Ok real life started again ....

It seems most Holidays are over and most people are on the roads again. Although not extremely busy I had several issues with rather aggressive drivers this morning. For the last 6-8 weeks, roads were almost "empty" and people were much friendlier. Not good ....

Interesting Artist, scary video ...

Triangle Walks from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

Apple music event the 9th of September, what will it be about?

Nice ...

That is it will cost me not going on Holiday but overall it is not too bad. Flight will cost a little, car no costs, B&B no costs, cruise a lot though ..

Today I also arranged me a short Holiday to my friends in Otley, England. Just for a weekend, but being away for a few days is also good :-).

Robben scores twice ...

I am really no fan from Bayern, van Gaal nor Robben, but I think it is a very good soccer player which can help van Gaal as coach and Bayern as team to gain some confidence again.

From CNN

Arjen Robben scored twice on his debut as Bayern Munich gave new coach Louis Van Gaal his first victory with a 3-0 crushing of German Bundesliga champions Wolfsburg on Saturday.

Two-goal Arjen Robben made an immediate impact following his transfer from Real Madrid.

The Dutch winger netted both goals in the second half to add to Mario Gomez's first-half opener at the Allianz Arena.

The victory left Bayern five points behind new leaders Bayer Leverkusen, who went three points clear after four games with a 2-1 victory at home to Bochum earlier on Saturday.

Visiting Wolfsburg crashed to a second successive defeat, having lost 4-2 to Hamburg last weekend.

Armin Veh's team went behind in the 27th minute when Germany striker Gomez pounced for his second goal of the season after Diego Benaglio could only parry Hamit Altintop's long-range shot.

Van Gaal brought on Robben, signed during the week from Spanish big-spenders Real Madrid, at the start of the second half.

His first goal was set up by fellow substitute Franck Ribery in the 69th minute, with the Dutchman's shot taking a slight deflection off Andrea Barzagli.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

No Holiday

What? Yeah no Holiday, not possible to go business wise, some important clients to take care off. I have had months of pre-fun ... but now it's over.

Well next year new chances to go to Canada.

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone

If you use Facebook and have an iPhone, here it is version 3.0.

Back at Squarespace

Yeah I know, switching all the time, back to Squarespace. I think it's by far the best and most functional system I have worked with. Not the cheapest though, but you get money for the bucks. A major advantage was I could get easily back as all my stuff was still available.

Exchange support in Snow Leopard

Finally it will be easy to hook up my Mac directly to the corporate Exchange server, so I will be able to use Mac mail and iCal without problems, at least that is what the first reviews are promising. I was already able to use it with MS Entourage but I would like to use iCal especially.

Getting closer

OK, still some days but I am getting closer to my Holiday. Yesterday got the ticket and the car voucher and in the afternoon I went to the city hall to get me a new passport. Although my current one is still valid I need a new one, with chip, for the USA. And as part of my trip to Canada, I will take a cruise to Alaska, so I'd better be sure to have the right ingredients. Would be a pity if I can not board the ship in Vancouver.

Continuing story :-)

With another team we lost this tournament in Mechelen, Belgium, once, we now won. Only 3 matches in a very high temperature 25-28 degrees Celsius, and some drinks in between, made us unbeatable :-).

Saturday Vimeo Video: Niagara in Motion

Niagara Falls in Motion from Matthew Wartman on Vimeo.

 

Hockey Tournament

Today to Belgium, Mechelen, to play a one day Veterans Hockey Tournament. We will stay for the night though to "party" in Mechelen itself. Mechelen is a very nice town with lots of bars and restaurants.

Mechelen (Dutch, pronounced [ˈmɛçələ(n)] (help·info); Malines in French, Mechlin in English) is a Dutch-speaking city and municipality in the province of Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium. The municipality comprises the city of Mechelen proper, some quarters at its outskirts, the hamlets of Nekkerspoel (adjacent) and Battel (a few kilometers away), as well as the villages of Walem, Heffen, Leest, Hombeek, and Muizen. The Dijle flows through the city, hence the term 'Dijlestad' (City by the Dijle).

Mechelen lies on the major urban and industrial axis Brussels-Antwerp, about 25 km from each city. Inhabitants find employment at Mechelen's southern industrial and northern office estates, as well as at offices or industry near the capital, or at industrial plants near Antwerp's seaport.

5-0

Ajax won 5-0 from Slovan Bratislava. The first half was bad, but the second half showed some nice soccer and especially Louis Suarez was in great form and scored the first four goals.

Carnival of Cultures 2009 Berlin

Great Video shot with GH1

Carnival of Cultures 2009 Berlin - Lumix GH1 from Matzeb on Vimeo.

And you guys are talking about us Dutch ..... hm .....

WASHINGTON - Nearly all the dollar bills in the United States carry traces of cocaine. This suggests a study that was presented Sunday at a conference of the American Chemical Society.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found 90 percent of the survey notes miniscule traces of cocaine. That is 20 percent more than in a survey two years ago.
The U.S. capital stretched the crown with 95 percent of the tickets. Paper money is used for cocaine to sniff and most dealers pay in cash. The researchers pointed out that the spread of cocaine particles mainly by Elma machines shall be removed. However, this, alarming rate''out how widespread cocaine use in the USA is.
The analysis of banknotes were also four other countries, Brazil, Canada, China and Japan. In Canada exceeded onde looking at 85 percent of the tickets traces of coacaïne, in Brazil 80, China 20 and Japan 12 per cent.

Great weekend

Just back from a great weekend. Actually just did some Holiday stuff. Arrived Friday at my parents house in Friesland, where also my 7 year old nephew was those days. Saturday we were on a boat trip with friends in Friesland on the many lakes, it's all in the North of the Netherlands.

The Saturday evening for dinner and stay overat other friends in Drente (also in the North), and just back home in Amsterdam.

Fake? The new Apple tablet, for sure ....

Tele2 outage

Tele2 is my Internet provider, but also my phone and TV company. I just changed providers some month ago and had more problems with Tele2 then I had ever before with my old one, UPC. But I decided due to the much lower pricing (500 euro less per year ..) it was time to switch.

Having some smaller issues over the past few month, annoying, but most of the time solved rather fast.

Yesterday though for over 8 hours Internet was working, phone a bit longer and TV for 12+ hours. The last 2 I do not mind, and I of course have also a mobile phone. But not being able to use Internet, and especially when you work at home is a problem.

So I had to use my iPhone a lot, in general working fine, but also here my mobile provider T-Mobile sometimes has problems with covering my area.

It all lead me to the question, "what if all providers are down" ... I think all business (and not only business) will come to a complete stop. I read something about terrorists trying to do this, or bring the Internet down .. hm .. this could be major.

Great new addition to Snappages

From the developer at Snappages.

The new web block is called a "code box" and it does pretty much what it sounds like it would do. It gives you a little box that you can dump whatever code you want into and it will run securely on your pages. You can now easily embed just about any third party widget that you want, or even add some custom html tables. The input box even has syntax highlighting and allows for the "tab" character so it will work like it's own mini code editor.

And if all that wasn't enough I also made a ton of improvements to the interface, added some other new features, and fixed a lot of little bugs. Here's a quick list of most of the improvements that were made:

• Custom code box added!


• Imroved interface for adding web blocks


• Added descriptions for web blocks so you know what they do


• Images with effects or frames added will now display as images instead of flash files so that pages will load faster and be more compatible with mobile browsers


• The blog posts block that displays your latest blog posts can now be filtered to only show updates from certain categories


• The folders in the page list menu are now collapsible


• Improved menus for web blocks


• Headings can now be centered and aligned to the right


• Improved image uploading


• Fixed several smaller bugs that would lock up the editor

Next stop .....

A thousand shades of white from icescapes on Vimeo.

 

Never ending story

That might be the case as at the moment I am not in the position to move, but thinking about is equally fun :-).

As written in other entries I am rather hooked to Canada, and especially to Nova Scotia. Why? The mix of perfect scenery, very friendly people, nice sea food, clean air and empty roads, gives a very comfortable feeling, at least to me. As living in Amsterdam is missing some of those aspects, but you do get other nice ones back though. And no I do not mean smoking pot or whatever ... Amsterdam is just a very nice and not too big city. Not been there? Try it :-).

Back to Nova Scotia. Almost every day I am checking out lots and houses and it seems I am narrowing the search, really .... only search ...

I think the best mix you can find is in the Chester area, but this is also one of the most expensive parts of Nova Scotia. Another area, near Lunenburg, and especially close to Kingsburg is rather special, not cheap but less pricy compared to Chester.

From Wikipedia:

Kingsburg, Nova Scotia is a small community in Lunenburg County on the South Shore that is now mainly a vacation area.

The village is located at the end of Kingsburg peninsula by the villages of Rose Bay and Riverport. The closest major centre is Bridgewater. It also is not very far from Lunenburg. Kingsburg is located between two beaches: the popular Hirtle's Beach and the lovely, but usually deserted Kingsburg Beach. There are also a cape which has hiking trails (Gaff Point) Like all of Nova Scotia, the ocean is usually too cold to swim in,but many of the locals do but Kingsburg has two large lakes and a number of smaller freshwater ponds that are popular swimming locations. and the locals only swim in one of those

The village was settled by German settlers, with a land grant from King George lll of England on July 5 1787 to five families. (Leonard Hirtle, John Mossman, Peter Knack, Christian Hartman and John Kayser) It was for many decades primarily a fishing community, and a fish packing plant was established there. The village grew to have a few hundred residents.

In the late twentieth century, with the widespread decline of small-scale Atlantic fishery, the packing plant closed and the fishing culture nearly disappeared completely. With little industry, the town's population collapsed and many of the buildings were abandoned and destroyed, leaving the town with only a few dozen full time inhabitants.

By the 1990s, however, the South Shore had become a major vacation destination. As other popular destinations such as Mahone Bay and Chester became crowded and very expensive, travellers turned to smaller locations like Kingsburg. Kingsburg with its beaches and quiet isolation became a prime location. The old houses were bought and restored, mostly by wealthy out-of-province cottage goers from Ontario and the United States. The empty land was also bought up and many new houses were built. Prices skyrocketed and land there is now worth over 200 000 Canadian dollars per acre ($50/m²).

One of the only detractions to Kingsburg's idyllic setting is the great amount of fog. It is perfectly possible to go for weeks, even in mid-summer, with only a few days of visible sun.

--------

The last sentence is not so good and the one about lot prices is also not very positive, but all together still very interesting.

One of the interesting aspects is also that a well know architect, Brian MacKay-Lyons, has built some extremely nice houses in the area, most of them on spectacular cliffs or in open fields with views you can only dream of. Well in my dreams I see myself overlooking the see with a beautiful sunset all from a Brian MacKay-Lyons house. Will I ever?

Below is one of his designs, the Hill house, now costs a staggering 2.650.000 $ Canadian, you get at least a nice acreage :-).

Slow everywhere

At work, in the newspapers, at Internet, with sports ... August is not a very entertaining month for these aspects. So everybody is writing lame stories or writes about stuff that already happened ages ago. For me it is more or less the same. So I have time to check out more websites and products I'd like to use. As written yesterday I found Springpad, very interesting service indeed. It is a productivity tool , like in GTD.

It is one of the services that tries to combine a lot of functionality. Still not sure to which other I should compare. It has something of Nozbe, something from Facebook, something from Wordpress. Meaning, list, social and blogging. So what is in? Well mainly it is about notebooks, they call it Springpads. Many predefined, but you can also add your own.

Some predefined, holiday, grocery, wedding, recipes, etc.

You can add tasks and (returning) meetings, which are sent by e-mail or in USA also by SMS. This is one of the disadvantages, until now it totally focuses on the USA, so it is less interesting for us over here as for instance no info from Europe about companies etc is added.

What I found out is that most people are using it, for the social part, to share recipes. Why? I do not know, but there seems to be great interest in this part.

You are able to import addresses from Google, works fine, but I would like to be more flexible by adding vCards or even synchronizing with Outlook of Apple Address book. They state many more connections will become available over the coming months. I think a product to watch.

Saturday Vimeo Video: ant-views

Just discovered "Springpad"

I was checking out CRM systems and online notebooks and todo list and found Springpad. I have played with a bit and think it has a lot of potential.

Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more. But it goes way beyond the standard simple tools. Connect to Gmail, connect to Flickr, also to Facebook and Twitter, it's all there.

I am testing it now to plan my upcomming Holiday and make a weblog in it. It is like Twitter and Inbox on Steroids ...

Check out the many examples and demos.

No traffic jams

For the last two weeks I have not seen nor experienced any traffic jam, at least not in the Netherlands. Most of the time in the Summer Holiday this is often the case, but this year it seems to be extremely quiet. I can not remember it being like this. It seems that the crisis does not have any impact on going on Holiday in a foreign country. Although some newspapers stated much more people are having Holidays in their own country.

Most probably it is only a luxury for some weeks and in one or two weeks in will be back to normal again. Normal is 200-300 Km in the morning and all in a limited area around the bigger cities Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and Rotterdam, that is just 1.600 square Km. When it's raining (and that is often) or snowing it can be 600-700 Km, and that is something stated as Black Saturday in a much bigger country like France, we have that often ....

Google launches Chrome gallery; almost all ugly

Wrong camera but nice video

Long weekend Mannheim

This weekend I have been with my 7 year old nephew to my sister in Mannheim, Germany. It was his first time and it went very well. Friday afternoon we had a good workout at the Felsenmeer near Reichenbach.The phraseFelsenmeer ('sea of rock') is the German word for astone run. In a Felsenmeer, frost and ice have quickly broken up the top layer of the rock, covering the underlying rock formation with jagged, angular bolders. The depth of the layer of bolders can vary depending on vegetation, climate, and rock type, and can be as much as twelve feet deep. Basalt and sedimentary rocks often produce larger, more numerous Felsenmeer's than other types of rock.

 

The Saturday we went to Heidelberg and took the cable cart up the mountain near the the old Castle.The castle is a mix of styles fromGothic toRenaissance. Prince Elector Ruprecht III (1398–1410) erected the first representative building in the inner courtyard as a regal residence. The building was divided into a ground floor made of stone and framework upper levels. Another regal building is located opposite to the Ruprecht Building: The Fountain Hall. Prince Elector Philipp (1476–1508) is said to have arranged the transfer of the hall's columns from a decayed palace ofCharlemagne to Heidelberg.

In the 16th and 17th century the Prince Electors added two representative palace buildings and turned the fortress into a castle. The two dominant buildings at the eastern and northern side of the courtyard were erected during the rule of Ottheinrich (1556–1559) and Friedrich IV (1583–1610). Under Friedrich V (1613–1619), the main building of the westside was erected, the so called "English Building".

The castle and its garden were destroyed several times (during the 30 Years' War and the Palatine war of succession). When Prince Elector Karl Theodor who resided in Schwetzingen tried to restore the castle, lightning struck the Castle in 1764 and finished all attempts to rebuild the castle. Later on, the castle was misused as a quarry - castle stones helped to build new houses in Heidelberg. This was stopped in 1800 by Count Charles de Graimberg who made any effort he could to preserve the Heidelberg Castle. In spite of its Gothic interior, it was not before 1934, that the King's Hall was added.

Today, the hall is used for festivities, e.g. dinner banquets, balls and theatre performances. During the Heidelberg Castle Festival in the summer, the courtyard is the site of open air musicals, operas, theatre performances and classical concerts performed by the Heidelberg Philharmonics.

The castle is surrounded by a park where the famous poetJohann von Goethe once walked. TheHeidelberger Bergbahn funicular railway runs from Heidelberg's Kornmakt to the summit of the Königstuhl via the castle.