April 2006 Archives
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Freedom is the greatest asset.
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It's Queensday, the Dutch equivalent of St Patrick's Day, only everybody dresses up in orange rather than green. Isn't it ironic.
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Alan Rickman, Harry Enfield, Eddie Izzard and Vic Reeves do Python's Yorkshire men sketh.
Hadn't been in town for Queensday since... well, since before I moved here. Didn't take long before I remembered why I never bother.
Queensday is when everybody:
1. sells crap in the streets
2. drinks a lot of crap beer
3. eats a lot of crap food
4. wears orange
Orange is probably my least favourite colour. Looking at it through a lens just makes it worse.
I'll try again in 2012.
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Various streaming 80s live gigs, Hothouse Flowers, Springsteen, Suzanne Vega (1 hour long)
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Dutch Queen's Day starts tonight with Queen's Day, um, Eve. Tourists beware.
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Easy geocoordinates
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Join the Whedonesque Last.fm group
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I hosted these pages between 96 and 97, as part of my Eddie Izzard fansite. I've put them back online almost exactly as I found them (on an old HD), crappy HTML and all.
Eleven years ago, I saw British comedian Eddie Izzard perform a show in Amsterdam. Not long after, I set up a website about him, which ran in various incarnations from '95 to '2000. It was my most succesful website, at least until we set up Whedonesque.com.
I hooked up an old HD to my computer yesterday, and found the most recent backup of the site, made just before I took the site off line in 2000. Among the files were two original pieces I wrote. They are a review and an interview, both of which I'd like to share with you again, starting with the review.
I've also put part of the site back online, not originally created by me, but given to me to host. It gives me great pleasure to present: Pantscat!, an early Izzard creation.
The review follows after the break. I haven't followed Izzard's career the past five years. I stopped 'believing' and thought he was a bit too calculating, too eager in the quest for fame. Not a lot of soul. Then I just lost interest. But this was written at the height of my comparatively brief obsession with the man who said 'Jam!'
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Matt Biddulph hooks BBC 6music up to Last.fm
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He doesn't write personal stuff very often these days, but when he does, it hurts.
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Find me at /caroline. I'll try put up a list soon
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'Visocica Hill, which is 2,300 feet high, is actually Europe's first pyramid in heart of Bosnia'
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Cold, warm, crust or not
Guess what I had for dinner? Pork pie. With a dab of brown sauce on the side. Guess what's in the fridge? Blackpudding and Kerrygold Irish butter.
No, I didn't fly to London or Dublin today after work. I jumped on my bike to pick up something from the Hardware.nl shop on Ceintuurbaan. And on my way back, my eye caught something interesting.
There on Sarphatipark, not 5 minutes from my door, was a sign that read "Thomas Green's, the best of British.' It looked very small, but I hit my brakes, got off my bike and went to investigate.
Inside I found a British grocery store. Fully stocked. Frozen products, a range of instant Indian meals as well as ingredients, cheese (Cheddar, natch, but Wensleydale too.), rashers, various kinds of sausages, double cream, clotted cream, beverages, crumpets, crisps (salt & vinegar!), a large rains of teas and enough biscuits and sweets and chocolate bars to give the entire nation diabetes. Bottled ales, cider. Etc. etc. And they deliver too.
How long had they been there? 18 months. How could I have missed them before? Local regulations prescribe they're not allowed to advertise in the street. They're looking for another location.
'Don't move too far out of this neighbourhood,' I said.
www.thomasgreen.nl
PS. Aussies, they've got tim tams and vegemite too!
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Beeb 2.0
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Wanna redesign the BBC website?
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'state of happiness'
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Timely article on American Apparel, whose website I only recently discovered
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Bandslash is very creepy. I find it respectless. Like pinching an artist's bum. But worse.
I've been trying to book something, anything, anywhere, but can't make up my mind. Or my mind is made up for me, when the mini break I pick is for couples only.
Flights anywhere seem particularly expensive that weekend, so I'm looking at something a little closer to home. Belgium. Germany. The Netherlands even.
Paris is out, since I've got that slotted in for June.
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Dutch text, with video
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x-ray video of the way birds sing
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Hasn't this been done? What's the point of the web2.0-ification.
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Museum of Modern Betas
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lightweight PHP application
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If I ever want to have tube socks delivered. They ship from/to Europe.
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'HP Sauce has launched the "Save the Proper British Cafe" campaign'
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Got myself one of these to make use of the old HD's I stripped from my old computer. All part of spring clean up.
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Bite me, Henninger.
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I might just have to start reading Doctor Who sites if the episodes continue this quality.
This morning when I tried to go to gmail at mail.google.com/mail, I got a 404 not found page. When I shortened the URL and tried mail.google.com, I got this pixyblog.com homepage. Some kind of freaky DNS problem?
Where's mah mail, Sergey?
This problem only occurs in Firefox.
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A thread on Mefi about sushi places in central London.
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'His growly commentary is charming.'
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A special supplement to mark the Easter Rising's 90th anniversary
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A week of Bob Dylan programmes. BBC Four is repeating a number of these for a special Dylan night on Sunday 23 April 2006.
The last musician on my list of artists I absolutely have to see live once in my life is George Michael, now that I've seen the other three on that list: Morrissey, Peter Gabriel and Tom Waits.
As with a lot of the artists I like his output is low and he hardly ever tours. But he's finally getting back on the road.
Tickets went on sale today. I didn't know about it, so by the time I got to Ticketmaster, all the shows' (£100, £60 and £40) tickets were sold out. I tried again a few hours later and they'd put some more shows on, one of which was still giving results for single tickets. So I got one.
I'll be checking out George at Earl's Court in London on November 28th. Dutch shows haven't been announced yet, but I'd rather travel to London than see him here (in Rotterdam most likely) anyway.
Ever wonder why salmon is called 'sake', as in 'Nigiri sake', and the rice wine (that's really a beer) you drink with it is called 'sake' too?
Apparently the Japanese language is just rife with homophones. 'Kiki', for example, means 'chrysanthemum', 'to be effective' and 'to listen to'. It's complex.
But there's more! From this Japan Times Online report on the decline of the Japanese language we learn the following:
"Anata Setsumei Dekimasu ka (Can You Explain It?)" on TBS (Wednesdays, 7:25 p.m.) asks hapless celebrity contestants to try to explain the difference between frequently confused words or phrases in Japanese. In one recent episode, for example, viewers learned the difference between sake (salmon, the fish itself) and shake (salmon after it has been prepared for human consumption).
All we need now is a recipe that combines fish and drink, cause we all know fish must swim (three times, in water, butter and wine). Ah, there we go.
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Exterminate that!
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I am a 'reserved designer'
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Proto-punk, original 60s weirdness
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Thread about The Monks
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At long last available on DVD. Mr Dailliard!
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'Nothing could have prepared me for the time I spent with Serge Gainsbourg, the louche, turtle-eyed genius of la chanson Française.'
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'It's a shame that business problems and personal insecurities have led to him restraining his output'
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Michael vs John: catfight
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Speeding up your site
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Game by Entropy8Zuper
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PHP utility to delete, rename, chmod files, etc. Very nifty if you've lost permissions over a file due to some unruly script.
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For OSX and Konfabulator
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down the Yang-tse Yang
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The Guardian provides both yay and nay perspective
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'If Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen were ever invited in, he might describe the decor as "haunted curiosity shop".'
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'Next, I told the family that we wouldn’t be having them for Christmas Day. They said, ‘Fine’: it was that easy.'
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I went off iceberg lettuce years ago, but may have to try again
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(via doyoufeelloved.com)
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Great, great single at number 1 in the UK
Went on one of my regular walkabouts, from Museumplein to P.C. Hooftstraat, Spiegelkwartier, de Munt and Waterlooplein.
This is a shoe shop on P.C. Hooftstraat, the small upmarket shopping area that's usually jammed with SUVs and Russians.
Still, if you have a cup of coffee at the Patou café and you ignore the other customers, you can make yourself believe you're in London.
That's until the waiter rudely tells the elderly gent who is about to join your table that 'generally, sharing is not done'.
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All the speakers' mp3s for download
I'm gonna party like it's my birthday. Cause it is.
Sorry for the mess around here, but I'm never going to finish it if I don't just go live and fix it as we go along. So, comments are unstyled, individual page are incomplete and archives may or may not be working, etc, etc.
But: I'm so happy to be back on Movable Type after my Wordpress and Pivot adventures. You have to work with the tools that suit you best and I've found out the hard way that MT is that tool for me. Unfortunately, most developers seem to have switched to Wordpress and I don't think MT is marketed at personal publishers anymore which makes it harder for me to find solutions or plugins. But even without that online support I know my way around MT best.
The reason I switched from MT was that it didn't seem to handle my extremely large archive very well and rebuilding had become a real chore. This newer version of MT however does a better job, I think the server Pair has me on now is a little faster too. I've also lightened the load by dividing 7 years (!) of archives over four different weblogs.
So anyway, birthday, I'm not up to much, I think I need a hairdo...
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It's alive. Check out the C.R.A.P. article.
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mp3 download
I've been going on about 'monumental change' since the start of the year, but to be honest I had and still have little idea what kind of change exactly. I've given up on growing up, it just isn't going to happen. I'll happily tag on to the current 'gruppy' fad, how convenient. So what else is there that I could work on?
A new job would be a kind of change. I've thought about it and have actually ventured out there and tried my luck, but the experience taught me that it's not all bad where I am at the moment. In fact it's pretty good. Pretty cool colleagues (although the age difference is starting to smart), smack in the eye of the web/tv/radio digital hurricane, excellent work agreement, ok pay. It's the commuting that takes it out of me, the crowded trains, the daily loss of 2 hours... Honestly, workers should get paid for their travel time. But even commuting isn't all bad - it gives me time to read, if I don't fall asleep before I turn the page.
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Reading up on what himself is up to today
Lost's Bernard to Mr Eko: 'I liked you better when you were hitting people with sticks...'
Gnarls Barkley on TOTP performing the #1 song in the U.K., 'Crazy', live. Too bad about the rest of the album.
Dr Who Season Two premiere: Billie Piper has got a really weird face, but she's acting the pants off David Tennant.
All of Bradley Whitford's scenes on The West Wing's 'Election day, Part II'. A sad farewell to Leo/John Spencer, and the show itself.
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Really enjoying season II of Seth Green's Robot Chicken.
The best thing about having a break is going out without the sense of urgency I normally feel. I do not have to hurry. I can take my time, walk slowly.
First I booked an appointment with a health spa in town for next Tuesday. That's a first for me, a result of my rather severe upbringing. That kind of self indulgence was considered 'common'. Consequently my muscles ache with stress related knots. Time for a 60 minute pounding.
I spent the rest of my first day off taking it fairly easy, doing some light shopping: A Jamie Oliver cook book for a family member, a new soundcard for myself (to be installed in a new computer to be bought later this year or next year), a 'rocket air blower' to clean the dust off my camera's sensor. Looked at boots and sneakers, none took my fancy. Looked at jackets, none fit.
In my quest to test all the Japanese sushi places in town, I settled at Tokyo Cafe on Spui. I think they fancy themselves a rather chique 'grand cafe and restaurant', with the staff in traditional black and white clothing. But my overall experience was less favourable. It's hard to see inside from the outside, and the first impressions were 'tacky' and 'stuck in the 70s'. A waiter told me to shut the door behind me. I thought he sounded a little rude, but I did as I was told.
Someone had parked their Vespa in the front bar and the place looked like it hadn't been open in a while. I was shown to my table where, once seated, there was a distinct whiff of the sewer.
All the staff were Chinese. Is there ANY Japanese restaurant in town where the staff isn't Chinese? Have Japanese people all been deported? What's the story there?
I ordered edamame, sashimi sake, sashimi hotategai, nigiri hokegai and nigiri ebi. And some sake to drink.
The sake tasted a little funny, but it may have been the cup they served it inl. The edamame was fresh and warm, but I wasn't sure of their sashimi sake (salmon), and I definitely didn't like the slices of lemon they put between the hotategai (scallops). The lemon just didn't taste very nice in combination with the soy sauce and wasabi. I wasn't impressed with their nigiri sushi either, the rice wasn't sticky enough.
The rest of the day I spent encoding videos to upload to youtube.com. You can check them out, but it's all old people's music.
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Picked up this soundcard with external box today. It gets bad reviews, but I'm not an audiophile - the ext . box saves me from having to get down on my brittle knees.
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Kids cover You made me the thief of your heart. Badly.
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Online video editing. Wow.
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Spa in central Amsterdam.
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Review at Crap Filter
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Music by and starring Bjork alongside Barney
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Oh, pretty. Will it record?
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'40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old'. (via Vandenb.com)
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After he had uncovered the first 20 affairs, Mr Knowlson said he "stopped counting".
11 days no alarm, no commute, no delays, no meetings, nobody whistling through their teeth out of tune, no last minute food shopping, no early nights... what bliss.
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celebrating a literary life, by the University of Nottingham
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Gorjuss.
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Nudge nudge.
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Dutch writer Gerard Reve passes
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'Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.'
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Put any feed on your website easily
'It's spring again, and so I sing again, with these two lips, from Amsterdam.'
9pm, Stephen Patrick Morrissey kicks off his first ever solo gig in Amsterdam. He's just a red blotch with a quiff seen from my vantage point behind the mixing desk, but I tap my feet to the tunes from his latest and murmur along to the ones from his greatest.
9.30pm and Mozzer takes off his shirt. He's just perfect from this far away, square and padded in all the right places. Couldn't stand him when he was a little whiny fucker, but he and his weltschmerz have grown on me.
10.15pm, he says 'ciao' for the last time, having played a single song encore.
He comes and he goes, just a little too ironic, maybe just a tad too British. Irish blood, S.P., embrace it.
Ah, it was worth it, if only for the deep purple hues and mini opera of Life is a pigsty, and the bestest ever retort: 'I'm not as skinny as I once was... but neither are you.'
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Design elements, trends & problems in web design
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I was going to upload the Jools / I Spy video, but it's already there
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Martin Sheen will be studying philosophy and English literature in Ireland
Um...
I just found my wallet.
In my fatigues' leg pocket. Which I only put on today, so I must have slipped the wallet in this morning and promptly forgot about it.
This is the state of my brain this week.
So here I am with my wallet and a handful of cancelled cards.
Last night I lost my wallet with my bank card, my Mastercard, my Visa, my Amex, my work I.D., tons of other cards and, thankfully, only 30 Euro in cash. I haven't lost a wallet in 30 years, because I'm practically OCD about knowing where it is. But I bought a new wallet recently that turned out to be just a little too large to stick in my jeans pockets and felt slippery - I didn't feel good about it. It probably fell from my jacket pocket on the train or on the metro. Note to self: trust your instincts.
Did I mention I got caught without a ticket on the Metro the night before? 37 euro fine.
I'm stuck at home with no food and no money and a hell of a temper.
It's a wonderful world.
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My new favourite snack. Sold at work, but for how long?
Via Gordon: “What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry and paste it onto a new blog entry that you’ll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish! Leave a comment if you do this. The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.”
What time did you get up this morning?
6.35 am
Diamonds or pearls?
Neither strike my fancy. I think as far as jewelry goes, plain silver is what I prefer.
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Interesting page design with scrolling tree
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Awesome 'superfluous third column'
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Hadn't seen this one yet. Very entertaining. 'Are ya comin across?'
[rant deleted]
Sorry, I am having a total meltdown.
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I love how searching for my old url still returns a snapshot of the web as it was in 1999
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I'd participate, but it's too cold
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Scroll down. Isn't Brendan Gleeson the business? And so is Ciaran Hinds, here pictured together.
Bono has recorded the song 'The dying sailor to his shipmates' for a Chantey and Sea Songs tribute album, produced by Hal Willner.
Other artists involved in the project which is being recorded in various cities around the world with an all star line up including Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Gavin Friday, Bryan Ferry, Antony and the Johnsons, Loudon Wainwright III and Richard and Linda Thompson.
The album will be released on Epitaph Records in July 2006.
Source: U2log.com, GavinFriday.com (um, yeah, I'm blogging my own scoop.)
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'He is fed up with the way the government is wooing parents with longer maternity pay, paternity leave, flexible hours and family tax breaks.' Huzzah.
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Now on a p2p near you
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Late 90's, from 'Tilt'
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Maybe I should have read this before I started
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With Gavin Friday, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Antony and the Johnsons, Richard and Linda Thompson, Bono, Guggi, Dave-id, Andrea Corr, Bryan Ferry...
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recommended, have to check this out
- I was supposed to go to a web 2.0 presentation last night, and I thought it was today. Crap.
- I didn't get half the things done that I wanted to do this weekend.
- It's still freezing.
- I'm sick and tired of my current site and its cms.
- I'm already bored with its redesign.
11 days to go till my 11-day Easter break.
The plaintive call of my mobile wakes me up early this morning, not quite 5 am.
I open my eyes and find myself gazing into my stalwart laptop still spinning my West Wing S2 DVD.
Closing the lid puts it to sleep. I crawl out of bed.
Pick up the mobile from my desk, crawl back into bed and open up the message.
Read it. Something about talking mickeys.
Don't ask.
Sleepily I punch in a reply: "It's 5am luv, watcher doin' up? Zzz."
And fall back asleep.
In the morning it turns out to be a delayed delivery, the tail end of this boy-girl argument that's now spun out over two days.
He blames the Dutch.
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'Congratulations. It's your lucky day! You just found one damn fine photo newsletter.'
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'How to do pop art portraits'
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Filming of TWW ended at about 12:15am PT, April 1st. I am in total denial. Sorkin's new show can't start soon enough.
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Fab pictures of a new Ireland
So instead of doing all that on my to do list, last night until way past bedtime I did sketches for another long overdue redesign. It's probably quite similar to what I've got cooking for eachman.com. Consider it practice.