Bloggers@large

Bloggers@large wishes you a Merry Christmas & A Happy 2006Hope to blog you again next year!

Happy Xmas Oh yes: three more days to go and then I’m driving home for Christmas! This friday I’ll be on the plane and then I grab a rental for my last stretch to Tallahassee. I have spend a lot of christmases with my girlfriend, but for some reason this year feels special to me (for several reasons). What – to me – surely is going to be weird about it, is the fact that for the first time ever, my girlfriend will not be home when I arrive; she is working at a different time now and she probably […]

Honda Asimo The Japanese never cease to amaze me. They are doing a lot of research with robotics and it seems they are years ahead of the Americans. Just take a look at the new Honda Asimo robot. It is awesome to see this thing move! Fluid motion and a perfect balance. Just check out the little flash movies they have on the website. You can see by the way this robot moves so fluid like and the way it interacts, that a lot of progress has been made: previous attempts to have a robot with two legs were pretty […]

YouTube rocks! Ok, here is a cool new service: YouTube. It lets you put all your video’s (with a maximum upload of 100mb per movie) online and converts them into Flash movies. You can then view them from anywhere in the world or you can add the video’s to your own webpage (like I just did), e-mail them etc. etc.. I think this is going to be the next cool thing that will sweep the web. This really rocks!! Check out the video that I attached here for fun! It is a spoof on the Dutch Scarlet One commercials that […]

Rotting away! For the first time since I have started to buy and use DVD’s I have come upon a DVD (a Dutch documentary called “I’ts magic time”) that doesn’t work anymore because of oxydation (aka “dvd rot”)! A scary thought because this DVD is from 2002 and it’s 100% legit. It is a welknown fact that DVD’s (or CD’s for that matter) that you burn yourself, have a shell life that is less than a regular DVD. Since I have over 375 DVD’s (about 90% I burned myself) it makes me wonder what will happen the next few years. […]

$5000 delivery? Ok, I don’t know what PR genius came up with this contest, but apparantly someone at Domino’s Pizza’s thought that it would be fun to sell a hypermodern “Ultimate Man Cave Couch” to the first person “to call 1-800-521-8274 (ask for Scott Senne) between 12-2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Dec. 14, so devotees of this divan should work on their dialing dexterity. All major credit cards are accepted.” Now, the couch will set the “lucky” owner back for a mere $30,000 (I would say; about a life-time supply of Pizza). But, the clincher is: “Some nit-picky details: The […]

AJAX: enabling Web 2.0? Recently I wrote about my last 10 years online. When I wrote that article I felt that, in comparison with those first 5-6 years (’95 – 2001), nothing ‘radical’ or really ‘new’ was going on. Well, I need to revise my opinion because I completely left something out: Web 2.0. I guess it completely skipped my mind because a lot of what is hyped to be “Web 2.0” has been around in some way or form, but was pretty dormant, so to speak. But with something like AJAX popping up all around us, it seems that […]

Frits Philips: 1905-2005 Frits Philips, son of inventor Anton Philips, died last night at the age of 100. Frits, or as he was known by most people “Meneer Frits” (Mr. Frits) played a key role in the development of the Dutch Multinational Philips. Although he wasn’t known for his excellent management skills, he was a beloved and respected person in Holland espcially because of his social involvement. During WWII he didn’t leave Holland (the rest of the Philips management fled Holland) and managed to save many Jewish people from being deported to German work camps.The German occupiers even threw him […]

Wrongful imprisonment How do you become your own worst enemy? Basically by doing the same things you accuse your enemy of doing. That is the paradox that the CIA is facing now, as it has become clear that they are using very questionable methods in the war on terror. Abduction, torture, keeping people in prisons without any trial (Guantanamo Bay): it’s just a short list of all the things the USA is doing. Dana Priest from The Washington Post has literally pulled the lid of some covert operations with her article on November 2nd called “CIA holds Terror Supects in […]

RIAA: suck my **** Apparantly it takes the RIAA 14,800 lawsuits in the last two years before someone stands up against these morons. Before now not a single one has gone to trial. That’s about to change because Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, New York, is taking her case to trial. According to the report at the Arstechnica website, she recently found herself the target of an RIAA lawsuit and vowed to contest it, claiming that she knows nothing about downloading music online. The RIAA, however, is quite sure that she does. As they […]