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Great timing to be in NL today, just in time  for Sinterklaas, the dutch family tradition that was the initial model for Santa Claus type of Xmas celebration elsewhere…so indeed, that means shitloads of presents! The special thing is that most of the presents are WITH a rhyme…fun to make, fun to read!

pohodafestival.sk: Bažant Pohoda Festival 2010 will take place one week earlier than in the previous years – on the second weekend of July. The venue remains the same – the Trenčín airfield. This date change is due to a Pilgrimage near Trenčín on  July 17 every year…The 14th annual Bažant Pohoda Festival will kick off July 8, 2010 and will run to July 10, 2010.

No matter what, you can be sure that I will go, together with Robbert…ha, we didn’t miss a year since 2005!

Ticket sales for early birds starts coming Monday and for the first time the organization put a  limitation on capacity (around 30.000 tickets)…I assume the lather is due to this years disaster and panic.

Yeah, it’s that time of the year: it’s time to get ‘Lost’. The TV series has reached Season 5 and watching it from DVD (or did I find it on the Net? ;)) is a perfect way to spend the long dark December evenings. As ‘usual’ it’s hard to stop watching as all episodes are available ‘under the button’ so that means short nights. Oh well, there are only 6 episodes left to watch, the end is coming close (and, ’24’ Season 7 is next haha)!

Winter has arrived!

The picture below says it all; it’s the first time I see the garden ‘packed’ in a whopping 10cm layer of snow!

Also, on the way home today I saw that the ski slope close by the house is open, the Oslo-ring has its half yearly 60kph speeding limit *and* the bimmer got a brand new set of winter tires (as the old set turned out to be TOO old and unsafe)…

Yeah, winter has arrived and I-am-ready for it!!

Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang…I just LOVE this song!! 😉

Technology makes it now possible to create an ad like this without having to train a dozen babies in ‘roller-skate-camp’! 😉

Oh, and just so you know: I don’t get paid for pointing you to this ad. After all, Evian spelled backwards becomes Naive! 😉

My early sign-up for Google Wave turned into an invite today, finally hehe! 😉

Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool designed to merge your different ways of Internet communication (e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, social networking, etc.). I haven’t got much time to play with it yet, but will do in the coming weeks.

Robert Scoble (a.k.a. Scobleizer) describes Google Wave as follows:

“Imagine you had an infinitely-long strip of paper that you, and your friends, could write on anywhere along the strip. Imagine that you could write anywhere along that strip anytime, or even all at the same time.”

He btw. also comments that this initial thought has been put in an email interface making it useless…well, let’s see, perhaps it might be useless for an information junk as he is and not so useless for anyone else. 😉

Together with the invite today, I received 8 invites to give away…let me know if you want one, if I like the reason it’s yours!

Happy waving!

Useless Friday fun;

NosePod, the new integrated iPod speaker-set that always travels with you! 😉

I am in a three days meeting session held in a conference center just outside Oslo which is a special place for me:

Early 2007, just after I announced my resignation from my previous job, I was asked to participate in a team preparing a big proposal. The team was located in Norway and the job was indeed huge, which meant that we needed to sit together on a week-on week-off basis.

The first meeting took place in the same conference center that I am in now.

My historical achievements and approach in that process were apparently seen by the Norwegian management who then started talking with me whether or not I would be interested in moving to Norway and join the company there.

My initial reaction was; ‘we can talk, but knowing the company as well as I do (I worked there for almost 10 years already) and having an ambition to do something else, it will probably lead to nowhere’. Well, we talked a bit more (and a bit more) and then I received an offer for a very challenging, newly created, position. I decided to go for it and move my life to Norway, starting mid June 2007…the rest, as they say, is history. And, I have no regrets…am still loving it here everyday!

I blogged about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on September 10 last year when the system was first started up. Only nine days after that event the LHC operations had to be stopped due to a serious equipment fault which took over a year to repair.

The system recently has been put back in operation and only three days after that, on November 23, the first high-energy collisions (colliding beams) occured!

The good news of all this: WE ARE STILL HERE! (there are people who believe that the LHC will cause the earth to vanish in a black hole…?!?)

And now the scientists can start their quest to proof that time travel is possible! 😉

In light of yesterdays post on Global Warming, have a look at the following ad (which I think is aweful btw.):

The term Global Warming has changed to ‘Climate Change’, which is an interesting term in itself; the climate is ALWAYS changing…one day it rains, the next day the sun shines…;)

I have expressed my disbelieve in the Global Warming ‘trend’ several times before, and in the last days more fuel was put on the debate after several 1000’s of emails and documents were hacked out of the Climate Research Unit‘s email-server, the CRU is one of the United Kingdom’s leading climate research centers. Interestingly enough the news is not HUGE in mainstream media (I wonder why…yeahyeah, read this telegraph.co.uk article and you’ll understand). Listen to the latest No Agenda show with Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak, they talk about it (and not only in this episode btw. 😉 ) roughly 10 minutes into the show.

Whether or not this new info is truly proof that Global Warming is a hoax or not (driven by politics, funding a new industry and overall intended to regain power and control over people/society), it doesn’t mean that we can now safely continue polluting our environment…on the contrary; I still believe that we ALWAYS have be conscious and live in balance with nature…peace out.

During the Onze Taal (’Our Language’) congress in Utrecht, the word ‘twitteren’ was elected Word of the Year 2009 in The Netherlands. The word means ‘to twitter’, a trend that has gone completely mainstream in 2009.

I first tweeted on July 6 2009: ‘Just subscribed to Twitter…couldn’t hold off any longer 🙂‘

This brilliant Monty Python clip has been on my mind for weeks now…about time to put it on the blog! 😉

Hilarious!

Tonight we have the traditional Xmas dinner/party (‘Julebord‘) with work (yes, November 20 might seem early, but remember this is Norway and Julebord should be late November/early December! 😉 ). I say ‘we’ since it is the first time that partners are invited too, nice! It will a special evening at a restaurant run by a master of the culinary art and we’ll have our own DJ for the night…hmm, I suppose that means it will be PARTYYYY!!!

So, first day back at work, stuck in a customer meeting the whole day (a good one, so I don’t complain 😉 ) and now in a restaurant ready to enjoy a splendid fish dinner…hehe, it’s good to be back! 😉 …also good because I got my new iPhone, the 3GS! Knowing the iPhone it took me less than a minute to have it up and configured AND to have the WordPress for iPhone application among others installed. This is the first blogpost from it and (of course!) it works like a charm! 😉

I’m back in Norway, and…JETLAGGED!! Am trying to hang in there until the early evening and then crash (haven’t slept on the Bonaire-Amsterdam flight, but did doze off for an hour orso from Amsterdam-Oslo.

All went well, luckily no problems with the standby flying this time although the come back to Norway had some surprises; a flat car battery was one of them…:( Luckily that got sorted out pretty fast so we didn’t loose too much time on the airport parking lot.

Ahhh, home sweet home…a COLD home I might add too, damn! There is no electrical heating at the moment and it takes some time to warm up the place with just wood in the fireplace, brrrr…such a difference with Bonaire!!

That’s it; vacation time is over. 🙁 At least, IF we make it on the flight back to Amsterdam, one is never sure when flying on standby.
It should be fine though, yesterdays airplane was delayed by a day, and most people should have been put on different flights already. That means that there are two flights will half the amount of passengers…hey, hey, who knows, we might be upgraded to Business Class! 😉
I’ll tweet it if we make it on the flight, so
check my Twitter status from around 10pm (European time).

BoB, Boating on Bonaire, a perfect activity for our last day on the island. We rented a small 19ft motorboat with enough power (115hp) for some fun! 😉
Sunbathing, boating around Klein Bonaire, snorkling at some spots that we could not reach before from the shore, drinking bubbles…life is grande!

We decided to spend another day sunbathing on the quiet beaches of Klein Bonaire, vacation time is almost over and we ‘needed’ the extra suntan. 🙂 It wasn’t too quiet since some americanos wanted everyone to know that they have a great soundsystem on board of their yacht, typical. Oh well, let them be, as long as I can still listen to my own tunes while juggling, everyone’s happy! Metallica’s Black Album (with the energetic ‘Enter Sandman’ as first track) is a great ‘juggle-album’…;)

I thought we’ve done enough moving for this year, but even during vacation we are into moving!
We already knew that the bungalow would not be available for the whole period of our stay, so today we moved into an apartment for the last three days. It sounds worse than it is (I at least associate apartments with huge buildings rising high up in the sky…;)), this apartment is great; cool interior, a swimming pool, cozy veranda, hammocks…just about everything one needs to relax, and that’s just what we do! 😉