raymondpoort.com

A long time wish will come true; I made up my mind and…Peru it will be! (plus some of Bolivia 😉 )

I am traveling to Inca country from August 24 until September 24, woohoooo!!! I am very much looking forward to this new experience, backpacking on my own for a month is a first timer for me…exciting!!

Tips are more than welcome! 😉

And I thought that finding the Peru flag would be easy; it turns out that there are multiple versions…hihi

Cherie Ve Ard: “You don’t have to live your life so that your life is suitable for small talk. Life can be lived in ways that circumnavigate a myriad of colors and landscapes.”

Chuck Sigars: “Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones.”

Clifton Fadiman: “Cheese – milk’s leap toward immortality.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The ancestor of every action is a thought.”

Apple’s iOS 7 beta releases keep coming in; today iOS 7 Beta 5 was released, just one week after Beta 4. I guess Apple is making sure that the final release will be available for its new iPhone 5S, somewhere September/October. 😉

No major changes in this release besides the standard ‘improvements, changes, and bug fixes to the operating system’ as well as a newly redesigned Settings icons and some more tweaks. Ha, iOS 7 has been a great experience so far; I am still a happy Beta tester/user. 😉

don Miguel Ruiz: “Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”

What starts of as an entertaining dance performance in the windows of the Red Light district, turns out to be a pretty strong and confronting message: ‘Every year, thousands of women are promised a dance career in Western Europe. Sadly, they end up here’…

STOP THE TRAFFIK is a global movement of individuals, communities and organisations fighting to prevent human trafficking around the world.

So you think you can dance? Well, perhaps a lap-dance is what they really meant…sad!

Jane Austen: “To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”

The Dutch Club Oslo organized a BBQ in the Frognerpark today and over 40 fellow dutchies joined for a sunny afternoon gathering at a  ‘designated area’ marked by a dutch flag on a bicycle. Great to see some friends and meet new people. Misha had a blast too; a whole field for himself, wow, and oh so many things to play with (besides a soccer ball 😉 ).

Laura Moncur: “Mighty hard to tell the people you love you’re a failure.”

Edith Sodergran: “The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.”

I changed the default representation of images on the weblog. They will now be loaded in a nice overlay instead of in a separate browser window/tab. I used the Lightbox JavaScript technique (extremely easy and smooth to install) and you can access all pictures in one post by clicking the arrow on the side of the image or using  the arrows on your keyboard (clicking anywhere outside the image frame or hitting the <esc> key will bring you back to the blogpost). You can still see the full version of the image if you want; just right-click the image and open it in a separate tab or window.

I am still testing, so let me know how this works for you.

As an example I included some of the fantastic pictures from last weeks trip to the South… 😉

Jennifer Hudson: “If you can’t take responsibility for your own well-being, you will never take control over it.”

Erica Jong: “A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”

ROTFLMAO!!

The YouTube clip below shows the ‘harshness’ of the German language as a joke, yet in a very funny way. Indeed, pretty harsh especially done this way; one of the ‘worst’ of the languages I know (I consider Dutch a close nr. 2 btw. 😉 ). There are two follow-ups videos which are just as funny as the original (part 2 and part 3)! 😉

Part 2:

Part 3:

W. H. Auden: “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”

Wow…this guy can draw!! His name is Xiaonan Sun (interview) and mannnn, is this guy talented!

Check out the full-color pastel portrait drawing of Chloe Grace Moretz below…unreal yet sooo realistic! Or the one below that; a two (!!) handed simultaneous drawing of Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins (honouring the movie Shawshank Redemption).

If you can’t get enough of it, check out his website at ThePortraitArt.com or his YouTube channel.

Dale Carnegie: “Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.”

I took loads of magnificent pictures during last weeks roadtrip to the South of Norway so the blue skies and green trees header graphic from end of May will have to go…the replacement is worth it though! 😉

The picture below shows the Lidnesnes Lighthouse on the southernmost tip of mainland Norway, stunning views as you can see!

Btw. I used the panorama feature on my iPhone and edited the image a little to obtain the image scale I need (830×315)…