Category Archives: Main

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Boats, Boats, and more Boa…well, actually just two.

Posted on April 3, 2009 by |

Well, the sun came out a few weeks ago and has (for the most part) continued to hang around. Jan-Jitze and I just had a study break and took a pot of coffee outside to the dock, and all the passing boats reminded me that I haven’t really uploaded all of the boat photos from the previous few weeks.

Susan was in town a little while ago, and we headed down to Bruges/Brugge/Bruge/Whatever to meet up with our friends from Antwerp, Elise and Josie. It was such nice weather that we decided to do a touristy boat ride, which was a lot of fun. Click on the photo below for more pics of Bruges:

Bruges

Hiske couldn’t make it down to Bruges since she was working, so we decided to rent a boat in Amsterdam that weekend and cruise around locally. Nina, Susan, Roberto, Hiske and I all pitched in and were on the water for a few hours, really having a wonderful time (save for the few minutes we were stranded on an old submerged dock support). Check out the last photo in that album…it’s where we ran aground, and I’m precariously perched on the side of a building trying to get the boat free. Thankfully that strategy didn’t work, otherwise I’d still there on that ledge… :)

Same deal as above, click for more photos:
Boat Rental - Amsterdam

All of this has made me desperately want to get a boat. I think next week I’ll look into all the rules for parking one in Amsterdam :)

Posted in Main

Playing with words

Posted on March 24, 2009 by |

I copied all of the text from an earlier paper I wrote (which is now evolving into a thesis) into Wordle to generate a “word cloud”. It turned out pretty neat, actually.

NGO Wordle

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Could be fun to run this against future interview transcriptions to see what pops up.

Posted in All, Main

Take a tour around Amsterdam

Posted on March 19, 2009 by |

Google just released Street View for Amsterdam, meaning that you can virtually walk/drive around the city and have full 360˚ panoramas at Google Maps, just like you can in most major U.S. cities.

Back in August I caught these “Streetview Cars” driving around my neighborhood, and I actually posed with my absentee ballot. Alas, they haven’t yet published/uploaded pictures of my street, so I don’t yet know if my voting-from-abroad moment was captured or not.

Regardless, here’s a few links to some panoramas of my everyday experience:

Maybe I’ll find some more later

Posted in All, Main

Changes

Posted on February 11, 2009 by |

Things are a bit in flux at the moment. I’m rearraging stuff so bear with me, but I promise to maintain my journal again soon. :)

Posted in All, Main, Study Abroad

A night at The Movies

Posted on November 9, 2006 by |

So last night we decided that we’d go check out the local movie theater, called The Movies. We’ve heard that the Dutch moviegoing experiance isn’t wonderful, with comments like “it’s expensive”, “there’s talking during the movies”, “getting a seat means you have to push and shove”, etc.

We figured it’d be exactly like seeing a movie in Union City :)

I’m pleased to say it wasn’t nearly as bad as we were told. We originally wanted to see Babel, but since the movie has multiple languages in it we were told it would be tricky to watch (the subtitles would be in Dutch, not English). We decided on Al Gore’s An Inconveinient Truth instead.
Tickets were €16 (about $20), so they’re similar to prices at home. We already looked like tourists because of the whole subtitles-thing, so I asked “Do you guys sell popcorn here?”. I got a funny look and an “umm, no”. We rushed to the movie, which was great, and it didn’t involve any rude behavior. Horray.

After the movie, we noticed that Dutch movie-going is a much different experience than that in America.

Everything here is compact and old, so the theaters, lobby, and hallways were small and had some history to them. Instead of a kiosk selling expensive soda and popcorn, the cramped lobby had a full bar with sofas, chairs, and tables. You can get relatively inexpensive beer, spirits, snacks, or even food, and are encouraged to take your beer bottle or martini glass with you into the theater. The cinema also shows classic films (like Taxi Driver) after midnight on some nights.
It seemed like most customers showed up early for their show and had a drink to warm up from the cold, saw the movie, and then spent some time socializing and talking about the film. There were absolutely zero children, not even a group of rowdy teenagers, so prominent at U.S. theaters. I wish I could take pictures because the atmosphere is totally different than the cold, modern megaplexes back home.

I do miss the popcorn though :/

Posted in All, Journal, Main, Study Abroad

KPN + Speed Touch = no Vonage

Posted on October 15, 2006 by |

This post is not really related to study abroad. I’m just putting this up here in the hopes that someone who has a similar problem can find the answer.

So I finally got internet access (a neighbor was nice enough to let me install a wireless access point), but I found that I could not use my Vonage Softphone to make calls back to the states. This is the third network I’ve been on here where it would not work.

The thing they all have in common is that KPN (dutch telco) is their ISP. Looks like KPN doesn’t like their users using VOIP to make cheap/free long distance calls, so they block SIP. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that they’re idiots. The block configured on the DSL modem/router which is not password protected. The option is pretty hidden though, you have to telnet into the modem to change it (it’s not in the web-interface).

So, if you have KPN and a Speed Touch 500-series DSL modem (Thomson or Alcatel), here’s how to hack it (mine says it’s a 546, but this should work for 510 or 530 models too):

  • Telnet to 10.0.0.138 (modem’s address)
  • Login as “root” or “Administrator” (both work on mine). It should not prompt you for a password.
  • At the => prompt, type “nat unbind application=SIP port=5060″
  • type “config save” to make the changes permanent
  • type “system reboot” to restart the modem.

This worked great and allowed me to use Vonage with KPN. It took me forever to figure out how to get it working, but after I did I searched for that command and found that this seems to be the fix for a whole lot of providers who block this same way (BT, Telstra, and others).

Blocking SIP may kill iChat and other video/voice/chat programs as well, so it’s not a very nice thing to do.  Bad KPN!

Posted in All, Journal, Main, Tech