Netherlands and more

Blog about life in Holland

In Vino Veritas

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One of the things that make me wonder is comparison of prices for alcohol in Holland and Russia, and especially their relationship with the quality.

Alex Exler considers 1000 rubles (€ 25) for a bottle of decent wine in Moscow is a good deal. Here in Holland you would usually buy a collection item for this price, and definitely not Chateau Tour 2006. Even taking into account local alcohol prices are substantially higher than, say, in Germany.

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Storm Alert

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Штормовое предупреждение (Russian for Storm Alert) is a prelude to Ураган (“Hurricane”). This track was composed and recorded by Igor Abakumov and me back in 2002–2003.

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Ubuntu/GNOME 3 random wallpaper script

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

The previous version of the script worked fine with GNOME 2 and Ubuntu 11.04 (and earlier), but after GConf backend was changed to dconf in GNOME 3, it stopped working.

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iMac: Mac OS X Lion + Ubuntu

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Upgrading Mac OS X to Lion

A while ago I made up my mind to upgrade my Apple iMac 27" from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion. Not that I’ve been actively using it, but did it rather out of curiosity: I heard many positive reactions about it.

My main system on this machine has always been Ubuntu.

In theory, upgrading should not be a big pain. All you need is to buy Mac OS X Lion in Apple’s AppStore:

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iSad

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What this man has done in his not-so-long lifetime has undoubtedly changed the world for better.

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October. Summer

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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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AutoRAI 2011

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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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For Dummies

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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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A new look

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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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