It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’ve been way too busy.
A quick update of what I’ve been doing the last few months.

First and most importantly, we are expecting a baby boy.
Kim (my gf) is now about 28 weeks pregnant and everything seems okay so far. The baby is growing and developing normally.

He allready has more clothes then his father

As for the rest, I will update my portfolio in the upcoming week and will backdate some projects in my portfolio.

Share/Save

And I must say that the installation (did a clean one to make sure everything went okay) was indeed very smooth. I then installed all my usual application like Nero, the Adobe Master Collection CS4, Cinema 4D, some games, etc.. and have found that all work on my x64 Windows 7 Ultimate.

It’s running much faster then my Vista Ultimate and seems much more stable. So far so good.. I’ll keep you posted.

Share/Save

I managed to get back from vacation in one piece. As I told you in this post we went from Costa Rica, to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatamala and then Mexico.

I was very excited to go to that part of the world because it’s one of the last contents we still have to visit (we now only have Australia on our list). It was more beautiful then I could hope.

Costa Rica is incredibly green. It’s most famous for it’s eco-tourism nowadays. We stayed in La Fortuna (where we didn’t see the Arenal  vulcano because of the clouds) and later in Monteverde. In Monteverde we did a boat trip along some beautiful islands and of course did the Canopy tour Monteverde is famous for.

The Canopy tour is basically going from one mountain side to the other over treetops and rivers on a very thin cable. You have 13 slides which vary in height and length. The best one is 60 meters high and 1km long.

From Costa Rica we went on the Nicaragua, Grenada. Nicaragua was also a country I was very anxious to see, but in the end it was a bit dissapointing. The nature is incredible, but the people are poorer then I expected. This resulted in beggars at your breakfast table and women that pissed on the street right in front of you where you were about to set your foot down. From there on we went to León, the former capital of Nicaragua. León is a bit bigger and that is a bit easier going for the tourists like us

From León we went Vulcano boarding. I myself never heard of it, but you basically walk up a active vulcano in 1,5 hours in the hottest part of the day (38 C) on black sand with a wind that could blow you of it any minute to then when you arrive at the top sit on your board and slide down at 60 mph. Now who in his right mind would do that .

It was super super cool to do.

From there on we went further to Copan where we went to visit the Ruins. Its amazing that these ruins are so well preserved. Those Maya people sure knew how to build a decent temple.

For the people who are interested in reading the rest of the story or are interested in some more photo’s you can view them here.

Share/Save

You could say that DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS technology is to cable what DSL is (tries to be) to a traditional telephony network. The latest version of EuroDOCSIS -version 3.0- is a breakthrough technology for European cable operators and consumers. It already allow data speeds of 160 Mbps downstream and 120 Mbps.

Most remarkable about EuroDOCSIS 3.0 is that it bundles minimum 4 frequency channels of the cable network together whereas previous versions of EuroDOCSIS used only one frequency channel. This makes EuroDOCSIS 3.0 at least 4 times faster than the previous EuroDOCSIS version. As EuroDOCSIS 3.0 has no limit in how many channels it can bundle, the speed for data communications via cable will progressively increase to a multitude of 160Mbps/120Mbps.

The consumer subscriptions available have reached an astonishing 120 Mbps (6 times faster then ADSL!).

In the Netherlands the major ISP UPC is now offering the following subscriptions:

This image represents the stand-alone prices for Internet subscriptions. If you subscripe to a total package that includes television and phone you will get an additional discount on these prices.

Ziggo (another large ISP , cable provider) is now also implementing EuroDocsis 3 on a large scale and promises that they will have it available by the end July this year.

While the ADSL providers are operating at their maximum speeds and selling the 20 mbps lines for almost their costprice, the cable providers offer a better deal then the ADSL providers ever could.

UPC and Ziggo will soon launch a massive scale advertising campaign to really finish off the (A)DSL providers.

I can’t wait for EuroDocsis 4 (Lab speeds at 1Gbps).

Update: 26-06-2009 – UPC launches their new commercial to give ADSL providers the final blow.

I told her I would really love a new watch since the one I got now is starting to fall apart. (Leather bracelets suck…(and smell bad)).

I already had my eye out for the new Seiko kinetic watch (SNL047P1) so we went to look for it at several jeweler stores in Amstelveen. They have almost every major jeweler brand in Holland there in one shopping mall, so good chance that it was on display at one of them.

I already checked the internet for prices. The cheapest one was on e-bay at a power-seller for 375 euro including VAT and shipping and the most expensive ones are the regular jewelers that listed it for around 675 euro.

We found several jewelers with the silver Seiko on display (all 675 euro) but I like the black one better and the 300 euro pricedifference that ebay would give me was of course a big plus for buying it online. It turned out that they haven’t even been shipping the black model to jeweler stores in Holland yet.

Once we got home we immediatly ordered the black model online on e-bay. Now only hoping that I don’t get scammed…

Update Jun 2, 2009 – Watch received in good order and it’s even more beautifull then I could hope for.

Share/Save

Now lets just hope that the big pig flu turns out not to be that big as the WHO is trying to make us believe…

Day-by-day:

1 San José (Costa Rica);
2 La Fortuna Arenal;
3 La Fortuna Arenal;
4 Monteverde;
5 Monteverde;
6 Granada (Nicaragua);
7 Granada;
8 Léon;
9 León;
10 Comayagua (Honduras);
11 Copán;
12 Copán;
13 Antigua (Guatemala);
14 Antigua;
15 Panajachel;
16 Panajachel;
17 San Cristóbal de las Casas (Mexico);
18 San Cristóbal de las Casas;
19 Palenque;
20 Nachtbus naar Playa del Carmen;
21 Playa del Carmen;
22 Playa del Carmen;
23 Vliegtuig;
24 Aankomst Amsterdam;

Share/Save

Then Windows 7 Build 7068 can out and with that I hoped to get rid of that single problem. I burned the DVD and started the upgrade procedure which stopped after just 3 minutes. Not that a success.

After an hour of trying to rescue what was left of my data (didn’t make a back-up of course) I did a clean install which went really well. Not only did the installation finish in about 35 min (instead of upgrading from vista that took around 3 hours), but the resolution problem was gone as well.

I played with Build 7068 for a few weeks and I must say that some of the new features are quite impressive. There are many little enhancements that make your life just a little bit easier, like arranging windows side by side with a keyboard shortcut. I hadn’t even thought of Ubuntu was it not that I wanted to show it to a friend of mine.

That was when I found out that Windows 7 completely got rid of GRUB. No booting to Ubuntu anymore. I remembered the MediaDirect button that is on my Dell laptop. It takes you to a sort of bootmenu that lets you boot a minimalistic mediacenter that is on a hidden Dell partition. I pressed the button, the MediaDirect screen came up and then everything froze.

No MediaDirect, no GRUB, and when I tried to get back into Windows 7 it said that all my partitions were gone. Thanks Microsoft.

Of course I know that this is still a beta and that some problems are to be expected and unavoidable, but this is not acceptable. This build is the last build before the Release Candidate and should not screw up your entire partition table.

In that same week Ubuntu 9.04 came out. Every time I install Ubuntu I’m suprised how easy and quick the installation is. All my drivers are automatically installed (except the closed-source Nvidia, but that is easy to fetch) and it’s immediatly ready to work with.

I’m certainly not a Windows or Microsoft basher because I think most of their software is really great, but this was the last time I install a Windows Beta on my laptop (that I use every day).

p.s. Ubuntu rules

Share/Save