Sunday 25 May 2008

Cute by ugliness


We have something cute in our garden... A song thrush (zanglijster) has built a nest on a couple of iron supports in our garden shed. After she sat on some stunning bright blue eggs for a while, a couple of very ugly little birds came out. And they don't seem to get any prettier... Hopefully, our cat won't find out!

Monday 12 May 2008

Recumbent trip to France - holiday plans


Made an official start planning our summer holiday of this year today. We had some cautious plans to go to Japan again, but because of my new job I had to buy a car which seriously cut our holiday budget. But, no worries, we have other plans! Eise's parents have a holiday home in the south-western part of France (roughly 100 km. north of the French-Spanish border a few hundred meters from the Atlantic coast) and they are staying there in August together with Eise's sister (plus boyfriend and two kids) and Eise's brother (plus wife and three kids). Initially, our plan was to take our recumbent bikes and cycle to Moliets (where the house is located). Nice detail is that Moliets is about 30 km. from the cycling variant of the Camino de Santiago, leading from Haarlem (NL) to Santiago de Compostella (ES). Unfortunately, I don't have enough days off to cycle this route all the way from home to Moliets (at holiday speed, that is), so we decided to cycle the second part of the three-part route only (see picture). This second part runs from Tours to the French Pyrenees, which gives us about 600 km to cycle (we will leave the official route a little north of Dax). The plan now is to take a cycle bus from Amsterdam to Tours on August 15th and to cover the distance to Moliets in one to one-and-a-half week. There we will spend another couple of days and take a plane back from Pau to Amsterdam. We will leave our bikes behind so we can bring those back when we go to Moliets by car a next time, or perhaps we'll cycle the third part of the route next year, we'll see. But anyway, the bus is booked, we have the route maps and we still have all the cycling stuff from our trip four years ago. Looking forward already!

Sunday 11 May 2008

Darwin2.0


Cool, spotted this movie on the core77 website, showing a great example of modern, urban evolution:

Thursday 8 May 2008

Intuitive design


Here's some nice proof of the intuitive interaction design of the iPhone: