Bye Bye

I made my decision. EightDegree.com will be eliminated. Sounds harsh huh? I guess it is. There are several reasons for this and I will explain what is going on...

1. Money, Moolah, Cash
Yep, it's that simple. Main reason is money. Now most of you will think: what the hell is he complaining about. Nowadays it cost zilch to maintain a weblog. True, but I decided three years ago to sign up with the fine people of Six Apart and their service Typepad. I become a beta tester and then a pro-user. A pro-user pays $119.00 a year to maintain the service. Now that I shifted my attention more to mindplunge.com I don't want to pay two services. Simple.

2. Traffic
EightDegree has plenty of traffic. Here are the latest stats:

Total number of page views: 182775
Average per day: 150.06
Last 7 days: 130
Today since midnight GMT: 75

Sweet huh? Well, almost. 95% is generated by one post. It's actually the picture that generates my traffic. No useful referrals at all. My guess is that only my family will read this post and that's it. (Hi Mom, I will give you guys a call next weekend)

3. Time
I'm getting more and more educated about 'building' blogs (rather then maintaining blogs). Building a blog takes time and I just had to drop some. In this case EightDegree.com. Waterpearblog.com is the second one I have to take in considaration...

And there you have it. There will be some sort of re-direct from EightDegree to Mindplunge so people don't get stuck on a 'dead end'. Updates pretty soon...

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone. For me Halloween is an anniversary date. It's the day I arrived from the Netherlands to the U.S. of A. Today it's been three years ago. Time flies and you can bet I'm having fun! A great job, awesome friends (this includes the ones I left behind in Europe) and most important of it all: I'm in good health.

I feel that I'm finally in 'a groove' and things are looking great for me. I'm actually getting my life organized with the help of some useful apps on the Net. First of all BackPack. I've got my things to-do lists, calendars and reminders all in one place now. BackPack is part of the 37signals network and it's pretty addictive. If you sign up for an account use this referral code: BPM7L7J.

Another great tool is Netvibes. Every morning I check my personal page with the latest feeds and other great content. I can check my mail, read the news, check the latest pictures on Flickr etc. If you don't like netvibes try Pageflakes. Same principle...

More hot sites to watch:

PINGER.COM Lets you send voice mail from a mobile phone to an email address

DOOSTANG.COM An invitation-only career-networking site; aims to be a Facebook for the Morgan Stanley crowd

37SIGNALS.COM Elegant, easy to use; offers web-based software for project collaboration

PANDORA.COM Takes songs you like and create an instant radio station that suits your taste.

BLURB.COM From pictures, documents, recipes or a blog, creates a professional-looking book for as little as $30.00

Web 2.0 Overload

The Internet is becoming more the drawer in my kitchen filled with notes, undefinable keys, empty batteries, screwdrivers, maclite's... you get the point. Same thing as my Safari browser: tons of bookmarks, feeds and bookmarklets. Time to clean house and I'm not talking about the kitchen drawer. Today I discovered Flock. I know, I'm need to catch up on the latest web 2.0 development but all is to blame on Playstation's online gaming.

Flock is the new kid on the browser block. Introduced as the Superstar Social Browser it acts and performs like it. A few quirks but an overall impressive performance. Flock is the first browser to take full advantage of two fairly new sets of Web 2.0 resources: first, the open-source Mozilla browser code base, which gives Flock all the same features you're accustomed to in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing; and second, the rapidly multiplying application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow external parties to interact with database-driven services like Flickr. Those APIs are what lets Flock's programmers give you the tools to manage much of your personal information aura -- your bookmarks, images, blog posts, tags, and favorite news sources -- from a single application.  My favorite thing about Flock? The "blog this" option in the right-click menu, which beautifully illustrates how Flock integrates with other online services and simplifies common tasks such as creating a blog entry.

Another great feature is the 'web snippet'. Highlight text and right-click, choose "Send to Web-Snippets" and Flock puts it at the bottom of the browser, ready to reuse it in an email or blog post. Forget about copy-paste. The snippets are drag and drop. Isn't virtual life sweet?

I could go on and on. The 'Star' feature. The 'add to Del.icio.us' feature. The 'Uploader' to Flickr feature. The 'photo sharing' features, one of which lets you drag-and-drop photographs into HTML forms, such as the comment fields at other people's blogs or MySpace profiles. The... it's infinite.

Next review: Netvibes

Update

Yes, I'm still here. All of my time is consumed by MindPlunge.com And it's up and running for real now! First I have to update some URL's since I changed the structure at MP a bit. Here we go! Make sure to bookmark at least the first two links:

MindPlunge.com (blog)
Photo gallery MindPlunge
About MindPlunge
Contact MindPlunge

I'm thinking of transfering EightDegree to the new system and host (Movable Type and Media Temple) but I'm not sure yet. It's a waste of money in my opinion to keep two systems running. EightDegree is due for renewal so I guess this would be the best time. Not sure how it all works with the current design and exporting all of EightDegree's content (images?). We'll see. I got another month so think things through.

Anyways... If you are looking for new pictures and updates on my personal life please visit MindPlunge as well! Again, EightDegree will still be up untill further notice...

Breaking a habit with the use of Web 2.0

As of tomorrow I will quit smoking. A habit for 15 years now. This time (attempt #4) I will use BackPackIt.com. You an sign up for free and set reminders for email and/or text messages. I selected both. I'm going to send uplifting and inspirational messages to kick my habit! So far I will receive two messages a day. You can invite your friends to send you messages as well and edit a page you created on backpackit.com. They can even subscribe to a calender and add events and reminders. When everything is set up I will post the link so the readers of MP can access this page and support me. More to come!

A weekend of sitting around the house and do absolutly nothing... well, almost nothing

Yes, finally a weekend with no obligations. Well, I still need to clean the house and do my laundry but that doesn't compare with the milage I drove for the past two/three weeks. Another reason why EightDegree hasn't been updated. Another reason is... the launch of a new weblog! It's called MindPlunge and can be found here. The reason for this blog is that I'm moving into a different direction with the company I currently work. MindPlunge gives me the oppertunity to play around with databases (MySQL, php etc.). Basically MP will be a playground for several project just to get some hands-on training.

Does this mean EightDegree will be ignored?
No, MindPlunge is actually improving my time on the web again. I noticed there a bunch of new things to discover concerning the blogosphere so expect some improvements on eightdegree as well. Also knowing my family back in the Netherlands are reading the latest updates about my daily life here at EightDegree.

As a matter of fact I will be posting pictures soon of my trips the last couple weekends (San Francisco, Oakland) pretty soon so you guys can see I havn't been sitting on my ass doing nothing...

More soon!

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - A Date With a Dangerous Mind

Call me nuts but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made sense today at the UN. when I picked up the mail today the new issue of time magazine was waiting for me with on the cover: yep, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Read this article to find out what he said today.

Here the cover story of Time Magazine.

Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped

Yeah! Got some new music from my friend John N. today. One of the cd's was the new album of the Sonic Youth. It's awesome. Gotta have this album on repeat for at least the first week. A quick bio of Sonic Youth for those not familiar with the band:

Sonic Youth was one of the most unlikely success stories of underground American rock in the '80s. Where contemporaries R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü were fairly conventional in terms of song structure and melody, Sonic Youth began their career by abandoning any pretense of traditional rock & roll conventions. Borrowing heavily from the free-form noise experimentalism of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and melding it with a performance art aesthetic borrowed from the New York post-punk avant-garde, Sonic Youth redefined what noise meant within rock & roll. Sonic Youth rarely rocked, though they were inspired directly by hardcore punk, post-punk, and no wave. Instead, their dissonance, feedback, and alternate tunings created a new sonic landscape, one that redefined what rock guitar could do. Their trio of independent late-'80s records -- EVOL, Sister, Daydream Nation -- became touchstones for a generation of indie rockers who either replicated the noise or reinterpreted it in a more palatable setting.

As their career progressed, Sonic Youth grew more palatable as well, as their more free-form songs began to feel like compositions and their shorter works began to rock harder. During the '90s, most American indie bands, and many British underground bands, displayed a heavy debt to Sonic Youth, and the group itself had become a popular cult band, with each of its albums charting in the Top 100.

My top three thus far are: Turquoise Boy, Incinerate and Pink Steam.

Get your copy here

Bay Area Round trip

A.G. and me had a mission on Saturday. It was a simple mission: return a broken laptop and get a loaner. For some reason this mission turned into an ugly monster. A monster called Fry's. The people at Fry's are so incompetent there should be an award for it. Every single employee has not a single clue what he/she is doing. Serious! We had several people helping us but for some reason the first guy had to go to lunch, the second guy was just looking at a screen without doing anything (I'm serious) the third guy finally had something going on. 2 freakin' hours later (yes 120 minutes customer service!) there was a loaner on the desk.

One obstacle to go. The register. In order to give us the loaner the cashier had to print out a piece of paper which the service guy had to copy and send it down to whatever-ville. Ah yes, another thing. I noticed ho many copies these guys took. The amount of paper equaled 10% of the trees in Brazil. I shit you not. INSANE.

Of course the 8-year old girl at the register was not familiar with the process of a loaner. I think every process in the company was a enormous task for her. Maybe she was hired 2 minutes ago and we were her first clients... Time for me to go on a smoke-break. I needed the nicotine after being inside with the most incompetent CS in the Universe.

But hey... we got the loaner.

The branch in Concord is probably even more retarded. When we called Concord in the morning the 'tech-guy' (read: moron)told us the 'loaner-program was put on hold until Monday. This applied to all the branches of Fry's. huh? ON HOLD? DUDE! He just didn't know how to fill out the paperwork and came up with this lame excuse even a 4th grader would be embarrassed to tell you!

Alright... some pictures of Saturday. Not from the 'event', just pictures we took from the bay area:

Lost in the Castro Valley

San Francisco Bay

Sunset Golden Gate Bridge

September 11, 2001 - What We Saw...

Chilling home video of the burning WTC. It emerged on 9/11 2006 and is shown at revver... Click picture below to watch the video.

Intro of the movie:

5 years ago today, we watched and filmed the attack on the WTC out of the window of home, 36 floors up and 500 yards away from the North Tower. Releasing this tape was a difficult decision for us because of its emotional and pesonal nature, and the potential of misuse. We feel, however, that our unique perspective has an important historical value, and shows the horror of the day without soundtracks or hype often seen in other accounts. Please be respectful of the contents of this account and be aware some may find the scenes on this video very disturbing. Please share only in its entirety.

We chose Revver to distribute our video because of its artist-friendly licensing terms and support for the Creative Commons

Bob and Bri