Barcelona

I just got here today, took the 4 o´clock flight. I was walking around after 8pm and it´s amazing that all the stores are still open. You wanna shop for clothes? CDs? Perfume? Anything else? It´s all open!

Which is a bit weird for me because I´m so used to having shops close at 6pm. Oh well, if the Spanish prefer to do their shopping late at night, who am I to judge them?

I will be meeting up for the party soon, so here´s for a great party! Hopefully it will make me forget the fact that I will be sleeping on the floor tonight.

Election Day

If you have been following the news - any kind of news - you will know that there will be an election in the USA next Tuesday. It's between Bush and Kerry (and whathisname, oh yeah, Nader).

If you wanna know more, here is the USA election 2004 guide from The Onion.

Rain

I'm looking outside the window of my office and all I see is rain. It's wet and grey. Typical October weather and definitely the kind of weather that I hate. I hate it I hate it I hate it!

Last weekend it was still really nice weather. On saturday afternoon I still managed to sit outside and have a barbeque with a couple of mates. And on sunday I was still able to walk around in the mountains with only a t-shirt (no jackets) and not feel cold at all. Could this be the impact of the USA getting out of the Kyoto agreement?

Well, as long as it's nice weather next weekend in Barcelona.

At the moment I'm hooked with Football Manager 2005. It's the next version of Championship Manager and I've been playing the demo everytime I'm home and in front of the computer (which is the time I spent at home not sleeping).

If you're a fan of Shrek and F1 then you will like this website: Donkey Does F1.

"The end has no end..."

five

I left home on October 16, 1999.

Can't believe that I've been here for five years already...

CERN

On Saturday it was an Open Day at CERN - the European Center for Nuclear Research. It's a huge facility dedicated to physics and other science. It's a huge site, on the border of Switzerland and France, crossing both countries. It has a huge underground tunnel going for 27km, where the geeks physicists blast off tiny tiny particles against each other in hope to find even smaller particles. Don't ask me how it works, I think it's more complicated than it sounds.

So we visited this Open Day in the hope to learn more about science and what they were doing. I was just hoping for a sandwich as I was hungry as hell. Unfortunately, it was not just us who had this brilliant idea. Don't know the official number, but I guess about 50,000 people had the same idea as us. So it looked more like Disneyland than a Nuclear Research Center.

They had facilities open where the public can just walk in and look at how things are working. It's a bit frightening though, the sight of ordinary people like me who doesn't understand anything about physics let loose in the world's most advanced physics center, where if someone pushes the wrong button something like a nuclear bomb might be unleashed. But hey, the geeks physicists obviously believe that there are no evil persons among the visitors.

We walked around looking for the accelerator (don't ask me what it is, I was just following the crowd). We couldn't find it so settled on explanation of the Grid. It's bigger and more powerful than the World Wide Web and apparently in a couple of years time we will have our computers hooked up to a main server somewhere that will be using our computer to help them find ET.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience. Now I know in what environment those geeks physicists work in.

Oh, I found this interesting article on Bling-Bling written by Maxi Jazz from Faithless. I hope the likes of Jay-Z, P Diddy, Usher and Mr. T are reading it.

"I'm not King of Comedy"

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

A movie written by Charlie Kauffman and directed by Michel Gondry. There is no way in the world I miss out on that one. I've been raving about this movie for ages and it should have been out for ages as well, but it only came out here yesterday. So with high expectations I went to the cinema to watch this movie.

I love Kauffman's works. Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are just clever scripts, making it possible to make sense out of a wierd movie. And with Michel Gondry as the director, you know you will get some magic. Gondry has shown his magic in several music videos already.

Jim Carrey is Joel Barisch who wakes up with some sort of memory loss, as if he had a huge night out the night before. While going to work, suddenly Joel went to Montaux where he met Clementine. And suddenly it becomes a relation. Now while this relation is blooming, the next thing we see is Clementine looking at Joel as if he is a stranger. At first you'll probably be confused, but it turns out that the movie is not in a direct timeline. To make out the timeline there are several references to St. Valentine's Day.

Turns out that Clementine had erased Joel from her mind and Joel is set to do the same thing through a company called Laguna Inc. But while the guys from Laguna are erasing Joel's memories of Clementine, he realizes in his mind that he doesn't want this memories to be deleted. A chasing game ensues within Joel mind which ends in a weird but logical ending.

No wonder that this movie got rave reviews. It's an outstanding movie which makes you think, not feel. And in the days where movies are trying to make you feel and not think Eternal Sunshine defintely stands out. I Wouldn't be surprised if Kauffman gets another Oscar. Even Jim Carrey is worthy for a nomination - although he has probably given up on that hope. And Gondry, well he will go on and achieve great stuff.

"Talking all the time is not a form of communication"

Gmail by Google

I got a gmail account. Nothing to be excited about actually. The big thing is (was) that they were giving out huge email space. 1GB of email space is huge compared to hotmail (2MB) or yahoo (6MB). The downside was that Google will go through your emails in gmail and look for keywords so that they can send 'targeted' marketing emails (read: spam).

Some people have problems with this and cite 'privacy issues'. For me that's just a load of bollocks. Go check your hotmail now, it's probably filled with tons of junkmail, mostly related to the sex industry. Now what you see in hotmail is 'untargeted' marekting email. So I rather have 'targeted' marketing emails than porn/junk spam. And with laws like Patriot Act, nothing is private anyways.

The huge space for me is nothing. I pay to pop yahoo and now I get 2GB of space in yahoo. Which actually defeats my purpose of popping it. I pop it to save space on yahoo, so I pay. After I pay, I get 2GB of space, which makes the popping obsolete. A Vicious circle.

Anyway, I have 6 invites for gmail, so if you want a gmail account let me know (leave a comment, send me an email, send me a sms, send me a letter via post, send your owl, telepathy - whatever suits you).

Busy Bee

I don't know when I was ever this busy at work. I had a couple of busy days during my 4 years here, but never like this. It's going to be a hectic week and it's just weird, from not being busy for 4 years to suddenly being busy for a whole week.

You might be asking the question, 'if he is so busy, how can he have time to update his blog?'. The answer is because I don't care. I know I should be doing other stuff but at the moment I need 5 minutes of distraction. Enough time to update my blog.

At home I just installed Windows XP. I have been using Windows 2000 NT for ages and decided to upgrade it to XP (afetr much hassle from my tech-geek friends). I did it and now I have trouble connecting to the internet. Also I had to re-install the drivers for my soundcard. And I almost forgot the password for the administrator. Yeah right XP is better!

And things aren't looking too rosy for Ajax...

(Reach Up for the) Sunrise

For those who don't know yet, I'm a (big) fan of Duran Duran. I practically grew up listening to Duran Duran. And at one point John Taylor was the man to be. Even my bass-playing is influenced by John Taylor. For me Duran Duran defined the 80s. The music, the boyband-like adulation, the fashion, etc.

Their first three albums were just classic new wave. Then Roger Taylor resigned from the band and became a farmer. Andy Taylor left as well as he felt his rocking guitar sound is undermined by Nick Rhodes synthesizers. Andy tried a solo career which failed. So that left three and they made Notorious. Warren Cucurello joined ranks as guitarist and Duran Duran made The Wedding Album, an album about growing up.

During the recording of Medazzaland, John Taylor left the band and now it was only Simon LeBon, Nick and Warren. The three of them recorded Pop Trash but it was basically a flop. Then after 20 years in existence, suddenly Duran Duran became a household name again because new bands are 'copying' their 80s sound. Stellastar*, Interpol, The Killers, Hot Hot Heat, The Stills, etc, they all owe a bit of their sound to Duran Duran.

That made those five guys think again and suddenly a reunion beckons. So in 2003 all five of them gathered up again, just like when they did 25 years ago in Birmingham. They did a couple of reunion gigs in the States, which sold out in minutes. They received an MTV Lifetime Achievement award. And poor Avril Lavigne was clueless about them ("Who is Duran Duran? Are they a new boyband?" said the self-acclaimed modern day Sid Vicious).

Their album, Astronaut, is coming out in a couple of weeks and I cannot wait to hear them again. Right now the single is out, called (Reach Up for the) Sunrise. From the intro you can tell instantly that it is Roger on the drums and Andy doing the guitars. Classic Duran Duran.

Click here to enjoy the video.
Click here to get the single.