Visiting my folks

Leaving for work with the ferry. I like how my new iPhone has a much better camera but still captures the colours the same way!

(click to enlarge)
The area where I work. It's old dock lands now being turned in to office lands...

After work I went straight to my folks in Alkmaar because it was my mom's birthday yesterday. I took the train.

My dad wasn't there when I arrived, he was at the stamp collectors club. When he came home he was dying to show me these German misprints he was all excited about. I was thrilled for him... ;-)

There was a lot of TV action going on. Absolutely nothing I liked.
I like the tulips though.

I upgraded my mom's new laptop to Windows 8.1. The setup messages are more vague than ever before: "Setting up a few things 2%".

Or this one: "Some tasks are being executed". You're not kidding little laptop?

The upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1 took about 4 hours. Un-fucking-real.

But it was nice to be with my folks a bit.

My stirfry.

Late morning I went to town. I was on a mission.

A mission to order my new computer! On the right the old 24" I used to have in Adelaide and on the left the new 27" iMac I now have on order.

I made a chicken stirfry for dinner. It was not bad for a first attempt.

In the evening I walked in to town. I said hello to this little lady.

I sat at the bar a bit at first.

Alie was there. She looked great and was full of "hopla hopla".

The band was OK.

And then I walked home again. All in all it was a nice evening :-)

Yeah, definitely broken

Yep, my iMac's harddisk is really, definitely broken. We brought it back to the shop this morning. Should take 7 days max the guy said. I'd like to see that he's right but I cannot imagine they can fix it that fast.

Then it was off to the shops. I hadn't been in a car seat for 2 weeks, bit exciting.

Plenty of other people using their car seats today...

Merry Christmas, dear reader.

After a lot of research online last night I found a way to create a Windows XP setup out of an existing installation of Windows. Interested geeks (Gerrit, Kees and Mic, are you paying attention? ;-) can read more on this on my Creative blog.

Traditionally lots of people have a bbq on Christmas day. So did we.

But for the first time we sat in the garden under the big apple tree instead of in the kitchen. Lots better I think. It was very nice.

Mason also got some Christmas extras.

Nicole found a little spider in a cup she got from the cupboard. It was small (it was bigger than what this photo shows though) but it had 3mm long fangs so we treated it with respect and put it back in the garden far away from our flat.

The pigeons have fights sometimes. I had never seen that until I came here. They basically hit each other with their wings. They can not do any serious damage like that but they hit each other frantically for about five minutes.

I was giving the doves some Christmas food as well. Of course Mason runs to you immediately when you squat like this but once positioned properly he's a good boy.

The new Eee PC 1000H

I went out to look for a little Netbook today. Although my seven year old Compaq notebook is in good condition it's getting a tad slow (esp. since it only has usb 1.1) and it's also rather bulky. So I went to Harvey Norman, one of Australia's electronics stores.

I found the netbooks alright and had a look. Netbooks are downsized (in size AND features) notebooks or laptops. The one I was after has 3 x usb2, 1GB ram, 160GB hd, 1.6GHz Intel Atom cpu, a build in 1.3mp webcam, WiFi, blueTooth, Ethernet and a 10" widescreen that can display 1024x600. You can also attach a separate screen.

There it is, $799. That's a bit steep. I've seen it cheaper.
I never haggled before but I just thought I'd give it a try. When the salesman approached me and asked if he could help me I told him "yeah, I like this netbook a lot. If you can sell it to me for $699 I'll pay cash and take one home right now". He of course needed to discuss this with a superior. It was mad busy, the rush before Christmas. He came back and said the lowest price he could get me was $719 which we agreed upon. Not bad for a first haggle attempt.

I was going down, still loads more people going up...

Outside a fire truck was parked for a while. I think the driver was having lunch.

After work we went to the Thai Orchid in Henley to celebrate Nic's start of her holiday.

Our cactus still has flowers. They look cool, kinda alien.

This is my new netbook after I unpacked it at home. It's now happily charging it's battery.

The software day

I spent almost all day configuring my computer, installing new software and copying all my data back (that alone took hours).
Now Windows Vista can run under Mac OS X smoortly. Email is setup as well as browsing webpages. Skype too of course and World of Warcraft.

So there's only 1 picture, sorry. Shown is a feature called "spaces" from OS X. it allows you to have additional virtual screens, very handy. Left is Windows and right is OS X.

Our friends from last weekend, Trevor and Sharon dropped by today which was fun, but I forgot to make photo's...