There was a total lunar eclipse tonight. From 10:30pm the shadow of the earth slowly moved over the Moon and from 11:44pm to 12:58am the eclipse was complete and the moon was a beautiful bright red from the Sun’s rays going through the Earth’s atmosphere. Actually, at 11:43pm, just one minute before the total eclipse, a huge cloud came in front of the moon here in Leiden and it started raining and hailing. It didn’t move until just ten minutes before the end of the eclipse, so we were really lucky to see it at all. I had a chance to try out my new Canon 400D. I know these photos are not really great, but it’s the first time I took pictures of the moon, so I’m pretty happy with it. More »

A year ago I wrote about the security tag I found in my Old Navy Jeans that was setting off alarms in other stores. The square tag with the text “remove before washing or wearing” was hidden in an unusual place inside the jeans and sewn into fabric where I hadn’t noticed it before. I argued that Old Navy should tell customers about these RFID tags or simply move them to a place where you can see them. The post has brought forward some interesting comments of angry customers versus angry Old Navy employees. More »

Another shameless plug, this week we’ve launched a new Cafepress store: Leftique – The Boutique for Democrats . The store features dozens of democrat designs, and we are busy adding many more. A lot of the designs are for 2008 presidential candidates, like senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York. When we move to the United States we want Bush to be replaced by a new democratic president, so we do have a stake in this and are helping supporters with t-shirts, stickers and other products of their favorite candidate. Our best-selling candidate so far is Obama! More »

Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »

Later this year Google will built a huge server farm in Eemshaven, near Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. The new ‘Telehouse’ will have room for 100,000 servers that Google uses for storing its search data. Google is estimated to have some 450,000 servers around the world, in places like Mountain View (California), Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia and Dublin (Ireland). The cluster of computers will require an amount of energy enough to sustain 80,000 households. More »

I’ve been using Windows Vista since Friday, and I’ve been very pleased with it. It looks beautiful, it’s fast and it’s been very stable (knock, knock), but the new User Account Control security measures are ridiculous. What UAC does is ask you if it is okay to do something, basically every time you want to open a window or perform an action. This means that you get bombarded with pop-up windows that ask you if you want to Cancel or Allow the action, even for things that you just clicked on yourself. What’s especially annoying is that the pop-up window disables your entire desktop and has a black background, so your screen is constantly flashing to black. I switched the feature off after one day of frustration, but now Windows keeps telling me that my system is not secure, which I suppose it isn’t anymore. More »

Kingfishers in the Netherlands are doing exceptionally well due to the recent mild winters. In the Dutch language they are called ijsvogels, which means ice birds. Despite that name, the birds do not fare well in cold winters. More »

From 5 to 15 January 2007 we were in The Gambia where we did a five-day birdwatching safari upriver to Georgetown and saw 177 different species of birds. I have just published a new travel photo album with 51 photos of this trip. More »

Many countries have a euphemism for common traveller’s gastrointestinal disorders, like diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea and bloating. For instance, in India they say Delhi Belly, and in Egypt they use the phrase Pharaoh’s Revenge. Here is a list of international terms. More »

Scubadorables are cute and colorful reef fish of the kind you will find around coral reefs when you go scuba diving. On www.scubadorable.com you will find Butterflyfish, Angelfish, Damselfish and many other popular fish from around the world, which have all been cutified closely matching the original shape and colors. They are available on t-shirts, mugs, bags, hats and more! More »