Harold's Home The moving finger writes...

Today I had a meeting in Amsterdam about a new federated search engine from Ebsco, one of the largest database providers for my work. We're not in the market for a new federated search engine at the moment as we still have 2 years to go on our current contract but I thought it would be get a look at this new product as next year we'll be critically examining our current one so as to have enough time to consider the next step.

It also happened to be in a small room off the Hortus and as I like nature stuff and admission was free I got a chance to have a look.

Generally I don't really like Hortuses (is that a word?). Seeing a thousand plants bunched up in 100 square meters with little hard-to-read hand-scribbled labels feels a bit sad in some way. Most of the plants also looked a bit tired due to the extreme heat.

But I did get to see a very lovely and almost endearing little pineapple in the butterfly house.

Clicky for the set with 3 other pictures of lovely butterflies.

The day has just started but this review of Opera's new browser has already made my day.

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

Please excuse the silence around here. I've been busy at work, we're doing the Dutch version of 23 things. This is a course that teaches library staff various web 2.0 tools like weblogs, Flickr, wikis, RSS readers, social networks and forces them to think about them and how they might be implemented in a library setting. It's a fun course but takes a lot of time, I am a coach so that means I not only follow the course myself but also attempt to guide several people through it. The 23 things aren't all actually tools on the web, some of the things are just moments to reflect on stuff learned previously. As part of this I keep a weblog (yes, I've been cheating on you, I am seeing a weblog on the side, it's not you baby, it's me) and comment on other people's blogs. This is taking a bit more time than I expected and I haven't really felt the urge to write here as well.

Another thing is that I've been dabbling with video editing again. Last time I did this the OOOk Default: team were amateur VJs and most of the work we did was done in Premiere 4 and 5, as well as After Effects. Things have sure changed. I have After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3 but the interfaces have changed so much that it's hard to adapt to old ways of working. In fact I am finding it easier to work in iMovie as that's more intuitive to use and it DOESN'T MESS UP THE FRACKING SOUND!
Adobe's interface designers have gone mad and their editing tools have become arcane and cumbersome. By contrast iMovie has hit the spot for me. At first glance the editing tools are extremely limited but with a bit of time you can accomplish quite nice things. Plus it DOESN'T MESS UP THE FRACKING SOUND! In fact I really thought I might not like iMovie thinking it was way too limited but Apple has left out all the non-essentials and just focussed on getting the important bits right. I'm using version 6 which is a bit old by now and I understand things have changed a bit in later versions but don't have any experience with those.

The thing I'm working on is a compilation of some epic fights in Ulduar, which is a new dungeon in World of Warcraft. I may show it to you all when it's finished.

http://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/trunk/XeePhotoshopLoader.m?spec=svn28&r=11#107
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
// your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
// birthday.

via: Michael Tsai

Jees, as if the cold I'm coming down with isn't enough to clot my brains, the brits have to come up with this crazy job-creation scheme:
Psychics given £4,500 government funding to teach people to communicate with the dead.

See the funny crazy people laugh! I'd laugh too if I was scamming people and got rewarded like this.

To: virtualpetrockhelp @ virtualpetrock.nl
Subject: VPR feedback - helpme
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Reply-To: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:12:08 +0100 (CET)

Hans <xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 26-03-2009, 23:12:08 about "helpme":

Must... buy... AppleMac... becuz... need... to... have... VPR! *sigh!*

I'm currently reading "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated" by Steve Jones and it includes a funny introduction to one of the chapters, I looked it up on the interwebs to find out more about it and it appears to be a fictional categorisation of animals I thought I might share with you. I might do a full review of Almost like a whale if the mood strikes me when I finish the book, or I might not, I have a zillion books left to read and time is short, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

Wikipedia entry.

Except maybe in videogames.
ACCELERATION DUE TO GRAVITY: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS.

Aaargh, my kitchen water-heater thing is being replaced and in order to do that the water and gas in my entire building has been cut off. It's cold and I'm freezing my ass off. This is probably going to take an entire day so if you don't hear anything from me in the next few weeks I'll have reverted to a primal state and am off hunting seals.