These predictions is what I think will happen, not what I want to happen. Because in that case, NED would beat BRA, go on to beat ENG in the semis and then the finals would be the most awesomest game ever: A 1974 revenge of NED-GER, which NED would win 2-0.
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Thu May 27th, 2010, 14:18: Dutch ballot
My absentee voting ballot for the 2010 Parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. I get to make one choice out of the ~600 or so people.
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Today I was reading through the Rude Pundit's blogentry on a new law in Arizona that deals with whether immigrants can be asked to show that they're legal:
"No official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may adopt a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law."
The way that our Rude Pundit interprets that in his usual rude way is:
[...] Arizona, decided that the police now have the power to stop and ask people for their papers in order to determine if someone is a citizen. And if that person doesn't have papers? Are they assumed to be innocent? Aw, fuck no. That's for pussy states, not Arizona, which all big and tough with its big and tough white people. You are assumed at that point to be illegal. It's charmingly retro, like South African apartheid, except a few skin shades lighter.
First off, Arizona didn't actually create a brand-new policy, they simply said all AZ state and local police should obey federal law. And, as a greencard holder myself, the law is clear: As a non-citizen, I must carry proof of visa status or greencard status at all times.
The problem lies with the negative: What if a law officer asks a citizen to show proof of immigration status and he can't because he's really a citizen and is not required to carry papers? What if a law officer asks a non-citizen to show papers and that person actually simply says he's really a citizen? Can you then be detained?
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Sun April 11th, 2010, 9:56: People
Today I read jwz's post linking to an article that claims "Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now."
That reminded me of a question I've had for a while: "How many people have every lived on Earth", so I finally googled it. Of course, first you have to define "what is a human", so I put the marker at around 10,000 years ago. I found that in 8,000 B.C., scientist project there were about 5 million people on Earth, about 300 million in 1 A.D. and about 2.5 billion in 1950. Then it shot up over the past 50 years to the current 6 billion.
When you do that math, it turns out about 100 billion people were ever born, with about 6 billion alive right now. That's 6% of all people who have walked the earth are alive right now, and 10% of the people who live in the past 10,000 years have been born in the last 100 years.
Ref: pbr.org
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Wed April 7th, 2010, 14:09: Annoyances
Two things:
1. My parents decided to try the Capital Metro red line to go downtown today. But the Southbound trains don't run after 8am, except for 1 trip at 5:30p. Ref http://www.capmetro.org/MetroRail/schedules.asp
2. Why can I not dial a number (or even cut&paste the number) from an iPhone calendar item. Isn't that the most logical thing to do, to dial the conference call number directly from the invite/cal item??
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Thu March 25th, 2010, 22:17: Lucas
I'm sure that --even while I haven't posted to this blog yet-- everybody knows that I'm now a daddy! Lucas is already 6 weeks old, and just in case you hadn't seen it, his website is at http://lucasjanssen.net/. Is has an RSS feed so no excuse to keep up with us!!
I just uploaded 3 new videos and a whole bunch of new pictures, so check it out!
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I found the source of that funky dryer smell that's been plaguing us for a while now. Watch and phear:
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Eight days ago:
Today:
More pictures than you can handle here.
Papa, dankjewel!
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Tue September 29th, 2009, 12:38: Pay phone
I saw someone use a pay phone today!
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From the NYT:
"President Obama will this week sign into law a provision allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons."
It seems that this provision is added to the "Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act" ("the Credit CARD Act", yes someone spent waaay to much time on this title). So in the end I guess I can agree with everything in this bill: Credit companies cannot jack up my rates and law-abiding citizens can carry a gun in a national park.
But that's not the reason I'm posting this.
Why is it allowed under Congress rules or US law to tack on completely unrelated riders to bills? Now Democrats who are in favor of gun control cannot vote this down because it would mean they have to vote against the credit card bill as well. And this happens all the time, especially with military appropriations bills, I understand.
This doesn't make any sense to me at all...
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Wed April 22nd, 2009, 15:22: Music taste
Just signed up for Pandora Internet Radio. I've never seen my favorite music explained and disected this well! Please keep bringing me "trance roots" with "laid back female vocals" please! I'm excited, and I need to read up on the Music Genome Project some more.
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Yes, that's hail. There's more pictures, including my broken windshield. I didn't get pictures of the baseball (3" / 7cm) hail that hit the car, I was too busy making sure I got safely off the roadway
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- The outermost nesting level is my home XP desktop at which I sit right now.
- It runs a VMWare Server session connected to my work VPN. You can see my work Outlook running.
- From there, I VPN+RDP into the customer site's only machine that allow RDP. I have some work utilities open, and a notepad as scratchpad.
- From within the customer's remote desktop, I have several RDP sessions to production machines open, checking various Services and log files.
I can't tell you how often I'm opening an Explorer window and not seeing what I was expecting.... :(
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Thu March 19th, 2009, 16:36: GLOBE at night
Yesterday, I participated in GLOBE at Night. From their website:
...the GLOBE community is invited to participate in the annual global sky observation known as GLOBE at Night. GLOBE at Night brings people outside to observe the constellation Orion from 16-28 March 2009. Participants simply choose a clear night on which stars are visible, take measurements of stars in this portion of the sky using GLOBE's Magnitude Charts, and enter observations into the GLOBE at Night Web site. Students — alongside teachers, parents and community members-- amass a data set from which they can begin to explore the concept of light pollution and to research the patterns of light pollution across the globe. Two interesting observations (pun intended):
- My area gets Limiting Magnitude 4, which I think is rather good being in a city the size of Austin
- It doesn't matter whether I stand on my front patio, with street lights and patio lights all over, or drive 2 miles (to the quarry on McNeil-Round Rock Road) where there's much less ambient light. Both sites got a '4'.
You should do it too! It's fun, connects you with nature and the stars, and helps understand light pollution around the globe better.
Participate here.
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Mon March 9th, 2009, 9:37: Random update
I usually don't post my day-to-day activities in my blog, but I just had a wonderful weekend. Went to the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market, did a whole bunch of spring-time yard-work, including chopping down a half-dead pine tree and topping all the crepe-myrtles in our yard. And Chantal bought a car! A 2006 Pontiac Vibe, light blue, good condition, luxury package, and right price. Hopefully we can do the loan stuff early this week and she'll be driving it soon.
Even while I did a lot of physical work this weekend, it just make me feel completely recharged and ready for the workweek ahead!
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When Will Emergency Rooms Go Back to Being Emergency Rooms?
My feelings exactly...
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Sun December 28th, 2008, 15:00: Married!
(more later, including much better quality pictures, this will have to do for now)
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Last month I upgraded my phone from a simple calling device to basically a computer. Choosing between a Blackberry, a G1, an iPhone or a Windows Mobile device, I decided to go for the HTC Touch Pro (branded as the Fuze by AT&T) from HTC, running Windows Mobile 6.1. Why?
These were the reasons for going with the Fuze:
- I'm locked to AT&T so the G1 or the Storm are out.
- 640x480 screen (vs. 340x240 for the iPhone or the G1)
- Full flip-out keyboard instead of the iPhone keyboard
- Windows Mobile would supposedly have plenty of apps. While Apple's Appstore is relatively new, and the G1 is really unproven (background shell "reboot" anyone?)
- Customization: You can hack as much as you want into the Windows OS, instead of the "closed" OS on the iPhone.
Well, after 25 days I returned the device and got myself an iPhone 3G 8Gb... Because:
- Although the Fuze's screen was 640x480, it was only 2.5", vs. iPhone's 3.5". That means it's a lot less space to touch the screen, and a lot harder to see Google Maps while driving.
- I found myself typing on the real keyboard very little, even resorting to the on-screen touch-keyboard so I didn't have to flip out the bottom half (which introduces a delay because it has to rotate the screen)
- My work's Wifi uses PEAP auth and Windows kept popping up a password screen with the Medianet (cingular1@cingulargprs.com or something) credentials which I then had to manually change. And don't get me started that it doesn't accept unsigned certificates unless you hack the registry.
- The gmail java app didn't work and using gmail in the IMAP "outlook" client was wonky, since outlook didn't understand tags. Each sync, I'd end up with a new tag "Sent Items" :)
- Opera worked decently but not as intuitive as I've seen Safari work. Sure you can tap to zoom in but it would constantly re-render the whole paragraph so you would not end up where you tapped. And you can only click a link if you're zoomed in!
But the worst I'm saving for a paragraph by itself, since it supersedes all the bulletpoints above. It was
SLOW. Seriously, firing up Opera took like 15 seconds, folding out the keyboard would rotate the screen which leads to a redraw time of at least 5 seconds. Then you'd have to go into Taskmanager to manually kill Opera otherwise it would suck batteries in the background. Hitting the Home button would not respond by going to the home screen 50% of the time. Once I loaded 10 or so apps, the phone's performance became simply unbearable, even browsing through the contact list would become seriously slow.
And sometimes I'd wake up in the morning, touch the screen only to see it spontaneously reboot. Seriously??? A phone that reboots at random times?? How many calls did I miss because of this?
Now, this might be because I loaded the thing with a bunch of 3rd party CABs (installable apps) that would degrade stability, but I don't want to use a virgin phone. I want apps. I'm sure that once I install 10 apps from the Appstore on the iPhone, the thing won't start rebooting on me.
So it turns out, the iPhone connects to the PEAP wifi right away, syncs with gmail perfectly, syncs with my work exchange (even better than Outlook!), Safari renders various "mobile" pages like google, wunderground, etc. better than Opera, and the keyboard is adequate for the amount of typing that I do.
So there it is. I now own an iPhone. And I'm loving it!
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Tue November 4th, 2008, 23:09: Hell yeah!
Yay.
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