Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

Just a quick video of me practicing at the range using my Viridian X5L. Works like a charm. Still need to work a bit on my tendency to jerk the trigger after going through half a box of ammo.

Oh well, they say practice makes perfect...

News sometimes trickles down kind of slow here in Holland, but this was a bit too good let it pass even though it happened a week ago. What is it that I would like to share here?

Well, on Friday Jan. 29th Obama visited a House Republican retreat in Baltimore to answer questions from republicans in, what The Huffington Post calls "The Lions Den".

At the end of the session there was a Q&A session that wasn't supposed to be broadcast, but the White House pressured the Republican party to bring the cameras in. And Obama got a sterling opportunity to defend his policies against a whole audience full of Republicans.

As The Huffington Post describes:

What resulted was what one Democratic strategist described as "amazing theater" -- certainly for cable news. Standing on a stage, looking down at his Republican questioners, Obama assumed the role of responsible adult to the GOP children, or, at the very least, of a college professor teaching and lecturing a room full of students.

The event was aired live - among others - by Fox News (known as "the voice of the republicans"). What is interesting about that, is that Fox News choose to cut off the live feed from the broadcast 20 minutes before it ended. I wonder why.

Anyway: here it is. Obama at his best.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you feel like reading it, here's the complete transcript:

Continue reading "Obama tells it like it is" »

Ok, what is wrong with this picture? €83 million euros equals $117 million dollars. That's the amount of money raised in Holland with a the Holland Helps Haiti telethon this Thursday Jan. 21st.

This Friday, there was a telethon in the USA (and some other countries) organized (among others) by actor "George - do good - Clooney". The telethon was aired simultaneously on more than 25 networks, including CNN.

So far that show raised... $58 million dollars...

What? That must be wrong?

Let me get this straight: Holland with only 17 million people, raises $117 million dollars and the US (and other countries) with an estimated 308 million people, only raise $58 million?

I hope those are preliminary figures, because that would be a shame and disgrace in my book. It can't be right can it?  The Funny thing is that CNN writes in it's article about the telethon:

"The preliminary figure is a record for donations made by the public through a disaster relief telethon, according to a news release from telethon organizers."

Wow. I surely hope that this is a mistake and they can't really count all the donations fast enough.

See also: Hope for Haiti telethon vs Holland helps Haiti

With the winter hitting several parts of the European mainland and the UK hard, we see an increase of people getting stranded. They either get snowed in or find themselves trapped at the airport or train station. I find it amazing how bad people are prepared for these winter conditions. In several parts of Europe people have already died from accidents and/or because of the cold or - as I see it - a lack of preparation.

If people would just think a few steps ahead, they might save themselves (and other people) from a lot of problems.

So, for those of you out there that do want to prepare, have a look a the video below by YouTube user USNERDOC. He prepares for wintertime by putting a box with some basic tools and survival gear in the back of his car.

I highly recommend you prepare such a box yourself as well and put what ever gear in there that you think is useful. I think the video will help you come up with some ideas on how to go about that. I myself have a big backpack in my car filled with blankets, tools, a sleeping bag etc..  Anything I might need if I get stranded somewhere. There is really no need for you to become a sad statistic because of a lack of preparation. You can make the difference yourself.

Or, in the words of  Norwegian Arctic & Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen (1872 - 1928): "Adventure is just bad planning".

Winter kit

As an Asus Eee Pc 900 netbook user (the 900 model that came with 20gb), I use a homemade, slimmed and trimmed down Windows XP Professional version as my main OS. I installed over the dorky Linux version that came with my Eee PC. I prefer XP because I can get all the apps that I need for it, but still I think it’s too bloated. Thats why I also installed EeeBuntu (EB for short) on a 8gb SD-card as an alternative. It’s real easy to do and it works – so far – like a charm. But Eeebuntu is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and we already are at 9.10. Until EB 4.0 is coming out, I experimented with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but that had way too many little glitches. Mainly my mousepad not working correctly and very poor battery performance i.e. my battery time was almost cut in half. Eeebuntu is doing a little better as it comes with a tool that helps with battery life, but still it’s not as good as XP. So, this weekend I tried the Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10, but it performed like crap and the interface just sucks.

But here enters Jolicloud. Jolicloud is what I consider a competitor for Google Chrome OS. It’s a lightweight, Linux based operating system (Debian/Ubuntu) that is aimed primarily at netbooks. Just like Google Chrome OS. It is currently in it’s beta phase, but so far it looks promising. The interface is fully modeled after the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which isn’t bad to start with, but leaves a lot to be desired for more seasoned users that (also) want a regular desktop.

The idea, just as with Google Chrome OS, is, that users store a lot of there work online on the servers of Google. It’s no surprise then that Jolicloud works mostly with Google apps. But you can install many other apps as well, including Skype.

At the moment I am trying to install it on a 8gb USB stick so I can run it from there, just like I did with some other Linux alternatives, but it seems that the version of Grub that comes with the latest version doesn’t like this, so my first attempt ended in a Grub error.I am, however, able to run it from a USB stick without installation. This is off course not a persistent install (i.e. I loose my settings with every reboot).

So far it looks good, responds snappy – as far as my 900Mhz Intel can be called snappy – and just works. I just need to figure out if I can get it working (persistent) from a USB stick (or maybe SD-card). That might require an email to their support department, but I guess it’s worth it.

Anyway: I will keep testing this puppy a bit more and will report back here on my findings.