Today it’s
the 35th anniversary of the landing on the moon. It must have been quite the day and naturally, I was not yet put on this world that day.
This is also the day you’ll see people questioning the landing, as if it had never happened, even claiming that mankind never put a foot on the moon. Every single argument have been debunked, either at Redzero’s or NASA’s. However the most damning proof has been done by the Apollo 15 crew: the hammer and feather test (QT).
An 
alert reader over at Slashdot noticed the following:
From the product page on Apple.com.au;
“you could fly from Sydney to Singapore and still have hours of listening time left over as you stroll the Champs Elysee.”
I think the Australian ‘localisation team’ need to do better than a find and replace of ‘New York’ & ‘Paris’…
See picture. Lousy replace text example. Currently the page has been changed: the offending text now says:
Imagine: you could fly from Sydney to Singapore and still have hours of listening time left over as you stroll through the Singapore Zoo.
Singapore Zoo, yes? I can hear it already: ‘Australians love visiting the unique Singapore Zoo!’
Bought Rise of Nations last Friday and am still not sure what to think of it. It looks like a combination of Risk (the board game) and Civilization, that is when playing the ‘Conquer the World’ variant. Neat sea battles though, although I find it hard to believe my ‘dreadnoughts’ could be sunk by sailing boats. Or that sailing boats survive a good bunch of torpedoes. Umm. No. I should have gone for something else. Euro 2004 for example.
Alfons dug this one out: In Europe, Elvis hits may become public domain after 2005. I think that would be pretty neat. Or see Slashdot discussion. We can finally have Cliff Richard as website-background-music (says Alan).
While doing 
some ownerdraw stuff in regular Windows stuff (stuff is my favourite word, as you can see), I noticed something weird: I was forced to ‘refresh’ regions by code, instead of relying on the tools of the specific programming language. For a single moment I was thinking I was seeing ghosts, but apparently, I wasn’t hence the use of a refresh in a specific piece of code that allowed me to merge a couple of cells in grid.
Now for the gifted among us, how do I make that ellipse look 3D (and don’t tell me to shift the ellipse a couple of pixels up or down, drawn in a different colour).
The 
latest Firebird supports RSS/Atom/YourSyndication format straight from within the program. The feature is called LiveMarks and apparently it’s the abbreviation of Live Bookmarks. It works perfect: blog entries (for example) are just added as bookmarks. That’s it. After all they are just links. No need for external applications or so-called RSS news readers. I only wished that someone would come up with a better icon than that ‘flash’ thing.
But wait: there’s more! Find as you type finally seems to mature: the developers have put an extra editbox in the statusline plus the additional arrowkeys to highlight the next found word or phrase. Perfect combination of using the regular way of finding text and the ‘vi’ way.
For the daring, find (and install) your latest Firefox build here.
I have a problem with flag-waving people. There you have it. No matter how you turn it, flag-waving still smells like nationalism to me. Of the worst kind. It’s the symbolism that turns me off: it happens everytime I see a winning athlete picking up a flag from the crowd and draping himself/herself in it. I mean, that athlete, he won the race himself and on his own, right? Why bother running around with the country’s flag? If I finish a masterpiece of programming work, you think I would drape myself in the national flag and run around the office? Sounds silly, right?
For some kind of reason, I keep thinking that the flag-draping and waving stems from the early Eighties, and to be specific, from the Olympics. 1980 and 1984 to be exactly. Maybe I’m wrong.
Guess, I won’t be watching the Olympics. Unless athletes decide to run around with flags with pictures of their relatives and trainers.
Yesterday, I 
discovered that the DVDs I ordered 4 weeks ago didn’t arrive because of an error in the paperwork. Today, I discovered that I had an account at the same store, something I wasn’t aware of. Weird.
Additionally, we decided to look for dividers for the living room and we ended up at a major furniture store on Robie Street. We did find the ones we wanted, but at the end we walked out with a wicker plant stand, for which we (obviously) needed a plant for.
So we drove through town to find something that would fit in the house or on the plant stand. Something droopy: Which means something that automatically resembles something like an ivy. An ivy! I’m not superstitious, but I embargo anything that looks like or is called ‘ivy’. I do not want to have ivies in my house. They bring bad luck.
Does this entry make sense? Not at all.
Something weird struck me today. I promised someone to copy a file to a disk and discovered that my diskdrive on my (almost new) laptop was gone.
It’s not there. It was never there. When buying the computer, 4 months ago, I never thought of actually considering to add a diskdrive. Nobody offered it either. And today, for the very first time, I had this feeling that something was missing while I tried to push the disk into an imaginary diskdrive in the front of the laptop.
So much for being into computers. I feel diskless for the first time in my 17 year computer-life.
For no
good reason we made ‘oliebollen’ today, using our secret recipe. Well, it’s hardly a secret. It takes flour, sugar, eggs, butter, a sprinkle of salt, milk and yeast. What a coincidence: over at MetaFilter there was a discussion about sourdough too! Which I could relate too, as (many of the frequent visitors already know) I’m a pretty proficient ‘home-made-bread-maker-without-an-electronic-breadmaker’ myself too.
There’s something about making these kind of flour and yeast things. The best moment is not the final result, it’s actually the moment to find out that the dough has finally risen. If something went wrong in the mean time, your friendly one-celled bacteria may have bitten the dust. For example today, I stowed the bowls of dough away at quarter to 6, or say 6 PM. By 9:30, the dough had risen high enough to guarantee puffy nice ‘oliebollen’. That’s almost 4 hours, but looking at the dough, it was nearly perfect.
It must have been the weather.
Watched ‘House Of Sand and Fog’ (distributed by Dreamworks) today and thought it was a bit over top. Still good but I wonder why it is rated higher than, well, for example ‘City Of Ghosts’, which I thought was more impressive. Additionally, with City Of Ghosts you get Thai songs, which (like with the 4, 5, 6s’ from Kill Bill) make that particular movie.
Earlier, we watched the first Spider-Man movie. According to others I am the last person in the world that watched that movie. I’m not a Spider-man expert, so can somebody explain why there should be a dash between ‘Spider’ and ‘Man’?
And 
thus starts the painful road to execution. Anyways, today’s ‘mystery person of the day’ (Encarta) over at Encarta (yeah, yeah, what the hell was I doing there?) is Franz Kafka (Wikipedia).
Note the difference between Wikipedia and Encarta
If you haven’t read The Trial, tough luck. However, feel free to read the original German version. As a sidenote: I keep saying ‘Das Proceß’, while I actually meant ‘Der Proceß’. My German is getting rusty. An additional sidenote: I corrected the entry over at WikiPedia too. It said ‘Der Prozess’. There’s a difference between Prozess and Proceß (like in ‘processed cheese and trial cheese’). Don’t you just love Wikipedia?
Greece surprised another time: it beat the Czech Republic in the last semi-final by 1-0. The goal was scored at the end of the first extra time period, invoking the ‘silver goal’ rule. That’s going to be a party in Toronto, as Alan already mentions.
It would make a great finish for the Greeks if they won: they defeated France, held on to Spain and defeated the other finalist, Portugal, earlier in the opening game of the tournament. What a weird Euro.
Fractals. 
You know, those images drawn from ‘recursive functions or algorithms’. Nowadays nobody understands why it boomed, and quite frankly that’s understandable. It’s that long ago, when the first homecomputer marched into the livingroom, sporting 16 to 256 colours in a low resolution.
I remember the first articles appearing in a popular Dutch science magazine (Kijk). When the first home computer entered our parental house, mid to late Eighties, fractals became part of that experiment too. Creating a fractal could take days.
