Water polo final in Beijing

Right now, (it’s Thursday 21 Aug, 2008, 13:37 CET), the ladies are playing the water polo final at the Beijing Olympics. The Netherlands are playing the United States. You can see it live at http://os2008.nos.nl/.

But when I looked at Wikipedia just now, I found something interesting:

Apparently, the Dutch have already won!

(As you can see in the image, the score is 5-5 at the time of the screenshot, but on the Dutch Wikipedia page, it says the Dutch have won the gold medal in the final against the US!)

Reinforcing the dykes?

Found in the local newspaper (therefore, in Dutch):

I’d sure like to be there when they start dumping 430.000 euros on the sea dyke in Westkapelle!

Netherlands? Holland!

Do you know how “Netherlands” should be pronounced?
You may think you do, but maybe you should check out Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, just to be sure!

The Daily WTF

A friend of mine pointed me to this website, The Daily WTF, Curious Perversions in Information Technology.
On this website you can get your daily dose of funny, stupid or weird bits of programming code.

How about this bit of code for converting a byte array to hexadecimal?
Notice the use of constants to improve readibility, such as:

public static final int FIRST_BIT_OFFSET = 1;
public static final char ZERO = '0';

Here’s another nice example of the use of constants, to make SQL query building much easier!

EULA

Found on Slashdot: End User License Gems.

There’s an article about statements in End User License Agreements – you know, the things you should actually read before you click “I agree”. Some companies really want you to agree to the most insane statements. I seriously think that some of these are, in fact, against the law.

User manual translation

This afternoon, we got a nice little package in the mail.
Because we ordered ADSL a few weeks ago, we received a free MP3 player. Nothing special, some unknown brand, but still a very nice, 256 MB MP3 player.
That’s not what this entry is about, however. It’s about the user manual…

It seems to me that the manual has been translated from Chinese, via Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, to French, then Russian, back to Chinese, Korean and finally to English. Let me quote (yes, literally) from the manual:

Not need to drive the USB dish function
need not to manage the procedure, can pass the “my computer “directly “can move dish” proceed the document operate, having no need in WIN2000 above system gearing the procedure

Encrypt the dish mode
make use of with the supplementary tool in machine, can be direct to divide the dish as two dishes, combine to encrypt an among those, conceal the space, keep to encrypt the part not been seen from, but conceal the secret

recording/reply to read
can pass the microphone recording and keep to WAV and ACT speech text file of the format, the eligibility chooses the part replies to read or contrast to reply to read

Why I use Jabber

This is the reason I don’t use MSN Messenger!

Read through the comments of this blog entry (in Dutch)… Are these people for real?!?

Google Moon

After Google Maps and Google Earth, Google today introduced Google Moon.

In honour of the first lunar landing, on July 20, 1969, we can now surf the Moon’s surface and explore the landing sites of the Apollo missions. (Courtesy of NASA, of course.)

Don’t forget to check out the highest detail images!

The code of Carl Munck

If you’re interested in history and ancient monuments like Stonehenge or the pyramids, and you like fiddling around with numbers, take a look at this site.

It’s about coordinates of these monuments, ancients weights and measures, mathematical constants, and even “monuments on Mars”, such as the famous “Face on Mars”. There are all kinds of relations between all these numbers, or at least – we are led to believe that. It sounds all a bit too far-fetched, if you ask me…

Our own stamp

Did you know you could create your own stamps?

At TPG Post, you can have you own picture be printed as a real stamp.

We already tried it a while ago. In fact, we used the stamps for our wedding invitations. It’s really easy, and not very expensive. I think it’s great for special occasions or something…

So, here’s the result:

(And this is the original photo, btw.)