This is a tintinologist essay I wrote in Dutch in 1996. Upon rereading it I noticed that I didn’t feel too ashamed about it, so here it is again in English. Enjoy. The role of Captain Haddock in Destination Moon Those who follow the adventures of the young reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy will … Read More

The old “don’t leave valuables in your car” sign was a cartoon of a fat man with a stubly face, a mask and a crowbar. It had a caption: “nothing in, nothing out“. The new sign is an artsier affair. Not only does it depict a broken window, it also suggests the designer cracked that … Read More

Did I say ‘up’? I meant ‘open’. Bought a couple of candidates for everybody’s favourite free e-book repository. It turns out the two of them had never been read. I know this because the pages were still stuck together, and I had to cut them open with a pocket knife. One was from 1880, the … Read More

Stuff I acquired on Queen’s Day this year: I’ll William Tell you one book among them: De Idioot. Intriguing. I bought the two football comics, the five old books, and the Grisham for the total sum of 2.35 euro. The Hiaasen I got for free from a guy who was handing out books for free. … Read More

The decay of Wikipedia can be measured by expressing the chance that it will fork. That’s all I’ve got. A fork is a term from the community of open source programmers. It means a split of a project into two distinct projects working from the exact same code base. These splits often happen for philosophical … Read More

The train from Utrecht to Schiphol Airport, a 20 minute trip. For some reason it always seems to be made up of thousands of cars, mostly empty.

Picture I took ages ago, during my military service. We were practising at a 15 km range in what otherwise was a very quiet place where wild boars loved to come. Sometimes the heath would catch fire, and we would have to take out our shovels and extinguish the flames by hitting them.

The last time I achieved Inbox Zero was somewhere last year. You should think I would be able to remember the exact date, but there you would be wrong. Sure, it was a momentous occasion. So momentous in fact that for days I was wrapped in the sound of heavenly trumpets and glided through life … Read More

Today the counter for public domain e-books at Distributed Proofreaders says: “20,000 titles preserved for the world!” At the top of the Recently Completed Titles list is Niederländische Volkslieder by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, though I don’t know if that is the official #20,000. Project Gutenberg expects to post its 30,000th English language ebook somewhere during … Read More