Obama? Clinton? No, no, no. This is not about the democratic candidate election this is about important stuff. Last night the Webby Awards winners were announced. As you might know my good friend Sander was nominated with his excellent Rube Goldberg machine viral for Hema.
Now is a good time to put on your party hats: Sander has WON THE WEBBY!!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
References:
You can be pro-Tibet, you can be pro-China or you can be an ignorant doofus…
Yes, we would… Rowan Benum shot this picture in California during a pro-Tibet rally.
Op 1 mei jongstleden, bewust op de dag van de arbeid, heeft J.J. Voskuil besloten het leven te beëindigen. Voskuil leed aan kanker maar door complicaties ging het in korte tijd bergafwaarts met zijn gezondheid. Voskuil is vooral bekend van zijn boekencyclus “Het Bureau” waarvan later een hoorspel gemaakt is. De afleveringen zijn nog tot 28 mei te beluisteren of downloaden. Wees er snel bij.
“Het Bureau” is grotendeels gebaseerd op zijn eigen arbeidsleven aan het Instituut voor Dialectologie, Volks- en Naamkunde, het tegenwoordige Meertens Instituut. Geweldige dialogen en een werksfeer die om te snijden is. Het aardige is dat mensen het of heel leuk vinden of helemaal niet.
Daarnaast heeft Voskuil zich ook sterk gemaakt voor dierenrechten en die van varkens in het bijzonder door het oprichten van “Varkens in nood”.
Het lijkt erop dat een hele generatie schrijvers ons aan het ontvallen is…
Er zit me iets dwars en dat moet ik toch even kwijt. De laatste decennia staan onze vrijheden zonder meer onder druk. Enerzijds door massale integratie van niet-westerse immigranten met niet-westerse opvattingen en anderzijds door verregaande beperking van de individuele vrijheid door middel van identificatie plicht, camera toezicht, afluisteren van telefoon en internet verkeer en andere praktijken die Nederland langzaam doen afglijden naar een politiestaat volgens het big-brother model. Voor de jongeren: met “big brother” bedoel ik niet dat kansloze televisieprogramma, het is een verwijzing naar het boek “1984” van Orwell.
Als er iets duidelijk is geworden de laatste jaren dan is het dat vrijheid niet een vanzelfsprekend gegeven is maar dat het bevochten is. We hebben onze vrijheden afgedwongen en verankerd in wetten die moeten waarborgen dat die vrijheden niet afgenomen worden. De bevochten vrijheid is me voorgehouden toen ik als kind vroeg waarom we twee minuten stil moesten zijn op 4 mei. In begrijpelijke taal werd me uitgelegd dat alle vrijheden die ik genoot te danken zijn aan mensen die hun leven geriskeerd (en verloren) hebben in de strijd tegen de bezetter. Als dank daarvoor herdenken we deze mensen met twee minuten stilte.
I came across this “motivational poster” on the internet yesterday and saved it. This morning I opened it again and I still liked it… so why not post it here?
I used to think that I was a liberal guy. Let people enjoy their freedom as long as they don’t invade other peoples freedom, that kind of stuff. Same goes for freedom of speech and press. I even wrote a post (dutch) against the Dutch government who plan to ban the game “Manhunt 2″ in the Netherlands. But now there is a game that is so terrible that it must be forbidden. It’s not the violence. I can handle violence in video games. It’s not about drinking and driving. It’s not the explicit language, I can handle bad mouthing. It’s not the nudity. I even demand nudity in games. Heck, I played Ms. PacMan for years hoping she would do a strip act at level 99.
No no no, none of that. It’s the insult and stigmata against a certain part of the world population. Poking fun at one’s religion is not funny and should be outlawed. I hope all consoles will freeze. What game I’m talking about? “Grand Theft Auto IV”. Here are some shocking screenshots from the game. Those who are not lightly insulted can see the screenshots below. Remember: the screenshots are from the game and they are not funny. NOT FUNNY!
Hans Reiser (inmate BFPS63) finally heeds the advise of his lawyers. After ignoring the advise of his lawyers and taking the stand to defend himself at his trial Hans now resorts to silence. A juror said after the trial that Reiser might have been acquitted had he exercised his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Too bad Hans resorts to silence now because Threat Level, who have been following the Reiser trial all the way, came to visit Hans Reiser in Santa Rita jail to ask him some questions. All for nothing because Hans declined any comment “on the advice of my attorneys”. From the article:
And as he hung up the telephone handset connecting us through the glass, all this reporter could think was that Hans Reiser waited too long to start heeding his lawyers’ advice.
Today is the 44th birthday of the first BASIC interpreter. At Dartmouth college two professors, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, ran the first program in their new computer programming language BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). They created BASIC to provide access for non-science students to computers. At 04:00 (AM) on May 1st 1964 the General Electric GE-225 mainframe of Dartmouth college started running a BASIC interpreter. This made the power of computing available to students and staff members who could not program Algol or Fortran.
BASIC was so simple that it became the language of choice for virtual all homecomputers albeit each had its own dialect. Exchanging programs always required considerable porting effort. However the computer industry owes Kemeny and Kurtz a lot. BASIC allowed the computer to enter the homes of millions of users and was one of the factors that made people accept and embrace computers.
BASIC has since evolved into a “serious” object oriented language. The rise of the BASIC compiler made it a viable alternative to develop production code in BASIC. For a long time BASIC was the scripting or ‘automation’ language in a lot of Microsoft products (VBA). I learned to program BASIC when I was 12 and abandoned it a few years later in favor of 6502 assembly. Maybe today is a good day to program a “hello world” in BASIC. You can do that online, have fun.
Well now, this blog exists for six months now. I tried to waste your time with 253 posts and you returned the favor by posting 366 comments. Luckily the spam filter caught 803 spam comments with only a few false positives and only two or three comments required manual spam flagging. The adsense counter already reaches $30.30 which is a stunning $5.05 per month. I still enjoy formulating provocative and highly biased statements so don’t expect me to quit anytime soon.
Unfortunately most statistics over 2007 are lost. I did recover some of it using google adsense. However from 2008 on I keep some statistics around. Over the first 4 months over 2008 the server got 75406 requests for articles (278571 total requests) from 8566 different IP addresses.
I have a fairly strict power management and security settings on my Mac. This will cause the screen to dim when the laptop is not used for a few moments. Furthermore the screensaver will kick-in after a couple of minutes and requires my password to unlock. Now this can be annoying when you are watching a movie on YouTube or something that don’t require interactivity with your Mac. The screen will dim and after a few minutes the screensaver will hide the movie. Sure, you can change your power management and security settings but that is also annoying. So just put your Mac on caffeine. It puts a tiny icon in your menu bar and allows you to (temporarily) disable the screen dimmer and the screensaver. You can even trigger it on a timeout so you will never forget to ‘restore’ the settings. After the specified timeout Cafeine will turn on the dimmer and the screensaver again.