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. ;)

	Sunday, April 30 Pictures from Koninginnedag #Posted by Dreams on 11:02 I have a few pictures I'd like to share with you of yesterday's very relaxed Koninginnedag 2006.
	Saturday, April 29 Happy Queen's Day! #Posted by Dreams on 12:49 Today, Holland celebrates "Koninginnedag", aka Queen's Day! It's actually tomorrow, April 30th, but the Royal Family won't celebrate on a (religious) Sunday... :yawn: oh well, gotta respect that I guess. Doesn't make much of a difference anyway and it'll make getting up on Monday a lot easier! ;) The Queen's birthday is neither today nor tomorrow... :confused: Her birthday is actually January 31st. :more confused: The Queen's mother's birthday is April 30th, so we celebrated it for years on this day. Since January is definitely not a good day for outdoor, open air festivals and parties, they decided to keep the national celebration on April 30th (for commercial reasons)! Gotta love it! For Queen's Day, the Queen and her family travel to one or more villages in Holland, waving to everyone, doing ceremonial things and protocol blabla. Everywhere else, there are tons of free festivals, carnavals, concerts and dancathons. It's a big thing here where everyone loves everyone else, we all make arses of ourselves and party the day away. It is also a day where there's a "free market" system, meaning it is allowed for everyone - and I do mean everyone - to sell things on the street in an open air market fashion from midnight to midnight. Long story short: you can buy everyone's old junk and shit for little in the world's biggest garage sale! :D w00t Sell your junk to other people and make a little of money off of it. Sheer genius!
	Thursday, April 27 TINE 2006 #Posted by Dreams on 11:29 Today, I am at the TINE for two days in the Amsterdam RAI with Red Hat and RealOpen IT... joy! NOT! Got some pictures. Oh well, shit happens and there's always death to get some rest... LOL ;)
	D'Sound im Kölner Stadtgarten #Posted by Dreams on 01:56 Petra and I took the day off to have a break and listen to D'Sound in concert im Kölner Stadtgarten. We had a blast and wonderful evening. Thanks D'Sound for being in Cologne and signing all my CDs!
	Tuesday, April 25 Black holes actually green #Posted by Dreams on 14:33 Him: "Yoh mamma is so fat, she could plug even a black hole!" Me: "Uhm, sorry but no. A black hole is actually green, mofo!" Eat that for the latest galatic trivia... LOL :D Black holes are "green" because the conversion of energy, as matter falls into the black hole, is so efficient, that if cars had the same efficiency, a car could drive a billion miles on a gallon of gas! You'd only need to fill up your car once in your entire lifetime. The car'd break down sooner than run out of gas! ROFL
	Summer's coming! #Posted by Dreams on 09:39 Today is the first gorgeous day of the year, officially! Temps are soaring to 20 Celsius (70 F) and the sun's out. The beach is the place to be, of course, I'm all ready for summer season! Check out the beachcam of zeezicht, a beachclub at Scheveningen and see what the weather is like, people, crowds, situation and all... :) I'll be at Soomers! w00t
	Binghamton University research links digital images and cameras #Posted by Dreams on 09:22 Good news for photographers everywhere: Binghamton University research links digital images and cameras! This means, like bullets fired by guns, digital images can be uniquely linked to the camera that took them. So if anyone steals your photo and denies it, "we have wayz to make you talk"! The technique is based on a simple principle: "Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity." The weak part is that either the original camera is needed to confirm the identity or multiple images taken by that camera. I don't know if manipulating the image in a program repeatedly will mask the noise-levels sufficiently to avoid identification or not... /me runs back into the lab...
	Monday, April 24 Matsushita: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD Will Never Merge #Posted by Dreams on 13:25 It seems it up to the customers again... Blu-Ray, HD-DVD Will Never Merge. Just like Betamax and VHS, it is once again up the consumers to buy into one or the other. My guess is that PC support will matter as more and more people have a PC in the livingroom or a HTPC. Last I heard, Microsoft will back HD-DVD and HP swapped BluRay for HD-DVD, I heard for pricing/licensing reasons. Dell can therefore make or break BluRay, since Dell is the world's largest manufacturer of consumer PCs these days...
	Bad taste party #Posted by Dreams on 11:34 LOL Petra's parents already uploaded their pictures of last Saturday's Bad Taste party... Everyone's bad taste was impeccable! I'm glad to see we all know what not to wear! :) Thanks to everyone who came and made Petra's birthday a great party! Update: uploaded my pictures of the bad taste party to smugmug
	Friday, April 21 What happened...? #Posted by Dreams on 16:32 My god! Long time no blog... sjeez! What happened? No much actually. Easter break for a few days in Assen with Mleen and Michel. Eating, sleeping, computer games, inline skating, repeat... A lot of fun! Otherwise, I've been busy at work, come home, did excercise (Petra and I go to Jack Slagman 3-5 times a week to get back in shape - mostly spinning), have dinner and repeat this. Petra had a short trip abroad for two days, so I was home alone, but nothing much happend. I f*cked up my desktop PC by adding a new repository which got me new packages but also broke all kinds of things, $%!@#$!%, so I had to reinstall it. No big deal, but it takes a little time. It all works again but I need to add my fav applications still... Petra's birthday is coming up tomorrow! We're having a Bad Taste party and it's gonna be busy: 20-25 people are coming. I'm making Strawberry Marguarita's again. People, who had them last year, were very fond of them and although they can't remember anything, they're sure they had a great time. So they asked if I'd be so kind to make them again... ;)
	Tuesday, April 11 What a weekend! #Posted by Dreams on 10:40 Well, I'm finally back on earth. It was a great weekend! :) Friday techno party 'til late; sleep in until 2pm on saturday; breakfast with sjoerdski; back to den haag at 4pm; dinner (aka lunch) at 8pm in Den Haag with good friends; party in paradiso with those friends at 11pm - which was moved to more like 1am due to bad organisation; back home at 4am; sleep until 11am on sunday; put on some clothes and go to sauna and take clothes off; all day at sauna dozing off, reading, eating some, drinking some; sleep over at hotel by 10pm on sunday and wake to a gorgeous view of the Maas in the Delta Hotel in Vlaardingen. Incidently, I woke up about 1km or so from the place where my dad used to work after university: Unilever R&D lab in Vlaardingen. :) Cool! Monday was a nice day, still dozed and in a kind of blissfull ignorance of the week to come.
	Saturday, April 8 wickedJazzSounds in Paradiso #Posted by Dreams on 18:32 Barely recovered from a night of techno, I return to Amsterdam this evening with Petra and my friends July and Harald for a CD presentation in Amsterdam's pop temple Paradiso of wickedJazzSounds. Their music is hard to describe as it's a very latiny, soulfull, jazz-dance combination. We first heard them at a PINK party at beachclub Mekka in 2003 and this is the first time I'm able to revisit them. I got us tickets in honor of Petra and my 3rd anniversary on April 6th! Tomorrow, to complete the festivities, Petra and I go to the sauna in Rotterdam and spend the night in a waterfront hotel in Rotterdam on the Maas river... Big kiss (K) to my love (L)!
	Awakenings in the Westergasfabriek #Posted by Dreams on 18:24 After all this time, some friends and I finally were able to attend a famous Awakenings techno party in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. Awakenings is famous for their state-of-the-art laser shows and visual effects and combines this visual extravaganza with top techno DJs from all over in Holland's finest dance music location: the Westergasfabriek. It's something you have to have experienced to understand fully. Pictures don't do it justice, recordings are plain dull fakes of the real thing when the wall of sound comes to you from all directions (it's a giant round gastank) and the smoke, lasers and lights turn life itself into colors smørgasboard! update: sander and caro are so cute on PF!
	Friday, April 7 Power-hungry chips charted #Posted by Dreams on 10:10 Silent PC guys have compared a set of modern day CPUs and determined which PC consumes how much Watt. Why should you care? Well, you really don't have to, but it pays to know. The more power a CPU consumes, the heavier your power supply should be, the more money you'll pay for the elextricity bill and... the more fans your PC will need, which means the noisier it'll get. If you are in the market for a digital video recorder (DVR) or Personal Video Recorder (PVR) or Home Theatre PC (HTPC), you need to know this stuff.
	Canon EOS 30D Review #Posted by Dreams on 09:45 DPReview has thoroughly tested the Canon EOS 30D, Canon's latest successor to the semi-professional 20D. They didn't upgrade the pixel count. Granted 8 MPx is enough for everyone except the real photographers! Canon has added several features, though, that are very useful and provide even more flexibility and control. You can now change ISO in 0.3 EV steps, for more fine-grained controle over pixelation. More preset image parameters; finer-grainde tweaks for exposure, saturation, tone, etc.; a larger 2.5" LCD (nice!) and a larger buffer for burst shots. Although I would still wait and save for the 5D because of it's full-size CMOS sensor - eliminating the 1.6x crop factor common in Canon DSLR cameras - but the 30D is certainly an improvement for those who like to be able to tweak absolutely everything... like me. :)
	MoodViews #Posted by Dreams on 09:33 Scientists at the University of Amsterdam are testing bloggers' moods. MoodViews investigates the mood of the bloggers' posts and checks for changes in the language used. Happiness, sadness or dissatisfaction are easily detected by common words in the language. Interesting!
	Monday, April 3 First Annual Naked Day: April 05th #Posted by Dreams on 11:59 In just two days, it will be the world's First Annual Naked Day! Join in, if you have a website, that is... read to find out more!
	Sunday, April 2 Wyndy's Wonderland Site #Posted by Dreams on 23:27 Got a really nice mail today on my guestbook. Wyndy asked permission to use one of my photos of crocusses for a Spring-time design for her website: Wyndy's Wonderland Site. Nice design, soft friendly colors! Go ahead Wyndy! Use it! Glad to help!