Christmas Wishlist

Just in case you are wondering what to get me for Christmas, here are a few ideas.

The Crab

The Crab
by Annie (age 8)

The crab is sad because he has no brain.
The crab is sad no matter what.
I have a crab that is sad no matter what.
No tears, no fears,
Just a sad face on the crab face.

The End

Who Needs Katie Couric

Some grad students at Northwestern University have put together this great web site where by a program scans news sites and blogs for text, images, and videos all having a common topic. Then they run the text thru a text-to-speech engine and have an machinima news anchor read it off, while the images and videos play over her shoulder. Way cool. Link

I wish I would have thought of that

This guy has a much more entertaining way to document his travel photos. He superimposes souveniers over the actual attraction for a nice kitchy effect.
Link to Flickr Slide show

Of Course There Are Highways

In response to the reader comment from anonymous, of course there are highways there(as demonstrated by this out of focus terrible picture). I got caught in some pretty heavy duty traffic jams around Amsterdam. But one good thing is you can go 70 in a construction zone!

Bike Lanes

Bikes are first class vehicles on the roads in the Netherlands, and not just in the city. Compare this bike lane in the extremely busy Dam Square area of downtown Amsterdam to this quiet suburban bike lane in a small town nearby.

Wagon Bike

Amsterdam has every kind of bike you can imagine. This is my favorite model. Very popular with the families. I saw many of these "station wagon" style bikes tooling down the road loaded up with kids and packages.

What I like about this photo is the way the wheels on the bike seem to be glowing with some sort of nuclear energy.

See what I mean about the URLs?

Mac House

Another thing I noticed is that the Dutch love to give their buildings names, and if they are stuck for a name, they just call it "[something] House", or "[something] Huis" (in Dutch). Here is an Apple store aptly named: "MacHouse".

The other thing about this picture which is hard to tell, is that the pedestrian crossing signals had this great user interface feature whereby when the red signal was on, the lower signal had a count down timer displaying how many seconds remained until the light turned green. It worked on me. Anytime I was at one of those cross walks I didn't feel the usual urge to dart across the street. I just sat and watched the countdown timer....3....2....1....go!

Nobody home at the palace

My hotel was across from the royal palace, which actually the former royal palace and is now only used for decoration, or state functions or something. Anyway, I couldn't go inside, but was greeted by this very informative sign letting me know the palace was "Closed due to circumstances".

Oh yeah, the other thing this picture reminds me of is apparently there must be some rule that every single sign in the Netherlands should have a web site URL on it.