raymondpoort.com

WTF?!?

Last Thursday Oslo went back to the ‘good’old’ days of the Wild Wild West; some men were shooting people with a so-called softgun (a kind of air gun) as if they were friggin’ desperados!!

The Aftenposten (norwegian newspaper) broke the story; believe it or not, the guy in the picture is my colleague…he was actually shot at!! Un-be-lie-va-ble!! Last news is that one guy was caught, reason yet unknown, but he bought the gun (intentionally) that same afternoon…

…and I moved to Norway since it seemed such a nice and ‘quiet’ country with enough space for everyone to be less stressed out? 😉

It’s one week ago since I came back from Slovakia and Czechia and I still don’t feel that i’m completely back in the real world…Pohoda 2008 ROCKED!! I wish it would last longer than it does, then again, I’d probably not survive more days/nights of continuous partying…;)

I’m writing this blogpost from my iPhone using the WordPress for iPhone application. It’s so much easier to write a post offline, being able to save it for later, upload pictures, etc. All of that is not possible via the web, so this application is an useful addition for my iPhone! There are still some items on my wishlist, mainly related to comment management and an admin interface, maybe in a next version…

Yay! Firmware v2.0 is running on my first generation iPhone (which also known as iPhone 2G referring to the 2nd generation EDGE network capabilities, confusing?!? ;)).

Next to do is finding and installing old and new applications. The Jailbreak provides me with two options; Apple’s AppStore and the Open Source Installer.app program ‘Cydia‘…the best of both worlds!

I just upgraded my WordPress installation on this blog to the latest version 2.6. Nothing dramatic changed, but some nice features were added (see the changelog).

No regrets since I changed from Pivot to WordPress, especially since WordPress released a native iPhone application allowing me to blog directly from my iPhone! Now I just have to wait for a sim-unlock on the latest iPhone 2.0 firmware, the ‘community’ got the Jailbreak already out while I was partying at Pohoda, so I expect the sim-unlock soon!

*** UPDATE ***

I just discovered that the PwnageTool, responsible for the Jailbreak, is actually able to unlock my iPhone since I have the ‘older’ 2G iPhone…the sim-unlock ain’t possible for the new iPhone 3G, THAT tricked me.

Hmm, I might wait a bit, because Installer.app is not updated yet and I rely on a lot of ‘third party’, non Appstore applications.

• Today started relaxed, as it should be…a good night sleep and not too much to do. Until I came to the office…jeez! Shitloads to do…wb? #
• Yay! I managed to get A LOT of kg’s through check-in! 😉 Boarded and waiting for departure…almost home! #
• Just landed in Oslo, waiting for luggage to arrive…I wanna go home! #
• Hmm, the bright yellow ‘priority’ tags they put on my luggage at check-in obviously don’t help, my bags came in last…anyway, they’re here! #
• DAMN!! Next to being the last bags on the belt, they also managed to completely wreck my suitcase!! I’m NOT amused 🙁 🙁 #

• Dobry den Czechia, and cau cau. 😉 Just left Prague, we’re back on da road! #
• I don’t fancy traffic jams… #
• Roadwork just before the Czech-German border…we just lost an hour 🙁 #
• Flying low, making up for lost time…I love the German highway! #
• @warzabidul let’s make some noise!! 😉 #
• Byebye Germany…full brakes, we’re back in NL, too many cams 🙁 #
• A three lane highway, hardly any traffic on the road and a speedlimit of 100km/h…welcome in NL, jeez! #
• Came back home (Robberts place)…time to go zzzz. Pohoda 2008 was great! #

• I guess it’s time to zzzzzz…good night/morning 😉 #
• Oof, waking up after two days of partying ain’t easy at all… #
• Wow, this is amazing; it started to drizzle right after we packed the tent!?! I don’t know who kept Pohoda dry for us, but THANK YOU! #
• Jeez, it took an hour to leave the festival terrain…a typical case of too many cars trying to leave all at once. #
• Driving to Prague, looking forward to wander through the city (it’ll be my first time there). #
• Wandering in the Old City of Prague…this city is stuffed with some amazing historic buildings. Guess what…we’re having a great time! #
• Where’s an umbrella when you need one? It started to rain… #
• Walking on ‘Karluv most’ (Charles’ bridge), check wikipedia for the details 😉 beautiful sunset behind the castle. #

• Fat Boy Slim was great, gonna dance the night away now… #
• Hello world! We’re back! 😉 I’m feeling great, let the festivities begin… #
• @evertak The Subways, Fat Boy Slim, Editors, The Streets, Lou Rhodes and some fine Slovak bands! #
• Just saw the whole of Slovakia go wild; Polemic on stage, a Slovak band obviously! Next; The Prostitutes…what’s in a name? 😉 #
• I’ve never heard of the Irish band ‘Bell X1’…I like what I see and hear! #
• It takes a Slovak band to make the crowd go beyond WILD!
  Para on stage, great to see so many people having fun, the energy is overwhelming!! #
• And another band rockin’ the stage and that I never heard of before, The Cribs from the UK…this festival is an eye-opener, again! 😉 #
• Editors…say no more! #
• Halfway a bottle of vodka/red bull…did the sun just set? 😉 #
• OK, the vodka is home…beer? Anynone? #
• ON, The Streets are AWESOME!! #

• Good morning Pohoda!! It’s great to wake up expecting rain and then realize it’s hot and sunny ;)…sweating in the tent, time to get up! 😉 #
• And the bands started to play…sun is shining, beer is tasting great; let the festival begin!;) The Subways are rockin’ the stage now, yay! #
• Oh shit, there are rain clouds coming…we’re gonna keep the spirit high, let the sun shine!! #
• It drizzled for 5 seconds and then the sun came back, not too bad! On stage; Jana Kirschner, a Slovak artist. #
• Just saw Gossip…man, that’s a BIG girl, and she’s proud of it! Great show! #
• Gocoo, a Japanese drumband *with* a didgeridoo…BRILLIANT!! #

• On da road…Pohoda here we come!!! #
• Close to Frankfurt already, not too much traffic, Robbert is driving…hehe, I love a good roadtrip! 😉 #
• No tweets for some time; indeed, I was driving the car through Germany. 😉 Close to the Austrian border now, so 2/3 is done! #
• Austria is as it is every year; no fun at all!! And as expected it’s raining cats and dogs, quite a challenge to avoid them on the road…;) #
• Bratislava baby YEAH!! Dinner in Aupark shopping center. The rain is pissing down here as well so setting up the tent will be a challenge… #
• Pohoda, we’re here!! Doing some shopping at the nearby Tesco, we need some plastic to put the tent on 😉 the rain ain’t gonna spoil the fun! #
• HALLELUJAH!!! It stopped raining the moment we arrived at the festival terrain!! This is gonna be friggin’ GREAT!! #

The WordPress Twitter Tools plugin is enabled again on the blog so the daily Twitter digest is here again!

I’m out, having a great time at the Pohoda festival in Slovakia…back on Monday!

Two days from uhh, NOW to be precise 😉 I will be in Trencin, Slovakia, with the tent set up and ready to party the weekend away at Pohoda 2008, the festival that Robbert and I go to for the fourth year in a row now (it will be my fifth time actually!). Headliners this year; Fatboy Slim, The Streets, Gossip and Editors!

Apple released MobileMe last week, an update of their online service, .Mac.

I have been a .Mac subscriber for a couple of years now and mainly used it for document and photo storage and backup service for my Mac Mini. The MobileMe update adds a very nice feature, push Email/Contacts/Calendar…and THAT is what I want on my iPhone! 😉

Then, since a couple of years I am a huge supporter of Gmail, the lightweight, yet superfunctional online email application. Later on followed by Google Apps; a great way to use share documents and calendars online.

The dilemma;

Should I migrate everything to MobileMe or stick with Google, hoping they will introduce push Email/Contact/Calendar sometime in the future?

Well, I refuse to change my emailaddress, so I need Apple to be able to host my domain email, which is not possible at the moment I believe…I guess I will wait a while with a full migration then.

But you bet I am gonna sync the Google Apps data (email, contacts and calendar) with MobileMe and have Apple push everything to my iPhone, sweet!!

I told myself not to write on this topic on THE iPhone day last week (Friday), but today should be fine…so, I don’t think anyone has missed the launch of Apple’s latest gadget; iPhone 3G, ah? 😉

A new design, integrated GPS and high speed data (3G, giving the iPhone its new name) are the main improvements. Besides this, Apple released a version 2.0 of the firmware, replacing v1.1.4, providing access to the AppStore, a marketplace for Apple approved applications and also brings MS Exchange push email support…which is HUGE for me, since I use my iPhone at work.

I’m still very happy with my original iPhone (which we should probably call iPhone Classic from now on?!? ;)) and can’t wait until the developer community (either the iPhone Dev Team, Zibri or Geohot) brings the ‘easy as 1,2,3’ tool for jailbreaking, unlocking and activating my iPhone ‘Classic’ with the new v2.0 firmware…and if the rumours are proven to be spot on, that could be as soon as this week!

Wow! This one is very touching…sound on.

It’s pretty interesting to see how a Social Network builds up over time…yesterday I reached the ‘milestone’ of 100 people following me on Twitter.

It is interesting since most of my real-life friends are not nearly as geeky as I am ;), haven’t heard of Twitter at all, so; no followers there :(…(if only they knew/realized the power of Twitter, oh well ;)).

Next to that, I’m not the kind of Social Network Junk who just follows everyone I can find on the web (and then get a lot of followers back…the ‘I scratch your back if you scratch mine’ technique). No, most of the people I follow have been carefully selected…the rest are people who started to follow me first and, if they are interesting enough, I will follow them back.

Finally I found a perfect way to update my blog on days that I am without a proper internet connection!

I use the Twitter functionality to send a Tweet via SMS and then congregate the tweets of a day as one blogpost in a daily digest, via the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin.

This way I make sure that people who read my blog via a RSS newsreader, like Google Reader, or via the imported blogposts on my Hyves and Facebook pages, stay up to date!

Ofcourse, people who browse to my blog directly are reading my tweets on the sidebar of the mainpage (in realtime ;))…to minimize the inconvenience of double information I will disable the Twitter Tools daily digest for days that I am (/should be) able to write a normal blogpost. 😉

It took nearly four years, but during my vacation Dawn and Drew (finally) caught up with Adam Curry, that is, in number of podcasts of their original podcasts; the Dawn and Drew Show and the Daily Source Code.

Dawn Micelli and Drew Domkus started their podcast on September 23 2004…back in the days when a podcast wasn’t even called a podcast and just before I had my encounter with Adam Curry on the dutch A4 highway. Adam wasn’t counting at the time, but already had a number of Daily Source Code’s out, he kept this ‘lead’ until last week (even though it never has been a competition ;))…the Dawn and Drew Show is at #778 now, Adam’s Daily Source Code at #774…and I? I keep listening! 😉

• The first day at home after vacation is filled with those typical things…unpacking, washing, more washing and even more washing…;) #
• Playing Mario Kart on the Wii…fun fun fun! 😉 #