Last night I decided to try to take some pictures of fireworks without a tripod. Considering the freezing temperatures I knew I was in for disaster, but with plenty of space available on my memory card, that didn't really matter. Large (290 KB) Large (258 KB) Large (270 KB) I think the most important thing we just observed is that if you want to take nice pictures of fireworks, you should probably not stand upwind — although considering the distance involved that would have taken almost as long as the fireworks lasted (about 20 minutes). I did zoom in quite a bit. On the other hand, you'll miss some or most of the smell of gunpowder if you do that, which is an important part of the watching experience, after all. Happy new year!
I decided to join the crowd over half a decade after this kind of post started showing up across the Internet — and I bet it wasn't new when I first saw it either. Here is my 2009 in places, alphabetically. I spent the night at most of these places, but some were "merely" the subject of day trips. America Chicago West Bloomfield (+Detroit) Holland: where they tried to explain the flags of the Dutch provinces and Wilhelmina peppermint to me. Palatine Saugatuck Belgium Antwerpen Brugge Brussel Gent France Lille: on the way back the conductor told us we'd better be glad he's Flemish, 'cause the French would give us a huge fine for not validating our dated return ticket prior to boarding the train (had already been checked on the way there, as well…), and that this was apparently written "clearly in 4 languages at the station." Maybe on the validating machines themselves, but certainly nowhere else. Other than that it was quite nice. Germany Nürnberg: old looking city, but actually quite new due to WW2. Nice museums and metro system. Each church was apparently built by killing all the Jews who lived where the church is now located. A Nazi past, so to speak. The hotel had rooms based around local fairy tales, and was a total dream: both for the price we paid, and compared to our accommodations in Italy. Italy Atrani, Amalfi, Amalfi Coast: wonderful scenery, a horrible road that makes a 20–30 minute drive into one that's more like two hours, lots of touristy shops, and the most laid back people anywhere, ever. Capri: didn't spend quite as much time here as we'd liked; blue grotto is nice but overpriced. Florence: northern Italy is so refreshing after the south, recommended. Torre Annunziata: Naples suburb that is near the Pompeii and Oplonti archeological excavations; also has a convenient train connection to Naples. Very impressive Roman ruins, and nice landscape, but the modern-day suburbs, city, and nearby villages are not very inviting. The atmosphere is a lot better in the villages than around the city, but the natives peer at you like you were some creature from outer space, which is rather uncomfortable. Rome: definitely need to go back sometime; we barely scratched the surface despite being there for a while. Scariest and oldest elevator I've ever used. Who says elevators aren't supposed to go down like 10cm when you step into them? Sorrento: lots of stairs, just like anywhere else along that coast. Venice: involved quite a bit of dragging with suitcases. Very special place. The Netherlands Amsterdam Den Haag: they didn't have a sand sculpture. Lame. Den Helder Middelburg Rotterdam Scheveningen Texel Utrecht: I lived here, after all. Sweden Stockholm Tippen, Saltsjöbaden: where we spent the night and enjoyed the hospitality and company of a good friend.
If you copy (or move) the files in %appdata%\utorrent to the same directory where you keep utorrent.exe, it will exist independently from your Windows installation, and will be unaffected by reinstalling Windows. By reinstalling Windows I mean reformatting your dedicated Windows partition and starting fresh.
Browser Size is a utility by Google Labs which overlays a semi-transparent image with percentages indicating what part of the website people can see without scrolling. I don't know how long it has been around, but I found out about it, played a couple of minutes with it, and read the about page a couple of days ago. I mentally stumbled when I read the following. Browser Size works best on web pages with a fixed layout aligned to the left (emphasis added). If the content reflows as the width is adjusted or it is centered, then the results can be misleading. In this case, you can obtain more accurate results by reducing the browser width to a percentage column, e.g. 90% and seeing what content falls below the 90% horizontal line. I realize it would be hard to implement it any other way, and I would certainly hope that most people understand you have to play around with the size of your window to use the tool in a meaningful way without having read the preceding message — those that don't probably won't read the message either. It seems to me that this should certainly be the preferred way to use the tool — how it works best. Don't encourage those who produce such annoying designs by saying their methods work best. What they hopefully meant to say is that it works best to expose web pages with a fixed layout for the excrements they are.
This post is recycled, and was originally published on WatchZine on Wednesday 2004-03-03 at 14:00:00 UTC. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirelyand rewrote fairly large portions of the text to make it flow somewhat better. To exemplify the relationship with the original text, I made extensive use of DEL and INS elements. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content. "Halt" clearly the voice of a German soldier sounds.Halt! shouts the voice of a German soldier. After a well aimed shot in the head of the soldier's head, the player starts going tosearching for his next victim. A zombie appears. The player getstakes out a flamethrower, and some seconds after thatlater the zombie is somediminished to a pile of burning meat. Then, a group of German soldiers came togetherassembles [or gathers] and is (coordinated) attackingattacks the player in a coordinated fashion. Two of them are killed by the rocket launcher, the; pieces of bodies are flying aroundbody pieces go flying about. This is a scene from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Some people say this is bad for the minds of growing children,: that it will make them criminals, or even terrorists. Nonsense? [It's a reasonable introduction, but the end is rather weak. This is at least somewhat intentional, however, since in Dutch (high school?) argumentative essay writing the thesis statement is to be avoided until the conclusion. I always thought this was quite silly, and my present-day familiarity with American-style writing only reinforces this opinion.] These days, games becomeare becoming more and more realistic. That makes them more violent. [Now that's nonsense. It makes them appear more violent. Besides, I thought you were arguing against this point of view?] Ten years ago, in Wolfenstein 3D (the mother of all shooters, and still a game which is forbidden in a lot of countries [Like where? I don't know of any countries other than Germany, and that was for Nazi symbolism, not for violence.]), the German soldiers died in big red pixels. [See? It was much more violent in those days. You don't see those bad-ass blood splatters anymore these days.] No matter where you shot it, the body turned with you. Now, that doesn't exist anymore. Every character is build fromconsists of at least three to four thousand polygons. Shoot something from behind: it falls realistically; you can do bad things to the body and walks around it. Would this be bad? No, you just need to keep in mind that it's a game. At young age, parents should tell their children what's fake and what's real. Children are able to 'goimmerse themselves into a game' very good,well; that doesn't matter, as long as their parents/ or friends keep them in the real world. Besides, every game has a 'parental lock' option, which allows parents to reduce the amount of gore. [While I agree with the general gist of this paragraph, the point isn't made as well as it could have been, and some poorly phrased examples detract from the strength of the argument. Kids are aware of the differences between fiction and reality as well as adults, but parental locks aren't exactly a convincing argument in support of this, and are almost a red herring to the real issue. No matter how realistic games look and sound, they really aren't any different from watching a movie or reading a book. Governments are messing up the world and are trying to get history books rewritten so that they only point out the positive aspects in history—or have already succeeded, like in America—. Games are a non-issue and if there are people who cannot distinguish between games and reality, we should be glad that they're doing their vicious deeds in games.] Then it's possible to putSome people point a finger toat the shootings in the U.S. Why? Some people sayIt is alleged that theythe shooters did it because they played so-called 'bloody' games like Duke Nukem and Quake (I think they aren't bloody at all [I think you're fucking wrong.]). The way they went through the school looked like they were finishing level after level in a game. Also, here in the Netherlands something like that happened,: a boy killed a girl, because he 'got stressed by a game'. Okay, you can get stressed if you die again, but to kill your neighbor girl... That has nothing to do with the game, h. He would also have done that without the game; someone like that would also have done that if his lock refused to work. Indeed, those people we should protect, but not against games, just against themselves! [A good point is certainly made, but I'd have to check the Dutch original to see if the point was so poorly made, or if I lost something in the translation. Probably a bit of both.] Of course you have the eleventh of september9/11 [Of course, who wouldn't think of 9/11 when discussing violent games.]: some reporters said that the idea came from a game. Their action even was successful: some games, like Red Alert 2 (which has a scene with the destruction of NY - one of the coolest levels in the game [If it had been Chicago, I would have been up in arms. Go Wolves!]) and Flight Simulator 2002 were taken from the stores (or not released yet in the case of FS - hey, in a simulation you should be able to chrash!), o. Of course you take it from stores out of respect for the victims, but the terrorists surely haven't gotdidn't get their idea to chrus thecrash into the WTC from a game. [That may or may not be true—if they got inspiration from anything it would have been a movie—, but it's really a red herring to the real issue.] It becomes time that people will see that gaming is pure
Nowadays, the most obvious way to blend all kinds of UTF-8 characters in nicely with all the other text on your page might be Webfonts, but I think there are definitely valid reasons not to utilize those to achieve consistent display of IPA characters on a page. This post will focus on a very simple method which ensures that IPA will look decent across a variety of operating systems and browsers.
This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Tuesday 2005-03-01 at 19:16:38. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content. As you might have read, a couple of days ago I received the Deaf Dumb Blind and Use Your Brain reissues. So now I will be reviewing Use Your Brain, Clawfinger's second album; once again by going through my favorite tracks. [Once again, I added links to YouTube.] Use Your Brain Power (3:14) Pay The Bill (4:10) Pin Me Down (4:10) Wipe My Ass (3:13) Die High (2:34) It (5:21) Do What I Say (4:25) Undone (4:11) What Are You Afraid Of (3:47) Back to the Basics (2:27) Easy Way Out (2:39) Tomorrow (4:09) Better Than This * (3:36) Three Good Riffs * (3:56) Armageddon Down * (3:36) * Bonus Track + Videos: Pin Me Down, Do What I Say, Tomorrow The second song of the album is Pay The Bill. The lyrics are sharp on the topic of what certain people think and say, but it's the guitar (and drum stuff) which really gets the party started. [Sharp…on the topic? Say what? I suppose I meant to add a conjunction, i.e. The lyrics are sharp, and address what certain people think and say … Perhaps I should have specified "certain people" a bit more precisely, since I'm not sure which "certain people" I was referring to anymore.] It inhabits a couple of my most favorite style of powerful chords combined with powerful rap. [I didn't use to be aware that a couple is meant more literally in English than in Dutch; I should have said a few. Inhabit doesn't seem like the right verb to choose here, either.] Pin Me Down, the third track, is of a different class. If you're still unsure whether combining 'metal' with rap is a good idea, listen to this. I can't say much more about it than that this is just what Clawfinger is. [Seriously, was I on crack!? Did the pot my neighbors smoked affect me? This is just what it is, man! You know, what it is!! It is, man!] Do What I Say, the seventh track has a really interesting start. [Nice to meet you again, Mr Fanboy.] A kid starts off by singing: When I grow up, there will be a day when everybody has to do what I say. Then the metal guitars bash in [I don't think you can bash something in. Maybe the guitars bash the poor child away? That doesn't seem to convey the intended meaning either, though. Let's just stick with "The guitars come in."] and Zak starts singing like he's the father, telling the kid to do what he says. [I bet you didn't see that coming!] When I didn't know Clawfinger very long, this was probably my favorite song. [I think I was obsessed with songs featuring children's voices at the time, since Eminem's My Dad's Gone Crazy was also among my favorites.] The coolest part of the song is probably even when the kid starts rocking too. [It looks like I was indeed on crack. I clearly wanted to write The coolest part of the song is probably even cooler than the rest of the song, and I barely managed to save myself from complete and utter embarrassment by changing it to tell people when the song is "coolest." Bet you didn't count on me analyzing your words in ridiculous ways when you wrote that, sucker!] I've introduced Clawfinger to my friends and this one, Nothing Going On and Vienna were probably the most successful. What Are You Afraid Of (track 9) is a great song about stupid politicians and the crap they say. [Fuck yeah! Um—I mean, I was on crack, man!] Actually the whole album is pretty much politics related and some of the stuff in this song is just so damn cool. [Sorry, I got ahead of myself there. I was on crack, man!] But anyway, I think that if you don't like this song, there's some chance you don't like Clawfinger at all. [Indeed there is. Any more insights, Captain Obvious?] The bonus tracks on this album are good, but for me they don't match a song like Profit Preacher. [Same here—wait, what?] Three Good Riffs is probably the coolest bonus track [I need to stop using the word coolest, don't I? Hopefully, I have since stopped using it this excessively. :P], although it's not really good in the sense of... well, good. [Pothead!] Anyway, Zak on two of them: [Yup, right on top of them.] Three good riffs is a simple lyric about all the cliches in this great industry of rock & roll, we're all contributing to it whether we like it or not & the more serious we try and be as artists the closer we come to being pathetic...but hell I'll gladly treat people to that! :mrgreen: Armageddon down ha ha what is there to say, it's just a pisstake on religion of all sorts and a play with words for the sake of being annoying and having a bit of fun, Armageddon down obviously means that everyone should get up on the dance floor and shake their booties, don't really know what else to say about it? :mrgreen: The bottom line: if you liked Deaf Dumb Blind, this is a must buy. If you came into Clawfinger by means of the newer albums, it is something you have to check out. It's the last of the classic Clawfinger albums. [Ouch!]
This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Saturday 2005-02-26 at 11:40:12 UTC. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content. Yesterday, I received my reissues of "Deaf Dumb Blind" (1993) and "Use Your Brain" (1995): two classic, quintessential Clawfinger albums. In addition to the original tracks, they both feature three bonus tracks and the video clips of the released singles of the original CD in SVCD quality. Let me go through both of the albums by my favorite songs. [Use Your Brain will be reviewed in a later post: no, that's not because I split this post in two for this special occasion or some such.] My less favorite songs are a little less good, but that doesn't mean they're bad. But you'll probably have to be more of a fan to appreciate them. [I added links to YouTube so you can actually listen to the songs.] Deaf Dumb Blind Nigger (3:47) The Truth (4:12) Rosegrove (4:02) Don't Get Me Wrong (3:12) I Need You (4:58) Catch Me (4:39) Warfair (3:48) Wonderful World (2:40) Sad to See Your Sorrow (5:18) I Don't Care (3:11) Get it* (4:43) Profit Preacher * (5:55) Stars & Stripes * (3:52) * Bonus Track + Videos: Nigger, The Truth, Warfair The first track of Deaf Dumb Blind is Nigger. Nigger is a song which immediately steps out of the gray of bad songs out there because of the power it contains. [I understand what I was trying to say here, but steps out of the gray of bad songs? The gray what?] Some people might think it's a racist song when they first hear it, but it is all but that. [I've all but finished this book, and it was anything but boring.] It is to be said that the chorus (repeating the word nigger a couple of times) is very easy to catch up with and some stupid racists might even like to sing along with it(!) Luckily that was all but the intention behind the song. I would consider "Rosegrove", the third song, sort of a ballad, although it doesn't really sound like one, neither in lyrics nor in melody. It's one of the more melodic sounds on the album and one of my favorite on the album. [Boy, I can sure eloquently express myself about one of my favorite songs on the album! Maybe you should have tried it in Dutch, just 19-year old self.] Track 5 is "I need you". It's quite easy to play really, but it sounds just great and I did once meet a bitch this song perfectly applied to. [I did? I rather doubt that. Teenagers, eh?] So when you are in a sort of love/hate mood situation problem thing, just put this up loud. Very very loud. [I can't comment on that (anymore?), but it is nice while working out.] "Catch me," the sixth track of the album, is one of the more interesting songs lyrical wise [I think you mean lyrically.] (and considering the general level of Clawfinger lyrics, that means a lot [Fanboy much?]). When I listen to one of my current favorite songs (Horse With No Name by America), I can almost imagine being in one by listening to the music. [One what? A desert? Are you talking about a freaking desert?] My personal fantasy is quite alright and I have no problem imaging deserts [No trouble imagining the vastness, at any rate. You don't quite comprehend just how hot they are. And no, I still don't.], but that song captures the spirit and puts you in one if you listen, disregarding your own imagination. [Are you on crack!?] The same applies to "Catch me": it's like Metallica's "Fade to black" on steroids. [Whatever you say.] It just seems to come from deeper within, or maybe Zak, Clawfinger's vocalist and lyrics writer, is just more on one line of thoughts with me, I don't know. Zak said the following on the song: Well Catch me is pretty much a direct translation from a Swedish punk song which I wrote an additional third verse for so the idea was already there! In other words it's not a personal song even if there have been times when I have felt those feelings! My other favorite song on the album is one of the bonus tracks, "Profit Preacher". I will just quote Zak on the bonus tracks. Profit preacher is about the American TV evangelists who preach faith, love & beauty, the more money you give them, the more blessed you will be! Obviously they are vultures profiting on peoples need for something or someone to believe in! I got the idea from Frank Zappa who has made a few songs on the same topic! Stars & stripes, damn I hardly even remember the fucking song, I guess it was just an excuse to throw some shit at the United States for how they choose to angle their news reports and sedate their people into believing they are being told the truth! I'll read it sometime soon and get back to you with a more detailed answer! :wink: In conclusion, despite this being their debut album and the Clawz having so much less experience than they have now, this album will still rock your house away. [Rock your house away? Whatever it will rock, it will most certainly not do that. Then again, I was probably just making up something as random as rock your socks off. Perhaps that's a better way to finish this entry. "Deaf Dumb Blind" will not merely rock your socks off, it will rock your fucking house away!]
This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Wednesday 2005-03-16 at 10:13:36. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content. Oh yeah, throw open those doors and windows and let the fresh air dwirl through your house. [Oh yeah! By the way, dwirl is not a word. Twirl is, although I'm not sure if fresh air can twirl. For poetic consistency, I'm going to suggest Allow the spring breeze to enter your house and twirl your papers.] Plants growing leaves, flowers coming up; all those scents and colors, it's just wonderful. [I wish I was two puppies, so I could play together.] The same applies to autumn, but summer? That's boring and often too hot. [Word on the hot. Boring depends mostly on what you do with it.] It's not bad at all, but boring in a way, that's all. [Bravo! Excellent repetition.] But it's about the summer nights after all... ;) [Ew! Gross. Don't tell me that, keep it to yourself. Dirtbag. Also, just so we're clear on this: you're saying that summer days are boring because they are too hot, but summer nights aren't because they are…hot?] This reminds me that I want a digital camera someday. [I've got two, sucker. One compact and one DSLR. No, you can't play with them.] I hate (too) limited budgets like mine. [Boo–fucking–hoo. You've got bloody 100 Mbit Internet while I'm stuck with a theoretical 8 Mbit which amounts to 6 Mbit in practice. Keep on saving, spend your money responsibly, and perhaps you will own a nice camera or two in 4 years.] It's time to finally get in touch with the local library and read some fucking cool books outside! [Fuck that shit. We're living in the future.]
Lately, I've been sorting out some old digital junk. Not because I'm short on space—I've got plenty—, but because some of it simply isn't worth keeping. Most of the posts on my former weblog fall in this category, but about half a dozen of them I just couldn't delete. I decided to integrate them with my current weblog. Initially, I was thinking of just slipping them in at the temporal beginning of the weblog, so they would silently appear in the year 2005. However, while I was investigating how I could make the Wordpress 1.5 database compatible with the current Wordpress 2.8 database, I changed my mind. It would be much easier to repost the entries on my current weblog, but that wouldn't be right if I didn't do it with a twist. While I was rereading some of the entries, I was thinking things like Were you on fucking crack!? Wouldn't it be amusing to make fun of the things I wrote back then by actually adding these thoughts to the entries themselves? Additionally, this would justify reposting them as entirely new entries. If nothing else, at least it will be amusing to me. You can expect the first three recycled entries this week, and a few more may follow, but I'm not promising anything.
I don't know how people managed to end up on my most popular post (visited 358 times last month), but neither walla nor voila were in the terms people apparently used to reach this site. People did use some puzzling phrases and terms, however, such as my quickfires screen is all wavy and i didn t do anything whats wrong, and swedish babes. Another "interesting" statistic is the number of spam comments Akismet stopped since I first started using it. Akismet has protected your site from 47,749 spam comments already, but there's nothing in your spam queue at the moment.
There are three sounds usually represented in writing as g or ch that I can produce. Voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, as in Dutch gaan, transcribed as [ɣaːn]. Voiceless velar fricative /x/, as in German Kuchen, transcribed as [kuːxən]. Voiceless palatal fricative /ç/, as in German ich, transcribed as [ɪç]. From this list, you might guess that there is also a voiced palatal fricative, and you'd be right. I cannot, however, produce the /ʝ/, which can be seen as the Flemish equivalent to my Dutch /ɣ/. According to commonly accepted Dutch phonetics, the second g-sound occurs in words like acht, thus transcribed as [ɑxt], and also in words like chaos, thus transcribed as [xaɔs]. For me, this is not the case. I pronounce all of my words with the voiced velar fricative. It's definitely true that not all people do this: in the east of the Netherlands, where I lived for a few years, most local people thought the way I pronounce my gs at the end of words sounds aggressive merely because they employ a slightly different g, the /x/, in final positions. They may utilize it in certain other positions as well, but I'm fairly sure they do no such thing in a word like chaos. I may be wrong, though. I decided to investigate this further, and I think I may have found a possible explanation. If I force myself to pronounce echt with a clearly pronounced /t/, I do indeed find myself slightly more likely to use the /x/, although by no means as any kind of constant. This may very well be affected by my knowledge that it is more or less supposed to be this way, however, and I'm not sure if I would normally have done this at all. In normal usage, however, I'm more likely to either drop the /t/ or to come really close to dropping it, thus rendering echt waar into /ɛɣʋar/. I postulate that this might aid to preserve the /ɣ/ in my speech, at the possible expense of other phonemes that might weaken it. Nevertheless, I fully retain the /ɣ/ in acht, and also in things like acht gulden. As far as I can tell, Utrecht (or sometimes pronounced as Utrech), [ˈʏtrɛx(t)], is the only word in which the /x/ is actually established in my speech. I wonder if living there for a year might have affected my pronunciation of the name of the city, while leaving the rest of my speech unscathed, or if I've always pronounced it that way. This unscientific analysis would not be complete if I didn't add that some words, such as Michiel, and vliegje are pronounced with the /ç/. In other words, [mɪçil] and [vliçjə]. As far as I know any Dutch speaker will pronounce these words the same, though as should be obvious due to the very reason I'm writing all of this, I may be wrong. In conclusion, save for an almost negligible number of exceptions, I pronounce each and every g or ch that is not pronounced as /ç/ as /ɣ/.
