, eg your names, and AAS (which means 'bait' in Dutch, btw) roles out various more or less funny anagrams that can be made from your name. Some of them are hilarious! LOL :D Examples: chain stripper christie napper ethnic appriser ice partnership harp recipients panties chirper
	esp@cenet #Posted by Dreams on 14:59 Are you wondering what the hell I do at work? Sure you are! :) I work at the EPO as a Patent Examiner, so far so good. I treat patent applications as they come in. Or at least, as they are given to me by my coach. I work in the Computer cluster, which consists of 4 departments (I think). Together, we are about 100 people or so. I work in the ECLA (European Patent Classification) classes G06F9/40 through G06F9/46. :) The see what that is, search esp@cenet (fill in G06F9/00 in the top right box and press 'view'). World-wide, there are 3 classification schemes: the UCLA (US), ECLA (Europe) and the FICLA (Japan). Currently, everyone's trying to unify these. But as you can imagine, that takes a lot of work. :) So now you kinda know what I work with. You can use esp@cenet to search for some patents in my field as well... [excercise for the reader]