gone ...

Bye bye blogger ...

It was a short but fierce relation, but I had to quit.
The grass is so much greener on the other side.

should i stay or should i go (2)

I think I'll go.
But first a list of tedious tasks to perform before I can move:

• export this set of posts
• format it to be able to upload it to WP (hopefully don't loose the posting dates)
• import into WP
• correct, edit images, ...

pffff ...

should i stay or should i go

No, this is not the terrible Clash song, but my doubts about moving over from Blogspot to
WordPress.





Pro's :

• nice layouts
• snappy reaction (vs. long loading and crappy rendering of Blogspot)
• not surrounded by spamblogs
• more user tools

Con's :

• no "foo-fu" as a userid, nor in the url, only letters and numbers
• moving over effort
• losing link (or silly forward pages)
• how reliable is the export/import ?

This requires some sleeping over ...

.not .notter. nottest

Bzzzt ... wrong!

Despite being laughed at by the whole world (squirting anyone?), you try making friends (well actually, buying friends) and they still screw you over.

too good to be true ?

Suppose these guys are right ...
Suppose they get the funding (Bill, this is were your truckloads of money would come in handy) ...
Suppose it turns out to work ...

Just imagine the revolution!

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

close, but no sigar

New kid on the block in the world of online library sites is Shelfari.
Assuming things could only get better (after my initial search for a book version of last.fm), I checked out Shelfari as recommended by Lifehacker, but alas ...

I tried

But the result was not great. The import of my miserable 76 books on Librarything failed to the extend that only 23 of them were loaded on my shelf.

The sad thing is that I couldn't even bring myself to find out why it didn't work.
Maybe in better times?

island in the sun

With all the talk lately about Piratbyrån (founders of the Pirate Bay) wanting to purchase Sealand in order to find a safe haven for their servers, I would suggest them to just buy an island themselves. Just compare where you would rather be.

Skype TV (3)

Where the project previously ran under the name "The Venice Project" the child now has a new name :

Joost

I'm curious whether they managed to solve the upload hungriness of the program.

outside

Today is one of those days where the sunshine creates a special feeling and renders the day into an experience in itself, just to look around and see the colors.

The fact that the weather is more or less completely out of sync with the normal seasons makes it even more fairy-like.

So I took the opportunity to get out my camera and make some more pictures. I hope the quality has improved somewhat.

kids in the hall

In 1984 a bunch of then rather unknown Canadian comedians trooped together an formed Kids In The Hall.

By 1989 they managed to get a series on CBC untill 1994, which consequently aired all over the world which yielded them instant popularity.

To me they were Month Python new style. Their sketches ranging from utterly childish stupidity (like "The Magical Flying Pig" series, "Dr Seuss Bible" and "Bobby And The Devil") over witty sketches (like and "I Speak No English") to absolute brilliant portrayals of humankind's not so lovely characters (like " The King Of Empty Promises").
And then there is the "Pit Of Ultimate Darkness" ...

The intro tunes are surflike and sound great as do most of the songs they perform in their shows ("These Are The Dave's I Know")

Wel go ahead an loose an entire day watching these.

intercrastination

We all know procrastination i.e. when you start pushing your tasks forward and end up doing little or nothing.

Over at Lifehacker a reader popped the question about a similar phenomena: procrastinating your spare time in between to tasks or parts of a task.
(Like taking a small sanitary break and ending up reading the entire newspaper or more familiar: just checking your mail and finishing your evening still behind the screen reading all wonders of the internets.)

As this is a procrastination alike issue but then in between tasks the proposed term is "inter-crastination".

For those curious about the relation to the image : "Thief Of Time" should suffice.

and phone has site

Now we have it official on apple's site :

• iPhone
• Apple TV

Be warned, site is slow. I guess everybody is watching this now.

we have phone

Finally the ghost is out of the bottle : Apple just announced it's long awaited phone (referred to as iPhone) on the San Fransisco 2007 MacWorld.

Basically its a widescreen iPod with full calendar syncing and a new touchscreen alike interface. Syncs with iTunes, 3.5 inch screen ,...

More over at MacRumorsLive ...

Ohh... and also AppleTV (former iTV)

walter making friends

No need for a lot of explanation. Check out the whole series and the photographers site.
And the story here.

about foo-fu

Sunday being my day of rest and thinking things through, I considered it a good moment to give a bit more explanation about "foo-fu" and what it means for me.

Let's look at the two parts of foo-fu: foo and fu.

On itself foo is generally known as a metasyntactic variable, especially in programming examples like "if foo=1 then ..." .
This is even specified in its own RFC (RFC 3092)!

Foo is also a type of chinese dog.
Well more correctly, "foo" carries the connotation "lucky" in Standard chinese. Therefor you have the dogs guarding a doorway called foo-dog as they're intended to bring luck or to conserve luck for those behind this door.

Although sometimes considered an alternative method of writing of the word "foo", in itself "fu" has an other meaning which also happens to be the one I intended for this blog which is "expertise".
This is especially through if you look at martial arts where the pupil will obtain a certain level of "fu" from his master or through his/her learnings.
Although a bit "Karate Kid"-esque, it relates to real life, in a sense that, through trial and error, you grow skills and learn to master the art of living your life.

"Fu" is also an extention regularly added to wordt to describe the mastering of something. Mostly in a joking way. A very popular version of this is animefu, an anime enthousiasts site.

the future of 2007

Like every year around this period, Robert Cringely posts his predictions on IT for the coming year.

Apart from the fact the a lot of these predictions are spot on - which is rare in the IT prediction world, some analysts even manage to make no correct prediction at all for one quarter, let alone a year- he is the kind of guy who's not afraid to look back and evaluate his last years predictions.

With an average prediction rate of around 75% I'd say he does a great job.

Here's one that, IHMO could also happen here in Europe :

10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can't really deliver.

(via /.)

GTD martha steward style

Lifehacker features this weeks martha steward style getting things done home improvement.
The general idea is to paint a chalkboard calender on your wall with about six weeks worth of days on it. This you can do with special chalkboard paint that renders any surface it's put on into a chalkboard.

Although I feel quite opposed to ruining my walls with this kind of paintjob, the picture joining the article demonstrates what a nice set of web 2.0 colors can do to your wall.

As an extra I suggest to first coat the wall with a paint that has a high level of metal particles in it. You will then end up with a wall you not only can write on but also stick magnets onto.

stupidoverload

While copying the link of the famous "Look at me I'm an attention whore" I noticed the main site this image resides on.
And off course as there is a collector of wisdom in the form of Wikipedia, there should be a counterpart or this would not be the internets.

Ladies and gentlemen ...
I present you ...
The Encyclopedia Of Stupid !
(which is exactly what it's name says, just look at the picture with this post which was the first one I got to see on this site ... need I say more ?)


Enjoy a good reading!

Thrasher mag

Having serious doubts about having ditched my entire Thrasher skate magazine collection a few years back, there is now a sparkle of hope of ever reading them again.
Thrasher magazine has now posted online their first 12 ever magazines!
January 81 'till December '81.

Ride on!

(via BoingBoing)

Skype TV (2)

Last month I mentioned the beta project of Venice TV, the Skype founders digital TV concept.

Turns out the app eats away on upload which basically spoils the broth for users on ADSL or with a money hungry ISP (capping off on the upload seems to be benificial to these ISP's, even if your a cable user like I am).

As this tool is likely to run always on (at least as long as your machine is running) it doesn' t even matter if your watching or not, upload will suck through your wires at a rate of up to 320 megabytes/hour.

(thanks to OUTLAW.COM via the register to warn us)

translucent

Sometimes it's fun just to just find a word which you feel sounds great and the look at the results in google image search (SafeSearch turned off).

I tried it with " translucent" and the resulting puctures vary from a crappy card with a translucent heart in it, to a stunning photo of greenish amber pills .

The most funny result were these translucent water sandals from www.artlex.com.


Oh, and these are the search results as they appeared to me.

calirezo

Via Boing Boing I noticed the work of Calirezo.
This French artist draws/paints with a tablet directly onto her PC.
Apart from the obvious portfolio, her site also features a making of section, including a short clip that shows how she works.

One way or the other I do feel however her work has a creepy feeling to it, maybe because of the typical real-but-not-real aspect of digital drawing? See for yourself.