It is Liberation Day in NL today and it was Liberation Day for my late Grandma too, on this day 68 years ago…Happy Birthday dad! 😉
Your first as a knight, it must be special; I am pretty sure that the flags outside are all for you! 😉
This one is for all parents who raise their children with patience and unconditional LOVE!
Beautiful clip…and very recognizable…Misha went down the slide at kindergarten about 105 times today 😉 , he had so much fun and loved it *so* much…and I loved it too!
Ha, the inauguration of the King is only one day ago and Norway already welcomes the King in the country today…*my* King that is hehe…we came back to Norway and will stay long enough to celebrate ‘syttende mai‘ in two weeks; we LOVE parties! (and Misha obviously celebrates in style…so *with* a crown! 😉 )
(click to enlarge)
It has been a special Queen’s Day this year, the last! 😉
The Netherlands welcomed its first male monarch since 1890: King Willem-Alexander! One of consequences of it is that one of the biggest public holidays in Holland, Queen’s Day, will change name and date; King’s Day will be celebrated from coming year on April 27, Willem-Alexander’s Birthday.
As you can see in the YouTube clip below; the country can expect a new style of ‘royal leadership’ from the King (monarchy 2.0? ) )…a dancing King instead of a dancing Queen, nice!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pHgXQ4rv8c
I picked up my 19 months old (/young) angel today, oof, he has *grown* in the past 2,5 weeks!
Misha didn’t have a chance to personally congratulate me with my Birthday last Tuesday, and he did so now; look what he made me! Sweeeettttt! 😉
Daddy is happy!
(click to enlarge)
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the iTunes Store (originally iTunes Music Store). Only 1,5 years after the introduction of the first iPod on November 10 2001, the Store turned out to be another game changer introduced by Apple.
Despite many people ‘in the industry’ doubting if an official online music store could ever turn around the declining music sales, the concept (/lock-in?!) of the best mp3 player and a seamless way to legally purchase music for it via an online store turned out to be a big hit (thank you Steve! 😉 ).
The iTunes Store has been the biggest music vendor in the United States since April 2008 and the biggest music vendor in the world since February 2010, and despite the increased competition it still has a 64% market share in the USA.
The iTunes Store contains over 26 million songs, and became a full-blown digital content store with the addition of Books, Movies, TV Shows and Apps to the Store. Especially the Apps made the iTunes Store fly high; while in 10 years an impressive 25+ billion songs have been sold, in less than 5 years 45 (!!) billion Apps have been purchased/downloaded!
Wonder if it will still be around 10 years from now…
This is a very special day today for my father; this morning he was awarded the honour of Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau! It is a royal honour which he received for everything he has done (a LOT!), voluntarily, for society in his life, a true appreciation and recognition from society for the special way in which he has carried out all his activities…WoW!
A very special day for a very special man…PROUD!!
Yay!! I had to wait a whole year for it, but we are here now; that one special day of the year that makes me a whole year older, aarrggghhh! 😉
Oh well, age is just a number (an expression mostly used by ‘older’ people 😉 ) and half of the day has past already…so uhhh, no time to waste; I’m gonna enjoy every minute!!
Education always had my interest and being a parent that interest has only increased. I have said it before; I believe that education is broken (watch the video in this link), and it couldn’t be illustrated any better than in the drawing below. Just think about how long ago Einstein made his comment on education…and then realize that not so much has really changed!! It should be no surprise that I am a strong believer in new, alternative ways to educate people. More on that soon… 😉
Yayyyyy…from today on, the sun sets later in Norway (Oslo) than in NL so, let the lonnnggggg hot and sunny summer nights begin! 😉
The start of spring a month ago (on March 20) is the actual moment that days are longer in OSL than NL, though that is due to earlier sunrise. The sunset ‘break-even point’ is today, which matters as I happen to like long evenings/nights way better than earlier (way too early) mornings! 😉
It will all be over coming August 20 when the sunset ‘breaks-even’ the other way around and from September 25 days in NL are longer days than days in OSL, bbrrrr…
See for yourself at timeanddate.com, pretty nice.
I never realized it, but my sweet electric Nissan LEAF is a World Champion, w00t! 😉
The LEAF is World Champion driving in reverse, achieving the fastest time over a one mile distance, in reverse. The LEAF, driven by Stunt driver Terry Grant, raced the 1.16-mile Goodwood hillclimb backwards in 1m 37.02s at an average speed of 88.5km/hr (55mph). Ha, the theory ‘a direct drive electric motor can go as fast in reverse as it can move forward’ has been proven, nice!
Oh, and even if I wanted, I couldn’t try this at home folks…Nissan installed a reverse speed limiter, darn! 😉
It is something that not many people are fully aware of; the Norwegian language is an extremely efficient language, as you can see below! And no, no, no, this is not impolite or rude behaviour, nah, this is well thought through; why spill words when you can rather save energy for more important matters such as the ones described in the article that I shared earlier? 😉
(click to enlarge)
This is Shi-ka-fu-rin-mo-to-te speaking! (a.k.a. Gurl-sha-mi-di-ee-ta-que, a.k.a. Skinny Money Bradley, a.k.a. a-shitload-of-funny-drawings! 😉 )
Obviously, the title of this post is somewhat silly;Â eeeeveryone *knows* their name, right? Well, that might be so for the name you ‘normally’ use, but…did you know that you have many more names??
For instance, do you know you Ninja name?
Or your Ghetto name??
Or, for the bluesy types amongst you, find your Bluessss name below!
Lastly, a golden oldie…your Hieroglyph name! 😉
(click to enlarge)
So tell me, what is YOUR name??
I stumbled upon this old TV recording yesterday and even though I have seen it before (‘live’ on TV somewhere in the 90s 😉 ), it once again cracked me up!
Very recognisable, a little outdated, and most of all: HILARIOUS!!
Haha, John Fealey, you are FUNNY!
Today the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had its Grand Opening after almost 10 (!!) years of renovation, restoration and alteration. The initial reviews are fantastic, it is being perceived as the ‘future of museums’.
I am not entirely sure, but don’t think I have ever been there…about time! 😉 It will open its doors to the ‘general’ public from tomorrow and it will be the first national museum in the world that will be open every day of the year, from 9 am to 5 pm. (hmm, really no excuse of not going then 😉 ).
In order to create awareness of the reopening, the museum staged a flashmob in a local shopping mall, which is recreating one of the museum’s most famous paintings, Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’…brilliant!!
‘Our Heroes are Back’ – after an absence of one decade, all major pieces in the Rijksmuseum’s collection are back where they belong.
Hahaha, below a hilarious YouTube clip that shows how animals eat their food…funnyyyy, it cranked me up!!
We humans came a long way, eating our food so civilized, or did we? 😉 …(still) most food that we eat *are* animals…food for thought……
The past days I have been enjoying the return of the Great Tit in da house…uhh, the bird house that is! 😉 Yessss, last years ‘build a tree and get a Great Tit for free‘ program is in full operation again, and it works…yayyy!
I guess they don’t have the challenge of the bird below; ‘my’ Big Tits seems to have a pretty intense work-out, finding and dropping loads of small twigs in the bird house… 😉
Today marks a milestone on my blog; *this* is my 3000th blogpost!! (not counting tweets or Facebook status updates)
It took a little over 8 years to come to this ‘far’, 2979 days to be exact as my first post was published on February 10 2005.
As life in general, things seems to move faster and faster these days; while the first 1000 blogposts took me 1219 days (post #1000 on June 13 2008), the second 1000 posts took ‘just’ 989 days (blogpost #2000 being published on February 27th, 2011) and the last 1000 posts took only 771 days…wow! (the daily Quote Of The Day in addition to my regular posts help the decrease in time obviously 😉 )
Well, you can expect #4000 in a year or two as I am still having fun doing this! (and the blog archive becomes/is a valuable asset (to me))
I took away the last bits of snow from the veranda today and though the garden and the forest are still covered in snow, the white layer gets thinner by the day…so, skiing will soon be replaced by mountain biking yay!
The YouTube clip below got me in the mood, ha, I should prepare myself for some technical challenging trails…’they’ say it looks more scary than it really is but still, brrrrr!
The new iMac finally gave me enough power (and storage 😉 ) to start managing my iLife the way I wanted to for years. With iLife I don’t refer to ‘My Life’, but to Apple’s iLife suite which contains various software applications for organizing, editing, and publishing photos (iPhoto), movies (iMovie), and music (iTunes).
It is incredible how much music, photos and movies one collects over the years (side note; realizing that the digital age really just began, a better way to manage all this is highly needed 😉 ). I am only halfway in adding my complete music collection into iTunes and already have over 11,000 songs in close to 700 albums and well over 30 days of continuous music playback; in total of more than 80GB, and counting.
The situation is more or less the same as far as my photos are concerned; a little over half of them are in iPhoto at the moment (though not fully organized yet) and already there are close to 15,000 photos in…oof!
It takes a bit of time to organize one’s iLife, yet it is worth it…if only for backup purposes, quite vital for photos, and especially for a parent! 😉
Btw. is anyone familiar with Apple’s Aperture, would using that instead of iPhoto ease up my photo management?
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