Today my dad’s “comrade” was removed. Comrade here means the thing with all the chords and stuff going into his blood. His fluid diet was also cancelled, meaning he can more or less eat normal again. He can almost walk by himself again (currently with such a walker old people use) and just a few days ago he could barely pull up by himself. So everything’s going well. My father, with the operation and everything hadn’t yet heard I switched to IO (Industrial Design/Industrieel Ontwerpen) and was very positive about the news, as was my mother earlier on. This afternoon, together with my mom, I took care of changing my parents’ connection to “InternetPlusBellen” (Internet plus Calling), KPN’s new ADSL and telephony offering. You don’t have a normal telephone line anymore, but VoIP instead. Not that you’ll notice any difference in how you call as it’s compatible with old phones via the box which enables the stuff. Further the internet will remain the same as it is, but the complete package will be € 34,95 per month, thus cheaper. Besides you can call for free to non-mobile numbers in the Netherlands in the weekend, which is not that interesting, but will presumably make a little difference for calling with some family which isn’t on Skype yet. It also includes compatibility with soon to come technology like video telephones and such, but I guess I’d prefer just to buy myself and my mom a cheap webcam and use Skype 2 for that and I doubt my mom would like a phone with all kinds of weird things. Her own mobile phone she considers just fine and mine with camera and stuff she already considers over the top. Frankly I agree with her, but there are no phones with colour screen and other stuff I like without a camera in it anymore… and besides it has proven to be quite nice at times, although usually it’s just useless because of the low resolution. So for my parents nothing will change, except that it’s slightly cheaper. A much bigger difference, also included in the package for free, is the WLAN which also comes with the box enabling all the technologies. Secured Wireless Internet Access at my parents, and I don’t have to put any work into it, nor do I or my parents have to pay anything for it since we ordered before the first of March. Can it get any better? ;) Last Friday I watched Funny Business with Rowan Atkinson, a not too serious analysis of (slapstick) comedy techniques. Having acquired it from an American community of lovers of British comedy, I was surprised to find it was recorded from Dutch television, so Dutch subtitles were integrated in the movie itself. It’s illegal of course, but it’s not like it’s available on DVD or VHS, so my conscience simply enjoyed watching it as much as the rest of me. Just a little while ago I watched 50 things to eat before you die, something I got from the same community. It was quite an interesting list, although (with some national pride perhaps) I’d say it lacked herring (Dutch style). On the other hand, with Sushi being at 9 and fresh fish at 1, one could argue it’s basically covered by that. On the other hand, I consider it as unique as octopus (Greek style) in a way. The program got me really hungry so I ate some of my bread, but then somewhere in the 20’s of the list the American Breakfast came along. It certainly looked pretty good, but the one person portion looked like you could eat from it with six people, or perhaps even six third-world families. The mere sight made me feel completely filled. Right now I’m finishing the remainder of my bread, most notably the parts I put Roquefort on. It’s certainly lacking from that list of 50 things (not specifically Roquefort, just cheese in general), but on the other hand it’s a British list, I’d assume we’d get a different list in the Netherlands. Typing this on my laptop keyboard in the train I’m making more typos than usual, but Word seems to correct all of them automatically. It makes me wonder to what degree Microsoft is helping people in a habit of bad typing, for example to type “teh” without even noticing it. Last Thursday I went to Nedtrain with a bunch of other Mechanical Engineering students (switching is no reason not to go on interesting excursions, now is it?) and I basically planned to spend my time in the train going to Nedtrain by talking to Thomas and Ivo. In the last minute however Thomas decided to bring “The World according to Clarkson” with him, which he lent from their “bathroom-library”. In the train however, it turned so that I couldn’t sit with Thomas and Ivo for lack of space and I nicked the book. I haven’t returned it yet and I will not either until I finished it. That brings me to another interesting thing. Except for Lost and Die Hard, I’ve only been watching British programs over the past two weeks. I’ve mainly been listening to British music (Bowie, Pink Floyd, Stones) and now I’ve been reading a British book. Ah well, it doesn’t mean anything really as just a month ago I was only watching Friends, The Simpsons, reading Jack Vance and Kurt Vonnegut. And of course I’ve been watching a lot of Dutch cabaret/theater, it’s just that my foreign “efforts” always seem to be so concentrated on one country. I just noticed my writing is getting a little vague and less comprehensive. I’ve been going on without looking back for almost 30 minutes, so I guess it’s time to stop. I could easily continue typing for the other hour my train trip will last, but I’ll continue reading and listening to music instead. But another thought entered my mind and I cannot yet stop typing. Since the late 90’s,

There are a few sort of old sites I wanted to tell you about anyway. SpreadIE.com is the logical answer to spreadFirefox.com. Firefox helps communist nations, switch back to IE! The content on the site is too obviously fake to be funny though. Then there's IE7.com. I consider it quite a brilliant action by whoever bought the domain. Meanwhile, Opera Mini is the only Opera related thing I've been spreading lately. Everybody in my circle of friends already switched to Firefox or Opera, so there seems little left to be done.

As you may or may not know, the only console of the "current" generation, disregarding Xbox 360, I've really had some playing time with was the Playstation 2. Last week I persuaded Thomas to put his Gamecube in the living room because he hardly used it anyway. Since then the Gamecube has been used quite frequently by the rest of us, and also by Thomas. The second controller however sucked and was broken on top of that (some kind of "GT-line" thing). A new official controller would be € 35, so I (with consent because it's not just my money :P) decided to order the cheapest one which didn't look like it came from the 80's (i.e. square corners instead of rounded corners). The Piranha controller arrived today and I think I might even like it better than the official Gamecube one. Of course it has to go through some more testing, but if we'd order two more of them, we'd have four good controllers (and a reserve which isn't very good anymore) and we'd still be 5 euros cheaper off than by buying an official one! Nevertheless, it has all the faults of the official one. I truly don't understand why they made the design that way. The green (A) button is huge and the other three "less important" action buttons are just small (less important my ass with the exception of racing games). Every time I'm pressing some button a bit too enthusiastically I press the green one instead. I think this is just a case of "not being like the PSX" gone wrong. But perhaps other disagree with me, who knows. It starts happening less frequently now, but it still strikes me as very unintuitive. Most importantly however, the low resolution works horrible. I remember that back in 2001/2002 the only reason I preferred playing Tony Hawk 3 on the Playstation 2 was the controller. Seriously. The Dual Shock 2 is superior to everything else, except perhaps a wireless version of it. Already on the 2001/2002 P3 1GHz Tony Hawk 3 was superior in every aspect, except that I never bothered to buy a good gamepad. High resolution, practically no loading times and a much clearer image. As said before, the Xbox 360 currently looks about the same as my 1.5 years old laptop. So if PC gaming decreases it's because of one thing only in my opinion: copy protection. Starforce 2, SafeDisk 4... they all seriously fuck up your computer. Ah well, it's still a fun machine. But only now near the end and the parts and games cost much less. Would this (now old) console persuade me to by a next-gen one? Nah, at best it convinced me to get a next-gen in 3 or 4 years... Console and handheld are somewhat related. I was surprised to learn that Opera will be available on the Nintendo DS.

I placed a reasonably big order at bol.com yesterday, basically combining a birthday present to self (The Wee Free Men) and a few things I wanted to order anyway. I would've ordered some of them earlier of course, but the sending costs are always € 1,95. This way it only adds about 40 cents per item. ;) Aantal Prijs Totaalbedrag Titel Levertijd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 EUR 9.99 EUR 9.99 Piranha, Game 2-3 weken Controller Black 1 EUR 8.99 EUR 8.99 The Wee Free Men 3-4 werkdagen 1 EUR 7.99 EUR 7.99 Diamond Dogs 3-4 werkdagen 1 EUR 12.99 EUR 12.99 Smash 3-4 werkdagen 1 EUR 15.00 EUR 15.00 Mezmerize Op werkdagen voor 17.00 uur besteld, morgen in huis Subtotaal EUR 54.96 Verzendkosten EUR 1.95 Totaalbedrag EUR 56.91 Anyway, the funny thing is that Mezmerize is an "order before 17:00 on workdays, at your place before 12:00 next day"-item. The Piranha Gamecube controller was a similar item last week when I first considered buying it. I will come back at the Gamecube controller in a subsequent post. Turns out it turned into 2-3 weeks expected delivery time yesterday. When I checked early this morning (around 8:00 before I left like 20 minutes later) it said Mezmerize and the Piranha controller had been sent. Expected time unchanged. Later when I just got home (10:30) a friendly delivery guy came by. He brought a pretty big package. As expected, it contained both the controller and the album. I just thought it was sort of funny, considering that it still says that the expected delivery time is 2-3 weeks, yet it already arrived. Of course it's always better to say it will take a while and deliver it in a shorter time than the other way around. Perhaps game publishers could learn from that. On a different note, definitely consider buying Mezmerize and Hypnotize, it's basically a brilliant double album by System of a Down. The price for Mezmerize had finally dropped to an acceptable level and I will buy Hypnotize as well in a few months when it's somewhat cheaper. Since both Bol.com and I use Postbank (and thus have Giro) my online payment (which I make after arrival and checking the items) is always instantly. The system thus also updates and changes the status to sent without any extra information (about delivery time). So the funny thing has disappeared, alas. ;)

I thought it was quite good. It was sent a while ago, of course. If you didn't receive one, happen to read this entry and happen to be close tomorrow, just drop by. Otherwise don't feel disappointed, I didn't invite you because I didn't think you'd make it anyway. ;) Geachte heren, U bent met behulp van de data in onze computer geselecteerd als de meest intelligente en getalenteerde mensen in West-Europa. Daarom hebben we besloten U in te lichten over geweldige kansen die Uw leven kunnen veranderen, dit is geen spam! Dit geweldige aanbod is slechts beperkt geldig en daarom hopen we dat U op onze bijeenkomst komt om de voorlichting bij te wonen. Deze is op donderdag 9 februari, rond de klok van 21 uur. De geheime locatie is Matenweg 6, "Patio Melba", op de campus. Mocht U niet weten waar dat is, de route vind U op http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11 Mocht iemand U naar inlichtingen hierover vragen, pretendeert U dan dat het een "verjaardagsfeestje van Frans en Ivo" betreft. Wij verwachten U op 9 februari te zien, Hoogachtend Ivo Stammis en Frans de Jonge Or, in English: Gentlemen, With the data in our computer, you have been selected as the most intelligent and talented people in Western-Europe. Therefore we are telling you about great opportunities which can change your life. This is not spam! This magnificent offer is only valid for a short while and therefore we hope to see you at our meeting. This is at Thursday February the 9th, around the clock of 21 hours. De secret location is Matenweg 6, "Patio Melba", on the campus. May you not know where this is, you can find the route at http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11 If anybody asks what this is about, pretend it's the "birthdaypartay of Frans and Ivo". Regards, Ivo Stammis and Frans de Jonge

Who doesn't love a new toy/tool? And best of all, it's free. I consider the Opera 9 technical preview 2 to be far more exiting than IE7 beta 2 or the latest Firefox nightly. "Living on the edge" as I am, I will migrate my custom settings and start to use it as my main browser. Not that I ever felt on the edge with an Opera technical preview (except perhaps with the experimental BitTorrent implementation), so kudos for that. I am not too sure about the new thumbnails if you hover over tabs. As I seldomly use that anyway I decided to enable them as well for ctrl+tab. It seems to slow down things a little without being really useful, but I'm going to leave it enabled for a while to see if I like it. Perhaps it's useful if I have more than 30 pages open, but I seldomly have and in the few cases I do have so many windows open, I consider the windows manager the most convenient way to deal with them in Opera. Then there's the addition of widgets, but you should know that I uninstalled Konfabulator quickly after trying it once it became free. For now the only widget I considered interesting enough to enable was the analog clock, which is not interesting at all, especially since I use the ASD Clock (don't mind the design, I'll be involved in creating something good looking, semantic and standards compliant in the future). Anne wrote about it. Tim wrote about it. Moose posted about his personal work on the internal stylesheets and, of course, updated the designer setup. I personally do keep the risky Javascript enabled however, so if you're like me, keep in mind that you'll have to edit that. Moose's idea is of course to only enable Javascript on sites you trust and keep it disabled anywhere else except to enable it to quickly check something out, but I'm lazy for now. First I should update my site-specific styles to the new method anyway. I don't think there's more to tell, except perhaps where to get it and where to read the changelog. I only just noticed. The history is finally similar to IE's history, which, as far as I'm concerned, is good.

I just decided to check my stats and apperently people coming from American-based IP's take up nearly 70% of my traffic. Not that I specifically aim for any kind of traffic, but it's still quite a surprise. Assuming that Ethan doesn't refresh this page all the time of course. :P

At the IEblog a little was posted about ClearType in IE7. Of course this was posted at a time more suitable for Americans, so it was already filled with comments. Thus my opinion had already been posted by someone else. Why is this a setting in IE 7 and not taken from the system wide setting in display properties? It doesn't make sense to me that only one app (well, two, IE and Outlook Express) should have the option specifically for that app when all apps have the option from the global property. Particularly because this isn't a setting you would enable a per application basis. Clear type is nice and all if you have the right monitor, but come on, this doesn't make sense. There were more posts on the blog, some of which actually managed to make me laugh or raise an eyebrow. I'll quote an example. It's an old friend for us Opera users (and more recently to Firefox users with some extension and Maxthon users). What’s my favourite feature in the new IE? I’m an old Office hound myself, and so I really love to see Zoom. Available from the bottom right of the main browse window, this acts like it does in Word or Excel – it enlarges or reduces the entire page (text and graphics) to a specific zoom setting. My opinion of IE has not changed, nor is it likely to change. All that's changed is that it's moving a bit again, which might maintain userbase. But I still forecast a flow of users towards other browsers. The roots of "the others" have simply grown to deep to stop their growth now. Or one could write this into a "biblical" story, in which case my conclusion in the above paragraph would be like this: Cane just laughed, and the sound was as of a thousand coins of gold rained down from the heavens. Many heard the laughter, and felt comforted. Others, though, knew Cane for what it was: the same Cane as old, only polished, shiny and new. Since I was already promoting Opera over IE, you could as well see what the next version of Opera copied from the AOL Internet Explorer browser and how Opera already does something (much) better for years already which IE7 has recently implemented and Firefox can do through an extension.

The new ferry has finally been introduced to the Den Helder – Texel line. The older ones already have a screen where you can follow all kinds of information about the trip (distance, speed, water temperature etcetera), which is also being recorded and used for sea research. But now there have also been installed bar-seats with touch-screen computers. I wasn't really interested, but the kids were around it like bees around flowers. One blonde little girl of aproximately 6 years old sat down at one of the “consoles”, with a big smile on her face. After studying the screen intensely for a while her face depressed. “Daddy, come here!!!” she exclaimed. A man in his thirties, apperently the father, stood up and walked to her. He took her on his knee and the next 10 minutes you could see her asking “What does this say?” and the dad “That is *mumble, mumble*”. You couldn't hear them because similar situations were taking place for all the other 5 computers. Later in the train. Two people, (a boy and a girl) presumably descending from Turkish immigrants, sit down next to me. So they start conversating. At first there's some general chit-chat, I wasn't paying attention. In the back of my head I was aware of the boy asking about the girl's purse (if it was €30). She said “no, it was 34 damn it!”. He asked if it was real. “Of course it is, I went to Egypt to get it.” “Seriously?” And her answer turned my attention to their conversation: “No, it's just a fake but don't tell it to anyone.” It turned out the purse was actually her mothers. “Do you know what's sweet?” the guy asked later on. “Yes, me” she replied with the greatest confidence. He was probably surprised at her reaction, but in the end he said: “Well, perhaps on the outside, but are you also sweet on the inside?” “Of course I am as sweet on the inside! Actually much sweeter I'd say! Although... perhaps I'm actually less sweet on the inside, but don't tell anybody about it!” It may also be worth noting that I forgot to take my earphones with me, so I could neither listen to music, nor watch Lost. I decided to play Solitaire on my laptop however. An older man, presumably late 50's, sat down in front of me, with a "the youth of today..." look on his face. Then they continued talking about her hair and I lost all kinds of interest. However, then an interesting development came forth. The girl had a very strong accent, but according to her, nobody knew where it came from, as apperently it didn't really sound like any kind of Turkish and/or Marrocan accent and her mother was Dutch! Then they left the train and went on to live their lives without my bored listening ears. Then a dad with two kids sat down. The father basically put down a philosophical question for his youngest kid. "Are we driving away from the station or is the station moving away from us?" The kids were starting to become a little annoying, but luckily I had to switch trains. Then I practically fell asleep because it was too warm and I was tired. And before you know it you're home again and for a couple of days you forget to post the thing you typed in the train. :P

I decided to make an alphabet in music, but it got a little fucked up because I liked too many artists which made a chance. Then I changed by only counting frontnames and not surnames because that made it possible to list more artists without fearing my conscience. This list gives a better insight in what I consider good music than Last.FM, but as an A-Z into music it lacks. Art Brut. Close calls for Agalloch and Atrocity. Billy Talent for being the coolest new punkish thing I discovered lately. Close call for The Bloodhound Gang and Boudewijn de Groot. The Beatles have some cool songs and especially their latter material is also quite experimental and cool, but they'll probably occupy this spot on most of these kinds of lists anyway. Clawfinger. Perhaps Creedence Clearwater Revival if Clawfinger didn't exist. David Bowie. If I'd have let him count for B then Billy Talent wouldn't have had a chance and I like them. ;) Doe Maar is also quite cool, but Bowie simply made too much good music to let anybody else have a chance. Or perhaps I simply shouldn't make an A-Z list if I like Bowie and Billy Talent both better than Doe Maar. Eminem. Ennio Morricone as distant second for all of his brilliant soundtracks for westerns. Eurythmics as third for having this neat sound everybody likes (or should like). Feindflug. I don't believe they are right wing as they're accused to be, although I must admit that they make nazi material sound cool in a modern way. But they use such samples that if they'd mean that as support, then they'd be insane, nazi or not. They can only be meant as critisism. Fatboy Slim, Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra very close calls as well. Gorillaz. Their sound is very cool and you can hear a lot of work goes into making each song sound just right. Garbage and Green Day fall off because I only really like one of their multiple albums. HorrorPops. They're pretty cool and there's no real contestant to the H-spot. Perhaps Harry Belafonte. But then he'd also compete to the letter B. That would make it too crowded there. Iggy Pop. In Extremo is close. JJ72. I really like their sound. Jack Off Jill and Jimi Hendrix Experience are close. Korn. I particularly like their first four albums and their latest, but all of their albums are good. There isn't really any contestant either. Krezip is fun, but not great or anything. Lordi. Especially Blood Red Sandman is a great song. Led Zeppelin is something everybody will say (with good reason though) and Linkin Park or the lostprophets are a little bit too much of my musical past, although they are certainly cool. Ludwig von Beethoven is also a contestant, but strictly speaking that's yet another one for the B, a seriously overcrowded letter. Metallica. I was going to say Marilyn Manson because there is nothing better until I realised there most certainly was. Michael Jackson and Muse are also considered. No Doubt. Nine Inch Nails is certainly the best, but I enjoyed No Doubt more the past few months. NWA and Nina Simone are also considered. Oomph! Possibly the band which most inspired Rammstein, but certainly much more than just good inspiration. Okkervil River is also very good, but sadly for them I am not that familiar with their music yet. Not that it matters much as I doubt more than ten people or so will actually do more than just give this list a quick glance and will actually read everything I wrote into it. The Offspring is a third, but would definitely have taken this position last year. Pink Floyd. There's not much choice, is there? Papa Roach isn't bad nor are the Pixies, but still inferior to Pink Floyd's The Wall. Queen. I have to as except for Queens of the Stone Age I can't think of any artist with the letter Q who has one song I like quite a lot. Rammstein. Rage Against The Machine very seriously considered. Samael. They are somewhat in the same genre as Shai Hulud, but better, are superior to Saliva's rock & roll sound, Shania Twain and Shpongle also have to move over, leaving Star One and System of a Down as very serious contestants. Actually considering it a bit more it's a definite tie with System of a Down Tenacious D. But Tool certainly isn't bad. Underworld. I don't want to say U2 and The Upskirts and Ultravox aren't top class material. Van Halen. The Velvet Revolver isn't my thing and the Vandals are quite cool, but not great enough. White Stripes. Close second for "Weird Al" Yankovic. Wagner isn't bad either. Although following the method I used he should compete for J. Xzibit. Complete lack of competition however. Yes. For the song Owner of a lonely heart (and a few others) and because of lack of competition. Perhaps the Yardbirds, but I don't like them. Zager & Evans. Better than Zebrahead, despite having only one song. Tom nicked my idea.