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This here is the weblog of me, Sander van Lambalgen. I'm a sometimes Mozilla contributor, ectophile, allaround computer geek, avid science fiction reader, amateur photographer and professional web developer with a penchant for traveling.
Although you can expect me to write about all these interest, it's this last, the traveling part, that gives rise to most entries in this here weblog, as I write "tripreports" detailing the experiences of my travels around the world.
Sun 17 May 2009, 11:02 GMT
Photos from the Elf Fantasy Fair 2009
As I do most years when I'm in the country for it, I visited the
Elf Fantasy Fair this year, and due to a leeetle bit of prompting from certain parties, I actually got around to sorting through my photos from it reasonably swiftly (my photos from last year are still languishing in the dusty corners of my harddisk).
I didn't end up with all that many photos, either, but enough decent shots that I figure it's worth putting up this here post to tell you about it.
Had a lot of fun during the Fair again this year, although I didn't see nearly as many friends as usual (I guess 25k visitors is really getting a bit much for being able to rely on just randomly bumping into people you know), and really felt the lack of any big name authors visiting (their readings and signings usually help me structure my day). But on the positive side, I got to wander the terrain in the company of my friend xavie, who'd come over from Germany for this, so I had someone there to marvel at costumes with (including all the adorable pink princesses) :D and with whom I could share laughter at such things as the group of children who were engaged in throwing stuffed dragons ever higher into a tree until their mother's sword wasn't long enough anymore to poke them back out.
Anyhoo, wasn't intending to make this a complete report, so here for your approval:
Picshures!
Mon 9 Mar 2009, 00:37 GMT
Busy Days: FOSDEM, MozCamp, Vienna, Stockholm and Sevilla
Just a short (hopefully) update on what all has been keeping me busy lately, in no particular order, and containing far too much rambling, as I'm tired and really shouldn't be taking out the time to try writing here. First the most recent event: last Friday I attended
MozCamp Utrecht, the first of a series of Mozilla organized events on "the open web". I was asked to give
a presentation on HTML 5, preparing for which gobbled up the last of the free time I already didn't have during this last week. I found it hard to envision my audience for this talk, and I
still didn't succeed in getting my Ubuntu laptop to send output to the beamer (I
hate how hard that is; the only consolation being that the backup Windows laptop had exactly as many problems with being set up; why do beamers have to be so difficult, while an external monitor on the laptop just works out of the box?), but I still think the talk went reasonably well. It ended up generating some good discussion and questions at the end, and I think I managed to convey the important parts about why HTML 5 exists, while dispelling some common misconceptions about it; if that impression is correct, I'd even call it a success.
Beyond this selfish focus on my own presentation, I found the day to be highly inspiring and worthwhile; the Netherlands is running far behind in various ways wrt promoting the open web (just look at the abysmal Firefox market share in the Netherlands, way behind any other country in Europe), but this is not due to the people who were here. Had some very interesting talks with various people, got to meet some new Mozilla people who I knew by nickname but had never met in person before, and generally had a good time. (And upon arriving home, I collapsed into bed, slept for a solid 13 hours, and still had to fight off tiredness throughout the rest of the weekend as I enjoyed the company of friends at a birthday party and a boardgames day.
About a month before MozCamp I attended my third
FOSDEM in Brussels, where I ate yummy Belgian waffle, and at the conference spent most of my time in the Mozilla devroom, also being heavily inspired and getting to touch base again with various fellow Mozillians (plus scoring various Mozilla-related laptop stickers, and my third Mozilla t-shirt). :D
City tripping was my modus operandi for pretty much the entire month, as besides Brussels, I also visited Stockholm, Sevilla and Vienna. Stockholm was visited as part of the SwedeMeet reunion. Some of you might remember me going there back in February 2003 before, just because the insanity of going to Scandinavia in February appealed. The appeal still held, and so a large part of that previous meet was reunited this time around, while we even managed to lure teh Sam over from the USA. I finally got to meet the Minxie, catch up with Addy, and once more wander the SF Bokhandeln (somehow I picked a hostel within crawling distance of this most magnificent store; Books Before Breakfast should become a tradition!) :) The best part of Stockholm was sitting in several of its awesome basement cafes, where lazy chairs and couches were the perfect accompaniment to huge mugs of hot chocolate and tea. We also did some wandering through the lightly drifting snow, snapping pictures of the lantern-lit winding cobblestone streets of Gamla Stan. After freezing half to death in Stockholm, the next stop for me, Sam and Nevman was Sevilla, where the 20 degree temperatures of our first day were bettered on the second day with 25 degree temperatures. We sat outside under the blue sky eating tapas, visiting the Roman ruins at Italica, spent just a
wee bit too much time taking photos at the Plaza de España (which is pretty on the entire range of scales from tile to building), and generally relearned what it means to be warm. A lesson well learned, as back home in the Netherlands last week (on Friday the 27th of February) I saw the first spring flowers popping up out of the ground, and by now most stretches of grass are covered by a carpet of color. I do so very much love spring!
And what a contrast this with the freezing temperatures we experienced in Vienna a few weeks ago; the actual temperature probably wasn't much colder than in Stockholm, but a strong wind made it all feel much colder, and so the group of friends I met up with there was constantly retreating inside to warm up. Sadly enough we then invariably lost grip of our sanity, and proceeded to go outside again, and this pattern repeated throughout our entire stay in Vienna. I can't help but grinning broadly as I think back upon those days there, though. It's been entirely and far too long since I've laughed that frequently. Get the right group of people together, and anything and anywhere is enjoyable. How come so many of my friends live so far apart anyway? It's totally not fair!
The coming weeks will probably see me mostly staying at home. The days will be no less busy, I suspect (have been busy penciling in events already), but hopefully they'll still end up being slightly less tiring. I really should be more rested so I can focus on work a bit more; I've been feeling like I haven't been able to give it as much of my attention as I'd like - while I really love the environment where I work now, and they deserve more from me than me "just doing my job".
I also need to start plotting a 'vacation' for some point in this year, and maybe do some more city tripping. If anyone has suggestions (especially friends in places that are good for visiting during a long weekend), I'd love to hear them. For the moment, I'm pondering each of Ireland, Croatia, Southern Germany and Estonia/Latvia for a trip of 2-3 weeks, and Prague, Budapest and Rome for shorter city breaks.
Wed 4 Feb 2009, 23:06 GMT
An Undeclared Aubergine
Two hours ago, one of my best friends pointed me
at this awesome news item about a guy who
almost succeeded at smuggling two live pigeons into Australia. The very best line from the entire article was
Customs officials say they also seized seeds in the man's money belt and an undeclared aubergine
(emphasis mine). This struck us both as funny to such a degree that a very short time afterward the order for
undeclaredaubergine.com was submitted, and after a short bit of brainstorming on what should be on the domain, it is now host to what must surely be
the world's most awesomest website evar!
Hee! Totally not what I
should have spent tonight on, but exactly what I needed all the same. Enjoy! :D
edit: I've let the domain lapse, so pointing the links to the copy of the site here at juima, hoping to prevent the domain from being worthwhile to spammers.
Sun 18 Jan 2009, 16:30 GMT
Photo update: Colca Canyon and Arequipa. Plus: plans for this year
So it's been over three months since I last pushed photos from my RTW trip online. I had a routine there for a while, where I produced a few photos each day; but then late November was insanely busy with work, and the routine lapsed, after which there were the crazy holidays. Still, somehow I have eventually once more assembled a new batch of photos to push online, and have seen my total progress of original photos that have been looked at rise to a whopping 10.3%.
Given shots like the above, I hope you can forgive me, and agree that the wait has been worth it. There's nearly a hundred more to be found on the index pages for the
Colca Canyon and
Arequipa. I've also updated the middle part of
the relevant tripreport, in case you'd like some context with the photos, or just want to refresh your memory of what these places are.
I'd like to claim belief in the next batches (Puno, and then onward to Cuzco, the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu) being done "soon", but if I look ahead to what's in store for me this year, I'm not really hopeful. What
is in store, you ask? Well, I just started a new project at a large Dutch ISP which will keep me busy for the rest of the year. Yes, that's right: I will be working in one place for nearly an entire year, and won't be undertaking any major trips. (*gasp*) Rest assured that to make up for that I'm planning a travel extravaganza for 2010 unlike anything I've done so far (Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia and Tibet/Nepal are just the obvious choices I'm eying for this trip, and that's
before I've started coming up with crazy in-between destinations to fill things out), but I'm also planning to go on lots of weekend trips to various places all over Europe. I'll be making a good start with that, with trips to Brussels, Vienna, Riga, Stockholm and Sevilla being looked at for the immediate future.
Besides this, last week I also had the rare pleasure of being asked to come give a presentation on webdevelopment for a local school. The students at this place (16-18 year olds) had started an education in IT a year and a half ago, and were now at a point where they had to make up their mind if they wanted to specialize in web development, application development, or system administration. The web developer the school had originally contacted for this had fallen ill, and so at the last minute I was asked to fill in. I whipped up a presentation, and did. Despite some technical difficulties, the presentation went very well, and I think I managed to impart some knowledge on what it is you're really spending your time on as a web developer. Somewhat unexpectedly, I discovered that giving this presentation, and especially answering questions from interested students afterward (several of which came over to
thank me at the end!), was an extremely rewarding experience, which gave me a real sense of satisfaction. This was something
worth spending time on. I've been asked to return to the school in the future to give lessons to those students picking webdevelopment as their specialization, and assuming I can find the time for it all, I very much intend to. ...Which just leaves me shaking my head at myself. Me? A teacher?! Hah! This is one crazy world I find myself living in. :) (Moreover, next week I'll be giving a presentation on Fronteers at a PHP usergroup meeting. Before you'll know it I'll be a regular speaker, hopping from conference to conference.) :D
Thu 15 Jan 2009, 21:31 GMT
News in 2009: twitter is where it's at. (Hudson crash.)
Forget about traditional media. The first place I looked at when I heard someone mention the plane 'landing' in the Hudson River just now was twitter search.
I want to bet a pretty penny that
this tweet by
Jim Hanrahan was the very first published news anywhere in the world of the event.
(I did similar searches for "plane" and "crash" that didn't show earlier tweets either.)
Wikipedia is crazy fast, too.
So far it looks like everyone got out alive, thanks, no doubt, to ferries and other boats responding very swiftly to pick people up. Really glad. That water must be deadly cold...
Sat 10 Jan 2009, 02:33 GMT
Message from the Present: A picture perfect winter's day
Winters in the Netherlands are generally miserable affairs. Most days are grey and overcast, and one longs for spring. Yet almost every winter there's a few days where the country shrugs off the cloak of drabness lying over it and dazzles everyone with a thin layer of white frost covering everything, or with a sun shining down on the world from clear blue skies, or with the kind of endless haze and wondrous pastel colors which can be found on all the best postcards featuring winter landscapes from the days of yore.
Today was a magical day which had all of the above. Half the country was out iceskating, while the other half was out taking photographs (frequently of the first half). (The third half, meanwhile, was undoubtedly sitting at work, grumbling about the unfairness of it all, and why didn't
they think to skip work, and please let tomorrow be another wonderful day like that so they too could enjoy the knowledge that pure beauty was still possessed by their country.)
This afternoon I got out my bicycle and made my way into the polder to become part of that second half of the country chronicling the beauty which surrounded us. One hundred sixty-five photos were taken this afternoon, which resulted after some frantic editing in seventeen final versions. Here's six of the best for your immediate approval, and you can of course click through for the full seventeen.
By the time I finally returned home, I had lost all feeling in my feet, and my fingers have probably never been that cold either... But it was totally worth it. Know that none of these photos even begin to come close to the beauty which was ours. It's not often that I wholeheartedly and unreservedly love my country, but on a day like today it leaves me little choice.
