Juni

First day of June today. Probably the opening of flying insects season also. Something even deemed it necessary to use my eyelid for a pincushion last night. Ah well, got 2 eyes anyway. Meanwhile, there's a lot on offer for a Gmail account.

Code Humor Challenge, with the following wonderful error haiku:

Chaos reigns within.

Reflect, repent, and reboot.

Order shall return.

And then there's MTV Liebt Günther.

With the 60th anniversary of D-Day coming up, I find this lack of knowledge quite alarming.

Just read the news about the double-click patent which has been granted to Microsoft. Alarming. Now if only I could find a clear list of the opinions of the Dutch EU candidates on software patents.

Day of the Dynamo festival and also the 1250th anniversary of the day the pagan Frisians killed Bonifatius. Just so you know. ;-)

I spend the day at Ikea to buy some decorations and another cd-rack.

Check out Lines Online which allows you to colour in the newsphoto's of the day. Very cool.

Got to love these bunnies. It's Titanic they're doing now.

My modem seems to have died on me, a process that started last Sunday. Been offline ever since. Called the KPN, luckily it's only been 6 months since I bought it, so they're going to send me another one. But first I need to be called by a 'special' department. Aparently only the people in that department have the authority to state it's really the modem that's busted. That's meant to happen this friday. After that it'll be a few days before a new one will arrive. Looks like I'll have to be patient. :-(

A few links I wanted to mention throughout this week.

• The Island at the Center of the World, should be an interesting read.
• Timeline of Dietary Shifts in the Human Line of Evolution, which is part of Paleolithic Diet vs. Vegetarianism: What was humanity's original, natural diet? in 3 parts.
• Maniac Mansion returns.
• Take the WaSP Survey, if you use web standards.
• Visit the world's tallest virtual building

Oh, and don't forget to vote!

The first thing I usually do when I get home is check my e-mail and process whatever downloads finished during the day. But now -in my new offline state- I can't. So strange. Confusing. So when I got home yesterday, I played some Duke Nukem to comfort myself. Not the whimpy 3D version, but the classic EGA one. Thirteen years old and it still rocks.

If you're still not using it, here's a tour of Firefox.

Pleasently surprised by Zakk Wylde's Hangover Music, Vol. 6. It's even quite suitable for the office.

Still no modem, so here's a recap of the weekend. Watched Secret Window, which was alright. Don't think I ever read the book though, so I couldn't say if that was better. Cheered for my brother, who participated in the Leiden Marathon.

Read a lot. Finished Excalibur and started on Dreaming the Eagle. Treated myself to the Highway DVD. Oh, and I bought the first four Dune books (Dune, Messiah, Children and God Emperor). Finally found a matching set at the secondhand book store.

The country seems to be getting ready for the match tonight. Sigh. I don't like the game. Never have. And now that the country's decorated in orange, that's not likely to happen either. You could make this site orange, though. If you like that sort of thing.

Firefox 0.9 has been released. Download it now.

Update: and now they've even released a new Thunderbird, which is 0.7.

Just picked up the new Thomson 510 Ethernet Modem from the postoffice. Install went like a breeze, and as you can tell, I'm back online! :-D

Since I still haven't found a hairdresser nearby, I made an appointment with my old one in Hazerswoude. Which was last night. Lost about 15cm. Strange. But I like it.

Combined it with dinner with my parents. Which was nice. And also gave me the opportunity to check out my dad's new HP iPAQ 2210 Pocket PC, which he bought to replace his broken Psion. I'm jealous.

Today is the longest day of the year. Known as the Summer solstice or Midsummer. Enjoy.

The only thing that annoyed me about the new Thunderbird, was the way it handled quoted messages. That used to be nice and stylish, but in the upgrade it looked less pleasing. Luckily, I found the solution in the MozillaZine forum. Just put the following in your usercontent.css.

blockquote[type=cite]

{border-left-width: medium ! important;

border-left-style: solid ! important;

border-left-color: gray ! important;

border-right: none ! important;}

I'd like to go to the User Experience 2004 Conference which is being held in Amsterdam in November. Shame it's so expensive.

Though it's still very much under construction, you might like to take a look at my bright new Movie section. I recently imported my IMDb voting history (over 1200 records!) into my sites MySQL database. Now I'm using the Amazon API to display the most recently voted movies. Cool huh? I hope to add a rating of some sorts in the near future, but for now I just want to play around with the sourcecode.

Watched American Psycho last night. Had seen it before, but that was a while ago so the plot was a bit hazy for me. Christain Bale is wonderfully scary. Try getting a reservation at Dorsia now. I wonder what the original book, by Bret Easton Ellis, is like.

The Dark Symphonies website has been redone. Pretty.

Finally had a chance to buy "The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America" and "Om de Noord: De tochten van Willem Barentsz en Jacob van Heemskerck en de overwintering op Nova Zembla, zoals opgetekend door Gerrit de Veer".

Look forward to reading those. But first I want to finish Dreaming the Eagle, the story of Boudica. Which, as I only recently found out, is the first part of a trilogy and followed by Dreaming the Bull and an unknown third novel.

I'm thinking of buying the Profoon PDX 1020, because I've had enough of all the wires everywhere. Oh, and I received a '2nd ticket for free' coupon for the cinema. Maybe Shrek 2 would be nice to check out. Or The Day After Tomorrow. Or maybe something else altogether.

Read an interview with Mark Hertsgaard in yesterday's newspaper. He made some good points, and I would like to read his latest work, The Eagle's Shadow or his previous work Earth Odyssey.

In the same newspaper I found an article which warned against using Internet Explorer (for security reasons). Good ofcourse, however what annoys me is that it failed to mention what alternatives people have. Yet another missed opportunity to plug Firefox. Sigh.

Installed Shaun Inman's ShortStat to give it a trialrun. You can have a gander over here.

I'm actually quite impressed with omroep.nl/gids. It's an online tv guide system. You can add programs to a favourite list and have that mailed daily. Quite convenient. And the interface is very sharp and usable. I've used it's competitor TV Gids Online in the past, but that has a number of flaws which always annoy me. Glad I found this one.