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My mom turns 64 today, age still doesn’t show! 😉 We are unfortunately not able to be there in person today, though being a whole week together in Norway last week was fantastic ‘alternative’!

From sunny Norway; Happy Birthday Mom!

Apple uses the yearly Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to show off its next generation software and technologies for developers. The general public follows it closely via many live-blogs and generally can’t wait to have the upcoming goodies in their hands.

The opening Keynote speech kicked-off the WWDC today and it showed some very interesting developments:

• Mac OS X 10.9 preview. It will be called Mavericks (as Apple ran out of cats and OS X Sea Lion was a too far fetched name 😉 ) and released this fall. The highlights: Finder Tabs, Tags, Multiple display support done right, various great advanced features, Compressed memory, Safari on steroids, iCould Keychain (I like that as I was recently checking out various password managers such as 1Password, which might now become obsolete ;)), improved Notifications/Calendar/Maps and, finally, iBooks come to the Mac!
• An updated Macbook Air which brings  huge improvements on battery life (12h on the 13″ model!)
• Newly designed Airport Basestations supporting faster WiFi and more
• A sneak peak of the next Mac Pro…you gotta see this one for yourself, WoW!
• iCloud updates including the next member of the iWork family, iWork for iCloud, allowing you to fully edit your documents from within a browser thus *also* on a PC!
• iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone. It’s packed with amazing new features and a stunning new user interface. Believe me, this one is moves up the level for smartphone OS’s. New hardware to support all the features (iPhone 5S, iPad 5 and iPad mini 2 will be announced in the coming weeks…). The most exciting new features of iOS 7: A easy access Control Center (finally a way to put your phone into flight mode directly from the lock-screen 😉 ), true multitasking for all apps, great improvements on Safari (including loosing the 8 tab limit 😉 ), Airdrop (a supereasy way to share files between iDevices and Macs, greatly improved Camera and Photos App (especially the lather will make browsing your Photo library fun), Siri got even smarter (and might be useable), iOS in the car, App store, localised apps near me, automatically app updates, Music, iTunes Radio

Extra attention was given to Apple’s values in designing products, as you can see from the opening shots in the Keynote speech video:

if everyone
is busy making everything
how can anyone perfect anything?
we start to confuse convenience
with joy
Abundance with choice.
designing something requires
focus
the first thing we ask is
what do we want people to feel?
delight
surprise
love
connection
Then we begin to craft around our invention
It takes time…
There are a thousand no’s
for every yes.
we simplify
we perfect
we start over
until everything we touch
enhances each life
it touches.
only then do we sign our work.
designed by Apple in California

At the end of the Keynote, Tim Cook said: “I’d like to close this morning with a reminder. That our goal at Apple is to make amazing products that our customers love. Really great products that enrich peoples’ lives. The words you saw at the beginning of the show are more than just words to us. They are the values we live by. They drive us. You’ve seen them reflected in our products over the years and just as much in the products this morning…And you’ll continue to see these reflected in the products we do in the future.”

My parents gave Misha a swing while they are visiting us in Norway and my father and I made the construction to hold it this weekend. Ha, we ‘had to’ make it sooner than later; Misha was jumping up and down wanting to play with his present! 😉

No surprise, he LOVES it and can’t stop swinging! 😉

Amazing, and who would have thought… I really believed that I had Great Tits in da house, but it turns out that they were Blue Tits instead (also called Nuns, *that* would be hilarious!! 😉 )…well, there are still Tits in da house that the good news, or actually, Tits flying out of da house…really fantastic to see these little birds flying in and out!!

Summer vacation is knocking on the door so Misha’s kindergarten organized a summerparty for kids and their parents. Misha took the opportunity to show how much fun he has at the kindergarten; running around, sliding off the slide, having fun on the swing and eating fishburgers that my father prepared on the BBQ, and entertaining us and other parents with his dancing skills…what a boy, heaps of fun! 😉

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My parents arrived today for a week of sun, fun and relaxing at my place. 😉 It was a pretty special flight as they took Misha with them, their first time flying with a little one! Needles to say, all went well…an angel is an angel eh? 😉

Misha entertained us on the way back from the airport by making the correct sounds that go with the animals we told him; horse, cat, cow, lion, dog, pig, chicken…he is GOOD at this game! 😉 An intensive day for him, he hardly didn’t sleep, so went relatively early to bed and has been vast asleep since! Tomorrow it’s kindergarten day, the picture below was taken there by a professional photographer some weeks ago…SWEETTT!!

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Nowadays there is hardly any excuse for people to be lost; technological advancements such as GPS used in navigation systems and smart phones enable ‘us’ to find our way wherever we are. At the same moment it seems as if more people are lost then ever; lost in an era of information overload, social media stress (always be ‘on’ and responding), having a hard time determining who they really are and where they stand in all of this. I assume that this is one of the reasons that personal awareness is becoming so much more relevant and that the books of Anastasia for instance are so appealing to many; these books show an opposite way of living, back to nature, bringing back a balance for people to realize they have a choice, *their* choice, in deciding how to live their lives.

If only ‘those who decide in this world’ (or at least, think they do 😉 ) would be open for such a change and transformation…

Check out this optical illusion, and find the catch before it is shown! You know upfront that something isn’t quite right, yet it takes a while before you understand what it is, nicely done!

Hehe, this one is *very* easy to solve in 25 moves (or 9.18s 😉 ). 😉

Today ten years ago the very first version of WordPress was released, which has become the most blogging platform in use on the Web at the moment, powering over 60 million websites worldwide! I personally am using WordPress since January 2008 and still a happy user! I have gone through 11 main releases in roughly six years as I started with version 2.3 (‘Dexter‘) while the current version is 3.5.1 (‘Elvin‘)…main releases of WordPress are codenamed after well-known jazz musicians.

Some pretty well known websites are using the platform too; The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, GigaOM, AllThingsD, etc.

Sweet is the love letter that cofounder Matt Mullenweg wrote to the love of his life: WordPress! 😉

Happy 10th anniversary WordPress, and indeed; the next 10 starts now!

The festival weekend almost comes to an end; tonight we enjoy the last bands on stage. First off The Scene, fan-friggin-tastic to see Thé Lau perform again! Then Coldplace, a Coldplay tribute band, who almost made us forget Chris Martin, almost! 😉
Next on stage: Beef, Bazzooka’s, The Dirty Daddies (who’s your daddy 😉 ), June Noa, Rina Mushonga and Nielson…as usual, the last evening @ het Parkfeest is heaps of fun, yayyy!!

It becomes a tradition; the festival season begins with the Parkfeest in Oosterhout! I am here for the third year in a row and tonight we start with Kraantje Pappie (Dutch ‘hip hop’) followed by the Astroid Galaxy Tour (from the latest Heineken commercial), supposed to be quite ok! Closing act for tonight: The Baseballs, a German rock and roll band known for their 50s and 60s style rockcover versions of modern hits (saw them two years ago).
It’s gonna be good…live music, beer and friends are always a guarantee for a great party! 😉

The youngest cat Pluis (a.k.a. walkabout cat 😉 ) ‘celebrated’ his 10th Birthday today, which is 56 in cat years so special dinner and lots of cuddles for him! (though it is hard to catch him, he is kind of a loner 😉 )

I always thought that the calculation of human years to cat years was a multiplication by seven and he would turn 70 today, but it actually varies with age as you can see in this chart. So, no retirement for him, yet! 😉

Today Norway celebrates its Constitution (May 17, ‘syttende mai’), so GRATULERER MED DAGEN Norge (Congratulations Norway)!!

We are both dressed up and ready to enjoy a nice day with friends. It is Misha’s first ‘syttende mai’ (he was in NL last year, while I was in Mozambique); I am sure he will love waving the flag! 😉

I believe that balance is the key to (almost) everything in life and it is fantastic to see it represented in this truly amazing act by Miyoko Shida! In the end it all comes down to one feather…nice!

See it for yourself and make sure to watch the whole clip; it will reveal how fragile balance can be… 😉

Miyoko Shida’s YouTube channel has other versions of this performance in a higher quality, I just loved the music of this one better.

I guess that not many people will understand what the babies in the YouTube video below are discussing, but I am sure Misha does; this is exactly how he communicates with me these days, HILARIOUS! 😉

Sooo sweet and fantastic to see his speech developing; at least one new word a day, both norwegian and dutch…HERO!

I will show the video to him tomorrow and come with his translation, *if* he has one! 😉

I found a worthy successor to the two TV series that I got hooked on (‘Lie to Me‘ and ‘Person of Interest‘), and just in time I might add; all available episodes of those two series fell of the unwatched list! 😉

There have been two ‘in-betweeners’, Paradox and Sherlock (especially the lather is pretty awesome!), though the new kid in town is called Neal Caffrey, the main character in ‘White Collar‘…the first two season (out of the four available) were great, so once again; hooked and couch potato nights hehe, me like! 😉

I bet most of you heard or seen the lithograph print of the ‘Escherian Stairwell‘  (named for the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher). An interesting though obvious impossible concept…until last week; have a look for yourself at the video below, the third video of the ‘Can You Imagine’ series about interesting facts, stories and myths of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). This one documents the existence of an ‘Escherian Stairwell’ at RIT, and yes, it *does* violate the laws of physics and basic logic by looping back into itself!!

Haha, it is quite a workout, running up this one! 😉

I guess the song from the sheet music below is best performed playing the flute, eh? 😉

A catchy tune this is…LoL!

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Wow, it has been quite a long ‘white’ season this year (Norway has two seasons; the white season and the non-white season, aka rainy season 😉 ). The season started Monday October 29th 2012 and the picture below shows that it is safe to bet that it ends tomorrow, May 7th 2013; weather predictions show 20C and blue skies. 😉 Heyhey, that’s less than 6 months in winter wonderland…it was nice for as long as it lasted, though I am all in for a long, warm and sunny summer now! 😉