Guido van Loon

Yesterday I did a post about the Windows XP wallpaper 'Serenity' and how a man named nick tosches tried to find the place where the photo was shot.

Today I found out that the same story made it to a big Dutch news site webwereld.nl. I think it's fun that I beat them to it this time!

Every release of Windows comes with a stock of desktop wallpaper art. Usualy photographs of beautiful landscapes.

The latest Windows release Vista comes with a photo of a sand dune with small bushes and grass on it which I like very much and have currently installed as my active desktop wallpaper.

Have you ever wondered where these photographs where taken? If you knew, would you visit the place you look at on your computer screen every day? As it turns out there are people who can get quite obsessive about it.

Take the photo of the Windows XP desktop wallpaper named 'Serenity' (shown here). Someone by the name of Nick Tosches actually wrote an entertaining article about his obsession for this particular photo and how he tried to find the man responsible for it and the place it was shot.

Eight months after I started digging the pond in my back yard is finally finished! I promised to post a picture when I was done so here it is.

It was a bit dark when I took this photo, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it's like. It's 4 by 2 meters and 90 cemtimetres deep. There went 3000 litres of water in. I ran the tap for two hours!

Yesterday I got tagged by two people. First by Ramon and later that day by Raimond. If you don't know what this tagging is all about: When you get tagged you must write 5 different thing about yourself that you would normally not blog about. Then you must Tag five other people who must do the same. This should be a simple task. So here we go...

1. As a student I earned some extra money working at the Netherlands biggest amusement park "De Efteling". I had a great time there for 5 years. I've met my girl friend Carine there and we still see many colleagues from back then on a regular basis.
2. My favourite ice cream flavour is lemon. Don't ask me why, I just like it better than all the other flavours.
3. Past summer I started to build a pond in the back yard of my home. It turned out to be a lot of hard work and many Saturday's went into this project. The pond is near completion now but still not finished after six months. My colleagues at work mock me about this but I don't care. I'm sure it will be beautiful once finished. I promise to post a picture when I'm ready.
4. I like to play video games. Without choosing sides I've bought a Play Station 2 about four years ago to play Grand Theft Auto Vice City, which was exclusive for the PS2 at first. Many games have followed since then. Last year I bought a Play Station Portable to entertain myself when commuting to and from work by train.
5. According to my friends my favourite colour is Yellow. This started when I was visiting London with some of my friends and we went to Canary Wharf. They made a picture of me under a sign saying "Canary Wharf" while I was wearing a Yellow T-shirt. Ever since they like to think yellow is my favourite colour. Yellow is not bad but I like Blue as well. So guys, if you're ever reading this, Blue is also a favourite.

All the people I could Tag already have been tagged by others... I know of one other person though. Twan, you are now tagged!

Google has decided to celebrate their 8th birthday today. This is my 28th birthday as well! I think it's a funny coincidence.

A while ago someone showed me this movie of a presentation on Identity 2.0. Today I attended a presentation about Microsoft Card Space (Aka Info Card) when I remembered this wonderfull presentation by Dick Hardt. He has a very special style, but it works real nice. You must see it to understand what I'm talking about...

The people over at http://www.cakephp.org/ have restyled their website. But that's not all. They also have a stable release available for download!

Today I found a Windows version of the PSP game Lumines. For the people who don't know what Lumines is. Lumines is a puzzel music games for the PlayStation Portable. Some Chinese fellow has created a Windows version of this highly addictive game. He made it in such a way that people can add their own skins and music. I wonder how many skins there are out there, the PSP version has a lot. The game can be downloaded from the authors website.

I'm excited about my new usenet provider eweka.nl from wich I finally get the speed I deserve.

The graph shows a download from a binary group with a stable 833,5 kB/s! This is the first download I do from eweka but it's already so much better than speedxs.nl I was using! It's even a little better than usenetserver.