At least Scrooge was Honest.
Dec 22
This is not going to be one of these posts where I need to start of with an apology and stuff like that. Reason I have not been blogging away eagerly has to do with the holiday season. This time of year reeks havoc with my "general order of events" and tends to drain away quite a lot of my energy and perkiness about existence in general.
Brake it down in a few words ? I’m a grumpy man when the holiday season comes around. I thought I would get over it but I don’t. I don"t like all this Christmas shit. I never have and probably never will. The day I’ll bust out of my house on Christmas morning in my pijama’s shouting ‘merry Christmas everyone" will hopefully never arrive. I hereby warn the three ghosts of Christmas to save their energy and keep the frack away from me.
My peeve with this time of year ? The "holiday spirit" whatever that may be. A feeling of warm fuzziness that makes you feel joy and peace towards fellow men, and makes you a better person kind of shit. What it actually turns into is this mass hysteria that seems to invade peoples minds where they discard any sense of style, decorate their house with lights, put on a silly Santa hat and go shopping like there is no tomorrow.
So never mind the fact that the Christians celebrate the time their lord was born. Who gives a frack. Its all about father ‘coca cola’ Christmas and the feast of overspending. Like mad we are dashing out to buy Christmas presents for people who have everything, take the crap and shove the crap in a box. Next we HAVE to have Christmas dinner with the family (also a punishment by itself) where exchange boxes of crap with other idiots and end up with stuff all of us don’t really want. Who wins ? The stores do !
Next up its time to over-eat on turkey and what have you and complain afterwards we have eaten to much. So by the time this stressfull feast is over and we are still wretching on some kind of horrible turkey stuffing, its time to get stressed about new year. Cause new year needs to be special .. who is gonna invite who ? It has to be expensive etc etc..
By the time this hysterical behavior has finally ended we are well into the new year and are patching up our credit card debts thinking what the frack came over us. Good riddens I say.
My point ? That I am amazed at how people ride this commercially driven wave like their is no tomorrow. Every year we look at " a Christmas carol " and smile when cold hearted Scrooge is blessed by Tiny Tim. While in truth we are sitting in our recliners, belly full of food as other tiny Tims continue to wait for the real Scrooge.
So for Christmas I wish everybody to have an attack of their conscience.
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Floating beyond the cloud.
Nov 20
Seems that my evolution is taking me away from the concepts of "my operating system" (obsolete .. i use 3 of them) its taking me away from ideas like "my computer" (I can use every computer I get my hand) Its taking me beyond ‘my home network’ (I live on the web) My harddisk (everything is on the network) and "my applications" (I can use a myriad of ways to interact with my data) All in all its very strange. Sometimes it seems I’m floating above my own digital cloud , beyond the digital restrictions of location , operating system, processor power etc..
Strange .. but interesting.
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i'm Crackburried .
Nov 06
Ok, I think I can call it official now : i’m crackberried ! Yep , its true, its the horrible horrible truth, but my name is Knightwise and i’m a crackberry addict.
I’ve had the little device for over three weeks now and must say, that I can hardly live without it. Not that i’m one of those work-a-holics that needs to read and forward every piece of CC-mail they recieve, no its not that . I’m a blackberry addict because to me, its my digital lifeline to my virtual lifestyle. The 8310 I bought, second hand of kapaza.be cost me about 200 euro’s. The device was in mint condition (can you say : bubblewrapped ) and had obviously never been properly used when I took ownership of it. The first thing that I noticed is how light but sturdy the device is. The sceen is big and bright, the interface is very modest but very productive and the buttons remind me of my beloved Treo. Hardwarewise ? I loved it right off the batt. What makes it stand out from the other smartphones that I owned is that its very sturdy and built for productivity, instead of bling – centered and being cluttered with all kinds of applications that don’t realy DO anything for you, besides waste your time. The camera is pretty good and shooting pictures at the 2 mpixes setting results in something more then 1600 x 1200 blobs of noise. The mp3 functionality is awesome and the one gig SD card onboard is home to a duplicate of my daily podcast list.
The true power of this device however, lies in the software that is available. Pretty soon I had found the MAC OS version of the blackberry sync program and was pushing pictures, ringtones and music back and forth with ease. It also syncs up nice with Icall (nice but useless) and syncs up the contacts with my address book on the mac. So after some cleaning up of both calendar and address book, I had all my contacts on the device.
Now what ? As i said : I was looking for a completely wireless solution to my daily activities. Mail, contacts and Calendar should NOT be synced via a computer ! It should be done right away over the air .. thats what a blackberry is for. Enter Google and the Google plex ! First off all : Gmail supports full imap and instant delivery services on the Blackberry. No pop3 stuff , no sending under the wrong name , no delays. Instant mails on your blackberry from your Gmail account , Instant replication of forwarded messages, sent items and deleted items ! Love it ! .
But Google took it a step further : Gcalsync does an INSTANT 2 way sync between your Google calendar and your Blackberry. That opened up a fantastic way of ‘groupware working’ between me and Nyana. She can add items to my calendar , I can add items .. and that way she knows where i’m hanging out and what’s on my schedule. The sync is instant and happens behind the screens. I don’t even need to run the app.
For instant communications I’m using the Googletalk client that i installed and that also gives me enhanced communication skills. (i must say , I hardly use the blackberry for calling people, its all mail ) and my facebook and Twitter traffic also goes over the respective clients I installed.
The bottom line ? I have not switched on my classic cellphone in a few days now. i’ve left a greeting message on my voicemail telling people they must email me instead of using the telephone. And guess what ? It works ! Finally i’m casting of the lines of direct communications with endusers in favor of a new way of "doing my digital thing". I’m not at the point where I get ‘blackberry deprived’ just yett, but even with the simple functionalities i’ve installed .. I’m crackberryfied !
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Oh brave new world.
Nov 06Yesterday was my birthday. And my birthday is something that I let slide past me without making any fuss about it. Its a slow quiet day where I contemplate about what i’ve achieved in life and where I count my blessings and am thankfull for all I have. ( I of course also wonder if I am indeed getting older and slowly mutter a curse that my good looks are fading away). But i’m not one of those " Yippie ka Yeey its my birthday types". No big party, no raving half-drunk about the virtues of old age .. no near depressive episodes .. stuff like that.
Usually the day passes with a few phone calls from friends and family who call to congratulate me. (I never know what to say to those, they make me a bit shy and uneasy), the occasional birthday card (fewer and fewer over the years) and that is about that. This year however, that all changed.
The addition of my FACEBOOK PROFILE to my digital lifestyle came with a built in calendar. And that in turn, notified my friends online .. and that changed my birthday experience altogether.
So pretty soon I had friends from far of places sending me best wishes, my Blackberry became abuzz with emails, Text messages started coming in and I even got some phone calls (my mom and my aunt). But all the rest ? All of it was online ! Email, Facebook, Instant messaging.. All of it became digital.
It made me realize just how my life has changed. How I have become a citizen of the world, and the web. How my "social landscape" is much broader then the town I live in. And how importantly I value that "digital lifestyle". And as my perceptions of the world are those of a shrinking planet, bringing us closer together, I feel my horizons broaden as I get to stay in touch with all these different people all over the world. I love it !.
Oh Brave new world.
I’m generally not much of an optimist, mostly cautious in my views on world events. But yesterday the world presented my with a great birthday present. History was made yesterday, as we saw that change, that ANYTHING is possible. The outcome of the elections in the US resonated across the globe. The speech of Barak Obama made living rooms fall silent as people listened in. On Cnn a Hologram reported the victory of a black president in the 2008 elections. Online millions of people commented, participated and experienced the event. It sounds like pure science fiction but it was in fact pure reality. For one , wonderful moment, humanity conviced me that anything is possible if we put our minds to it. : YES WE CAN !
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Audi Arkanoid.
Oct 27
Man ! What a week this has been. Believe it or not, this is the first time I get to sit down decently behind a computer and do something in the vicinity of writing a blog post. Most of this week has been spent on the road, cruising through the beautiful country of Belgium and all of its autumn tainted landscapes. A great experience of course, and ideal for an podcast fanatic like me to catch up on some episodes and beef up on knowledge. Even my own podcasting exploits are benefited by this “time on the road” and I managed to record the next episode already (Now I just need to get down to mixing and uploading the fracker)
The week however was not uneventful as I had my fair share of adventure (or could I call it misadventure ) on Tuesday. I was up in Luxemburg , visiting one of our company sites when I thought it would be a good idea to go out for a little snack during my lunchbreak. I took the car and drove of the industrial estate , trailing behind a car with one of these little trailers behind it. Suddenly I saw something drop off the little trailer. I saw something (I thought it was a peace of Styrofoam) hit the road. The truck coming towards me in the other lane prevented me from swerving out of the objects way so I hit it straight on. Can you imagine the scene in Star Trek 1 where they are heading towards an asteroid, caught in some kind of wormhole effect.. Unable to go left and right ? Well , I had kind of the same situation, minus the ability to launch photon torpedo’s.
There are some noises in the universe who are inherently bad. You don”t have to know where they come from, you dont even have to know what they mean .. you just KNOW it doesn’t sound right; One of these terrible noises perpetrated from underneath the car as I slammed into the unknown object.
I had to pull over right away, switch of the engine (that by now was making an even MORE horrible noise) and got out only to find a BIG CONCRETE BLOCK behind my car , streaked with motor oil and a black puddle that was slowly but surely propagating from underneath my car. The driver who had just LOST ‘unknown object 001’ continued merrily on his way, oblivious to what had just transpired. The audi however had suffered a lethal blow from this unforeseen game of “asteroids” .. or actually its more like Arkanoid since the Audi was minus one rocket launcher to defend itself.
So after calling up road assistance to have the audi towed of to a garage far far away.. I had nothing better to do then to walk back to the company and wait for the replacement car to arrive. As I spend the remainder of my lunchbreak online, quickly doing some emails and posting the ‘recent events” on twitter and facebook.
What was heartwarming is that suddenly my whole online community came alive. Several people commented if I was Ok, asked questions about what happened (and insisted I posted pictures to flickr ASAP ) and others even offered to come and pick me up ! Seriously ! Good friends, most from my facebook list , let me know that if I needed a ride, I just had to give them a shout !.As my blackberry buzzed alive with direct messages from twitter and facebook , I felt a little less alone in the world. ( being without a car in the middle of a deserted industrial estate a far of country of Belgium DOES make you feel lonely) but now, that ONLINE posse that keeps me warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I ‘live online” was literally close to my heart , as I tucked my Blackberry in my breast pocket.
But it all turned out well in the end. The replacement car was delivered in time and I was to go on my merry way. Exhausted from the excitement and the shock ( Because quite frankly, that little event scared the crap out of me) but feeling good knowing that my “virtual friend-scape” had become very real to me that day !!!
