Category Archives: xsamplex

The latest popular ‘programming article on a blog’ is “Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus”, which, mind my language, is a piece of crap, obviously written by somebody who is an application developer. It is so full of … Continue reading →

Dear neighbourhood astrologer: Recently, the International Astronomer Union (website) decided to downgrade Pluto’s planetary status to ‘dwarf planet’ after a lengthy voting process (results). You may have heard about this via the regular channels, since it has caused quite the … Continue reading →

Donuts 2 hands of milk, approximately the size of adult hands 1 gravel sized yeast. The size of your pink finger’s nail will do. 1 rock size amount of Flour. Find a good size (medium) rock in your yard. 1/2 … Continue reading →

On the eve of V-J day, I was going to start a rant about the Dutch resistance in The Netherlands and particularly, the armed fight of the Dutch (remarkably lead by Communists) against the German forces. The funny thing is … Continue reading →

During breakfast, English pronunciation came up (yeah, we tend to have endless discussions early in the morning). This time it was the word ‘adjective’ (Webster has a neat ‘pronunciation’ sound file there too). It’s a word I keep pronouncing the … Continue reading →

This afternoon, Alfons forwarded a couple of pictures of the Anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam he ran into today (for him that will be yesterday)1. I ended up making a joke about the possibility of intelligence services monitoring these kind of … Continue reading →

I have been watching my e-mail accounts closely and I noticed that I’ve been receiving a lot more sapm per day since July 1st. Most of them target my domain registration E-mail’s address. However, noticably, I’ve been receiving e-mails from … Continue reading →

Reading games reviews on the Internet reminds me of the days (way back) when I literally ate car reviews for breakfast. Numbers, average ratings, I was obsessed with averages. However, reviews based on average (numerical) ratings don’t work: take for … Continue reading →

It’s Alfons’ birthday! Who would have thought.

Soon you can buy these 8 MP cameras with built-in GSM capable phones: why do you want to have a crappy 1.2 MP fuzzy-camera-phone, while the real-deal is just around the corner. Soon available with keyboard and extra wireless mouse. … Continue reading →

Back when I was younger, I walked to school through 10 foot of snow, in -30 degrees Celsius, 10 miles each day (that is 100 kms in your puny metric system). And back. 390 days a year. When I was … Continue reading →

Earlier this day, a close Dutch relative (understatement) brought up the Dutch word ‘flater’, which had me confused for a couple of seconds: the actual meaning of the word (“a fiasco of gigantic proportions”, I guess you could call that … Continue reading →

Reading a flyer of an unspecified company selling electronic wares like MP3 players and computer stuff I was startled by a slogan next to a picture of a DVD burner: BURN ALL YOUR FILES! Imagine living in the 70s and … Continue reading →