Honeymoon

We have as good as made up our minds about a destination for our honeymoon, which will most likely be happening in the end of November. Morocco !

Initially, we thought of going to Egypt, but first of all, it’s kind of expensive, and we’ll be needing money this year (purchase of new house, wedding in November + possible additions/enhancements to the house). Secondly, we figured it’s better to take out a few more days (say a min. of 12) and do a complete trip of the most interesting places of Egypt (including Cairo, Alexandria, excursion on the desert with open-sky sleeping facilities -as in: on the sand-, Luxor, cruising the Nile and visiting the ancient temples, and Aswan).

So, looking at other countries, I was hugely interested in doing Syria (Damascus!), but in that time of year, it’s not very warm there, and it is a honeymoon you know, so that ended up on the wishlist.

Lybia had some hidden gems, but that country is hard to get in (visa), and not all that ’stable’…

Of course popular Morocco holds the best cards then: decent enough temperature in Nov/Dec, plenty of historical sites, easy to visit… We wanted to stay for about 8 days, and mainly in Marrakech.

A friend of mine at work (the surfer dude from DailyBits.be) actually did about the same trip some time ago, and gave me some more tips on the region (he loved Ouarzazate and Essaouira). I used his advice and we visited a local travel agency, that gave us mucho kilos of reading material on the matter.

But we already made up our mind, to be honest. So we’ll soon be returning to the agency to book our honeymoon. They offer a combi of 4 days Marrakech (in a lovely riad), and 3 days in Ouarzazate (probably hotel there to really relax - we’ll be doing tough ‘field trips’ there ). All we have to decide upon is which riad / hotel we want to book. One of our favs is this one (can be found on site of Jetair, for instance): Riad Dar El Kheir [ riad-darelkheir.com ].

Something warm to look forward to in winter :o]

CPeX @ Pukemarock 2008 !!!

YES !! Thank you, Lord !
The legendary and totally ass-kicking Clement Peerens Explosition is performing at the Pukemarock festival in Puurs in September. I am so stoked about them getting together again and touring Belgium !

Several years ago, they ruled the rock scene in Flanders with their combination of no-nonsense, hard rock and humour on stage. The music most reminds me of the equally great AC/DC, but combined with a hilarious sense of humour (the front man, Clement Peerens, is actually Hugo Matthysen, and together with the former drummer, “Vettige” Swa De Bock, or Bart Peeters, they have their own crazy radio show “Het Leugenpaleis”, and a TV version “Het Peulengaleis”).

I remember when I was younger and totally loving their performances with CPeX. I simply thought it was genious! You get to rock out ànd crack yourself up with their jokes. Brilliant.

Are you ready veur den Dikke Lu ?

Read about them on Wikipedia (NL) here.
Their official site is of course www.cpex.be.
If you’re on Facebook, become their fan by joining this group.
If you’re on Facebook and attending Pukemarock, join this group.

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Tags: cpex, clement peerens explosition, clement peerens, sylvain aertbelien, swa de bock, dave depeuter, pukema, pukemarock

I Like To Move It, Move It

It’s coming to a close.

This Friday we will be moving from our apartment in Antwerp’s city center to our recently bought house in Bornem. It will be a day of heavy lifting, driving between the city and the municipality, accompanied with some healthy stress.
In the same weekend, we will be painting the living room, and a friend of ours will be replacing the ceiling in the bedroom.

This is possible thanks to the huge garage we have, because of the bel-etage (don’t know the english equivalent of it) layout of the building. It means that the garage and hallway comprise the entire ground floor, meaning space for two very large cars, or our entire household

From that weekend on, we will finally be living in our new house (can I have a w00t?).

In the week following, we’ll be changing our residency and painting the bedroom. I also have to fix us up with an Internet connection, and HD satellite TV and radio ASAP. Sure hope the latter doesn’t give me too much troubles…

I’ll miss the conveniency of living close to absolutely everything, but I sure as hell won’t miss the tourists and the lack of parking space

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Tags: moving, house

Scheduling a Meeting Date

Just what the doctor ordered !

I regularly need to set a date for a meeting, in many cases with +10 attendees. What is the best way to do this?
I’m not even considering scheduling the meeting through Outlook (decline - propose new date - decline - propose new date - …). And what if not everybody has Outlook at their disposal…
What I found to be the best solution so far, was to write a simple e-mail message, with potential dates vertically, and attendee names horizontally, where they simply had to edit the days they were absolutely not available. I then selected the closest date on which everybody could attend.

Needless to say, this is a bit messy. And it requires close follow-up on my part. With the added bonus that sometimes people just don’t get this system, causing even more tedious, useless work.

Well, NO MORE !!!88!!!8

Via Lifehacker [ lifehacker.com ], I came across these two (free) web applications: Doodle and When is Good (I totally dig the name of the latter).

The big strength of these solutions is the simplicity and the openness. You don’t need to register (not even the organizer of the meeting), and you can specify certain timeframes per day. They both even have the ability to take timezones into account (super handy for conference calls).

My vote goes to Doodle, because it is more versatile (aside from OK/NOT OK also a “OK if no other way possible”), and you can use it for polls as well (e.g. what business incentive do the colleagues prefer?)

Doodle [ doodle.ch ]
When is Good [ whenisgood.net ]

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Tags: timemanagement, meeting scheduling, meeting date, doodle, when is good

Suggest Friends on Facebook - also for ‘Senior’ Users

If you’re not yet on Facebook, either go register yourself, or stop reading now.

As some of you might know, you can suggest friends to other Facebook users. For instance, when a good friend you know joins Facebook after you invited him/her, Facebook automatically tries to help the new user get more connections. There will be a link under their profile picture saying “Suggest Friends for <friend’s name>”.
But, when you happen to ‘discover’ a friend, that has been on Facebook for some time, and has several friends, Facebook does not offer you this kind of action to perform.

I actually needed this for a friend I found by just searching for his name. He used an e-mail alias when registering for Facebook, so I didn’t find him by importing my webmail contacts. This friend and I have a lot of friends in common, but somehow he never added any of them. So, obviously, I wanted to suggest all those friends to him. I looked around and searched, but was unable to find anything of the kind in all the menus and links on Facebook.
Googled a bit, and found out that indeed, Facebook doesn’t offer the friends suggest option on profiles of people that have been registered for some time (no idea what that timespan is though).

So I did some snooping of my own and found that you can simply use the address of someone’s profile (in the style of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1065010701) and type &suggestfriends directly behind it and press enter. Now the profile will show up again, but with the suggest friends box on top of it.

Suggest friends for Filip Lejon [ facebook.com ]

Update: I don’t know if this option was available earlier, but in any case, you can now suggest friends for anyone, by clicking a small link all the way at the bottom of someone’s profile page. Noticed that after I wrote this post. Makes it just a bit easier

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Tags: facebook, suggest friends, social network

Classic Photographs in Lego

Mike Stimpson recreates several classics in photography using Lego’s. I’m sure you recognize more than one. Click the photo to discover the original (he posts a link to the originals in his descriptions).

Classics in Lego - a photoset on Flickr [ flickr.com ]

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Tags: photography, lego, classic, mike stimpson

Why More Megapixels Is Bad On Compact Cameras

This is an article explaining why the trend and hunger of customers, and thus, manufacturers, for more and more megapixels on compact digital cameras is actually a bad thing.
Most people that don’t have a technical understanding of the digital photography technology are fooled to believe that the more MP a digicam has, the better its image quality. This was true in the beginning of the digital photography era, but especially nowadays, is totally wrong.

I experienced it myself, having a Sony DSC-P73 from 2003, with 3MP on a 1/2.5″ sensor. It produced images that were actually better than the Sony DSC-H9 I bought in 2007, having 8MP on the same size sensor. I knew then that more MP on a small sensor is indeed bad, but I trusted that technology and know-how had evolved over those years, being able to compensate for the increase of noise. Boy, was I wrong.
The difference was not so much there with pictures taken outdoors on very bright, sunny days, but was definitely noticeable on cloudy days, indoors, etc… At the time of purchase, the P73 cost about €250 if I recall correctly, while the H9 at its introduction cost around twice as much !

I was shocked with this, and it made me totally disgusted with any camera that had a small sensor and more than 6MP.

I think it was only two months after I bought that H9, that I went to search for a second-hand Sony DSC-R1 (which has an APS-C size sensor), and the image quality of that is on par with an SLR camera in combination with very expensive glass.
I now own two of them, and I practically haven’t touched my H9 since I got the first one.

» Best picture quality with 6 megapixels! [ 6mpixel.org ]

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Tags: megapixel, mp, dsc-p73, dsc-h9, dsc-r1, digicam, camera sensor, image quality

digsby

With all the fancy (and sometimes useless) online social applications and tools, it is becoming more and more cumbersome to just even quickly check up on things. Check your friends’ photo’s in Flickr, see their Facebook updates, see if you got mail, etc…

How many of us that are proficient on the web only have one (1) e-mail address? Congratulations, you’re a minority! You’re usually on Hotmail, because you need the MSN network for all your friends, you of course have a Gmail account coz that’s the best webmail service, you have a Yahoo account for Flickr, etc…

On top of that, you like to chat, and very often via several protocols: MSN, Google Talk or Jabber for the more professional environment, specialized groups on IRC, …

Surely you have experienced first-hand that keeping track of all these things takes a lot of time, and is not very exciting to do (visit the site, log in, check status, log out, NEXT, …). Wouldn’t it be great to just have one application (preferably installed on your local machine, so it’s fast), where you can do all of that? OF COURSE IT WOULD ! Unless you get payed to check all your private stuff at work; in that case, surf along.

I recently came across a small application called digsby, which is still being developed (currently in private beta) and tries to deliver all of the above. I tried it out already, and it does look very promising.
If you’re still reading, you’re probably interested. In that case, I suggest you click the link down below, and send them an e-mail to get an invite code, so you can try for yourself. They go more into detail on their homepage, so do like clickety clickety right away…

digsby [ digsby.com ]

Oh, by the way: I’m writing this post from within the latest installation of the Flock web browser. Never heard of it? Congratulations, you’re not (yet) a minority. But it does look like the combination Flock + digsby could work wonders for one’s busy online social life.

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Tags: digsby, im, e-mail, notify, chat, client, social, flock

Life is taking its Corners

Sooner than expected/planned, the lives of my girlfriend and me are taking corners pretty fast.

On the 31st of November 2007, I asked her to marry me. Being the lucky bastard that I am, she said yes (otherwise, I wouldn’t be posting anything here, obviously). So good news !

But then a few weeks after, we received word that we had to move out of our appartment in Antwerp by the first of July 2008. We have been searching for a house to buy in the area of Klein-Brabant since then, and currently we’re very close to accomplishing that.

So a busy period for me once again (after the 7 months work at Huntsman), in which I won’t be posting very often. But who knows, once we have moved I might use my blog for posting the progress of garden work. And when children arrive, I’ll certainly have something to talk about!

All you readers (should that even be plural?) take care, enjoy life and prove yourself to the world. [ -> consider that my New Year's message for 2008 ]

Daft Punk - Alive 2007 clip

It’s been awfully quiet on my blog, but that’s because I’m extremely busy at work until the end of the year at least. Probably my Flickr photos site is my busiest publication at the moment (not that it’s busy ;)).

Anyhoo, I just had to share this track of the legendary Daft Punk. It’s a mash-up of “Around The World” and “Harder Better Faster Stronger” which they played at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, an 18,000-capacity sports arena in Paris, on June 14th, 2007. They asked the public to bring their digital camera, and tape the concert. The result of the recording is now available as Alive 2007 on double compact disc + dvd.

Here is a YouTube clip with the mash-up. Makes me wanna be there !