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:

]]> http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2010/01/no-more-sweet-coffee/feed/ 0 http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2010/01/museum-m-rogier-van-der-weyden-nocturne/ http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2010/01/museum-m-rogier-van-der-weyden-nocturne/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 08:20:17 +0000 David http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/?p=116

This will be translated in due course. No time yet, sorry.

Way to go Sir Patrick!

The article is on CNN.

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

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. 

]]> http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2009/11/blender-2-50-in-3dworld-magazine/feed/ 0 http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2009/08/moby-sold-out-in-less-than-30-minutes/ http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/2009/08/moby-sold-out-in-less-than-30-minutes/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:26:20 +0000 David http://karekiet39.nebulagame.com/?p=93 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.

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

free download in mp3 format for subscribers of the print edition where professional actors read most of the articles. My english accent is looking forward to it, and I can imagine some of these might come in handy during our english conversation class too.

This seems to me the logical follow-up of the multi-channel approach that has been in use with most of the news-related publishers for years. A publication by one copywriter can be published through multiple channels, whether it is paper, the web or in spoken form. Web and paper are used in the same way : you read them. The only difference for the end-user is that he’s reading from paper or from a screen. The audio edition serves a totally different sense, and potentially allows The Economist to be ‘consumed’ in new ways, like in the car. Hopefully this takes off, because I’ll be downloading the audio edition in a moment to start working on my english accent.