I want these, all of them (almost, that is)

You know that slight panicky feeling, when you need inspiration for cool and not-too-expensive x-mas gifts? Preferably geeky ones? Just found this link on Huffington Post, some of these ideas are worth bookmarking for personal consummation and for lots o' upcoming birthday wishlists.

Like this Polaroid: I remember reading about Polaroid fans trying to bring it back to life, seems like that worked out OK. Big thanx to The Impossible team!

I'm back

Drowned a bit in the analog world these last few months. Gone under due to some surgery and a couple of weeks of well earned rest @ home ...interesting to note that, when you finally have the time to start reading again -really reading, like one new book every other day- the blogsphere fades away. Oh, I had the laptop nearby for an occasional Facebook update and to check for professional emergencies but when you never talk about private stuff on FB and when there are no emergencies, life can get really ... restful. Which was the point to begin with.

I'm crazy about this stuff

The Niche Market Mountains, the Old Facebook Resistance up north, the Great Firewall near the Gulf of China, the Bay of Drama, ... as always to be found on xkcd.com and yes, you should click on the map and enjoy the details!

The story? This guy works for www.belgium.be and writes rap songs. The fact that he filmed a clip giving a rather depressing impression of 'a day in the life' hasn't gone unnoticed by his bosses who promptly felt he needed some serious talking to ... never heard of humor?

cool tool

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

 ... and the FF is actually fairly stable, while Chrome gains and IE looses. FF not really part of the browser war.

The Nabazmob: smart rabbits indeed

As seen yesterday evening @ the ICT2010.eu reception held in the Koninklijke St Hubertus Gallerij in the centre of Brussels: the Opera for 100 Smart Rabbits. 100 Nabaztags perform an opera, transmitted via WiFi. Each rabbit has a small loudspeaker in its stomach and the combination of the lights and the choreographed ears gives the whole performance a magical touch.

You'd expect this performance to be relatively new -especially when it's one of the attractions at a ICT2010 event but it has been created in ... 2006. Makes me wonder ...

The creators have a website and this is what the performance is all about: this opera questions the issues of working together, organization, decision and control, which are increasingly central and difficult in our contemporary world.


I'll stick to 'magical'.

Why the Internet will fail (said Newsweek in 1995)

"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney."

Or so said a Newsweek article, published in 1995 and recovered by the blog ThreeWordChant, where you can read the full article. This is the era of Usenet (BBS), of the first mobile phones in the workplace, the shift from desktops to laptops (but nothing to be compared with what we use now). I should check my old professional files: I'd probably come up with this kind of stuff as well. The only part of it which isn't totally wrong is the part about a more democratic government. Still a long way to go there.

And I would absolutely love for someone to take 15 years of Forrester reports with 5 year predictions and calculate how often they were wrong. Or any other big consulting firm, for that matter.

To be a little kid again ...

It's not as if I have an iPad or plan to buy me one any day soon but even die-hard Apple-bashers have to admit that these tools bring out the best in some publishers.

Imagine working for Penguin Books' interactive division and be able to create this stuff. 3D Pop-up books for the iPad.  This is soooo cute. Enjoy!

Thank you, Leonard ...

... for a fantastic concert last Saturday in Ghent. It was a magical night, cloudless, warm breeze, perfect soundmix, great musicians and you, of course. Although I must admit I've never been much of a fan: Leonard Cohen, that's sixties stuff (before my time) and The Future is a CD my mom used to play a lot. When I bought tickets it was more of a 'let's go see him because he may never be coming back' kind of motivation so I was completely caught off guard by your impact. Of course you are a ladies man, but still. And what a playlist. You started at 20PM and played till a couple of minutes before midnight, half an hour intermission included. Such energy, such grace, such a gentleman.

By far the most sexy 75+ I ever saw :-)

Who'd have hunched it was Belgium?

As a starter: I'm not convinced. Hunch.com, the new toy created by Caterina Fake (Flick'r) basically claims to personalize the internet by asking its users a bunch of questions, thus creating profiles and link these to services, products, destinations, ... based on gathered profile data. I don't see why I would bother leaving my very personal information on likes and dislikes out there in Cyberspace but hey, maybe that's a generational thing.

What Hunch.com also does (and my guess is that's where the money is) is data-mine this pile of data. They keep a blog in which they come up with fancy new demographics. On the subject of travelling:
- women prefer to travel to Europe: in particular to 'civilised countries like Belgium, Ireland or Greece
- when Americans in general travel they again think Belgium and the UK are the countries to visit
- Europeans on the other hand seem to think Finland is the country to visit

Hunch.com claims that their registered users have already answered more than 50 million questions and are registering at a rate of 3000 a day. It would be interesting to know where they come from.

One example of user feedback: 'whoooaaa! (...) It's so accurate! 80% of the stuff (in this case: recommendations linked to his profile) I already have/use.

My point exactly. Where's the added value? Why bother?

Scary stuff, living in the States

... even when you are a law-abiding, succesfull, well integrated Syrian immigrant. Just finished the Dave Eggers book "Zeitoun", the unbelievable tale of a Muslim entrepreneur who decides to stay at home when Katrina is about to drown New Orleans. His family (wife, 4 kids) have left town and during the first couple of days he peddles around in a cano, helping people, distributing food, feeding animals, ... till the day he gets arrested in his own home as a looter and a terrorist.

What follows defies even the most pessimistic views on American society and the States as a police state where army and special forces can disregard even the most minimal of civic rights.

Zeitoun is alive and well and still living in New Orleans.

And about Katrina: it wasn't Katrina that flooded New Orleans. It was the neglect of engineers who didn't build the necessary safety constructions to protect the city. New Orleans was flooded before Katrina hit the coast. And when she did, she veered away from New Orleans and never reached it. You could say the engineers displayed the same human arrogance as the police forces.

How to survive the Apocalyps

It seems even in End-of-The-World scenario's there is a wide gap between the Have's and the Have not's. If you are rich enough (and crazy enough, I might add but maybe both go together) you can buy yourself a 50K package to survive in a luxury shelter when nuclear winter sets in.

The complex has everything, even a jail and ... Internet, apparantly. I would think that, after a nuclear or other blast, .... never mind.

Depressing thought, spending the End-of-Your-Life amongst people who think this is a great idea. No wonder Fastcompany thinks it's a design crime.

Another holiday gone by

Just back from two weeks in a beautiful holiday home which we'll remember especially for its salamanders on the walls, frogs and toads in the swimming pool, incredible starry nights, great view, great wine, great quiet and of course, great kids and a very restful stay. Dordogne country, swamped with Brits, the village being St Meard de Gurçon, the hamlet Les Bonnins. (Looking at their website, going to live there and help them out a bit would be a good idea ...)

Byebye Florane, we will miss you.

Remembering

How strange it feels that my mum would have turned 75 today. I often wonder how she would look at all that happened these last 18 months, if she could come back just for a little while. And how much I would ask her if she did.

75. ...I'm not sure she would've liked it, turning 75. Oh well ... Happy Birthday Mum.

I need an infograpic's section here

My kinda car

Ever heard of Henrik Fisker? Used to be head of design at Aston Martin and responsible for such beauties as the DB9. What happens when such a guy decides to start his own car company? And does it in an era in which most of the majors are in deep trouble or going down the drain?

He builds a Fisker and calls it Karma.

And to be more precise, he goes and challenges Nissan, GM and, above all Tesla (if the look of the Fisker is anything to go buy) by building an electrified car. Wired compares Henrik to Tucker, Delorean or Ford: visionary car builders, not all succesful, alas. Henrik is starting out differently. Lean and mean. Designing a car in 2 months instead of 12. Using suppliers to create, build and test parts instead of producing everything in house. A green car in a new economic environment. And already 1600 waiting customers.

Let's not talk about the pricetag, OK? Let's not spoil it. And don't you just love those Titanic hands in the picture?

A very cool infographic on Google Search

Infographic by PPC Blog

Invisible Art?

Walking regularly through the Brussels Wetstraat, heading for the centre, I pass an open air exhibition set up by the www.thehumanrightsproject.org. Kinda hard finding them online, if you Google stuff like human rights project.org ... but found them anyway. The frustrating thing is that so far, no one ever bothers to stop, look and digest what they are seeing here. Let me quote from the site as to what the aim of the project is: 


"The Declaration of Human Rights is a manifest that evolved from the founding of the United Nations in 1948. Whether or not it was meant by all UN participants as an achievable maxim for the post war world, it does remain a vital testimonial to the assumption that the people of the entire world should have access to the dignity of their species. However, a cursory glance around the world today makes clear that the 30 articles contained within the declaration of Human Rights have, for the most part, been ignored, and are likely to remain ignored (...) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated into 360 languages, there has never been a visual interpretation of this kind of the complete Declaration of Human Rights." Which means it's picture stories we get to see here, powerful images.

This one illustrates the fact that everyone has a right to education (article 26).


Please take a moment to look at them, when you pass them by? 

I'm a sucker for Moleskin notebooks. For lot's of notebooks actually, for nicely made notebooks and writing tools in particular. Ordning & Reda for example or Paperblanks with their incredibly beautiful 'old' covers. But Moleskin tops them all. Thats' because they not only hold on to the legendary aura of little black books used by journalists, coppers and writers but because they also keep up with changing times.

Moleskin has created an e-reader cover, a Kindle cover to be more precise. On the outside it looks and feels like a Moleskin, rounded corners and elastic band included. On the inside you can insert your Kindle and keep it in place with ... 4 elastic bands. What's more, it comes including two reporter-style notebooks with blank ivory paper.

The nice thing is: the original idea comes from a community of so called Moleskin hackers. They can be found all over the web, creating new tools based on the classic Moleskin product. Moleskin is just smart enough to listen to them and to use these ideas. Check out the Moleskin site, it contains interesting way's of digital-analog marketing.

Back to the future: Tron

This is an oldies post. Or a Geek Dad's post.

Who remembers Tron, the hopelessly flopped movie, released in 1982? Notwithstanding the fact that it got Oscar nominations, it failed miserably at the box office. Tron was the story of  hacker who is literally abducted into the world of a computer and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program (called TRON). 

In 1982 computers could generate static images, but could not automatically put them into motion. Thus, the coordinates for each image, such as a lightcycle, had to be entered for each individual frame. It took 600 coordinates to get 4 seconds of film. Each of these coordinates was entered into the computer by hand by the filmmakers. So imagine what we could do today, with the technology we have.


Well: TRON is back. Disney is planning a release for the end of this year and is already merchandising the toys that are to go with it. Check out this cool "zero gravity light cycle' that cas run across ceilings.

Something tells me this new TRON will be incomparable to the old one. Which makes the old one vert futuristic indeed. With thanx to www.fastcompany.com for the image.

Newspapers for adolescents? Manga them!

They call Japan a newspaper-crazy country. The Yomiuri Shimbun has a circulation that's 10 times the circulation of The New York Times (not that this is saying much: the NYT circulation has nosedived these last months). But just as everywhere else the younger generations are not reading newspapers as much as their parents, here's an interesting alternative: the Manga No Shimbun.

Now how cool is that: a website employing more than a 100 Manga-artists who cover the week's news and breaking stories, updating up to 15 times a day. Available for iPhone and Android. With thanx to Wired.

Somewhat less fed up or worried ...

... as our elections turned out to deliver two totally-opposing monster-victories on both sides of the language border they are doomed to get together and TALK.

Which means we might actually move forward.

Fed up and worried sick ...

... about these upcoming elections. Will we wake up in a totally different country altogether on Monday morning? Do all these people who will vote for NVA and Bart De Wever really want an independent Flanders or do they just want to make clear some things urgently need to change and change is not going to come from the traditional parties? What will happen to our economy if it takes months again before we have a new government? Do the French speaking politicians really only care about language issues instead of the economic crisis, the need for budgetary cuts and a very stringent policy the coming years? How is it possible that a major PS politician claims she has never ever even spoken to Bart De Wever? Will he really become Prime Minister? How can a Flemish rightist nationalist become Prime Minister of the whole country? Why are the words "Flemish" and "rightist" synonyms? Doesn't the fact that 75% of Flemish voters will not vote NVA count for nothing? How long would a government De Wever 1 last? Why won't these questions in my head stop?

An unexpected design subject: license plates

You might not have paid attention but we have been having these absolutely ridiculous discussions in Belgium on migrating the Belgian white-plate-red-digits license plate  towards the European format (7 digits, area for European flag and country code, black digits on a white background). And instead of just deciding to change, we are now fighting over which colours to use and it has become a language issue ...

Anyway.

How nice it must be to be able to design your own license plate (and I'm not talking vanity plates here) or have them designed by real designers.

Check out these cool designs for numberplates in the US.  Some of them are really over the top and some, like this one, are really quite cool. For the fans: an overview of designs going way back to 1969, when cars still looked great and so, apparently, did license plates.

Or at least they looked colourful.

A much better idea for a blog

For those of you who do not want to blog about general stuff, vaguely related to professional interests, personal emotions, love-it-or-hate-it issues and the like, take this as an example: the by-now-famous blog of a guy writing up different uses for the wedding dress his ex-wife left him when she ... left him.

I confess, I read about it some time ago and didn't pick it up. Meanwhile Huffington Post did. So did MSN and AOL. Someone mentioned it during a presentation on last Friday's Search University Seminar in Brussels. Which reminded me to go and have a look again and check if this guy was still at it. Yesss he is. So enjoy!

And, btw: his blog is called www.myexwifesweddingdress.com. Now how cool is that ;-)?

crazy ideas for us poor office workers

I had never heard of Steven M. Johnson. He creates these weird ideas for using workspaces or turning them into fascinating environments. What to think of the rollabout desks that you park at the end of the day like you would a cart in the supermarket? Or the Squirrel Cage Work Station! But this is my favourite.

To dream the impossible dream: wireless earphones

Funny, actually. A couple of years ago the great magazine on IT and lifestyle, Bright, had some kind of contest on applications or tools that its readers thought had to be invented. The result was a wishlist containing ideas like wireless electricity, flexible screens and the like. We are talking 2006. I suggested wireless earphones and got selected in the list.

Last night I attended another great BGGD 27 in Antwerp, courtesy of Sony Ericsson, where a new generation phones was presented: the impressive Xperia 10 and it's xperia 10 mini version, along with some background features information. In the wake of this BGGD 27 Sony organizes a contest through which we can win one.All we have to do is post a new idea on se.dot and hope for the best.


And guess what: 4 years later we still don't have wireless earphones. As Sony is first and foremost connected to music (after all, they did invent the Walkman), I thought relaunching this idea would be kinda fun. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I still can't believe that wireless earphones haven't been invented yet. I must be missing something.

Talking about cool infographs

... what to say about this one: the impact of computers on the environment. You think being virtual is being green? Think again!

state of web development 2010

These results of a professional web survey amongst developers and designers gives an interesting overview of technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices in web development. One of the reasons is that this survey claims to measure what developers and designers are actually doing, not what they are supposedly interested in when you read industry news or blogs.

Not really objective of course but very nicely presented in this infographic:

How to be invisible in cyberspace

I know, it seems more and more unlikely, but they do exist, these people that you cannot trace on the web. I've been wondering about an old friend and his whereabouts but if I Google him, I draw a blank. Actually, there is 1 hit that could possibly be him but I don't have any information to concur that he really is.

Wired had a cover story about shedding your identity in a digital age in its December 2009 issue. About how you really-really-really have to work very hard if you want to become untraceable. I can't imagine my friend has disappeared so completely because he doesn't want to be found. Or maybe he has? But just NOT being part of any social network, any professional network or even popping up in a Google query remains bizarre.

Let's just hope it doesn't mean something is really wrong. Let's just assume it's a generational thing and he's just not ... online.

The Internet of Things

Interesting read recently, The Internet of Things offered by McKinsey Quarterly. We all know the Internet of Things as a concept. Here, the authors design new business models, improved business processes and reduced costs and risks, resulting from new networks based on objects equipped with sensors and communication abilities.

Some of it is pure futurism, other stuff actually already exists: precision farming equipment that can spray extra fertilizer on patches of fields that need it (based on data from the ground and from satellite). Or Japanese billboards that peer at passers-by, assessing their profiles and adjusting the commercial messages. Car rentals being organised automatically. Initiatives in the fields of Health or Energy.

The point is that this Internet of Things has great promise  but there are a lot of challenges that need to be tackled before these systems wil become widespread. Legal liability frameworks for the bad decisions of automated systems, for one! Lower costs for sensors and actuators. Data security.

Imagine an ash-cloud passing over then ...
With thanks to McKinseyQuarterly.

sorrow floats

Just finished the latest John Irving, my favourite author. Last night in Twisted River. If you are an avid John Irving reader you come to appreciate, even expect, all of his recurring 'themes', the stuff that becomes as cosy and familiar as a blanket. The bears. The accidents. The wrestling. The amputations. The impressive women. The way of offhandedly announcing someone's demise chapters and chapters beforehand or starting chapters abruptly killing someone off. Never agressive, despite what might happen to the characters. Never cruel but for the cruelty of life itself.

This morning , the phrase 'Sorrow floats' popped up in my head. Maybe because I was feeling sad. I was thinking about my mom.She died now almost a year and a half ago and it feels as if life is racing by so fast there is no time to mourn. As if it still has to hit me.In 'The Hotel New Hampshire' Sorrow is a  labradaor who dies but keeps popping up in the book. Sorrow floats is a metaphore for the sorrow you cannot get rid off, the sad things that can happen in life and are inherent to it.

So yes, sorrow floats.

Why, that's a cool newspaper you've got there

These developments always make me smile. We announce the Death of Newspapers (or rather: most newspapers do that themselves) but when we've got a fine new communication tool, someone suddenly feels the need to take that tool, in this case Twitter, and build a .... newspaper app.

Check out Paper.li, aiming at taking your Twitter feeds and aggregating them in some kind of newspaper look & feel. I'm not sure I follow that completely, I don't get a 'wow! newspaper' feel when I look at it but the idea is nice. The 'newspaper feel' 's actually more visual when you click on one of the proposed feeds in this alpha version.

For those of you who are not sure what the .li domain stands for: it's not Lithuania but Liechtenstein. Yes, even in Liechtenstein, there is Internet. Maybe even tax-free Internet. They even have a portal site.

What if our kids look for something new?

Why would our kids want more of the same thing?

Imagine being a 14 to 17 year old today. You are of the so-called Internet generation. You have never known anything else. A digital camera is a camera (are there other camera's?). Internet is like electricity: always there. Schoolwork is done on the Web (if you can't Google it, it doesn't exist: my son needed information on the 1953 flouding disaster and was surprised that he couldn't find much on Google ...).

So I say: it's about time they change their ways. They are doing what we are doing, that's pretty uncool. Having parents on iTunes buying the latest songs: how mainstream is that? I remember a discussion I once had a couple of years ago where I predicted the end of the Messenger era (then really exploding), not because of the advent of new and better communication technologies but because ... it would have become old-fashioned, something that had always been around. Not cool at all.


My own son has kicked off his laptop a couple of weeks ago. Before that, he had already stopped MSN ages ago, was no longer interested in Netlog. All 'more of the same'. Games, yes. A renewed interest in PS. Watching stupid programs on tv but also the occasional National Geographic channel.

He hates touchscreens by the way: he's definitely not the only one. When Gartner predicts most kids wil be using touchscreen pc's by 2015, that's a grown-up's point of view. They will have to. There won't be any other choice (unless they collectively decline to buy)

Our other son wants to buy a record player. Records are cool.

Imagine them rediscovering books. Real ones. Newspapers when they are older. Using the Web for what they have learned it to be: a tool in your daily life. Not a must-always-be-on kinda thing that we are all so crazy about just because we still know what it used to be like before. When no-one had mobiles. When pc's @ home were a far away ambition, let alone having laptops.

So what if our kids look for something new? It might very well be something old.

iPad creates media avalanche

From iPads in blenders to iPad price elasticity to iPad's downfall (who needs proprietary apps when there is The Cloud?) to Tweets' sentiment analysis to the OS duel between tablets, slates and pads, ...

Not to mention local newspapers and news broadcasts.

Meanwhile Apple has sold 300.000+ on the first day. A well orchestrated campaign, as usual. And don't we all at least want to check it out?

De Standaard - Marc Appel overleden

De Standaard - Marc Appel overleden

Really Very Smart People join The Smart Life

If you are a Mensa member, a really smart person with a really high IQ, you have specific needs. You enjoy watching the Astronomy Picture of the Day (Nasa) or the photo of the day (Narional Geographic). You use Facebook and LinkedIn but you also socialize on The Smart Life. You buy books at Amazon like everybody else but also at Edmund Scientifics. In short, when you are a Mensa member, you have these 50 sites to entertain you in 2010.

You even like I can haz Cheeseburger.
Not so smart after all.

great way to prepare travelling

Check out this map, originally constructed by Nasa, and circulating as another image on Flick'r.

No more excuses: want to live through a full solar eclips somwhere in the coming years? Go and pick your holiday destination to do so.

I remember going on a solar eclipse trip in 1999: my mum and me participated in a trip organised by the local public observatory Urania and experienced it somewhere in the northern parts of France. Even though it was a very cloudy day it was very, very, very impressive. Nature holding its' breath.

It's the silence I remember most. Imagine experiencing it again in, say, Australia, November 13, 2012? I'm game!

Google's PR trick?

Admit that it sounded tricky from the beginning. Google's ethical stance on China and its indignant positioning against the Chinese authorities. Wasn't it Google that supported these authorities years ago when allowing censorship on its search engine? I distinctly remember one of my old mentors, Frederik Marain, proving this point by trying to use search terms like Tien-an-men.

The FT has announced that Google will withdraw from China and this time, it's for sure. Why do I keep thinking that they have been planning it for quite some time and that these ethical arguments are just a smoke screen? Shouldn't we take a closer look at Baidu?

Itch, it must!

I like not myself like this. Yes, hmmmm.
Itching me, this wool is.
But I do, what can, hmm?
You do this too want to, hmmm, yesss? Create woolen Yoda? Seek advice, you must. Here, find it, you will, hmmm.

Norgebukser hype on Facebook

You have to admit that the phenomenon of fan and group pages on Facebook sometimes is quite amazing. From the 'hommage' page for our deceased colleague to the Norwegian Olympic Curling Team's Pants Fan page with a mindblowing 606.333 members. All because of those equally amazing clown-like pants the team wore. You have to admit ... these pants fit that fascinating sport perfectly!

Like Google Buzzzzz but Better?

@ least that's what they say themselves: a Dutch startup company is launching an application called Inbox2 (yawn) that aims at uniting different kinds of communication flows into one solution. It's not build like a software app but as a platform. Users can add whatever service they want to integrate.

Sounds better than Google Buzz which, let's be honest, focusses primarily on keeping you within Google.

Inbox2 claimes it can handle mails from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, AOL and any other IMAP- or POP3-account. On top of that it links to social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, being Dutch, Hyves).

Want to try it out? For now the beta version is free but users who'll want to use and synchronise web, desktop and mobile will find themselves paying a fee. Which, if this thing does what it says it does, would not even be too much of a threshhold.

Manaos: devilishly delicious

I owe it to the name of my blog to honour the 'Manaos', a small salad sold by Exki, the (a bit too expenive) healthy food store.

Manaos contain bio-quinoa, sojabeans, tomato-pesto (made of tomato, rapeseed oil, celeriac, onion, parmesan, almonds, potato, red pepper, ...), peas, coriander and parseley.

I had never heard of quinoa, which has a special texture and a fine taste. Mana'o means 'thought' by the way. In Hawaiian.

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

collective mourning for a lost colleague

It is now official. One of the18 who perished in the train crash is our colleague. Our thoughts are with his family, who had to endure more than 36 hours of incertitude while waiting for official news. Our workplace, unified in mourning, will never be the same again.

How a dramatic event can stop you literally in your tracks

Yesterday two passenger trains collided south of Brussels and during the day we found out that one colleague (who hadn't shown up for work and takes that specific train) had indeed been injured and was hospitalized.

This morning we found out that not only were there two people with the same name aboard that train, the one in hospital is not our colleague. Which means there is no news: he will be either very heavyly injured or will not have survived. Another colleague was on the train that derailed because of the debris on the rails, yet another one ... any accident on any of the important commuter lines to brussels at that specific hour would have involved people working here.

The really sad thing is that this missing colleague barely survived a near-deadly motoraccident a couple of years ago and has undergone multiple operations over the years to deal with backproblems and other stuff. It never ever diminished his joie-de-vivre, his charm and his sense of humour. He seemed indestructible. Today, it's all we can hope for.

Why does someone get involved in a serious accident twice in his life? How is that possible? What does it mean?

(picture courtesy AP on numerous websites)

No more excuses: buy art!

Admit that this picture breathes a very strange atmosphere and is very beautiful. I picked it up on a site called www.eyebuyart.com, offering a selection of artworks in different price categories. This one is by Marshall Byrd Sterling. I suppose most, if not all of these artists are young and unknown but their work certainly deserves attention.

Google going social?

Posted in the Wall Street Journal today: Google to announce some social feature linked to Gmail allowing users to share media and even update statuses? The least you can say they don't create this irritating hype announcing something ages beforehand.

On the other hand: I don't mind creating status updates for my Facebook account on a (nearly) daily basis but do I want to see status updates on everything I do? Absolutely not.

The reason FB has remained this much fun is because most of the status updates I see in my friends' circle are witty, funny, serious, provocative ... no day-to-day 'i'm having coffee now and after that I will start doing the dishes' kinda stuff. But on my Google mail? And what is Google going to do with that? Run text analysis, sentiment analysis, semantic analysis and get me analyzed to bits?

I don't think so.

David & Goliath all over again

This is why I read the International herald Tribune: for the amazing stories you never read about in our quality papers or, when you do read about it, they have become 'after-the-facts' stories talking about far away places.

Check this out: there is this really tiny Eskimo village called Kivalina, perched on a barrier island even north of the Arctic circle, facing the Bering Strait.

They are suing some two dozen fuel and utility companies. Reason: these companies are responsable for the climate change which causes the Arctic ice, which protects the island, to melt, leaving Kivalina's fragile coast exposed to extreme weather conditions.

What makes this lawsuit especially bitter is that one of the companies accused is Exxon. Remember the Exxon Valdez? Some 21 years ago (March 89) Alaska suffered the gravest oil spill in history when the Exxon Valdez sank after hitting a reef. They were convicted to a 2,5 billion dollar penalty, later reversed to a shockingly mere half a million dollars by the Supreme Court.

Exxon makes 2,5 billion dollars in two days because of the astronomical enery prices ...

Specialists compare this case with cases against the tobacco industry: a lot of class action suits were lost but finally ... suers won big and the tobacco industry has had to pay and adapt itself.

I'd say: Go Kivalina!
And as the Kivalina picture is copyright protected: here is where I got it.

De Zandloper

It's 'national poetry-day' today in Flanders (which puts the word 'national' in a more humble context) and much to my surprise, an anouncer's voice on the train this morning started reciting a poem for the passengers. It was a very nice poem, with such a specific storyline I retrieved it from the Web in no time. I have no idea whether it was his own initiative or not but it certainly was a fine gift and one appreciated by at least some of the (otherwise very grumpy) passengers. Some of us shared smiles. That's something! And here is the poem, by Maarten Inghels, called 'De Zandloper'.

Dat haar besmeurde blauwe laarsjes het bed vol vuil
stampen, dat ze zich dan met een elegante boog
opdrukt in een handstand tegen de muur, deert mij
niet. Dat ze daarbij enigszins rood aanloopt, puft,
hijgt, maakt haar opwindender dan ooit tevoren.

Wennen is het wanneer ze ondertussen kreunend
uitroept, dat ze haar lenigheid, de kopstand, oefent
voor later, wanneer na haar dood de as in een houten
zandloper moet, testamentair vastgelegd. Zodat ze
dan eeuwig op mijn salontafel beweegt.

And finally some good news too

After the shockwave caused by the announced closure of the Opel plant in Antwerp, some good news at least: Saab has found a new and exciting home. Thanks to Spyker for tenaciously holding on to a deal declared dead in the press more than once. Saab is Safe!

Fair is fair: Lijit Wijit again

As I say: fair is fair. Who would 've expected to get an immediate and professional Lijit-response as a comment to my previous Lijit post? I certainly didn't. Well, there you go. Shows great committment and an almost creepy monitoring of the users (just joking!). Want to read the feedback, click the comment.

Lijit Wijit (bis)

Hmm. Searching on stuff I know is there (because I wrote it) gives no results.

I am NOT impressed. Or amused.

Let's give it some (crawling?) time ...

A Lijit Wijit.

Look to the left uppercorner of this blog. There is a search box. It's not just a search box, it's a lijit-searchbox. 'It does site search, but it does it better' or somesuch. The idea however is cool: Lijit gathers info from my site, my social content and content from my network. Someone searching for, let's say, the future of the web would not only find my stuff on this site but also my tweets and those of my Twitter friends and the tweets I follow.

The fact that I never heard of them doesn't exactly count in my favor .. apparantly they've been active quite some time already.... and burning some amazing amounts of money as well in the meantime.

I actually stumbled on it while reading an old Chris Anderson blogpost on Long Tails. And as we Dutch speaking cybernauts are very familiar with the 'wij' part of the word wijit my first reaction was to think I had found something weird & local. ('Wij' means 'us'). I apologize :-)

a-huffin'-and-a-puffin'

Meet NASA's personal flying suit' called Puffin, an intriguing mix between a one-man stealth plane and a futuristic jet suit. The whole thing is stil highly experimental and conceptual and, hey, what other use for it than military, right? Which makes me wonder why you'd want to put these highly conceptual things on Youtube in the first place?

Found on the homepage of The New York Times Global

Avatar

Yes, we went to see Avatar last week. Yes, it's a thin storyline but a breath-takingly beautiful movie.

Yes, it's a little bit Matrix, Star Wars, LOTR, Battlestart Galactica, ... its' good versus bad, machines versus nature, a tale about people living together, integration, etcetcetc.

I was a bit amazed to read this week that apparantly EVERYBODY finds something to bristle about: feminists who don't like these male Avatars being taller and stronger than the females, anti-smoking lobbies who protest against smoking in space stations, the Vatican protesting this nature worship and alien gods, ...

While we thought, when leaving the cinema, that it was already half a miracle that this tale so far hadn't (yet) inflamed the hearts and minds of people all over the world who have experience with this kind of American military (and other) arrogance ...

Been there too

Fascinating read, this "Richer women, poorer men"-article in yesterday's International Herald Tribune. On the problem women have when they advance themselves in terms of education and pay: it get's more and more difficult to find a partner for life. Men from any ethnic group get intimidated when women are smart. Money is a tricky subject (and I know, I have lived through a similar experience whan I was much younger). With the result that more and more perfectly elligible women cannot find a partner to spend (the rest of) their life with. A Big change in gender relations.

Some cute quotes though:
- on women wanting their potential partners to 'grow' with them instead of worrying about education and salary:"do you have a passport and a library card" is the first question to ask when you meet a new date.
- or this one, told by a male friend to a succesful designer: "you are confident, you have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?"

But as men need marriage more than women do, from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being, it seems to me we are not the ones who have to take a step back. C'mon guys, take a step forward!

(copyright Sam Roberts - IHT - Jan 20th 2010)

Heartwarming Relief initiatives

Tech and Internet Giants Step Up to Help Haiti

Posted using ShareThis

All you Farmville adepts out there: buy Haitian stuff!

Google Earth provides Haiti layer

THe layer allows to look at Haiti pictures and really see the unbelievable damage and destruction that has hit this island and it's people. It makes your blood run cold.

In from Japan

Finally! in a big carton cilinder and without having to pay any additional customs or other costs: my geeky web trend map.
It's actually much bigger than I expected, so I'm having trouble putting it on the wall in my office. Call that a luxury problem.
For those of you who click on the link: zoom in-zoom out-enjoy!

heard in the elevator

One of the perks of working in a high-level IT organisation is you hear interesting stuff all the time. Well. Most of the time. Or sometimes. Whatever. Coming back to the office from a meeting, one of my tech colleagues was impressing another one with the following quip: 'one of the lesser known applications of a Playstation is the ability to act as a supercomputer when you link for example 9 of them together and use their combined power'.

And when you would spend a fair amount of money on, let's say a Cray, buying 9 PS3's would definitely be a lot cheaper.

That got me thinking. Should be easy to Google stuff like this, no? Turned out much harder than I imagined but hey, I learned soemething new today. FLOPS.

Floating Point Operations per Second.

My brain started floating when I tried to read about it but the point is: yes, the Cray-supercomputer versus PS3 equation exists. Amazing stuff, if you can actually understand what it means.

I humbly withdraw :-)