Karekiet 39

I put it in my planning for today, but the other Sweet Coffee fans were faster it seems: the gig in the AB on thursday 25 February is sold out already. I hope there will be a second change, because I’d like to see them live. Otherwise, we’ll have to keep an eye on the festivals this summer to see if they’ll surface somewhere.

The new single is just great:

Ons nieuw stadsmuseum M vierde de laatste dagen van de openingstentoonstelling rond Rogier Van Der Weyden met laatavondopeningen. We moeten dus niet teveel verschillen van de doorsnee Vlaming, aangezien ook wij bijna vergeten waren dat de einddatum eraan kwam. Dan probeer je natuurlijk nog een vrij moment te vinden, met als resultaat dat we op vrijdagavond 4 december 2009 om 22u nog naar het Museum gegaan zijn (de nocturne in M was tot 24u).

Nocturne

Het fenomeen van de museum nocturne is in België duidelijk aan populariteit aan het winnen. De grote tentoonstellingen maken er meer en meer gebruik van, en recent was er ook de ‘Nocturne van de Brusselse Musea‘, waar een hele reeks musea in onze hoofdstad een aantal opeenvolgende donderdagen in de herfst openblijven tot 22u00. Een mooi initiatief van een niet onbelangrijke groep musea, dat ook weer dit jaar een enorm succes was, als we de kranten mogen geloven.

Wij hadden onze tickets online gereserveerd, wat vlot ging. Het is hetzelfde ticketing systeem dat ook door Het Depot gebruikt wordt, dus het systeem kenden we al. Wat meeviel is dat je bij de reservatie moet melden in welk uur je zal toekomen. Dat geeft je een volledig uur om binnen te gaan, maar zorgt er ook voor dat het museum de toegang kan spreiden over de dag. Zo krijg je niet dat de volledige dagcapaciteit van bezoekers opeens om 14u00 tegelijk het museum binnen wil, met klachten en een slechte reputatie tot gevolg.

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Patrick Stewart, best known by the public for his appearances as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in television series Star Trek : The Next Generation and more recently as Professor Xavier in the X-Men movie trilogy, is scheduled for knighthood.

Way to go Sir Patrick!

The article is on CNN.

Joke spent last night almost 4 hours in her car to do 30km due to heavy snowfall here in Belgium. This made us reconsider our planned christmas shopping trip to Reims, as more snow is promised in the following days.

There were more than 500 km of traffic jams in Belgium yesterday evening. Not bad, considering that a traversal of Belgium is approximately 300 km.

At least, the rate I booked in the Holiday Inn Express (which is perfectly located in Reims if you come by car) allowed me to cancel without charge, so it didn’t cost us anything.

Can you imagine it’s kinda difficult to grasp the concept of global warming when you’re getting more than 20cm snow in a few hours, in a country that sees snow for maybe two weeks a year.

Update 19 Dec 2009 00:05 – It seems it was a smart decision. Everywhere, there have been loads of problems until late at night. The Ring around Brussels was a good imitation of a parking lot , like yesterday, with cars blocked for several hours.

And things are predicted to get even worse. Now a good part of the snow has melted thanks to the tons of salt that have been dispatched, and all that liquid (i’m hesitant to call it ‘water’) is now happily freezing again. You could say we created the largest ice skating in Europe : every single road in Belgium. The kids around here will love it Their parents might be less enthousiastic.

Update 2 – 19 Dec 2009 00:21 – And yes! It’s snowing again

Bohemian Mupsody?

The current issue of 3DWorld (dec. 2009) has an interesting article about Blender 2.50. It covers the growing presence of Blender in the commercial artistic world. Next to that, it covers the changes forthcoming in release 2.50 and what that means to the end-user.

No Blender Tutorial

Unfortunately there’s no Blender tutorial in this issue (Andy wrote Blender tutorals and articles some time ago). As always though, the issue is chock-full tips and tricks that aren’t tied to any specific application, and could be used on Blender.

CD Content

The CD contains an impressive amount of hi-polygon models, to be used at your discretion. 

Big News! Moby would pass in the Ancienne Belgique during his tour in Europe. Quite a big name for a location that can hold (only) 2000-2300 people. Apparently, the IT department of the AB had underestimated Moby’s popularity, or maybe they overestimated their ticketing systems.

Comments on the site are clear: tickets were sold out less then half an hour after the tickets sales started. People were understandably very cross to get that message after trying to reach the reservation page every minute, but consistently getting the message that the maximum number of concurrent users had been reached. It’s small consolation that the system remained stable for the others due to your inability to get access and buy tickets.

This can be seen as a selling situation for Cloud Computing, where processing capacity can be added at the moment of need. AB won’t expand their servers for the remote probability that another big name like Moby will play in the near future, it’s just not cost effective.

A stinging detail: even before all tickets were sold out (within the first 30 minutes) tickets were already available on eBay, at 10 times the original price.

Na de vorige films elke keer rond de kerstperiode te kunnen bekijken, besloot Warner Brothers deze keer om de film pas in juli in de zalen te brengen. Juli kruipt stilaan dichterbij, en ik weet dat Joke hier ferm naar aan het uitkijken is. Hieronder de internationale trailer van “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”:

Happy Easter everybody! The weather here in Belgium isn’t all that bad lately, so enjoy your extra long weekend to the fullest. The Easter Bunny himself took off on holiday, but he left us something to keep that cholesterol level where it is…

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One of the easiest ways to learn a language isto use it actively. I’m used to doing that by reading a publication in the language I’m studying at that time. While I was following the German course, I was frequently in the IMS store buying the german C’t magazine. I tried Der Spiegel, but the heavy language couldn’t really motivate me to read on. With a computer magazine, that problem didn’t really exist.

At the moment I’m following an English conversation course, which means we talk a lot. For that, my subscription to The Economist comes in handy. Earlier, I used to read Business Week, but a few years back publisher McGraw-Hill decided to stop the publication of the European and Asian print editions, and following that it became a bit too US-centric for my tastes. Hence my switch to The Economist, where the editors succeed in providing a balanced overview of what happened in the world, even without regional editions. Sadly, at least one of the editors is a convinced euro-sceptic, which translates itself in a column blowing up some parts of european politics out of proportion and making fun of ut.

The perfect magazine doesn’t exist, that’s true. To my great surprise, I saw today that The Economist is offering an Audio Edition since a few weeks. Gone are the days when only best-selling autors were distributed on a multitude of audio cd’s, enabling the people stuck in trafic to follow the adventures of Harry Potter or Dan Brown. The Economist now offers a weekly

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