raymondpoort.com

You might have seen the official iPhone 5 promo video that Apple showed during last weeks iPhone 5 release keynote (check it out) where three of Apple’s Senior Vice Presidents take you through the design process and various new features of the iPhone 5. Using the same approach, there is a hilarious video out which shows the alternative iPhone 5: ‘A Taller Change Than Expected – Proving that size does matter. The feature upgrade you don’t want to miss!’

LoL!!!

Watch the official iPhone 5 promo video first so you get an idea how Apple’s promo videos are done.

I like to live (LEAF 😉 ) on the edge; tonight I tested the  battery charge indicator of my electric car to the edge; I left my friends place after a nice dinner for a 42km trip home with only a battery capacity to drive 46km…*and* knowing that most of the road would be uphill, I expected a less efficient drive than normal…brrrrr!

With my 11100km LEAF driving experience in just over 8 months (still FANTASTIC!), I pretty much know how to gain on battery efficiency (basically drive like my granny 😉 ) and…I made it home having at least ‘some’ juice left (< 5 km)!! Oof, a close call!
Haha, luckily the ‘nearby charging station’ was only 5 meters away!

The battery level indicates EMPTY, and the driving range indicator jumped from 5km to ‘—‘ some kilometers before home…

When you woke up this morning you noticed that something was different; the air seemed less dense and more clear, the sun was brighter, the sky more blue and everyone you met was friendly and helpful. The day went on and instead of arguing, people around you collaborated and were able to build things up instead of breaking them down.

…

You might wonder why the world seemed such a better place today…

Well, it is World Peace Day today…so no wonder! 😉

My suggestion to you: spread the LOVE and make every day a World Peace Day!

(and obviously the Global Love Project takes part in the event 😉 )

PS. You can also sign the Global Truce 2012 campaign at: www.peaceoneday.org

I participated in the yearly ‘Elvelangs i fakkellys‘ (walk along the Akers River by torchlight) in Oslo tonight.
A wonderful experience where the entire trail is lit by living and electric light, creating magical moods in the September darkness. My first time even though I live here for over 5 years now, great to catch up with fellow dutchies and experience Oslo in a way I have never seen before!
Pictures say more than a thousand words, though I could have used a better camera… 😉

Yesterday I wrote about acronyms and today there an event somewhat related to this: Smiley turns 30 years!

On 19 September, 1982 Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested to use the emoticons 🙂 and 🙁 to express emotion. He was the first person, at least documented, to make this suggestion, here is the original message posted by him. The rest as they say is history as, similar to acronyms, emoticons are used everywhere these days and able to express virtually any emotion. 😉

Online chatting, Instant Messaging and texting are completely integrated in our (online) life and that has had a big impact on  written language: acronyms became a new subculture language. Well known acronyms are for example; BTW – “By The Way”, OMG – “Oh, My God”, LOL – “Laughing Out Loud”, AFAIK – “As Far As I Know”, ETA – “Estimated Time of Arrival”.

A bit less known; CYA – “See Ya”, FUBAR – “Fucked Up Beyond All Repair”, ROTFLMAO – “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off” and BCWYWF, YWMCT – “Be Careful What You Wish For, Your Wish Might Come True”…which obscure acronyms do *you* use?

I assume that *everyone* knows how to draw a Stickman (check out my blogpost last year to get an online interactive experience! 😉 )- By default, a Stickman seems a bit boring, although your own creativity takes that ultimate decision. The Stickman below is a perfect example of that, I love it! <3

I find it important to know some of the history of the country that one lives in as part of the cultural integration process (similar to speaking the language 😉 ). I know that I have some catching up to do on the history part and tonight will be the moment to do so; I am going to see the movie Kon-Tiki, a norwegian film about Norway’s legendary explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his 1947 expedition across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. Partly Englishs and partly Norwegian spoken, so it will be a double cultural integration experience! 😉

In case you didn’t know (as it is impossible to forget when you know it 😉 ): September 13 is International Chocolate Day!

It is pretty simple to take part in the festivities: Eat chocolate. Drink chocolate. Give someone chocolate. Give yourself some chocolate!

Hehe, I *love* this day!!! 😉

What can I say…iWant!! 😉

Check out the iPhone 5 video (or if you dare, watch the entire keynote speech, geeks only! 😉 )

GoDaddy, my hosting provider for raymondpoort.com had a major outage today.

Apparently, the outage has been caused by a member of Anonymous known as AnonymousOwn3r who claimed responsibility…quite convenient (as pointed out by my Adam Curry), as the White House is circulating draft of executive order on cybersecurity. One should realize that the Anonymous group (as well the Occupy movement) might not be who you expect them to be (anti-government)…anyway, some of GoDaddy’s DNS servers are back on track, and I presumely got lucky to be in the first bunch. This means that:

(and www.godaddy.com is not?!?)

Lesson of the day: never choose a web hosting service while horny… 😉

I had quite a busy driving day today; nearly 400km visiting family and friends in West, Central, kinda North and kinda South NL, all with an angel in the backseat…I love it, he loves it, it was great! 😉

Grandma (again), godmother, brother and friend; I am very happy to have seen them again on this lovely and super sunny Sunday and the X5 has once again proven to be a fantastic roadtrip car!

…pretty knackered now, time to zzzzzleep! (just like Misha, I wonder how much of this day filled with new impressions will come back during the night…)

Kids are quite creative how to point out the differences between girls and boys…these two are well on their way to become nerds of the future! Hahaha 😉

This week is the first ‘real’ kindergarten week for Misha; from early morning until late afternoon, crawling like crazy, playing until he drops (playing in the uhhh eating sand is his favourite 😉 ), getting to know the other kids and flirting with the care-takers (they LOVE hime 😉 )…intense days for the little angel while daddy is working!

A pretty good arrangement I’d say, Misha is happy as ever which in the end is all that counts! Despite being tired when he gets home, he still has enough energy left to enjoy some nice hours together with me…with the sunny weather the past days, playing on the veranda together with daddy and ending the day with an outside dinner made his day complete….so sweet!!

I guess (almost) all of you grew up getting touched with some form of LEGO. It has been around for-evah it seems…well, actually, it has been around 80 years this year. Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, began making wooden toys in 1932 which got branded LEGO in 1934 and he started to produce its famous plastic interlocking bricks in 1949.

The word LEGO is formed from the Danish words “LEg GOdt” which means “play well”. ‘Coincidentally’ (there is no such thing as coincidence 😉 ), in Latin the lego means “I put together”…nice!

LEGO has released a 17-minute animation film celebrating its 80th Birthday and sharing the history of LEGO, check it out below, it is worth it!

Years ago, during my life as student we were able to scientifically proof that ‘100’ was the biggest number of all…try it yourself and count from 1 to 100….it takes forever!! 😉

Well, this video quantifies the magic number 100; it equals 150 seconds (wow!) and the count is done by people telling their age, nice!

So, check out this video document of people in the city of Amsterdam from age 0 to 100.

A few years ago I read about light field cameras and got excited about the potential and the change it would bring in ‘capturing the world around you’.

Instead of capturing a single plane of light as conventional cameras do, a light field camera captures the entire light field (which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space). This makes it possible to change the focus of a picture *after* the picture is taken…byebye out-of-focus pictures! 😉

This year the technology went mainstream after Lytro, a company that “produces light field cameras that everyone can enjoy”, released its rather affordable camera. Check out the Lytro website for some amazing examples (or check out this YouTube clip ‘How To Take a Light Field Portrait with the Lytro Camera’)

Yeah, this will dramatically change photography for the first time since the 1800s…iWant! 😉

LoL!!! This is a fantastic solution for any parent who runs into the same challenge; I am not sure about other kids, but this behaviour is *very* typical Misha…whenever he feels that his movement/freedom gets limited, he protests (I have no clue from who he got that 😉 ).

No worries, Bob cools your kid down, ya man!

It is Full Moon today, and this Full Moon is called Blue Moon as it is the second Full Moon in one month (August 2 was so-called Full Sturgeon Moon). Two Full Moons in a month, it doesn’t happen often, the next time will be in July 2015, so enjoy tonight while it lasts and let the energy flow…

Since this week is sort of a Misha-week, I thought it would be nice to show some of the skills that a guy develops when he turns into a daddy. Check out this YouTube clip and rap with me; ‘damn dude, you got daddy-skills’!! 😉