Archive for September, 2004

De Matriks: breng het on

Published by Peter on September 28, 2004 in movie. 0 Comments

In our series ‘Low Budget DIY movies’: the Belgian directors/actors Cédric Rossignol and Sam De Martelaere have made The Matrix: The Beginning: a prequel to the Matrix Trilogy. They wrote the script in2 days, shot the movie in 8 days, probably a couple of days post-production. The result is - all considered - amusing.
Some remarks:
don't mess with Ms Payne

  • soundtracks rule. Without music, this would have been amateuristic. With it, … never mind.
  • the dialogues are a splendid example of Flenglish, i.e. English with a heavy Flemish accent. (further examples: beuk.tk and lumberjack.be)
  • the ‘bullet time’ scenes are really well done.
  • the actors/directors/producers are all quite young (the lead actress is 15 yrs old?)
  • the fight choreographies are funny, certainly when Rossignol, the blond guy, who probably is not much into sports except the ones that involve a force-feedback controller, starts his Neo routine.
  • there’s a thin line between slow-motion and just moving slowly.

Visit their site: Cesam Productions

(via VolkomenK*t)

[Listening to: “Maceo The Macks - Soul Power 7″ - Maceo - 100% Funk]

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I remember house before it was techno

Published by Peter on September 26, 2004 in music. 5 Comments

I remember house before it was techno
I remember house before it had an afro
I remember house before it was deep
I remember house before it was hard
I remember house when house had tempos
I remember house before mpc 60’s
I remember house before house had loops
I remember house before the whole world knew
“Do You Remember House” - Blaze

If, like me, you every often have to explain why you’re into house music, but not techno, and what exactly the difference is between acid jazz, downbeat, deep house and lounge music, you should know about the Ishkur’s guide to electronic music. It gives an overview of styles, genres and sub-genres of house, trance, techno, breakbeat, ambient, jungle, hardcore and downtempo, all defined and annotated by a Canadian guy who compensates his lack of enthusiasm for some genres by a fair amount of sarcasm.

Hardcore is the musical genre with bi-polar disorder: one half is blistering, sadistic anger, a seething uncontrollable rage that seekd to ruin and wreck everything that exists, including everyone else’s fun time. (…) The other half of hardcore is way too silly and stupid to take such anger seriously anymore.
Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music

It even includes multiple sound samples with each definition, so put on those headphones and experience the delights of Nu Style Gabber, Gloomcore and New Beat (yes, we Belgians are still quite proud of that)!

Another, more serious way, of discovering house music is the excellent Jahsonic’s House Music History (some sound bites and really well cross-referenced), and if you really want to graduate from House University, check out House Music 101 (by Appollo). Wanna hear some? Browse through DeepHousePage or just use Smoothouse’s Smooth-o-Matic.

Disclaimer: If Chic don’t make you snap your fingers, if George Clinton can’t incite you to move that booty and Bob Marley cannot make you wave that spliff above them dreadlocks, then you will not get it. Go back to your R.E.M. albums (or Metallica, whatever) and forget about it. You’re a lost case.

Searching blogs for local content

Published by Peter on September 25, 2004 in Google. 0 Comments

The Belgian weekly newsletter T-Zine has just published an article about the site of the Belgian National Institute of Statistics (N.I.S./I.N.S.). This government agency publishes census data on population, employment, investments, …
Quickly browsing through some numbers shows e.g. that Belgium has the lowest % of people working between 50 and 64 years old in the European Union (we’re at 40%, Sweden is at 72%), which might indicate that we allow ‘pre-pension’ (retiring at 50 or 55) too easily.

The site also have a very complete list of links to the world’s country statistics, so if you want to know

  • how many inhabitants Belarus had in 2002 (9.940.000 - it’s way bigger than Ireland and I didn’t even have a clue where it was!)
  • how popular mobile phones are in Malta ( 290.000 phones on a population of 395.000: 73% penetration rate - Belgium is at 83%)
  • who the European Internet early and late adopters are (in 2001, Iceland had 69% of its citizens that were Internet users, Greece 13%)

it’s a great place to start. They even have a RSS newsfeed, I kid you not. Do not make fun of Belgian e-government.

On a related topic, I was trying to find out if this mentioning of the site in T-Zine had led to Belgian Blog activity.
Searching on Technorati and Feedster on ‘statbel‘ gave me nothing, so I started looking to other blog search engines.
The results:

Search on … ’statbel’ statbel.fgov.be George Bush
(Reality check)		 Remarks
Blogdex 0 0 25 results (only shows 1st 25) Not really impressed
Bloglines 108 results 108 results (same) 36.981 results Very thorough, I was suprised.
Feedster 0 0 21.886 results Unreliable (down 50% of the time)
Technorati 0 15 results 1.110 results (last 7 days) Scored bad on keyword, but better on URL search
Waypath 0 0 26.367 results Looks nice, but not impressed with the results

Basically the answer was: no recent related blog activity, but certainly the statbel.fgov.be site has been referenced in the past so Technorati and Bloglines seem to be the better sources for searching.

Next question I asked myself was: let’s say I wanted to limit this search to only Belgian blogs. How hard would that be?

  • In Google one could use “site:.be“, but 1) Google is not ideal for blog-only search, and 2) not all Belgian bloggers have a .be domain (blogspot.com users, for one)
  • Luk Van Braekel has a map of Belgian Bloggers @ lvb.net, but that list of Belgian blogs is not public and is not complete (currently 85 blogs - Luk, you can probably guess how I know ;-).
  • Blogwise has a list of Belgian blogs, but you can’t search them and the list is not complete (currently 218 entries - LVBlog is not there)
  • one can search on Dutch words like ’statistieken’ in order to limit the results to dutch-written blogs, but this might also include .nl blogs (God forbid) and excludes Belgian dudes that write in English (pompous bastards).
  • none of the blog search engines supports geograpical searching

Makes one wonder, is there an opportunity for localised (European) blog search?

PS: I’ve added all the above mentioned blog search engines to my StereoSearch page.

The last pinguin to drink coffee

Published by Peter on September 23, 2004 in media. 0 Comments


Kevin Cornell is an illustrator from Philadelphia and has published his BearSkinRug sketchbook #1 on the web.

This was my sketchbook between July 2002 and February 2003. I have posted the book in its entirity - front cover to back cover. Although a compilation of select drawings would have been smaller (and easier to put together), I felt posting the entire contents was necessary for it to be regarded as a full composition.

An amusing view into the mind and imagination of a talented guy, presented in a very appealing Flash interface.

Also check out his main site on bearskinrug.co.uk, there’s a tamagotchi ice bear on top to keep you company (it eats rabbits and chickens).

(via flabber.nl)

Visual history of spam and viruses

Published by Peter on September 17, 2004 in spam. 0 Comments

Raymond Chen from Microsoft has been saving all his spam and virus mails since 1997 and created a graphical representation of them: a dot per mail in time/size coordinates.

Spam history

Some of his observations:

  • Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off. 
  • The big red splotch in August 2003 around the 100K mark is the Sobig virus.
  • The horizontal line in 2004 that wanders around the 2K mark is the Netsky virus.
    Source: Visual history of spam 

    • But no worries, Bill Gates promised to terminate spam by 2006.

    The end of the world: french armpits

    Published by Peter on September 17, 2004 in Society. 0 Comments

    The End of France
    Some Californian guy with a funny accent made an amusing Flash movie on The end of the world, which has been circulating since 2003. No one seems to know who the author was. The movie has its own site www.endofworld.net, but even the people who set it up have no clue who made the movie. I guess not everyone needs his 15 minutes of fame.

    It does confirm some prejudices the Americans have: the English are phlegmatic, the French lazy, the Chinese stupid, the Russians rude soldiers and French women don’t shave their armpits. That is sò wrong, it’s German women.

    via ferket.com

    Japanese lesson in Rock ‘n Roll

    Published by Peter on September 15, 2004 in music. 2 Comments

    Japanese Rock 'n Roll (Prodikeys)
    Nothing like an enthusiastic engineer to sell a home entertainment keyboard.
    A commercial for the Creative ‘Prodikeys’ product (music and ‘normal’ keyboard in one) features an archetypical Japanese sales guy teaching us how to play rock ‘n roll drums on a MIDI keyboard. This is not the best way to play drums, and he adequately proves this point.

    I couldn’t help but put a soundtrack under it, it was too tempting. This was the original Prodikeys commercial (WMV) and this is the whole new Smoothpod mashup. Eat you heart out, Elvis!

    via drijfzand.com

    Coffee and Cigarettes: the halitosis effect

    Published by Peter on September 7, 2004 in movie. 1 Comment

    Coffee & Cigarettes

    I saw Coffee & Cigarettes yesterday, a movie by Jim Jarmusch. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a ‘comic series of short vignettes’ with as main theme people drinking coffee while smoking. Jim Jarmusch started the project in 1986 (for Saturday Night Live) with a scene by Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright. I was kinda looking forward to it, but for some reason, it didn’t do much for me. Yes, Bill Murray is good in “Delirium”. Yes, the “Cousins?” scene is OK. But Iggy Pop can’t act, and an equally shitty job is done by Meg White, Roberto Benigni, Steve Buscemi, Joe Rigano, and some other names. Most of the stories weren’t really compelling. And, but that’s a personal opinion, I do not consider smoking and drinking coffee at the same time a ‘cool’ thing to do or watch. For one, it doesn’t do wonders for your breath…
    At which point I’d like to refer to Stinken uit de bek by the Nieuwe Wereld orkest.

    Coffee & Cigarettes

    [Listening to: “Breathe” - Groove Armada - AnotherLateNight]