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August 30, 2006

Where Are The Pizzas?

We've got fire, we've got an oven. Now where are the pizzas?
Talking about manuals; the installation manual of my two brandnew toiletseats was incomprehensible to begin with.

On top of that somebody (number 242) sticked a note on a plastic bag filled with bolts and nuts that said: 'this box contains two extra rubber plugs, but we do advise NOT to use them'.

I couldn't find the rubber plugs anywhere, but I did have a good seat when I finally could test one of them. Forgot to shot a pic, so have a look at my new cooking area instead. After all, before being able to test toilet seats you have to cook something, right?

Two more days of cutting boards for the cabinets, sanding, painting, cleaning, and then, finally . . . saturday morning moving . . .

 Posted: August 30, 2006, 11:43 PM | Comments (3) |

August 29, 2006

The Black Aldis

With the finish of my renovation marathon almost there – moving back into our old house next Saturday – comes time. Time which I could spend keeping myself busy with my sound.

While I’m writing this in TextMate on the iMac the Airport streams my collection of narco tango’s an classic rock – iTunes is almost always on shuffle – to our 25 year old Pioneer combo. The Sony boxes that were connected to it in the past went kaflooie one day. One of them started rumbling like a erupting volcano, and when I touched one of the speaker cones it fell apart in some kind of thick dust and mouse poo.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

As it happened Aldi – some kind of European Walmart – sold a pair of heavy jet black speaker boxes for 99 euro. I copied the specs form the advertisement in the newspaper and took them to a high end hi fi shop around the corner. Turned out for the amount they asked for boxes with the same specifications we could travel through South America for three months with ease. It wasn’t a difficult choice and when we came back the black Aldis appeared a good choice ever after.

When we moved to our temporary living at Speelhuislaan it took my old Win2k machine, together with the trio Klipsch boxes and the Audigy Sound Card to the Internet desk at the newspaper. To great pleasure of a major majority of happy people – but to much chagrin of a minor minority – that combo became the deciding fun factor on the Internet desk, and most colleagues on central desk – listen, laugh and sing along.

Until nine o’clock, when the daily music curfew begins . At nine the sound level goes down to supermarketmuzaklevel, so that readers who make a call to the newspaper don’t get the wrong impression and think that it’s a complete madhouse over here.

What to do now? Connect Audigy and Klipsch to the Mac, whether or not over the Airport? Or let the Pioneer – beautiful retro 1980 brushed aluminum – do the job with the Aldis? Another option is connect Aldi to Audigy and see what kind of extra bass will result from that relation. But of course I can also make a nice combo of the Klipsch boom box – and the two high tone tweeters - together with Aldi One and Two.

Looking into the future going the renovation I’ve put some miles of extra plastic piping behind the new drywall. One of them contains the ADSL cable, another one coax, and three others heavy duty red and black speaker wiring.

Uttermost fun resulting in writing columns like this comes in my favorite pub next Friday when two hi fi fanatics try to explain – in vain – again – that I’m a complete idiot.

Boxes from the Aldi!

Come on!

 Posted: August 29, 2006, 09:00 AM | Comments (1) |

August 25, 2006

Finally Finishing

Three years and two months gone, one more week to go: next Saturday we’ll be moving into our old house. The renovation took more time than originally planned, but reasons galore. Beforehand we did not know we were going to South America twice during the renovations – three months last year, two months this year. But as the lease on our temporary living was extended twice without asking, (and for the last year without any rent to pay) there was no need for hurry.

Having said that: there is now! Next Friday gas, water and electricity will be cut, next Saturday we’lle be moving with a little help from some friends. Demolition of the block at Speelhuislaan will be starting Monday September 4.

Are we ready and done? Well, almost. Yesterday and today at old Van Goor the oak flooring is polished and covered in high gloss polyurethane twice. It looks brilliant, but you can smell it two blocks upwind, and we’re not allowed to step on it till noon Saturday. So we spend Friday afternoon sorting out stuff that has been unpacked on the attic for three years.

I’ve dumped four boxes of old computer books (Programming Pascal 1980, Dos For Dummies, PHP, MySQL, Windows 95, lots of Linux and BeOs manuals and so on) at a local charity, as well as bags full of old laptops, 8 Mb flash cards (two pics form my current Ixus would fill them) cables, plugs, ISDN and ADSL modems, and much more. Feel much better now that it’s all gone.

Next week finishing of the floor to ceiling colonial cabinets I’ve build downstairs, and painting, lots of painting. And some more trips to the junkyard, I’m afraid.

Check out the Finally Finishing Album in my ImageFolio.

 Posted: August 25, 2006, 04:28 PM | Comments (0) |

August 22, 2006

Is Google a Mr. of a Mrs?

The HP Garage is California Historic Landmark No. 976 — Birthplace of Silicon Valley. (1939 photo)

I’ve asked the question on the Movable Type Community Forum, some time ago, when my server almost collapsed under comment spam form porn- and viagra sellers: male or female?

While the thread in question, like everything else that ever will be written in the future, can be found by Google in a second: Is a server a he, or a she, like a ship?

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

I’ve never have maintained a relation so long without having seen her – or him. In 1999, while spending eight months of a sabbatical year in San Francisco, we drove to an address in Napa, right in the middle of the vineyards north of Marin County. Somewhere over there, was my guess, krijnen.com was living, because that was the address where the Tabnet bills came from.

When we noticed it wasn’t a server park, but some cubicles filled with young people phoning or working a desktop, I decided to forget about asking to see my server (they’d probably called a psych and the cops). The rest of the afternoon was better spend, doing what most people come to Napa for: tasting wine.

In hindsight we’ve set a trend then, because in 2006 nerds are doing day trips form San Francisco to important benchmarks in computer history. Like the main office of Apple in Cupertino, the Google campus in Mountain View. And the garage where Hewlett en Packard started playing with transistors in 1939, regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley: 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto.

Since Wednesday Mountain View, thanks to Google, is the first place in the world completely covered under blanket of wireless Internet. Through 380 hot spots, that serve 72.000 people on sixteen square mile with sufficient bandwidth.

You get free access through your gmail account, and if you don’t have one, you can get one, for free.

Mountain View is a test for the first big free wifi network Google is planning to set up: San Francisco, forty miles north. The inner city alone at least ten times bigger, so at least a couple of thousand hot spots, and a few million users, slurping bandwidth.

The question is what the consequences are for the classic providers of Internet access. How to compete with Google.

By the way; is Google a Mr. of a Mrs?

 Posted: August 22, 2006, 08:02 AM | Comments (0) |

August 18, 2006

Smuttiness in disguise

We’re seeing quite a lot of different things things during an average shift of website publishing, editing, moderating and deleting.

Some article comments are little jewels from visitors who earn a job as a journalist, to be moderated next to the rubbish from the full time shit stirrers, who we’d rather ban from the website forever.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

Because we’ve chosen for a system of validation, all comments have to be moderated. Computers cannot – yet – moderate, but with a couple of hundred of comments a day, we can’t spend the time we’d actually need to do the job proper.

As long as I can remember letters tot the editor from our readers, meant to be published on paper, are almost always shortened, as well as checked for typo’s. Apparently grown from a dualistic approach: the papers face, as well as from the letter writer, is cleaned before it's littered.

On the Internet everything is different. Where the first condition for publishing in the newspaper is a signature with a checkable name and home address, on the website filling in two fields is enough; name and email. He who uses noneofyourbusiness@hotmail.com is blocked – if we’re not moderating in a hurry – but everybody who uses a normal looking email address, passes our censors.

That is, if his text is decent to some level, next to some other considerations. Typos and error in style are not edited or improved: no time. Should we decide to do so, we’d need umpteen extra editors, in these hard times.

A bonus for this way of working are the sometimes bizarre discussions in the threads. Someone who has produced a comment is sneered at by someone who signs as a language teacher, followed by a third one who points to errors in the teacher’s use of language.

Our problems are very minor compared to a site like YouTube, where the most popular new videos on the Internet are published every day. Thirteen million visitors per month, 50,000 new video’s every day.

All those video’s should be moderated by humans, because the porn spammers have discovered YouTube. Everything should be viewed from the beginning to the end, because the smuttiness is in disguise. A video starts a child birthday party and it’s up to your imagination how it ends.

A YouTube video is bound yo a maximum of ten minutes, and the average is 3 minutes, so YouTube should spend 2500 hours per day on moderation.

They don’t do that because it’s impossible, so the problems are predictable.

 Posted: August 18, 2006, 09:43 AM | Comments (3) |

August 04, 2006

Pay This Post! Now!

I think you're perfect, how do you like me? Also online now: an old boy network, where everybody jolly hits shoulders, letting the whole world know how great the other old boy is.

It's the new blogging where every blog boy links and pings the other blog boy, the target is money for everybody (and chicks for free).
Pay Per Post is an American website that contacts bloggers with those who sell something. As always, I'm sitting here, wondering what to think about it.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

While your newspaper is pushed in your mailbox every day, next to free weeklies, junk mail and copies of handwritten offerings from hand readers and chimney cleaners, the spectrum of offerings on the web is much broader - and more bizar.

In this spectrum Pay per Post has discovered a niche, although it's no new hole.

In our newspaper battles are sometimes fought when advertorial salesmen have raped the written agreements between editors and sales, that is, in our view. When a commercials looks too much like a editorial the reader is confused, independence and trustfulness of the newspaper are damaged.

Bloggers that sell their soul to Pay Per Post don't have to worry about such discrepancy. Agreements are crystal clear: positive stories about beautiful products, and the money will arrive. At the seller whose products are recommended, in my account, and above all at Pay Per Post, I assume.

It sounds good. I haven't read the small print yet, so I even don't know if I have to stick a PpP logo on top of my blog if I should want to participate in the program. Although it's possible you don't have to do that, as a blog full of positive reviews might look more trustfully without a Pay Per Post logo.

Keep watching me. For clarity: I'm not (yet) participating, so if you read something very good about my Mac over here, it's straight form my heart. My iMac is up and running for ten months now, always fast as I can wish, always stable, never problems with viruses or intruders, I love my iMac!

Have you heard, Steve Jobs? Pay This Post. Now!

 Posted: August 04, 2006, 12:25 PM | Comments (1) |

August 01, 2006

Read on!

Humility is a virtue. I'll never reach the level of columnist Bob X. Cringely when it comes to computers and networking. As a matter of fact I also have to pass when it comes to quantity.

In his july 20 column - They Wrap Fish, Don't They? - he mentions he has been writing for the World Wide Web since April 1997, which is about as long as anyone on continuous duty can claim: 480+ columns, totalling just over 800.000 words. As it turns out, Bob X. isn't shy of comparing himself with a higher level, pointing out at least one version of the King James Bible consists of 783.137 words. (I assume there's a digital version).

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

Let me count. Since November 1995 I declare all kinds of things about computers and Internet, every week, almost continuous. They did quiet me for four weeks a couple of years ago because of paper-cuts, but they couldn't stop me writing and publishing on the website.

Browsing my archives I'm counting almost 500 columns. On a couple of occasions I had to pass because of bad planned public holidays. Word counting is a problem here; over time the column has moved a couple of times to different pages and sections of the newspaper, directed by editors and lay-outers, filling different spaces. Editors and lay-outers are the same everywhere; if your words don't fit in their space it's their scissor that cuts wherever they like.

Wonder what my average of words per column is; the current column bosses regimen is approximately 360, but until a couple of years ago I was allowed twice that quota. With an average of 250 I reach 250.000, so I have to type on at least some years before I'm level with King James.

What matters is if and how often all those words have been read. Cringely calls the Internet ‘the idiot savant of journalism’; supremely good at a thing or two and not at all good at anything else. His belief confirmed somewhat by a recent study from the University of Notre Dame: news stories survive on the Web for an average of 36 hours before half of their eventual readers have read them.

Almost at my quota I can't go on over here, bu Bob X. is afraid that content is hardly read at all, in a world where only heads are quickly scanned.

Tell me: did you finally arrive over here, at the very last sentence?

 Posted: August 01, 2006, 11:42 AM | Comments (1) |