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Still having ‘Airy’ thoughts crossing my mind…this notebook ROCKS!

I know some people are expecting a blogpost from me on Apple’s latest announcements as made by Steve Jobs today at MacWorld.

I just watched his Keynote speech so, here we go!

Steve said he liked to talk about four things today:

1. Time Capsule. It’s a companion product for Time Machine, basically an Airport Extreme basestation with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive enabling backing up wirelessly

2. New iPhone features; Maps with location (a great, innovative way to find your actual position by triangulating signals from WiFi Hotspots and GSM celltower information!)…Webclips…Customize home
screen(s)…SMS multiple people at once…Chapters, subtitles, languages…Lyrics support

The iPod touch got the same new features as well as some new apps; Mail…Maps…Stocks…Notes…Weather

3. iTunes
movie rentals, Every major studio is on board offering over 1,000 movies already. You’ll be able to start watching instantly within 30
seconds on all Macs & PCs, iPods and iPhones.

And, as for content on your TV at home…a new version of the Apple TV software allows movie rentals directly on your widescreen TV! This is Apple TV, Take 2 which doesn’t need a computer allowing you
to rent movies in HD quality with Dolby 5.1, play Podcasts and view photos from
Flickr & .Mac, watch YouTube movies, buy TV shows and music and of course still play all iTunes content from Macs & PCs

The tagline for this years MacWorld was; There’s something in the Air…well, there is…and it is called:

4. MacBook Air! World’s thinnest laptop. The features: 3.0 pounds (around 1.4kg),
measures 0.16 - 0.76 inches (thinnest to thickest part), 13.3″ widescreen
display, Full size and backlit keyboard, multi-touch gestures trackpad, iSight camera built in, 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB memory 80 GB hard drive, 64 GB Solid State Drive as option, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, Magsafe.

There is no optical drive, options are either a MacBook Air external optical drive or new software that allows you to “borrow” a Mac
or PC’s optical drive over a Wi-Fi network. The battery life is a stunning 5 hours.

Just look at the pictures below, and be sure…this is what I wanna have!

Steve didn’t end with a ‘oh, and one more thing’, instead he mentioned that all of the above is introduced in the first 2 weeks of 2008, and there are still 50 more weeks to come.

I just finished an EXCELLENT Indian dinner prepared for Andrea’s Birthday, our dutch friend who decided to celebrate this event with us up North in freezing Norway…uhh, freezing? The temperature skyrocketted to a stunning +3 dgr Celcius today. Melting the fresh snow as only snow can, even without sun!

Not much too time for late night Birthday festivities though…am flying out to The Netherlands tomorrow early morning, business meetings until Thursday…hehe, I hope I’m able to tune in to Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech tomorrow!

Sholem Asch: "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

MacWorld, the yearly event where Apple kicks off the New Year will be held in San Francisco coming week.

This years tag-line is: ‘2008 There’s something in the air’:

Last year the iPhone was announced…so, what will be BIG this year? Tune in to Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech, Tuesday January 15, at 18:00h CET…it’s a great experience to see him on stage!

Am off to have dinner celebrating the New Year at a small restaurant close to the ski-area Trollsvan near Oslo. As the place is owned by a dutch guy (Robbert) I expect a nice Dutch/Norwegian combination of food, drinks and entertainment!

As you might know it is not possible to download the movies directly from YouTube. There are however some sites that have a workaround making it possible to save the Flash Video (FLV-file) on your harddrive.

The process is itself fairly easy, just paste the link to the YouTube
video you want on to one of the following sites and download!

Since the
downloaded file will be a Flash video file (.flv), you will need a Flash Player
to play them. The ‘all-media-files’ player VLC will play them too, converting the file with a flv-to-mpg converter and then play it in Winblows MediaPlayer is another way

http://keepvid.com/

http://www.videolan.org/

The process is completed, my .com domain is now transfered and hosted via GoDaddy!

Have to admit, the pudding was sweet and contained just one tiny sour part; Email remained up sweet as honey, the website however was down for some hours

And it’s still not up as it should. All is caused by the domain forward not working properly. For now the domain is html re-directing to the .nl website and I guess it will remain that way for a while…hardly any time to work on it the coming days.

Am also thinking of changing the weblog tool from Pivot to Wordpress, what do ya think?

I’m still a big fan of Guitar Hero (am saving up for a PS3 to rock at home!). At CES 2008 Veronica Belmont shows us ‘Air Guitar Hero’…yeah, this thing ROCKS!

Check out Mahalo Daily with Veronica Belmont for your daily shot of geek stuff.

As said before, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’…so, let’s eat!

I just finished the last steps of the .com domain transfer and set up the hosting account. Have to admit, the migration process so far went really smooth, it just took some days (and the weekend inbetween didn’t help I guess).

Current status for the domain hosting is ‘Pending DNS’, so by the time the new location for this domain (with GoDaddy) is propagated through the root nameservers (appr. 24-48 hours) I should be good to go!

The MX-records are already adjusted for Google Apps and I have set a domain forward to the .nl domain (actually matching what it is today). This means that opposite to what I thought earlier, there should be no downtime for the website nor email…fingers crossed!

Oh man, this better be fixed before the airliner is used in commercial flights…and let’s just hope they don’t run any Microsoft Windows!

Wired: "Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security
vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow
passengers to access the plane’s control systems, according to the U.S.
Federal Aviation Administration.

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment,
designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to
the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA
report reveals."

One of the cultural differences between The Netherlands and Norway is
the social behaviour on the streets. Everbody has a phone to his ear,
nobody is noticing anything anymore, or looking at eachother, or saying
‘hei’ when passing another.

It’s clearly related to the mobile age we’re living in, the mobile
society where the ‘device’ seems more important than the one-to-one
contact with the guy/girl sitting next to you. The fact that
Norway/Scandinavia has a much longer tradition in mobile phones than
other countries probably made this behavior a cultural thing which
also prevails when people don’t have their cellphone at their ear.

Perhaps this situation is also different in Norway compared to NL due to population density.

Since your neighbor could be literally far away, the Norwegian culture
has historically developed itself to be much more oriented on the
individual and family, living in your own house and minding your own
business (although one will ALWAYS help another when asked…Norwegians
are far from a-social and of course I have been generalizing!)

Have to admit that I’m the kind of guy who always tries to greet the
people I pass, make eye contact and smile…it’s just amazing to see
what happens to the other person if you just smile, you should try it
too!

Marilyn vos Savant: "To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."

I learned today that the proverb phrase ‘the proof is in the pudding’ actually originates from the proverb ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

The proverb is especially applicable today since I just ordered the domain transfer and hosting package for my .com domain, all with GoDaddy…so, since it turns out that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it’ll be interesting to see how smooth the migration process will be. Go daddy, satisfy me!

24h - 48h downtime for website and email is unavoidable, expect it somewhere coming week…the .nl site and email will stay up though!

PS. Obviously I have been using the GoDaddy Promo Code from Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (dsc2)! It gave me an additional $5,- off the order, yay!

Am doing pretty good in my podcast catch up project…managed to listen to four Daily Source Codes today!

Pity Adam missed my audio comment congratulating him with DSC#700, there was however another great piece of audio in DSC#703: ‘everyday choices’ by Colin Mutchler, his spoken words start around 6 minutes into the show.

The original lyrics are on Colins ccMixter page, the audio file played in DSC#703 can be found on his Podshow page.
The transcript:

the markets are starting to question themselves
the bloggers exposing our blisters
as the everyday words of everyday people
are shifting the tone of the televised speeches

and the artists are starting to question themselves
and the poets are speaking like leaders
and the everyday choices of everyday people
are facing the storms and curing diseases

so go skype an ipod, premix some wages
but don’t forget to make a version for the sages

because when we look beyond our next meal, our next post,
we are responsible for our everyday votes,
the ones we use to buy our shoes,
to buy our homes, to buy our tunes.
Yes I’m talking about our dollars, our euros, our pesos, our yen.

because what if the next 20 years are happening again?
what if we’ve already arrived…it’s 2025.

and the doomsday duos, the war and peace heroes
haven’t avoided the global cooling, the flu grown zeros
and the forgotten people

Yes the markets are starting to question themselves
and the bloggers exposing our blisters
as the everyday words of everyday people
are shifting the tone of the televised speeches

and the artists are starting to question themselves
and the poets are speaking like leaders
and the everyday choices of everyday people
are facing the storms and curing diseases.

And the embedded track from the Podsafe Music Network:

Yo…Mr. Adam Curry…*that* was deap shit indeed, I love it! Thanks for sharing this dude!