Netherlands and more

Now that October has come, the summer is finally here. The last time it visited us was in April. After that I couldn’t say we ever had summer weather in the past months. Temperature would hardly rise above 21—22° C (70—72° F), and mainly kept around 16—18° C (61—64° F), especially during August and September.

But the last two days of September happened to be really warm, and on the first of October temperature soared to 26° C (79° F) again.

What else could one do on such a lazy Saturday than simply go to the coast?

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Even though nearly half a year has passed, better late than never.

In April 2011 I visited the largest car exhibition of the Netherlands called AutoRAI. It takes place in the Amsterdam RAI exhibition centre, and its name originates from Rijwiel- en Automobiel Industrie Vereniging (“Bicycle and Automobile Industry Association”, founded in 1893).

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Our sports club has installed new treadmills, a quick googling showed it’s Matrix T7xe. They are very trendy ones, pure high-tech:

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Each time when I saw books from the “For Dummies” series, I wanted to come up with a broader set of topics for John Wiley & Sons.

At last I got to do it. I give the ideas away for free, no royalties required.

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This is the third and the last part of the Post Nubila Sol trilogy. It’s composed, recorded and mixed by me in the same 2002. Genre: Electronic/Dark/Ambient/Progressive Metal.

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Yesterday I survived laser eye surgery, which was quite an act for me.

I was thinking about it a long time (money was another concern, of course), and it would apparently go on and on for indefinite time, but a chance turned up made me resolve to try.

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Tonight I surprised myself. It all began when my materials about Dias Latinos, the footage in particular, were all of a sudden highly evaluated by the Desperados band, mentioned in the above post. The frontman Daniël de Jong asked me if I could give him the original footage to use it for their promo package. We’ve met, started chatting and… then I decided I could make an interview out of it.

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Preface

Those of you who happen to author pictures and publish them on the Internet, must have thought about being able to claim your authorship for them.

One of the most obvious ways to do that is watermarking pictures by adding your URL, name, copyright and/or copyleft. An average Joe would open his favourite image editor, click the Text tool and write a magnificent message for the generations to come.

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From Friday the 19th until Sunday the 21st August 2011 a traditional Latin-American musical festival Dias Latinos (“Latin Days”) was held in Amersfoort.

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This is the second part of the Post Nubila Sol trilogy. It’s composed, recorded and mixed by me in 2002. Genre: Electronic/Ambient/Progressive Metal.

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The story I’m going to tell you this time is not about how a Russian sees Europe, but the other way around. I’ve been in my home city Tyumen for two weeks, and it’s noteworthy (although logical) that after three years in Holland I’m noticing now more peculiarities in Russia than there.

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Note: this script will not work in GNOME 3 and Ubuntu 11.10; for these systems you have to use the new version.

This bash script picks up a random image file (.jpg, .jpeg or .png) from the predefined directory and sets it as wallpaper.

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