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January 30, 2007

The B-word

Next week it's Tabloid Day at the newspaper were I'm working, last months all hands on every deck having been busy preparing , restyling, learning new tricks, and, pretty important, learning how to write shorter (and better).

Temporarily there's not as much attention for Internet and multimedia as there should be, but that's gonna be alright, in time to come. If not out by vision, then because of the market: publishers that don't take part in the Internet rat race, will find themselves empty handed at the finish - that is, if there ever will come and end to the race.

Most of my colleagues don't seem to understand it yet, but there's De Nieuwe Reporter(The New Reporter) to tell them it's paramount that they start blogging.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

Listen to Jeroen Mirck: Ladies en gentlemen journalists, you are sleeping. You're either sleeping or you are neglecting the most important trend in a decade, but you're feeling pretty satisfied about it. Most of you have written that Time Magazine has chosen me (you too) as Person of the Year 2006, but at the same time you are sneering about user generated content, thinking and saying it's all too unimportant to add anything to your profession.

You are so wrong

And that's why a lot of you will lose their job in the coming years. Luckily enough there's one remedy: you have to start blogging. Not only the Internet freaks under the editors, but each and everyone of you. Or else you'll be first in line when the pinks slips are presented.

The last sentence in previous quotation is not right. At least yet, here in Holland its impossible to receive a pink slip just like that. You might get kicked out eventually, but not before your boss has obliged tot a large set of rules, known as so called social plans or outsourcing rules and regulations, whatever. But so far I've never seen the B-word in all the paperwork accompanying redundancy.

Nevertheless; should you worry, my dear colleague, but non-blogger?

Well, maybe not right away, but you'd better take a subscription on the RSS feeds or the newsletter of De Nieuwe Reporter, to learn and understand what this B-phenomenon might mean for your profession, your future.

Mircks final words: Do I exaggerate? Of course not. You exaggerate when you think I'm talking bullshit. Keep thinking so, If you like, but don't start sulking when we stuff and mount you in a nature museum, like a frozen brontosaur.

In the end of the day it will be a blogger who puts the lights out over there.

Who knows, it might even be a journalist blogger, but that's up to you . . .

 Posted: January 30, 2007, 12:29 PM | Comments (0) |

January 19, 2007

Badonkadonk and Death by Milk

Do not try this in Holland, because before you're around the very first street corner it will be confiscated by grumpy men in black or blue, but in Britain or the US it's somewhat easier to drive your own soapbox, powered by something that roars.

You have to pass some kind of MOT, and if brakes, headlights and steering are doing a decent job you receive some kind of green slip and you're on your way. One should try to emigrate to the US for less.

I doubt if the Badonkadonk Land Cruiser Tank is 'street legal', because on most pictures I can find, it's badonkabonking around in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, during the Burning Man Festival. However, if you're prepared to pay 20.000 dollar, and you have a very big back garden, you can badonkadonk in in Holland. She's for sale on Amazon.

Burning Man is one of the festivals I'll hope to visit one day, the other one being pumpkin chunkin. Two great things I've already written about ten years ago, when the web was mainly some manuals and articles, accompanied by small and blurry pictures.

A more mature Internet has made these kind of things so much more fun. Bandwidth galore, photo albums, slide shows, YouTube, Google Video, and more, much more. Go Google for 'badonkadonk', 'burning man' or 'punkin chunkin' and you will see what I mean.

'Probably next year: the first National Dutch Championship of Pumpkin Shooting. After all, all it took to bring TrekkerTrek to the Low Lands was an article about Tractor Pulling in a Dutch farmers magazine'.

I wrote the previous two sentences in 1997, but then years later the first pumpkin has to be shot yet over here.

Carbide shooting on the other hand, a classic Dutch tradition, was almost defunct, but is hot and cool again. If you have been in the countryside in December and you haven't heard the deafening kabooms of the big milk cans, better hurry to a ear doctor.

Google 'carbid shooting' and the first hit is a nice Dutch website, all in English: 'Death by Milk'

A very lively culture, coming to Brabant from the far east Achterhoek.

I'm afraid you have to need a bit of patience when you wanna become a carbide shooter. At least eleven months, because most villages and cities have carbide rules these days: only on the last day of the year, on dedicated meadows.

Enough time to search a heavy duty milk can, and to do some research.

 Posted: January 19, 2007, 04:22 PM | Comments (0) |

January 13, 2007

iPhone, YouPhone . . . .

Maybe I should have become a marketeer. Some weeks before Xmas (2006) a song sang in between my ears, when Apple delayed the introduction of it's cross-breed between phone and iPod. Then, somewhere first week of December, LinkSys, either sensing problems or opportunities, presented a new model of its iPhone, the name than mum Cisco had registered seven years earlier. So, I thought, Apple will come with its own phone, but what will be its name?

I don't what you were thinking, but there's only one name fitting in Apple's (what's in a name?) Front Row of devices and applications: iMac, iPod, iLife, iWork and all other iThings I forget right now. Which leaves a little problem to be solved.

At least, that was what we alle were thinking, weren't we? Nevertheless, when super salesman Steve Jobs, able to sell fridges to Eskimo's, or fire to the sun, pulled the long awaited Apple phone out of his hat, he called it an iPhone.

It sure looks a ripper, like everything Apple produces. Too expansive? That's up to you, but I still haven't had one second of regret, enjoying my iMac for 14 months now. If you want to know what the iPhone can do, go to the Apple website to play a video of Jobs demonstrating the iPhone, and when you're done visit some tech sites and blogs for independent reviews.

I might buy one later,but why decided Apple - read Jobs - to use a name it doesn't own? Pure arrogance, or a thoroughly prepared stint of free publicity? In one league with Cisco? Arrogance will result in a court case, what Cisco apparently is going to pursue now. But there's also the chance that in another couple of weeks of free publicity this case will be closed, both partiessigning a NDA.

Meanwhile this old songh is till humming in my head. You know it too.

'Icecream, you scream, everybody wants icecream'.

Why haven't they called the bloody thing YouPhone?

 Posted: January 13, 2007, 03:00 PM | Comments (0) |

January 09, 2007

More on Google Maps

I just love GoogleMaps! Great what you can do with it, when you get your API key. It took me a while, and some hard work, but finally I'm getting somewhere.

So far I've set up three different maps:

MyGoogleMap,

a Big Full Screen Google Map (looks fabulous on my iMac),

and a Geocoder.

Couldn't have realised it without the Google Maps API Tutorial from Mike Williams, the Google Maps API Version 2 Documentation and Mapki.

Check them out, click on te markers, try the Custom Zoom, made possible by the Java Script written by Andre Lewis,

Click the markers on - or next to - the map, and see what you can do with CSS or HTML - even embedded video - in the pop-ups.

I've also begun to expirement with feeding GoogleEarth KML files to GoogleMaps, but I haven't found out yet how to feed KML to the URL of one of my own maps.

 Posted: January 09, 2007, 02:53 PM | Comments (0) |

January 08, 2007

Reminiscences of november 1985

Click map for Kooyong at GoogleMaps

My dear Australian friends,

Uncle Leon has has enjoyed his one minute of fame on national television.

If you miss some of the double Dutch over there; as even you can probably guess after having watched the video, it's all about soccer. A Dutch television magazine produced an error in an article about a a soccer match way back in 1985, and I'd send them a kind email about it, pointing out it deserved an 'undo' in the next issue. When they published it, as a letter from reader, I got a call from another television channel. Like in Australia, channels in Holland just love to broadcast about errors made by other media.

I remember that match very well for a number of reasons: it not only cost Holland a place in the Mexico World Cup in 1986, but it was played on the night - November 20 1985 - before I went Down Under for the very first time. After having made acquaintance with Graham, Animal, Damian, and some other crazy roos (shearer Ferris!), a few months earlier in Portugal. Another reason to remember: the next morning - while I was on my way to Schiphol Airport - our newspaper, with all the stories about the soccer drama, couldn't be printed nor delivered because of a big time crash in the Harris computer system.

Coïncidence had sent me to the main computer room that Wednesday afternoon, because I had a problem with a plug on the Olivetti M10, my second laptop computer of many in 25 years. Being there I enjoyed a rare moment of prescience. When the system engineer at service handed me a new plug, I noticed that one of the two Harris disk towers of our old mainframe Harris was producing a very soft high pitched sound (twenty two years ago my hearing was pretty perfect). I told him the note reminded me of my vacuum cleaner before is almost exploded because of a run out bearing that finally broke.

He looked at me the way nerds look at non-nerds, and didn't even bother to answer. So I shrugged my shoulders and went home to pack my laptop and my bags.

Only three days later, having set up office at Kooyong to cover one of the last but one Australian Open on grass, and testing my telephone line, someone told me about the big crash. I was pretty proud hearing the details: when the bearing broke shards flew around, and completely destroyed all disks on dev/#1. Firing up the back up procedure dev/#2 failed, and that was the end of the newspaper of November 21, 1985. Without the system the etching plates couldn't be processed, so the huge printing presses were waiting in vain.

On the phone in Melbourne I enjoyed a glorious day already, being very proud, having navigated the 30k from Daisy Street, Essendon to Glenferrie Road, Kooyong, in the old Ford (Fairlane?) that Graham had inherited from his granddad. I'd even succeeded in staying almost all the way at the right side of the road (left), as you and the Poms call the wrong side - the left - the right one.

More memories; on my way from Amsterdam to Tullamarine, with a stop-over in Athens, in the back of the Olympic Airways 747, I'd become good friends with some members of the Australian soccer team, who had lost 2-0 in Glasgow in the Intercontinental Play-off on the same night Holland blew it's World Cup stage in Rotterdam.

The Aussies still had a chance, to loose it two weeks later in Melbourne when they produced a goalless draw on their home turf in Melbourne. Nevertheless, Olympic Airways probably will remember the flight with the Australian Soccer team and a Dutch tennis writer for another record: all galley kitchens were completely out of beer half way between Athens and Singapore. The three hundred Greeks on board, on their way to Melbourne, the second biggest Greek city in the world, couldn't care less: they were smoking black unfiltered cigarettes, and drank Retsina, Ouzo, or Raki.

Now I'm not sure if booze was the main reason it would take Australia another twenty years to make it to the World Cup, but I do know a Dutchman - Super Saint Guus - finally delivered you there. I'm pretty sure soccer players don't drink where Hiddink rules, but sex under Guus is no problem. As trainer coach of Philips Eindhoven (PSV) in the nineties he used to let Romario sleep in every day after every one night stand, while all other players were training hard out in the cold.

His teammates didn't mind as long as the speedy little Brazilian kept his scoring average on the pitch on the same level as in bed: at least one girl per night, or a few per day per day.

(Romario kept on producing sperm and goals galore, but as a reward for Hiddinks wisdom he would score the first goal in the quarter final of the 1994 World Cup, in Dallas, where Brazil eliminated Holland, under Hiddink).

As I didn't get the chance to tell this story to the VARA camjo (Steven Albers was a very nice guy, but his hard disk would probably have crashed) I'll blog it.

Kooyong 1985 brought me lots of luck. In his first round Dutchman Michael Schapers beat Boris Becker, who'd risen to fame five months earlier, at 17 years of age becoming the youngest Wimbledon champ. While some twenty five German tennis writers were crying out loud 'Verdammt' or 'Scheisse', my phone started ringing. As I'd travelled to Australia on a free lance trip, I was allowed to work for more media, so I did some television interviews with Schapers, and wrote some more articles for other Dutch newspaper and tennis magazines.

Although Schapers would made it all the way to the quarter finals, with every win making my trip more profitable, we'd never become friends. He never was good at receiving criticism in any form, and probably didn't like my style of writing.

The Monday after the final, in which Stefan Edberg beat fellow Swede Mats Wilander in three straight (4, 3 and 3), I took a Greyhound north, to explore the immense country continent for the first time of nineteen more come backs to follow.

'By cripes', the immigration officers in Melbourne or Sydney asked me on some arrivals, after having checked my visa and passport, 'why don't you come and live here? It would save ya a lot of time and money!'

Who knows? Maybe later, retirement at the Gold or Sunshine Coast, or enjoying European summers, to go down to South America, of Australia in our winters, blogging from there, why not?

See ya later, guys!

 Posted: January 08, 2007, 01:06 PM | Comments (0) |

January 06, 2007

The 80/90 Zeng Rule

My black Aldi's, love and admired as well as despised and hated in the editorial desk room where I'm spending way to much of my time, have led to mail and real time listeners.

An elder classic audiophile needed only seconds of listening to tell me the boxes (as well as the amplifier) are crap, but some younger colleagues with a tiny budget thought the jet black heavy speaker boxes from the German retailer ' stellar'.

At the Internet corner of the central desk we think they're stellar too, so from seven tot nine (digital starts earlier that paper) it's morning disco at war level.

We're playing our favorite songs - varying from The Bolero and Ludwig Von to Creedence Clear Water, and plenty of modern stuff, we love the Scissor Sisters. After all, each day the mailman brings at least ten brand new cd's, to be reviewed by the culture cowboys on the next block, and they don't mind the stuff coming a few minutes later, trimmed and shaved by iTunes.

All legal according to Dutch law, that permits you to make back up copies of something legally acquired. Like review examples sent for free by record companies, right?

By the way; who is the owner when they arrive and the chief culture, who is to split the presents between his disciples, hans't fallen out of his bed yet, after another big night of opera - and after opera?

From 09:00 a.m. sharp we're working under a marching order: the big button on the old Pioneer amplifier is to be tunred ten ticks to the left. Not even enough for some colleagues, apparently gifted with perfect hearing, so the rest of the day we're listening to sleep-inducing muzak. Meanwhile silently growling that the time will come that we have to follow the smokers outside, to do what we can't miss.

But I must admit that the lovers of silence might be right after all.

A lot of blogs and newspapers this week wrote about professor Fan Gang Zeng from the University of California-Irvine, who started noticing something alarming among his students: unexplained hearing loss. In each of his biomedical engineering classes Zeng found several students with the type of damaged hearing you normally wouldn't see until 50 or 60 years old.

It's been two years since the phenomenon began; just about how long it took MP3 player to become a staple for college students nationwide.

Coincidence? Zeng doesn't think so.

"We can't say for sure it's from MP3 players, but I don't know what else has changed," said Zeng, a researcher specializing in hearing loss. "The climate and the food are the same."

While I particular like the last part of the previous sentence (Al Gore doesn't agree), I'm not deaf (yet) for what Zeng is telling.

So, next to the marching order mentioned, we've created another one, The 80/90 Zeng Rule: we won't turn the volume up higher than 80 percent, and limit the listening time to 90 minutes.

In time we'll hear if that helps.

 Posted: January 06, 2007, 04:00 PM | Comments (0) |

January 05, 2007

Hoezo, geen verstand van voetbal?

Waar een mailtje met een opmerking over een foutje in de VPRO gids al niet toe kan leiden. En nooit meer zeggen dat ik geen verstand van voetbal heb, want ik wist het echt nog uit mijn hoofd. Ha!

Link: Reminiscences of november 1985

 Posted: January 05, 2007, 09:30 PM | Comments (0) |

January 03, 2007

Revolution: (half) live or play back?

Hadn't checked GoogleVideo for a couple of weeks on 'Beatles'. Never seen this one before: performing 'Revolution' at the David Frost Show. Year?

Got my doubts about whether this is (half) live or play back. According to one commenter on GoogleVideo: 'many people think this is a lip-synced version, its not, its live vocals over the video'.

However; according to Wikipedia: A product of the recording sessions for The Beatles (aka The White Album), "Revolution" featured distorted guitars and an electric piano solo by session musician Nicky Hopkins. This track is one of the loudest and most aggressive Beatle songs; it begins abruptly with a loud, overdriven electric guitar played by John Lennon, a thundering, compressed drum beat from Ringo Starr and a wailing scream from Lennon as the song launches into gear. (The scream was an overdub added when Lennon double tracked his vocal. Paul McCartney performed the scream on the 'David Frost Show' semi-live television performance, because Lennon could not deliver the scream and catch his breath again in time to launch into the first verse.)

Another search on Google delivered this date: Revolution (4 Sep 1968, Promo TV David Frost Show)

 Posted: January 03, 2007, 10:13 AM | Comments (2) |