It has been a while since I wrote something here. Yesterday I was surprised with a visit to Herman van Veen, a Dutch singer and one of the creators of Alfred Jodocus Kwak. The school where my dad teaches is merged this year with another one and one of the festivities was this special gig of Herman van Veen for every employee with their partner.

It was a nice evening, Herman is doing his 60th birthday tour this year together with band; Erik van der Wurff, Edith Leerkes and Wieke Garcia and two more who’s name I couldn’t make out. He’s doing old songs and new ones, the new ones being partly political, partly emotional. He is rethinking his life, thinking back about his mother, about his daughter as a baby, but also letting Edith sing a funny song about what she would have done should she’d be a man.

I won’t try to translate some lines into English, since he can do it very much better than I.

Maar mocht ‘t nodig zijn, ik haal je uit de diepste
de diepste kraters van m’n hart, m’n lijf, m’n liefde.
Dat je me één keer vasthoudt heb ik liever
dan heel de wereld bij mekaar.

A nice surprise yesterday when I came on the Sigur Rós website. They come to the Netherlands on their 2005 tour! 13 July is the day, Paradiso Amsterdam the place. I’ll be there, who’ll be joining me?

I’ve been visting family in Düsseldorf this weekend, it was my uncle’s birthday and we went to his party in an Altstadt (downtown) café.

Easter Monday we went to walk along the Rhein to take a look at the new quarter called MedienHafen. Modeled after the London Docklands, this old harbour area got a thorough restyle and is now becoming a vivid (and probably expensive, judging by the many Porsches, Jaguars and one Hummer) place to live and work.

Behind the WDR Funkhaus building (which existed there quite some time already), three buildings designed by Frank Gehry called Der Neue Zollhof are the first pieces of modern architecture to appear in this area. Some old warehouses got a restyle, others were torn down and got replaced by glass boxes. Most of them aren’t very interesting, but it is the “Gehry-Bauten” as they are called by the Düsseldorfers which are the landmarks of this newly developed quarter.

Some photos I took: First an impression of the Rhein-Promenade, which was created around 1990 with the building of a tunnel between Oberkasselerbrücke and Kniebrücke (both bridges can be seen in the first picture). Before the tunnel existed, there was no real possibility to get anywhere near the water from the city center. Photos 11 and 12 show the Landtag building, the administration of Nordrhein Westfalen, of which Düsseldorf is the capital. The tower is called the Rheinturm and was built in 1981, it features the largest decimal clock in the world. The rest of the photos are all buildings part of MedienHafen.

Today I picked up Dancer in the Dark (starring Björk) and Ágætis Byrjun (by Sigur Rós) at the Free Record Shop, which I ordered two weeks ago. Both took a bit longer than was to be expected.

Since I was in the city anyway, I decided to hop by the local Apple Centre to take a good look at the Mac mini. On my way back I went to Van Leest and bought Homogenic by Björk.

In case you’re wondering what he’s doing with all this Icelandic stuff lately… Indeed, I’m intrigued by this little country in the northwestern corner of Europe and its people, language, culture… I would really like to go there some day and see for myself, maybe even do an internship? Esther must have infected me with the Iceland virus ;-)

Meanwhile in Eindhoven, the weather is nice, it’s not too hot, yet warm enough to sit on a terrace in the sun. Knowing Dutch weather however, this isn’t going to last long and the weather will change in a few days.

Like every Thursday, it was Spacelabs movie night. Rico joined the movie watchers club, so we had to have a re-run on a previous movie. Tonight we watched Shrek 2 (second time) and Napoleon Dynamite (third time now).

The absolute stupidity of the things that happen in Napoleon Dynamite astound me time and time again. It’s just brilliant how someone can make a movie that must have a storyline of about one A4 paper, yet make it a full one and a half hour feature film. The humor consists mainly of painfully recognizable embarrassing moments on the part of Napoleon and the absolute idiocy of his brother and uncle.

Well, I’ve had enough Napoleon for a while now. Next time we’ll really need a little more intelligent movie. Oh, and thanks Rico for the beer and baguette, that’ll have to be made up to you somehow.

Just wanted to say, I bought a CD today… Wow!

And then, just when you think that there can be nothing like Sigur Rós, you bump into Godspeed you! Black emperor… Strange, very strange. The music is a little bit different, the texts are different, but the sound as a whole is the same.

Funny…

I already mentioned Sigur Rós (Victory rose) in my iPod shuffle entry, but I think they deserve an entry of their own.

Two weeks ago, I heard the first sounds from this Icelandic group. It was the album Ágætis Byrjun, which is Icelandic for “an alright beginning”. Their music is really beautiful, much softer than for instance Björk. At first it made me think about The Gathering. But now it reminds me most of a giant evolution of the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd.

Their debute album, called Von (Hope) begins with a very intriguing introduction of two tracks Intro and Dögun (Dawn), followed by the beautiful Hún Jörð (Mother Earth). It is a pagan version of the “Our Father”.

Móðir vor sem ert á jörðu
heilagt veri nafn þitt
komi ríki þitt

Our mother, who areth in earth
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come.

Nice, nothing more to add…

This really must be the most strange debute I have ever heard; but it sounds great, almost like it is a record that you can use to test and adjust your stereo equipment to get the most out of their music. Every possible sound is contained in this one, low noises, high shrieks and everything in between.

Since their texts are all either in Icelandic or in their own pseudo-language Vonlenska (Hopelandic), I decided to do some language study on the first. The first step with every foreign text I get, is trying to read some text without any help of dictionaries or other documents. This might seem very hard, but since it is mainly a North-German language, it looks very much like Dutch and even more like Frisian. However, there are many gaps to fill still, so a dictionary is fairly obligatory. Luckily, there are translations available.

One of my housemates has seen Sigur Rós perform live and she said they’re even better then. So when they are around, I’ll try to catch a gig.

There is so much more to tell about the sound, but as always, it is better to hear it for yourself. So, my tip for this week: Sigur Rós.

I completely forgot I promised to write something about my iPod shuffle. So here you have it:

Many words have been said now about the shuffle by many users and I just can’t add much to that. It sounds all right, the electronic sounds of Sigur Rós tend to clip (can also be an encoding problem, but I don’t hear them that clear on my stereo) and switches slow between songs (about a second silence between each track which really is too ong). It might also give some audible feedback when pushing the buttons. Here are some interesting links about iPod shuffle.

• Apple Talk on Gathering of Tweakers (sorry, in Dutch)
• One of the first iPod shuffle covers and absolutely beautiful. The guy seems to got a lot of success by just putting some nice pics online :-)
• A funny mod, probably a weak pun on Apple’s comparison

Okay, so that is what they say and do with it. I had my own personal iPod experience. About a week after I had activated it, the left headphone started to make a cracking noise. That was a bit disappointing, but since I of course have warranty, I called Apple and they sent me a new pair without any question. Way to go, Apple! Excellent!

Pinpoint is the name of my first real project of Nogates. It is a bowling (hence the Pin) score (hence the Point) management application written in the beautiful Ruby programming language.

It will feature multiple frontend interfaces, but will primarily be built upon GNOME2/Gtk+. Maybe a Cocoa frontend will also be created, if I manage to understand the RubyCocoa bindings.

The SVN version can be checked out using the command:

svn co http://nogates.nl/svn/pinpoint</code>

Okay, after some bumps in the road thanks to a nice guy of TNT, the DVI-to-TV cable arrived today.

Yesterday, 11:18, I wasn’t at home, according to this person called Sabayo. I was however, and today at 11:58, the same Sabayo didn’t ring twice to deliver my package. Mildly irritated I called TNT at about 12:05 why I was at home and no one rang, but wrote a nice note for me. The guy at the other end didn’t understand either, but convinced the postman to come by my house again on his way back. And this way, at 15:51, the bag (the package I mean, not the postman) came after all.

Of course, I wanted to try it out immediately, but since I don’t have a television in my room, I first had to borrow the one from the kitchen. And find a cable. And find a new cable since the first one apparantly was broken as it only gave a distorted image once and then became completely silent. I almost thought I had a case of DOA, but luckily, with the new cable, the image was as bright and clear as it could possibly be on a television screen.

So, for those who thought I bought a Mac mini, you thought wrong. For those who thought I bought an iPod shuffle, you were right. I also bought an iPod shuffle :-) More about that later.

Take a look at the screenshot

… And guess what it is for. The one who gets it right… wins.