Buitenveldert is a neighbourhood in the South of Amsterdam, and it is there where I photographed these buildings, except for the last one which is across from the RAI, right next to where the last two buildings in this set used to stand.
Restaurant: Kantjil & de Tijger business The Dutch have a love-love relationship with Indonesian cuisine stretching back to colonial days. The Rijsttafel, literally meaning rice table, is a colonial invention, putting together all the specialities of the Indian archipelago into a single menu. The darker side of this tale is the ‘Chin. Ind.’ restaurant, the … Read More
In offices you have this thankless job called super user—not to be confused with the UNIX role of the same name. A super user, sometimes called ‘power user,’ is a person who is not part of the IT department but who does menial IT-related tasks such as fixing broken printers, explaining colleagues how to bold … Read More
It seems everybody and their kitchen sink is discussing the debate around US health care reform, with only a few opinion leaders actually reading and analysing (typically: cherry picking) the actual text of the law. But if the American right doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of these reforms, there is a simple solution. Give … Read More
I tried to experiment with lines and shapes, but that did not work out as much as I had hoped. Nevertheless there were a couple of photos I liked.
Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax service, sent a form for me to fill out in which I needed to indicate projected future earnings. They do this almost each year—well, regularly—so that they can let you pay your taxes for 2020 in 2019 instead of the more reasonable 2021. And every year I postpone filling out this … Read More
My friend Natasha pointed me to an article in De Pers about people working 80 hour work weeks in the Netherlands, rare creatures indeed. Fortunately, she also pointed out that it is apparently a slow news day. The author had interviewed five or so people and the article consists mainly of their words, which is … Read More
When I was still in bed in the morning and not quite ready to get up, I was listening to Eddie Izzard’s Definite Article on my audio player, and apparently I had dozed off, because at one point I was sitting in a living room on a fairly high rug or carpet, wedged between a … Read More
I unscrewed the lens from my Praktika L, screwed it on top of my EOS 1000D’s body, and took the contraption to the Amsterdamse Bos to practice. First thing I noticed that in full sunlight and with a wide open aperture, I had to set the exposure time to the fastest setting, 1/4000th second, to … Read More
Just me brainstorming. Authors should be obliged to exploit their works. When they don’t do that for a set period of time—ten years tops sounds reasonable—their copyrights should be transferred to an entity that will exploit it for them. Authors of works that are only fixed in rapidly decaying media, such as anything digital (where … Read More