Today it’s 24 degrees outside, but from what I understand the cloud cover that should be familiar by now to anyone’s who’s stayed in the city this summer will return tomorrow. The next time the sun will be back it will be autumn.
If you’re not a geek you probably don’t know SourceForge. It is a very useful website for computer programmers (or developers, as we like to call ourselves), because it provides an aggregation point for people, code and knowledge, and it does so for free. It unfortunately was built by a certain sub-type of geek that … Read More
Although my posting frequency here never has been a thing to brag about much, lately it has dropped below the “once a week” that I unconsciously saw as a minimum. This is not because of the dreaded blogging fatigue, but because I’ve joined a couple of other blogs—which I must have written about once or … Read More
This is too important to just leave to my browser’s bookmarks. I just found this absolutely marvelous online dictionary of narrative mechanisms called Television Tropes & Idioms. Despite the name it is not just about TV, but about story telling in all mediums, including games. And every definition I’ve encountered so far is absolutely spot … Read More
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cricket as big as the one that landed on my window sill today. Wikimedia Commons identifies it as a Great Green Bush Cricket. Didn’t know they were this common. The Dutch name translates to Great Green Sabre Cricket, undoubtedly in reference to its distinctive tail.
A couple of years ago I reviewed a book by web usability experts 37 Signals called Defensive Design for the Web in which they gave side by side examples of how to do web shops right and how to do them wrong. One of the examples had two sports stores go head to head. Both … Read More
The European Football Championships have entered their final phase, and people across the globe worry about playing systems, injuries, formations, fate, and what have you. Here’s the Jong Nieuws blog’s preferred formation for EURO2008. I probably should have translated “vrouw” as “wife,” but I feared that the caveman mentality present in this cartoon would perhaps … Read More
Sushi World business Don’t walk away, run Last month around this time I was having a heavy cold that wouldn’t go away, with a fever and a headache and a general under-the-weatherness that made me fall asleep every four hours or so. The past few days I had stayed home and done my own cooking, … Read More
Four years ago I blogged rather harshly about Dick Advocaat, then manager of the “Oranje,” the Dutch national football team. That was because he deserved it. People may remember the EC in Portugal as the one where Advocaat incurred the wrath of the Dutch for pulling his best man off the field (Arjen Robben) when … Read More
I did it before, but last time it only worked in Firefox, and barely at that. This time you can play coach of the Dutch national football team at the EC 2008 in any browser, as long as it’s not IE 6 (or indeed any other browser that fails to support even the smallest basics … Read More