raymondpoort.com

Aahhh, my car broke down!! We have it just for two months (even though it’s far from a brand new car :)) and now the thermostat house decided to break into two, leaving the cooling fluid no other option than to get outta the system, by that creating a lot of smoke (no fire :)) I might add. Luckily, the engine didn’t overheat, or at least, I hope it didn’t! 🙂

Check this Flickr-set for some ‘nice’ pix.

(reminder for Ray, I should upgrade to a Flickr-pro account and upload *all* my pix…)

Well, some people don’t want an iPhone, some want one (badly), some have one (happy people) and some…uhh..drop it in the toilet?!?

CURRY.COM: ‘My reaction was the same I’ve had with my Nokia’s… jam my hand down the porcelain throat of the beast to retrieve my darling… …Currently, she’s dead Jim, but I have high hopes for my Cupertino Creation.’

Dude, if you want to get rid of it…send it over already! 🙂

Engadget: "Last night the impossible was made possible: right in front of our very
eyes we witnessed a full SIM unlock of our iPhone with a small piece of
software."

I guess now is the time to buy myself an iPhone…finally! 🙂

I booked the norwegian language course today, first lesson September 10! Two nights a week for 6 weeks, wow…I expect to understand a lot more of the lunch conversations at work after finishing it!!

Btw., last Wednesday during the company event I discovered that there is a correlation between understanding the language and the amount of beer I drink hehehe:)

A mustsee for everyone who saw Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘: go watch Channel4’s (UK) ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle‘ too (on Google video, can also be found on DivX)!

I watched it last Sunday…extremely interesting to see scientists questioning the theory that Global Warming (which IS happening btw!) is caused by human-produced greenhouse gases…according to this other ‘truth’ we should blame the sun.

It’s important to understand that climate change is still too complex to be fully understood, predicted and proved by scientists to agree on ‘the’ truth, how inconvenient it might be :)…the truth you choose to believe should not be based on just one source/movie, right?

I therefore encourage everyone to open your mindset for another viewpoint (and yes, we should still aim to live in harmony with nature!), organize a movie-night, watch both movies after each other. Furthermore, educate yourself…there are zillions debates online, both pro and con, check ‘m out…I found this one an interesting read.

And I can’t stop thinking about Fear Industrial Complex, I blogged about that one before…never forget that the whole Global Warming discussion has hugely become a political one, unfortunately never unbiased.

The word of 2007 is……Bacn!

Bacn is pronounced as ‘bacon’, spelled in a fashionable web 2.0 style, so without the ‘o’. 🙂

It is used for ’email you want, but not right now’.

In other words, the kind of in between emails you receive and want to follow up on, but you don’t have the time right away to do so…newsletters, Facebook notifications, new followers on twitter, product announcement, etc…from now on you can Bacn these emails!

Some practical examples in everyday usage:

"All this bacn is driving me nuts!"

"Sorry hun, I’ll be home late today…too much bacn to sort out."

"Hmm, it seems your email got lost in all the bacn."

"I got my spamfilter and bacnfilter installed today!"

"Dude, stop bacning me!"

"I’m on track with my bacn, life’s great!"

It has the potential of becoming as widely known as the word ‘spam‘ if you ask me…especially since everyone nowadays seems to be affected by bacn.

Todays meeting with UNDP in Copenhagen went well, so well that we finished early and had some time to do a little sightseeing…and YES, I finally saw the Little Mermaid sculpture!! (it’s smallllll! :))

(pictures made with my Nokia E65 :))

Hmm, which reminds me…I still plan to put all my pictures on my Flickr-page, that is *after* I have upgraded it to a pro-account…first need to find the time to sort all pix out though…

Hmm, I just realized this;

I use Wikipedia (a lot) to link to as a source for more information on something I mention in a blogpost (as many others do, that’s why the wiki-pages end up so high in Google search results).

The beauty of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit a topic, thus improving the content of this free encyclopedia. The threat for Wikipedia is that…anyone can edit a topic, even with ‘wrong’ intentions…in other words, altering text to hide the real ‘truth’ or polish up a person/company/event (mainly an ego-thing if you think about it).

Last week Virgil Griffith launched the Wikipedia Scanner, Wired has the article.

It’s basically a database that links anonymous
Wikipedia edits to organizations by the originating IP address. The scanner will not catch all ‘false’ edits, but gives a good insight in supposedly common practices for some big corporations, neat!

It shows that one should never trust just one source of information, a statement which certainmly holds for something as commonly trusted as Google btw.!!

In that respect the Mahalo project started by Jason Calacanis becomes very interesting, a search service that combines the input from technology (rss-feeds), the public submitting links and the full time/part time Mahalo staff to create trustable search results, nice!

Oh, and Wikipedia is certainly not out for me, I’ll just combine their info with other sources to make up my truth.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice to have a service just a click away that is doing that work for me, combining all sources out there together into one ultimate answer…uhhh, the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is…42! 🙂

Just came back home from last nights party (slept over at Willy’s place)…had heaps of fun hanging out with the vikings!

Willy & Katka took very good care of us and the bar they have in the basement proofed to be a great place for partying. There’s a professional beertap and besides the audiosystem the place also has a beamer to watch (music)videos! Got into norwegian music (Dum Dum Boys) and we watched some ‘Dice‘ (Andrew Dice Clay, an american comedian)…all in all; great times!

Waking up was a bit harder though :), luckily the cleaning up wasn’t all that bad, I guess the viking-era has past! 🙂

Having a laid back Saturday and am lovin’ it!

Slept in this morning (I really needed to catch up on some sleep :)), explored the forest behind the house and did some webdesign for a new project.

Tonight is party time, my norwegian friend Willy is turning 39…it will be my first time at a norwegian Birthday party, interesting!

WTF??

So, I receive a copy of all mail send to unknown users in my .com domain (catch-all email address)…since 18.25h today (that is 20 minutes ago!) I have received almost 100 emails which bounced back to me with a delivery failure…all are send from non-existing accounts within the domain, go figure! Then I realized that I have mentioned the domain name in my post yesterday…I guess the domain name got picked up by some spambots (i.e. assholes) and used to spoof spam messages.

I hope no one got offended by receiving a spam message from my domain…what can I say…it wasn’t me!

I’ll migrate my raymondpoort.com domain in the near future from a domain forward package (currently forwarded to raymondpoort.nl) to a hosted service, anyone knows a good deal for a hosting plan?

The (dutch) hosting provider I currently use will charge me around $10 per month, which is not the best deal in town. Also, this plan gives me only 100Mb storage, no MySQL and domain registration costs more than they should be (around $35 per year).

I’d say a better deal must be possible, right? Do I hear GoDaddy??

Did a slight update on the site layout tonight, do you notice? Lemme know if things broke…

I took over the contract of the internet feed in the house (company is paying though :)) and at the same time upgraded it to an amazing 25,000kbps down/2,000kbps up!! Got a great deal with the local provider (NOK375=EUR47=USD64).

Way to go for fiber internet, I’ve got a fixed IP-address again and unlimited data usage (unlike the cable internet I was used to in NL)…YIHAAAA!

Just came back from a nice dinner with Jo (Joanne) and Ries (Richard). Jo I know from when she was born (she’s the daughter of one of my highschool teachers) and Ries trained together with me last year. Was great to see some fellow cheeseheads and talk dutch the whole evening 🙂

They’re staying with Erika, Jo’s norwegian friend who spent a year in NL some years back and (still!) speaks almost fluently dutch, now that really gives me hopes up for my language course starting in September! She learned me; blå glatt gateplakat! It translates to ‘blue shiny street sign’ which doesn’t make any sense but is a real tongue breaker !:)

They are the first ‘visitors’ from NL, besides my colleagues from the dutch office of course…kuddos to them, hope they have a nice time in Oslo this week, I guess they’ll know the city better than I do afterwards, uhhh…

It has been a short trip and completely packed with things to do, all fun…it was great to be home, and…it’s nice to go back home!?! 🙂

Today is Waterpop, a music festival in my ‘hometown’ Wateringen, line-up consists of The Psyke Project and Magnapop…heyhey, this weekend is filled with parties, yay!

Before I’ll go there I got some work on the house to do; paint the outside woodwork, aahhhh! Luckily the weather is grrrreat, time to get sunburned!

Sun’s shining, just came back from the hairdresser…it’s time to go! 🙂

The stay lasted just 9 days this time…am off to NL for the weekend (wedding tomorrow!).

Back Sunday night!

This Friday my sister will get married. Obviously a big day for the family, especially since she’s the first one marry (I might add she’s also the youngest child :))

Am heading back to NL tomorrow evening and will have just enough time to go to the hairdresser, or coiffeur :)…really looking forward to this special day!