Japanese people are just insane! And brilliantly funny at the same time..

Uno, dos, tres, Catorce!

Last night I experienced the U2 3D movie in the Pathe IMAX in Amsterdam. I was not sure what to expect, could that 3D be really good? At the door you get some sort of funny plastic glasses. You have to put them on to see the 3D. And it really worked! Waving hands when viewing from the crowd. Bono is staring at you like he’s right in front of you.

The screen was huge and had ultra high quality, better then a normal movie. And then sound.. 5.1 Surround Sound, that was really rocking! It was recorded during the U2 vertigo tour in Buenos Aires, Argentina. What an amazing show. The River Plate stadium was packed, must be over 100.000 people…

Last Thursday there was the 10th edition of the Dutch Spin awards. This is a prestigious prize for innovative Dutch website concepts. Some old colleagues of mine won several gold and silver prizes with their agency Achtung! 

It’s always good to see what other companies have built in the last year. Here are some nice entries that I really like:

• Volkswagen drive in - Guess game with which song is of the same age as the car?
• Hema viral campaign - A webshop layout combined with the game concept of ‘The incredible machine’
• http://www.laaf.info/ - A website that warns kids against fireworks
• Nederlands film festival - A site with several fake trailers. Examples (in Dutch): Van God Los 2 - roze is het nieuwe zwart. Zwartboek 2, dé romantische komedie van 2007. Kameleon 3 - schippers van de dood.
• Clipcaster - Combine youtube, karaoke and a webcam. Who is your idol?
• Bomvol - A online magazine with a lot of rich media. It links to the bookshop bol.com

These are some of the entries of the Spin awards, but there are more little gems..

Wondering what’s really going to be hot? Never want to miss a hype or trend? Then you should have this poster in your office

The collected the 300 most influential websites and put them on a map. Do you see Wordpress take a central connection point? Guess what my blog software is, heheh…

Web Trend Map 2008

You can always try to beg for a good cause.. 

Today I tried something new. I ran a 10 km athletic race in my pretty home town Utrecht. It was a beautiful day and also the route was very nice..
I am very happy with the result, which isn’t so bad afterall.. Especially if you consider that this is my first 10 km ever. The official site also shows a comparison with the Kenian winner:

Ok, he’s just slightly faster

Last saturday I bought my first bike: Yamaha FZ6-s. It’s a 600cc 4 cilinder, model 2005. A couple of months ago the FZ was repainted in the colors red and black (original color was dark blue).

Some pictures (taken by the previous owner):

[Side view 1] [Side view 2] [Rear view]

In the last couple of days I tried to install Visual Studio 2005 on my freshly installed Windows XP (service pack 2). Nevertheless I could get the job done, since the installation failed with the message “Could not install MS XML 6.0 parser”. When I ran the seperate MS XML setup (located on cd in \vs\wcu\MSXML\msxml6.exe), the setup told me that it was already installed. HUH? The some sort of deadlock situation kept me puzzled.
Finally I managed to install VS2005 with a work-around (bypassing the MS XML 6.0 setup). First I installed the .NET framework 2.0 and MS XML 6 (I already had this one). After that I installed VS2005 without the pre-requisites packages. This can be done by launching the setup via the command-line:

\vs\Setup\setup.exe /NO_BSLN_CHECK.

There are some great movies about Microsoft around. Maybe you missed some?

• The WSYP project
• Microsoft iPod
• Steve Ballmer sells Windows 1.0

Have fun!

Give your friends a nice Christmas greet. Upload your picture and start dancing!

http://www.elfyourself.com/