Weblog | May 2004

Wow, the new Sopranos season is great. As always. Oh, if you want to catch up, get the previous 4 seasons on DVD. I'm also enjoying the new Therion, entitled Lemuria/Sirius B.
It's another prolonged weekend, because it's Pentecost (Pinksteren) tomorrow, and that means no work on monday.

Interesting article on Pixar.

More mailorder fun. Another order arrived. A beautiful combined hardcover version of the The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer and Wilbur Smith's River God.

This article takes a look at new advances in Shrek 2, which is due for release here on July 1st.
Ordered a bunch of shirts last week. They arrived yesterday evening. Check out the harvest: Audioslave, Queens Of The Stone Age and A Perfect Circle. I'm ready for summer.

Still fascinated by the Amazon API. Found some more examples.
I'm confused by this article on MIME Types.

Easier print format is one of the many reasons I love CSS. The lasts ALA adds some nice detail in the article Print It Your Way.

For a while now I've been tracking the links from this site to amazon. Just out of interest. To see which items people are interested in. I've wanted to play around with the API for my fun, and just added a page to this site, which shows the 16 most popular clickthroughs. Interesting. Beware: page could take a while to load. I still want to speed things up.

No work yesterday, because of Hemelvaartsdag (Ascension). To stretch the weekend I took a day off work today. Watched Europa im Mittelalter on Canvas last night, a German documentary on the Middle Ages. After that I slept for 12 hours straight. Delightful.

Went to see Troy in Trianon last night.

In the year 1193 B.C., Paris, a prince of Troy stole Helen, Queen of Sparta, away from her husband, Menelaus, setting the kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece at war with Troy. The Greeks began a bloody siege at Troy that lasted over ten years. Achilles was the greatest hero among the Greeks, while Hector, the eldest son of Priam, King of Troy, embodied the hopes of the people of his city.

Quite loosely based on The Illiad and perhaps a few too many shots of Brad Achilles looking bulky and tormented. Plus they left out the storyline of Cassandra and her prophecies. But quite cool nonetheless. Now if only the airco in the theatre would have done it's job.

Update: completely forgot to link to Manowar's Achilles epic.

Received mail about the upcoming European Elections on June 10th. Since I'm completely oblivious of the parties involved, I took the 'quiz' at VoteMatch. Can't say it's all that clearer now. Hm. Something I'll need to look into further.

Happy birthday to my brother!

Some interesting articles:

• Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line
• Atom vs RSS
• Wiring a Neighborhood?
• Separation: The Web Designer's Dilemma
• Globe Grows Darker as Sunshine Diminishes
• Ten Questions for Andy Budd
• New clues to 2bn-year-old murder
• An Objective Look at Table Based vs. CSS Based Design

That's what you get for not checking your zines during the weekend.

Can't believe the Ukraine won... I thought it was about the song, not the outfit.

Spend the day in Amsterdam, browsing the stores and markets. Bought a bunch of thing, like earrings, jeans, shoes, a shirt and a book. Didn't see the 'stars' though. ;-)
After that, got some Chinese and watched a movie. A good day, all in all.

Today marks 100 years of Salvador Dalí.

Though I no longer use Blogger -I created my own custom CMS- it's still interesting to see what direction it's going. Read all about it's recent redesign at Stopdesign.
Oh, and I really like the Mozilla DOM inspector.

Couldn't resist anymore. Ordered the Blackadder DVD box earlier this week. Didn't get around to picking it up, so I decided to go this morning. But my cold has progressed and I feel horrible. But I ran out of tissues, so I had to go to the store anyway. Well, atleast it stopped raining. And now I've got something to watch after installing myself on the couch.

It needs to stop raining. I already caught a cold earlier this weeking riding home through the rain in my -to thin for this weather- jacket. Thanks. Oh, and the fact that I've heard Call of Ktulu more than once today (for some reason I wasn't the only one who added Ride The Lightning to the playlist today) reminds me I still need to read some Lovecraft. It's been on my list, the one with authors and titles I want to read. I'm sure you have one yourself.

Video night last night. Time for a pizza and a movie. We got this one (IMdb) with Robert Carlyle. Whom I'd never in a million years thought of to be cast in the leadrole. But was great as always. Scary.
And I bought Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott, which I'd wanted to read for a while now. Was actually looking for the Dune series, but I couldn't find a complete release.

Switched to the Thunderbird mailclient at home a while ago. With the recently released version 0.6 I decided to switch here at work also. But somehow I couldn't save attachments. Couldn't find anything online on how to solve this and reinstalling didn't help either. Luckily the profile manager did the trick. Created a new one and deleted the old one and now it works.
Oh and I'd like to read Defensive Design for the Web by the guys from 37signals.

It's Herdenkingsdag today, which is the day we remember the second world war. Tomorrow's Bevrijdingsdag, which is the day we celebrate our freedom.
Can't believe it's been a year since the New York trip. Can't believe it took me this long to post a report about it.

Take a look at Leiden.nl, which is the new website for the city I live in. I'm afraid you'll have to use Internet Explorer though, because it doesn't appear to be working properly in other browsers. And I wonder why it had to cost so much (€170.000). Sigh.

What a way to start the week! Check out The Shining in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies.

Just bought the Marmitek PC Control remote control. Bought their PC to TV sender a while back, but I was getting tired of running up the stairs all the time. Hopefully this will fix that.

The European Union will be enlarged as of today. Ten new countries will be added, adding roughly 75 million people.
Oh, and try the europaquiz, it's quite addictive.