raymondpoort.com

Everyone knows I *love* my cats…if only I had a piano, they would rock da house! 😉

As mentioned yesterday, my sister (Martine) was due to deliver any day…well, she ‘decided’ to pick her own Birthday as THE day!

Yesterday evening at 20.30h she and my brother in law (Arjan) got a baby boy, named Tygo! Everything is good with mother and son…and father…and grandfather/grandmother (this is a first timer!)…:)

Long live Skype, as I was able to see the baby live last night, wow! I’ll put up a picture later.

Sjeez….I am uncle Raymond now! 🙂

My sister has her Birthday today, 30 no less…as ‘we’ say in Norway: Gratulerer med deg!!

She’s also (very) pregnant and due to deliver any day…the doctors calculated the baby to come on the 25th, that IS tomorrow! Wow, I’m gonna be uncle!!

OK, thanks for all the advice and tips; I made up my mind and have decided to go with WordPress as blogging tool for my .com domain!

Basically I feel like learning something new and since WordPress has a lot more features and development going on, it will bring me more.

To be honest, the main reason I choose Pivot back in 2005, was the fact that I didn’t have a MySQL database in my hosting package…and I am WAY too cheap to pay extra for something I think should be standard! 😉

Well, I’m not leaving Pivot entirely (yet?), but am interested in getting cross-posting working for both domains, so, between Pivot and WordPress that is. I should have the time coming weekend to work on things and go live!

My baby is flying to Houston coming weekend and….might come back with an iPhone!!! That would be soooo cool!

If things go as hoped, I expect the phone (sorry, the iPhone!) to come with the latest and greatest software (v 1.1.3, released during last weeks MacWorld)…that means I’m up for two challenges:

1. jailbreak it; in order to use all its functionalities except the phone

2. SIM unlock it; so I can use it with a different carrier than the U.S. based AT&T

All information I found on the net so far shows that the v 1.1.3 jailbreak is done, but will only be made available in February. 🙁  The SIM unlock might require some additional hardware, but I expect that software solutions will be available soon…right, developers??

Am wondering if I could downgrade the software to the previous version (v 1.1.2) for the time being, it would make things a lot easier!

Woo-hooooo, am thrilled! (yeahyeah, I *do* realize I sound like a geek hehe;))

Here’s another ‘cultural difference’ between The Netherlands and Norway;

In Norway most water taps in public buildings (toilets of bars for instance) use a mixer tap with a single valve, allowing you to mix the water temperature as you like.

In The Netherlands most of water taps in public places are just single taps, supplying only cold water.

I often see the mixer taps in Norway (in houses too) set in the middle position, providing a nice mix of warm water.

So, people here wash their hands generally with warm water, while most people in The Netherlands wash their hands with cold water…hmm, could it be that Norwegians warm up their hands this way in order to protect them from freezing off in the generally colder temperature in Norway??

Hehe, and I thought I emigrated to the land of tough Vikings! 😉

In 2005 Steve Jobs delivered a commencement speech to the
graduates of Stanford University…it’s less then 15 minutes and I recommend everyone to take this time and listen to what he has to say…trust me, you will learn from it.

…everything happens for a reason!

The transcript of this great speech can be found in the Stanford University News Service Archives.

TGIF!

Am pretty knackered after an intensive week, but still have some energy left to go to the Balkan Beat Party tonight in Oslo!

It’s becoming very popular and I’m sure it’s an interesting experience when Vikings are mixing with people from the Balkan, topped off with a cheesehead twist! 😉

Hey, hey…it is party time!!!

Will be working on the .com domain and weblog coming weekend (it’s still a re-direct to the .nl website).

Did not make up my mind yet on what weblog tool to use…I’ll either give WordPress a try (it seems to be the most popular tool out there), or stick with Pivot…can use some advice here, anyone?

Still having ‘Airy’ thoughts crossing my mind…this notebook ROCKS!

I know some people are expecting a blogpost from me on Apple’s latest announcements as made by Steve Jobs today at MacWorld. 🙂

I just watched his Keynote speech so, here we go!

Steve said he liked to talk about four things today:

1. Time Capsule. It’s a companion product for Time Machine, basically an Airport Extreme basestation with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive enabling backing up wirelessly

2. New iPhone features; Maps with location (a great, innovative way to find your actual position by triangulating signals from WiFi Hotspots and GSM celltower information!)…Webclips…Customize home
screen(s)…SMS multiple people at once…Chapters, subtitles, languages…Lyrics support

The iPod touch got the same new features as well as some new apps; Mail…Maps…Stocks…Notes…Weather

3. iTunes
movie rentals, Every major studio is on board offering over 1,000 movies already. You’ll be able to start watching instantly within 30
seconds on all Macs & PCs, iPods and iPhones.

And, as for content on your TV at home…a new version of the Apple TV software allows movie rentals directly on your widescreen TV! This is Apple TV, Take 2 which doesn’t need a computer allowing you
to rent movies in HD quality with Dolby 5.1, play Podcasts and view photos from
Flickr & .Mac, watch YouTube movies, buy TV shows and music and of course still play all iTunes content from Macs & PCs

The tagline for this years MacWorld was; There’s something in the Air…well, there is…and it is called:

4. MacBook Air! World’s thinnest laptop. The features: 3.0 pounds (around 1.4kg),
measures 0.16 – 0.76 inches (thinnest to thickest part), 13.3″ widescreen
display, Full size and backlit keyboard, multi-touch gestures trackpad, iSight camera built in, 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB memory 80 GB hard drive, 64 GB Solid State Drive as option, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, Magsafe.

There is no optical drive, options are either a MacBook Air external optical drive or new software that allows you to “borrow” a Mac
or PC’s optical drive over a Wi-Fi network. The battery life is a stunning 5 hours.

Just look at the pictures below, and be sure…this is what I wanna have!

Steve didn’t end with a ‘oh, and one more thing’, instead he mentioned that all of the above is introduced in the first 2 weeks of 2008, and there are still 50 more weeks to come. 🙂

I just finished an EXCELLENT Indian dinner prepared for Andrea’s Birthday, our dutch friend who decided to celebrate this event with us up North in freezing Norway…uhh, freezing? The temperature skyrocketted to a stunning +3 dgr Celcius today. Melting the fresh snow as only snow can, even without sun! 🙂

Not much too time for late night Birthday festivities though…am flying out to The Netherlands tomorrow early morning, business meetings until Thursday…hehe, I hope I’m able to tune in to Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech tomorrow!

MacWorld, the yearly event where Apple kicks off the New Year will be held in San Francisco coming week.

This years tag-line is: ‘2008 There’s something in the air’:

Last year the iPhone was announced…so, what will be BIG this year? Tune in to Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech, Tuesday January 15, at 18:00h CET…it’s a great experience to see him on stage!

Am off to have dinner celebrating the New Year at a small restaurant close to the ski-area Trollsvan near Oslo. As the place is owned by a dutch guy (Robbert) I expect a nice Dutch/Norwegian combination of food, drinks and entertainment!

As you might know it is not possible to download the movies directly from YouTube. There are however some sites that have a workaround making it possible to save the Flash Video (FLV-file) on your harddrive.

The process is itself fairly easy, just paste the link to the YouTube
video you want on to one of the following sites and download!

Since the
downloaded file will be a Flash video file (.flv), you will need a Flash Player
to play them. The ‘all-media-files’ player VLC will play them too, converting the file with a flv-to-mpg converter and then play it in Winblows MediaPlayer is another way 🙂

http://keepvid.com/

http://www.videolan.org/

The process is completed, my .com domain is now transfered and hosted via GoDaddy!

Have to admit, the pudding was sweet and contained just one tiny sour part; Email remained up sweet as honey, the website however was down for some hours 🙁

And it’s still not up as it should. All is caused by the domain forward not working properly. For now the domain is html re-directing to the .nl website and I guess it will remain that way for a while…hardly any time to work on it the coming days.

Am also thinking of changing the weblog tool from Pivot to WordPress, what do ya think?

I’m still a big fan of Guitar Hero (am saving up for a PS3 to rock at home!). At CES 2008 Veronica Belmont shows us ‘Air Guitar Hero’…yeah, this thing ROCKS!

Check out Mahalo Daily with Veronica Belmont for your daily shot of geek stuff.

As said before, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’…so, let’s eat!

I just finished the last steps of the .com domain transfer and set up the hosting account. Have to admit, the migration process so far went really smooth, it just took some days (and the weekend inbetween didn’t help I guess).

Current status for the domain hosting is ‘Pending DNS’, so by the time the new location for this domain (with GoDaddy) is propagated through the root nameservers (appr. 24-48 hours) I should be good to go!

The MX-records are already adjusted for Google Apps and I have set a domain forward to the .nl domain (actually matching what it is today). This means that opposite to what I thought earlier, there should be no downtime for the website nor email…fingers crossed!

Oh man, this better be fixed before the airliner is used in commercial flights…and let’s just hope they don’t run any Microsoft Windows! 😉

Wired: "Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security
vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow
passengers to access the plane’s control systems, according to the U.S.
Federal Aviation Administration.

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment,
designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to
the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA
report reveals."

One of the cultural differences between The Netherlands and Norway is the social behaviour on the streets. Everbody has a phone to his ear, nobody is noticing anything anymore, or looking at eachother, or saying ‘hei’ when passing another.

It’s clearly related to the mobile age we’re living in, the mobile society where the ‘device’ seems more important than the one-to-one contact with the guy/girl sitting next to you. The fact that Norway/Scandinavia has a much longer tradition in mobile phones than other countries probably made this behavior a cultural thing which also prevails when people don’t have their cellphone at their ear.

Perhaps this situation is also different in Norway compared to NL due to population density.

Since your neighbor could be literally far away, the Norwegian culture has historically developed itself to be much more oriented on the individual and family, living in your own house and minding your own business (although one will ALWAYS help another when asked…Norwegians are far from a-social and of course I have been generalizing!)

Have to admit that I’m the kind of guy who always tries to greet the people I pass, make eye contact and smile…it’s just amazing to see what happens to the other person if you just smile, you should try it too! 🙂