Amsterdam: Some more photos for the family.
13 May 12Some photos that have Jade and I in them for the significant females in the family back at home :)
Happy mothers day!
Comments [0]
Geek obsessed with music, tech, old furniture and sustainability.
Check out stuff I work on:
http://wearehunted.com
http://m.tweete.net
Week 1: Amsterdam
12 May 12Well we've basically gotten to the end of our first week here. It's mothers day both here in A'dam and in Australia, so I'm going to post a few new photos. Jade's got a heap on her computer, I'll have to post those once we pool them somewhere to share :)
Jade and I are settling in well here. Starting to deal with a few of the more mundane aspects of living anywhere. We still don't really have any culture shock or anything like that; it's so much easier here because everyone speaks English. We're still intent on doing Dutch lessons while we're here, it sucks that you basically have no idea what is going on around you until the point where everyone realises you need to be spoken to in English.
Yesterday we checked out De 9 Strattjes (The 9 Alleys) a very cool little set of streets filled with street fashion, coffee shops and nice gourmet shops. So you walk between strong smells of perfume, marijuana, baked treats and cheese. I think we'll be spending more time around there as there are plenty of nice cafes in the sun, tasty treats and nice shops t
o check out.
We've both got bikes now (check out the photos) so we can do our own exploring of the city.
I've got a bunch of work I'm trying to get through, hopefully I'll start getting paid for stuff so we can get out and do some of the touristy things too.
Some of the things in the photos:
- A boat absolutely jam packed full of guys drinking. Must have been coming in for a night on the town.
- Us on our new bikes :)
Comments [0]
Day 5: Settling into Amsterdam
8 May 12So, we've started to get settled into our place in Amsterdam. We're a short walk from the city center which is nice, but actually not that useful. The neighbour hood we are in is so close to much cooler stuff away from all the usual tourist traps at the center of town.
Our place is fairly small but we have a nice large room and Marty is a cool flatmate! There's a Lidl downstairs (pretty much like Aldi in Australia) which has really cheap food. That will definitely help us on our shoestring budget over here! Our neighbour is a professional saxophonist, so there's often awesome jazz sax filtering through the walls.
We found a nice little cafe around the corner from our apartment. It has nice food, great beer and the coffee looks pretty awesome too.
Now that we have internet connected I'll have to get stuck into some major work for various clients I've been delaying while we get settled. My Dutch phone number is on my Facebook account, so grab it from there if you need to contact me.
The only other distraction we're pretty keen to chase down is going for Dutch lessons somewhere. Everyone speaks English here, but it's just not the same when you don't know what is going on around you.
The Dutch are mostly really friendly, everyone is pretty open and happy to talk. It's pretty common to see strangers just randomly talk to each other about stuff.
I've included some photos of our street and some of the neighbouring canals. There's also a couple of obligatory photos of the center of town.
Comments [0]
Day 2: Singapore Zoo
4 May 12I'm going to try and keep a few posts happening on here to track our progress to and through Europe. So our first port of call has been Singapore. Today we went to the zoo which was great. jade and I make an effort to visit whatever zoos we can, especially if they have a focus on conservation. Compared to say... Taronga, Singapore Zoo is on a whole new level. If you enjoy animals and conervation you simply have to check it out. We got many opportunities for close encounters with all sorts of animals in both planned and spurious situations. Truly memorable.
Also as a side note, the best breakfast buffet I've ever had has been in Singapore.. twice. Will report back after breakfast tomorrow too :)
So, some of the new things we've experienced today:
- Touching and feeding a pair of elephants
- Eating breakfast with a bunch of orangutans and their babies
- Petting a lemur
- Checking out a bunch of monkeys we haven't seen before
- Flamingoes
- Otters
- Hookah at a middle eastern restaurant
I've attached a few of photos from today :)
Comments [0]
Berners-Lee: Don't let record labels upset web openness
18 Apr 12We mustn't allow record companies' fear that their business model isn't working to upset the openness of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee told Wired.co.uk in a press conference at W3C.
The inventor of the web was referring to recent controversial pieces of legislation, including SOPA and PIPA in the US, and ACTA globally, which have all sought to clamp down on piracy and have all been strongly supported by record labels.
"Record labels have a very strong voice when it comes to arguing for their particular business model, which is in fact out of date," he said. "The result is that laws have been created which make out as if the only problem on the internet is teenagers stealing music. The world is bigger than that. The internet is bigger than the music industry. The economic impact of the internet is bigger than the music industry."
He said that most of the things that are taking place on the internet are social, and downloading and listening to music is just a small part of that. He said that record companies and other organizations seeking these pieces of legislation shouldn't be allowed to "take away the rule that you should only punish someone after appropriate court proceedings."
Berners-Lee supports any platform that allows people to pay for music online and said that there should be more ways of "getting money back to the person who creates" content, including paying for music and donating to blogs. However, he said that "this doesn't necessarily need to be a system created by the big record labels."
Image courtesy of wired.co.uk
via arstechnica.com
Coming out swinging :)
Comments [0]
Building libsndfile on osx Lion. Missing Carbon.h
18 Apr 12If you are trying to build libsndfile from source on Lion and get the error about missing Carbon.h, use these cflags to set up the env properly for build:
CFLAGS=-I`xcode-select -print-path`/Headers/FlatCarbon ./configure && make
If xcode-select isn't set up - I ran this:
sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk/Developer/
Many thanks to @wmeissner for saving my ass on this one! Slowly making my way towards getting some nice product ready for Tunecast.
Comments [0]
