Death in Amsterdam
When Slashdot features something, you know it’s hot. Or more to the point: if it’s in the realm of popular culture, it’s more likely that it’ll be hot in the near future.
At this very moment, the site has an article about photoblogs and photoblog software that allows you to put up a photo a day. The two sites they mention are Chromogenic and Slower (and one of them was slashdotted when I checked them out).
Indeed, if you’ve been on this site any time during the last 14 months or so, you are excused to not see the newsworthiness in Slashdot’s story. This site has been a photoblog for over a year now.
Also, I stumbled upon this site, which does something very similar to what I tried with 30yp.com.
Work
Today was a busy day. I started by going to Amsterdam, where I talked with Sander from X-Y and the technical guy behind Boekenmijn. I’m helping Sander setting up a portal which aims to supply reviews of publications in the field of development aid and we’re looking at off the shelf packages that could help us.
We’ve now reviewed several packages but haven’t found one that would work for us, yet. Currently, I’ve installed EZ publish which does look nice, but I still have to take it for a good spin. The Boekenmijn guy uses an adapted version of Geeklog, which is nice, but doesn’t appear to handle the multilingual aspect the way we want it to.
After that, I had to travel to Utrecht, where I talked to three guys from ICCO, to discuss a possible three month project in Afghanistan. The objective is to asses the current technical capacity and future requirements of a Danish organization that has been helping Afghani refugees return to their home country. The organisation is called DACAAR and has been working there for 20 years.
The interview went well, so I might have a ‘live’ one here.
Then, I had to rush to Utrecht central station, where I talked to Jeroen from Urbanet. I did some work with them somewhere last year, but now, Jeroen is looking for a technical guy to help him out with some inventive projects related to one of his passions: skiing.
This also went pretty well, and I might have landed myself two not to big but nice projects.
And while I was talking to Jeroen, I got a very strange call on my cellphone. The phone number which my phone displayed was a foreign one, but when I took the call, it turned out to come from within Utrecht.
It was a lady from VSO, saying they wanted me to do an assessment in preparation for a two year placement they though I would be suitable for.
This is very good news.
Death
Shortly before I arrived this morning, Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed, in Amsterdam. Killed by a Dutch guy of Moroccan decent. Needless to say, this is bad.
During the day and much more so in the evening, I was surprised to see (on TV) so much aggression against Moroccans in general and so many people saying van Gogh was a great man.
Theo van Gogh was an asshole. a dick, a bastard.
He has been making films for some twenty years and it was only during the last two years or so that, very slowly, the majority of the Dutch population would NOT get irritated when he only would show his fat face on television. Before that, the man had very few friends and even less admirers, the only reason his films were mildly successful being the shock-factor they carried.
But, of course, killing the man is completely absurd.
Recently, in an interview, van Gogh said he didn’t believe he could get shot (like the man he admired, the politician Pim Fortuyn, who got shot in the Netherlands 911(!) days ago) because he believed people saw him as looney, crazy, a mad man, like a court jester.
This makes sense, and I believe he was quite right. But ever so often, even a court jester gets the boot.