Moving to Typepad..

Ok, while I may eventually find something new for this blog for now my primary blog will be on Typepad. The new URL is http://jeroenr.typepad.com/.

New Gmail Invites

Hey all, I have some new Gmail invites. Leave a comment or send an e-mail if you want one.

Trying out Typepad

I'm trying out the Typepad weblog service as a possible alternative to the Blogger service. Typepad has several advantages such as more advanced posting options (categorization of posts is built in for example), trackback, Typelists (easily manageable lists of books, music, links and people, better templates, expanded hosting, and integrated photo albums. The drawback is that it isn't free. You can check my preliminary Typepad blog here. It is still in a somewhat primitive state but that is likely to change. If I like it enough it'll probably become my primary blog.

Freedom Tower Will Be Green Giant

Very nice article on Wired.com on the environmental aspects of the Freedom Tower (which will be built at the site of the former WTC).

100 Photographs that Changed the World

Great page at The Digital Journalist featuring some of the photographs of the corresponding book.

Just One Question..

The World's Shortest Blog is devoted to a single question: "How many times have you been arrested Mr. President?". Currently a $1909.00 Bounty is offered to the first person to ask George W. Bush this question in a public forum. Cool!

Re-design in progress

You probably noticed I switched templates (again). I got bored of the old one, and I'm fooling around a bit to what I can come up with. It will be based on this particular template, 'Minima' as my fellow bloggers will probably know, which I like because it is rather clean and unobtrusive. You may also have noticed that there is something different about the links section in the sidebar; I'm using furl to make it a little more dynamic and topical, but more about that later.

Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19!!

The Talk Like A Pirate Day 2004 is coming up! Avast ye landlubbers and get ready for this wondrous festivity!

Fahrenheit 9/11 not submitted as Best Documentary for Oscars

Big audience more important than Oscar for Michael Moore.

College Textbooks on Bit Torrent

Interesting post at Assemble Me. It only talks about Calculas texbook, but I'm guessing those overpriced business and marketing texbooks will be easy to find pretty soon as well. Studying from a .pdf would be hell of course, but If you've got access to free printing...

Jackson Talks Kong

A brief, but interesting, article about the upcoming King Kong movie on IGN Filmforce.

Communists for KERRY

Communists for KERRY is just brilliantly funny.

Big tech on campus

Interesting article on the influx of new technologies in American colleges and universities at CNET News.com

Got Gmail?

*Update: Two invites left..*

Dear readers of my blog (yes all 3 of you!), I just opened my very own Gmail account and I've got several invites to give away. If you're interested leave your first name, last name, and e-mail adress in the comments (or send an e-mail) and I'll send you an invite. I have only got three invites left, but I'm guessing that'll be enough.

For those of you who don't know what Gmail is, allow me to give a brief explanation. Gmail is a free webmail service by Google. Of course we all know free webmail, but Google gives you 1000 Mb of storage and allows you to receive and send messages of up to 10Mb. In return you'll have to put up with text ads based on the content of your e-mail. This is all automated though, so there aren't any real privacy issues. It is still in beta so you can only get an account if a current Gmail user invites you. Anyways, if you want an account just let me know.

Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies Strike Again!

We did pretty well in the Pub Quiz yesterday.

The new Apple iMac G5

Those who know me know I like Apple (even though I don't own any Apple products (saving up for the iPod though)). Anyways, their new iMac G5 is a great looking computer whick makes me green with envy of those who are able to afford one. However, they still have 256 MB SDRAM as the default configuration (they can go up to 2GB). Why on earth would anyone buy a new computer with only 256 MB RAM? Sure you can specify that you want more RAM when you order one, but really 512 MB should be the standard option. That said, I really love the slot-loading combo/superdrive and the fact that even the power supply is built-in.

Holiday is almost over..

So the Introduction week is over and classes start next week. Oddly enough I'm rather looking forward to start studying again. I'll also be online much more, so I'll be able to update more frequently. Yay!

Anyways yesterday was the open stage night, Jeroen Toet and I played two songs. I'm happy to say it went fairly well, I'll see if I'm able to post some pics soon.

I'm still alive !

Hey all, haven't been posting much lately..That's because I'm busy with the introduction week for new students at the university. I am having a blast though. I'll be back to my regular posting schedule somewhere next week.

The internet is for porn

*Update: the site is down*

As this song proves the sole reason the internet exists is for porn. Very funny!

Offensive T-Shirts: A Commercial Stroke Of Genious?

For the most offensive T-shirts ever got to TShirtHell.com. They are pretty funny, but I'm no so sure if I'd wear them in public.

I should have been writing a paper..

Instead I spent the afternoon finding CD Covers for the albums in my iTunes Library...

Free Music Downloads at Amazon

I didn't know that Amazon had Free Music Downloads, but apparently they do. They actually have some pretty good tracks, I spotted The Hives and Joss Stone among others. Unfortunately I can't check the quality right now (I'm at the university), but perhaps I'll post about that later.

FrankLeijtens.nl @ ATHENS 2004

Frrrank is leaving for the Olympics in Athens shortly, and he'll be blogging as well so you might want to keep tabs on what is going on there.

Washingtonpost.com: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you're like me you've been googling for Henri Cartier-Bresson the last couple of days. There is a great gallery of portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson up on Washingtonpost.com.

Purring Kitty: bringing pleasure to your phone!

Isn't technology wonderful? The *ahem* creative people at Vibelet.com have created a device that can "instantly turn your cell phone into a discreet vibrating personal 'masseur' [and] turn your phone's vibrations on at will!". Well isn't that nice?

Porn Blogs Manipulate Google

An interesting article on Wired.com about porn sites using weblogs to manipulate their Google Pagerank.

ROTK Extended Edition Fan Trailer

A bunch of LOTR-fans have made a fan trailer for the Extended Edition of The Return of The King. The trailer can be found here (beware ! German language alert), but you will need Realpayer to see it. Pretty cool!

Moore and Maher beg Nader to drop out of 2004 Presidential Election Race

Found on Yahoo! News.

John Edwards' Speech

I guess I can't ignore the Democratic National Convention (me being an American Studies major and all) so let me offer you some of my thoughts on John Edwards' speech last night. I was up around 4 am to catch it, and I wasn't disappointed. Edwards is an electrifying speaker who makes all this tired old campaign rhetoric sound fresh and new again. While I have seen Edwards speak better on other occasion this definitely was a good, solid speech.

Let's look at some specifics of the speech, shall we? The first thing that really grabbed me was the rejection of “the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past.”  A lot has been said about the appeal of an optimistic election campaign that Kerry and Edwards represent, as opposed to the negativism of Bush and Cheney. Edwards went out of this way to make that very explicit in his speech. Kerry and Edwards represent, “the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible because this is America, where everything is possible”. Edwards defines one of the interpretations of the American Dream here. The American Dream is all about possibilities, but the difference with the Republican intepretation is that the Democrats want the government to step in and actively create an environment of equal opportunities.

Of course, no Republican is against equal opportunity but they don't see as much as a role for the government to provide such an environment. Rather, they point to the self-responsibilty and self-reliance of the American people. However, the Republicans are wrong. Enter one of the crucial passages of Edwards' speech:

“John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck. You don't need me to explain this to you do you?
You know exactly what I'm talking about. Can't save any money, can you? Takes every dime you make just to pay your bills. And you know what happens if something goes wrong, if you have a child that gets sick, a financial problem, a layoff in the family -- you go right off the cliff. And when that happens, what's the first thing that goes? Your dreams. It doesn't have to be that way.”

Kerry and Edwards have been accused of being 'liberals', but I'd like to think that their liberal face is what will win them the elections (or so I hope). There'a lot of poverty in the US and minimum wages are atrociously low for a civilized country. You'd think that passages like the above would appeal to loads of people trying to make ends meet. Unfortunateley, 'liberal' is a scary word in the US and just a step away from socialism.

I'm not going to quote Edwards entire plan of action here, but I appreciated many of his point about health care, raising the minimum wage,  discouraging outsourcing of jobs, and making education equally available to all Americans.

A final passage I'd like to point out is the one dealing with the race issue, something that I found to be very tangible and disconcerting when I was in the US:

“I've heard some discussions and debates around America about where and in front of what audiences we ought to talk about race and equality and civil rights. I have an answer to that questions: Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. This is not an African-American issue. This is not a Latino issue. This is not an Asian-American issue. This is an American issue. It is about who we are, what our values are and what kind of country we live in. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”
 
What becomes apparent in this passage is that Edwards is deliberately targeting minorities and swing voters, but he does so by speaking about it to a broad audience. In doing so he makes it an American problem, and I think it succeeds in being appealling to minorities without coming across as patronizing.

All in all a pretty impressive speech, looking forward to the Kerry speech tonight. (PS: Check the full transcript of the speech)

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

No George Lucas ! No!

Ok, some disturbing Star Wars Dvd news on Dvdfile.com (scroll all the way down). Apparently Lucas is making some pretty extensive changes to the Original Trilogy for the Dvd release. The article claims that changes include everything from:

“sound effects to the color of a lightsaber - to more substantive additions, including Ian McDiarmid (the evil Emperor) replacing Clive Revill in The Empire Strikes Back, to Anakin Hayden Christensen's face (badly) added to the body of Sebastian Shaw at the end of Return of the Jedi, or a chorus of cheering Gungians (or whatever those Jar Jar things are called) also tacked on to the finale of Jedi”

Why do you hate us George Lucas, why can't we just have a faithful and authenthic release of the OT?

TRASHLOG

Ok this is weird, TRASHLOG takes a picture of a piece of trash each day and posts it on a log.

ROTK Extended Edition Dvd News

Major spoilers on the 4 DVD-set straight from the Comic-Con: ROTK EE DVD Panel Review.

Tropisms.org: Very Cool Movie Log!

Ok, this is interesting, an actual Movie Log (mlog) called Tropisms.org. Pretty cool and worth checking out if you have a broadband connection.

Just installed Firefox 0.9

I got so sick of Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time that I finally installed Firefox. So far, I like it. It has a clean interface, built in Google Search functionality, and it hasn't crashed (yet..). What's really useful about it is that you can opt to add tabs to your current browser, rather than adding new windows all the time. This avoids cluttering the taskbar, and makes keeping tabs (pun intended) on the websites you're watching lots easier. Also it's still version 0.9, so it isn't even the final version.

The only problem problem so far is that the custom themes don't seem to work as they should, but that probably has to do something with the desktop theme manager I'm running. *update: Themes work now it was Iconpackager software that caused the problem* I'm not a big Micro$oft hater, but it's good to know there are (viable) options other than Internet Explorer available. So if you're tired of IE as well, why not give Firefox a try?

Currently listening to: Sarah Bettens - Go

This is the first solo effort of K's Choice singer Sarah Bettens. It's an EP consisting of 5 tracks, 3 up-tempo songs and 2 slower balllads. While the songs may not be as strong as those of written for K's Choice, there's some good stuff here. The songs aren't very original, but they are performed convincingly and just sound good. Standout tracks are the up-tempo title track 'Go' and the wondeful ballad 'Grey'.  A full solo album should be coming late this year and if this EP is an indication it'll be worth picking up.

The New iPod, better and cheaper ?

Apple has made a new version of its popular digigital music player. The new iPod features longer battery life (12 hours!) and the Apple Click Wheel that we saw on the iPod mini. Better still, the price has gone down; it's $299 for a 20 gb iPod now. Once I save up some money I am so getting this one. However, I do wish that those funky colors for the mini were available for the regular pod as well.

Spider-Man 2

So Spider-Man 2 was released in The Netherlands last week, and I saw it on Saturday. I liked it a great deal and it is a better film than part 1, butI do have some issues with it. Most importantly I thought the pacing was off a bit. Director Sam Raimi takes a lot off to show us a clumbsy Peter Parker and the problems he's having to deal with. Of course, this is for a large part what the Spider-Man franchise is about, but Raimi takes so much time doing this that by the time the intermission came along not much had happened really. Yes we had been introduced by the villian, but he wasn't really used as a constant threath. By that time in the film it could have used a little urgency. That said, the second part of the film was pretty spectacular. Of course the "With great power comes great responsibility"-mantra was re-iterated, in a rather clumsy dream sequence with uncle Ben, but that was to be expected. However, Aunt May's speech was just a bit too much. Minor quibbles aside though it was a ver good an entertaining film. Doc Ock was a great villain, the cast pulled off some good performances, and combined with the spectacular the action sequences this really put this film a notch above the first film.

Portrait Illustration Maker...Nifty!!

Found a link to this Portrait Illustration Maker on Biz Stone's Blog. I got some pretty good results with it, and is ideally suited for creating avatars. It's a bit of work, but it's worth the effort.

Random Picture #3

Taken at last years' Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. It has kermit so it's cool.

A Great Quiz Portal

Since I'm on the topic of quizzing, I might as well point out the wonderful Quizzing.co.uk website. It is the website of the largest quizzing organisation in the UK and it features full quizzes, loads of free questions, and advice on setting up your own quiz night/league. Definitely one for the bookmarks!

Victory!

So we (The Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies All-Stars) competed in a special pub quiz in Arnhem last Sunday, and we actually won! Yay! For more info regarding The Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies, check our blog.

The Job Predictor

Fill in your name and find your ideal job! Apparently my ideal job is being a Hypnotist...

Been offline for a while

So I have this shiny new Blog and then my broadband connection at home stops working..Damn! Ah well at least it works now.

Just a funny website

Check this.

Rent is coming to the big screen!

My favorite musical ever is going to be made into a film ! Rent is an awesome musical that deals with issues such as AIDS. and being an artist in the U.S. I was fortunate enough to see it in New York last year, and I was totally blown away by it. The music in this musical is really fantastic, it may not be a big show-piece (like say: The Lion King), but it really speaks to you on many different levels.

So according to this article the film rights have been bought by Chris Columbus of Harry Potter fame. I'm looking forward to this one !

Condoms Contain Cancer-Causing Substance

I found this on Yahoo! News. So now we can get cancer from practicing safe sex. Well, that sure doesn't make the world a more fun place to live in. The article says that, "most condoms contain a cancer-causing chemical and their manufacture should be subject to greater quality control". Apparently 29 out of 32 tested condoms contained a carcinogen called N-Nitrosamine. Well, maybe it's just me, but I would like to know a bit more about the 3 that didn't contain this carcinogen. What brand? Where do I get them? I would also like to know if oral sex is especially dangerous. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide such info, and I really wonder why. Wouldn't the researchers disclose this data yet, or do they want to protect certain brands? It may not be a large health hazard, but things like this should be made public as soon as posssible. Even if it's just a small health risk!

A good night

This was a really good night. I just got back from our local pub where we (we being the quiz-team "The Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies") participated in the weekly quiz. This night was especially fun because one of my friends just returned from the U.S. where he studied this semester. It was good to have him back again on our weekly quiz-night. We actually played pretty well this week, we lost the best student-team prize in the tie-break. Winning would have been better of course, but not too sloppy overall. Well I'm off to bed, I have to get up early for work tomorrow.

Random Picture #2

A pic of me in a typical pose :-). Orange is one of my favorite colors.

Currently listening to: Jimi Heath

Jimi Heath is a singer-songwriter who is currently working on her debut independent CD. There are couple of her songs on her website, which I think are pretty neat. There's a lot of emotion in her voice without her sounding whiney, I really get the impresssion that she truly feels what she is singing about. Good stuff.

Random Picture #1

This is just a picture I took when I was in Washington last year. I kinda like how it turned out.

The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator

A friend sent me this highly entertaining link. Check it out. Of course a 12 year old AOl-er would say: A FREIND SAT M3 THIS HIGHLY ENTERTANENG LINK!111!1!1 OMG WTF LOL CH3K IT OUT11!! OMG LOL

Have fun :-)

Welcome !

Hi there and welcome to my Blog. I'll be boring you with all the details of my rather uneventful life. At the moment my life is writing papers, so not too thrilling overall. I'm currently working on a paper about The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. Good book for sure, but at the moment I just can't get anything insightful about it on paper. Oh well...better get back to work.