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Booking a room in the Arenal Observatory Lodge was a great idea; the hotel is situated in a spectacular environment, in the middle of the rain forest, close to the ‘active’ Arenal volcano.

The hike through the jungle this morning was superb, but unfortunately the volcano itself is covered in the clouds and instead of loud explosions and lava coming down the volcano cone, there is the sound of silence. The only thing I hear humming in the background is a variation of the Lion song, covered in the 80’s by Tight Fit:

‘In the Jungle, the mighty Jungle, the Volcano Sleeps Tonight’… 😉

We both lost most of our jetlags after a day of doing nothing but relaxing, followed by a long night sleep with over 10 hours of net-sleeping time! 😉
Well, time for some action now; our rental car just arrived at the hotel, a white Toyota RAV4 4WD (white is the new black 😉 ), an upgrade from the Suzuki Grand Vitara 4WD that we booked, so from today we’ll be cruising along the bumpy roads through the inlands of Costa Rica, yippee!
First stop; La Fortuna, known for its hot springs and the proximity of the Arenal volcano, one of the ten most active volcanos in the world! We’ll be staying at the Arenal Observatory Lodge, apparently the best place to see the volcano’s activity, *if* it’s not covered in the clouds that is!
Well, I hope that Fortuna, the goddess of fortune is with us and both make the clouds disappear and protect us from getting lava-burned! 😉

Hehe, I slept like a baby after the relative long journey to Costa Rica yesterday, in total 23h from leaving Robbert’s casa until arriving in the Vista del Valle hotel!
Waking up the first morning is an exceptionally nice experience; you have no idea what the environment looks like as we arrived in total darkness…well, it is FANTASTIC!! (see below)
There is a splendid view over the valley (Vista del Valle! 😉 ), extremely green vegetation, lots of colorful birds, eagles and butterflies; a great scenery to celebrate our 20 years Anniversary (today!) again, after the Ode to Love festivities last month…cheers!! 😉

So, with one day delay we made it on board the flight West, yayyy!! First stop: Houston…’Houston, we have a problem’? Nah, I don’t think so, not this time! 😉

From there we’ll have a direct flight to San Jose, where the weather has cleared up and risk of new mudslides is low, luckily!! This Houston-San Jose will again be a flight ‘on standby’ so we keep our fingers crossed!

Anyway, vacation has really started now, yeah!!

Uhh, who would think that Panama is such a popular destination; KLM has a daily flight and even then the flight was *crowded*…a bit too crowded as we unfortunately didn’t make it on the flight…:( 🙁 the most crazy thing was that the purser didn’t *want* to give out any of the extra crew seats!! OK, it *is* his call, but common…so much for being nice to your colleagues, eh? A$$h0le! 🙁

We’ve checked alternative options and wow, the flexibility is huge! I never realized that you can reach San Jose from Amsterdam via Houston, Dallas, Newark, Atlanta, Madrid, Panama, Mexico AND Frankfurt. Most of those flights have already left by now, so we’re heading back ‘home’ (casa Robbert that is), DAMN!

Oh well, better luck tomorrow, we’re gonna try via Houston @ 10:40h ITM (=In The Morning), enough seats available according to the system!

Vacation time has finally arrived! We’ll be heading West to enjoy three relaxing weeks in Costa Rica, yayyy!!
Instead of flying Oslo-Newark-San Jose as we planned initially, we did a last-minute-change-of-plans and will fly Oslo-Amsterdam-Panama-San Jose. This because we are flying with standby tickets and the Newark-San Jose flight was already full, no need to loose valuable Costa Rica sun-hours in Newark, eh? 😉
Flexibility and price are the benefits of flying with standby tickets, being unsure if you will actually make it on-board is the downside…
Well, at least the first part was successful; we just arrived in Amsterdam (and were even given seats with extra leg-room, a good start! 😉 ). The next flight is tomorrow morning @ 11am, Amsterdam-Panama, wish us luck to make it on that flight!!

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder, Treason
Should ever be forgot.

This rhyme is commonly known from Guy Fawkes Night, he intended to blow up the House of Lords in London during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. You might know the theme from the movie V for Vendetta. In England the 5th of November is still commemorated each year with fireworks and bonfires. A nice tradition, as everybody loves fire, eh? 😉

Check out the below compilation of ‘Funny Talking Animals’ from the BBC Show “Walk on the Wild Side“, it is *hilarious*, ROTFLMAO!!

There are totally 21 clips in this BBC One ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ YouTube playlist, allow yourself to have a laugh and watch ‘m all! 😉

Something similar was done in a show called ‘Animal Crackers‘ by dutch comedian André van Duin back in the late 80’s. I think that each episode was just 5 minutes, but people stayed home to watch it!

The renters of our house in NL moved out last weekend, so I could take care of housing stuff to prepare it for selling. Most of the practicalities have been done now, the house agent has everything to start the process, so I hope it will be officially put up ‘For Sale’ in the next coming days!! (hehe, just before vacation, nice timing…)

It’s quite exciting and special; even though I officially left NL already three years ago, the house is my last ‘formal’ thing that connects me to NL (besides friends and family of course!). Hehe, I’m becoming more and more a viking instead of cheesehead! (don’t worry, I will keep my NL passport, after all; it ain’t much if it ain’t dutch!! 😉 )

So, if you know anyone who could be interested in buying a VERY nice house in Wateringen, NL…let me know!! 😉

Adam Curry is ‘reinventing the art of radio’ with his Daily Source Code and No Agenda podcasts (the latter one is especially interesting since he and John C. Dvorak are living of of user donations/sponsorships).

Unlike No Agenda which is solely talk-‘radio’ (with some jingles here and there 😉 ), music has always played a big role in the the Daily Source Code, just think back about the good old days of Jan Polet’s HitTest, drum cadences and brilliant mash-ups.

Lately Adam is exploring new ways of listener interaction by using a shared Dropbox (if you ‘still’ haven’t heard of Dropbox, go and sign up, it’s awesome!). The DSC & Dropbox concept means that you put the music you would like to be played on the Daily Source Code in a folder in your Dropbox-account, you share that folder with Adam (name it appropriately <name> + <location>) and after he accepts the sharing invite, I guarantee you that you will experience a whole new way of your former favorite ‘radio request show’!

It is absolutely fantastic to listen to the DSC-livestream, or later-on to the downloaded podcast and hear ‘your’ song being played!! I have put 25 songs in a shared Dropbox and 6 of them have been played so far…ha, and if you’re lucky you even get a nice ‘thank you’ as happened to me in DSC-850!! It’s around 1h33m40s into the show, directly after Adam played my requested Queens of the Stone Age – Song for the Dead (so be warned for guitar riffs that make your ears bleed! 😉 )…I listened to that segment while I was driving back home last week…it gave me a BOOST of ENERGY, YAY! 😉

I’m in NL this weekend to take care of housing stuff; the renters are handing over the house since they are moving out. Timing is great as I’m now able to go to Bonzzzz’s Birthday party a.k.a. Halloween Costume Party…we’re all dressed up and ready to scare the shit out of people! Hehe, do you recognize Mr. Anti-Christ below?? 😉

Marko has his Birthday today (he is turning 40…congrats dude! 😉 ).

Besides all the singing, cheering, singing again, baking a Birthday cake, cooking his favorite meal and uhh, singing once more, we also prepared a very special gift for him; his own movie trailer!!

Making it was really simple since we took the time to shoot a lot of videos of Marko during the week. Apple’s iMovie ’11 (part of the recently released iLife ’11) did the rest…it really lived up to its promises as it took no more than 5 minutes to have the movie trailer ready! Hahaha, it’s a breeze to turn raw footage into a cool and Hollywood-style movie trailer this way…FUNNNN!!

We’re out in Oslo with the six of us tonight, enjoying a nice dinner in Klosteret, a very nice restaurant in Oslo. It has a somewhat romantic setting, something like a cozy dungeon with brick walls, lots of candles and great food…life is superb!

This one is hilarious!!

Take a moment and do the following:

1) go to Google Maps (maps.google.com)

2) Click on ‘Get Directions’ (‘Routebeschrijving’)

3) Type in from (A): Japan to (B): China

4) press <enter> or ‘Get Directions’

5) Scroll down to point 43…

WTF??? They suggest you to travel HOW across the Pacific Ocean for 782km??? A friggin’ Jet Ski?!?!?

LOL!!!!

(click on the picture for a larger version)

(via Michel van der Riet on FB)

Kissy is turning 36 today…Happy Birthday babe!

Rob and Stefanie arrived today for a week of relaxing, enjoying nature and the company of each other, drinking, partying and more. 😉

They made a tradition out of it to come over in the last week of October since it’s Kissy’s Birthday on the 26th. The surprise this year was that Muriel and Marko came with them! Actually, they didn’t fly here, but all drove with Marko’s car (a 25h trip!)…it meant that they were able to bring most of the bigger ‘Ode to Love‘ gifts with them, yayyyy, terrific!

I’m really looking forward to this week with our friends, it’s gonna be lovely!

Who can imagine a world without the iPod? It feels as the king of portable music players has been around forever, yet the era of ‘mp3’ ain’t all that old (16 years) and the iPod only has its 9th Birthday today; on 23 October 2001, Steve Jobs (hehe, him again) announced the iPod as ‘a Mac-compatible device with a 5 GB hard drive and a capacity that put ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’.

The portable media player can be seen as the turning point for Apple; the company gained traction from the masses, became a style icon, and the Halo effect has had a staggering impact on perception of Apple’s other products.

Hehe, their products are true wannahaves…my current count? 4 iPods, 2 iPhones, 2 Airport Express Base Stations, 1 Airport Extreme Base Station, 1 Time Capsule, 1 MacBook, 1 Mac mini, 1 iPad…what Apple products do you own??

OK, here we go, the answer to the ‘Count the colors’ quiz of the day from last Tuesday:

In total 10 people commented, five of them said ‘3’, four thought it would be ‘4’ and one thought the correct answer is ‘5’.

The correct answer is: 3!!

Great, half of you were correct, it’s apparently a bunch of smart people reading this blog! 😉 . I am pretty sure however that not everyone was correct for the right reasons! 😉

Let’s first start with the original picture:

No one can deny that you see 4 colors; two smaller stripes (orange and  magenta) and two bigger spirals (blue and green).

Well, let’s now first remove the small orange stripe:

The bigger stripes ‘change’ in color it seems, and become a little closer in relation than before. So, let’s now remove the magenta:

Wow!!

It is now clear that the ‘blue’ and green are actually the same color, in reality there is no blue in this picture!! The actual RGB (RedGreenBlue) color code is r=0, g=255, b=150, so mostly green with some blue in it.

Another thing that helps in tricking your brain is that the orange stripe crosses the green spiral, but not the ‘blue’ one and the magenta stripe crosses the ‘blue’ spiral, but not the green one.

Nice to see how you can be tricked, ah?

It shows that you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear, objects are not what they appear…the next time someone swears they saw Elvis, or a UFO (that could actually be true!), or a ghost, show them this picture.

Hehe, what you see is definitely not what you get! 😉

Similar as what Heineken has in NL with the Heineken Experience, the (‘THE’?) Norwegian beer-brand Ringnes has its Ølsenter, a Beer Museum within their old brewery in Grünerløkka, Oslo where they arrange beer tastings and other beer-related activities. Tonight we went there with a group from work to uhhh, learn about the history of beer 😉 …well, as it was all in Norwegian, spoken fast and pretty technical, I didn’t learn much, the drinking and tasting part however was pretty easy to follow, hehe…yummmm! 😉

Going back home afterwards felt like a ‘Driving home for Christmas’…indeed, snow came early this year! Jeez, it’s October 21 and we’ve had the first snow of the season, it’s gonna be a looonnngggggg winter!!

It’s hard to miss anything that Apple announces these days; Apple is hot and trendy so literally *all* media are on top of its news. And today for a good reason…if only it was to see Steve Jobs presenting, he is a phenomenal presenter!

If you have some time, check out the video of today’s ‘Back to the Mac’ event and/or check your favorite tech–news site for more information on the announcements today.

A short wrap-up:

New in software

– iLife 11; updates for iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, iDVD and iWeb. It has some very cool new features such as creating hollywood-style trailers (within 5 minutes!) with iMovie. Available today!

– FaceTime for Mac; giving you the ability to do FaceTime chat with other Macs, iPhone 4 or the new iPod Touch; Beta release out today!

– Mac App Store; the App Store that we know and love from iOS revamped for your Mac, finding and installing new software will be *easy*; it will open within 90 days!

– Mac OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’; in which the good of iOS meets OS X, including Multi-Touch Gestures, App Store, App Home Screens, Full Screen Apps, Auto Save and Apps Resume When Launched…the interface looked promising, expect it summer 2011

New in hardware

– New MacBook Air; where the MacBook meets the iPad…two stunning devices (13.3″ and 11.6″) that are powerful as a laptop, yet almost as thin and light as a tablet…they’re available today, wow!