Begin maart kreeg ik een mailtje van een Duits weekblad met de vraag of ze één van mijn foto’s mochten gebruiken voor de cover van hun volgende uitgave. Uiteraard heb ik terug geantwoord dat het een eer zou zijn als er één van mijn foto’s op de cover van een tijdschrift terecht komt. Het mailtje werd verstuurd en na een tijdje was ik het al weer vergeten.

We spoelen door naar afgelopen maandag en wat ligt daar op de mat? Een uitgave van het Duitse tijdschrift met mijn mooie tijger foto op de voorkant en mijn naam op de eerste pagina. Als mijn dag verpest zou zijn geweest dan zou één blik op dat tijdschrift hem weer goed gemaakt hebben. Dus bij deze even mijn bedankje aan Feng Shui Aktuell voor het gebruiken van mijn foto!

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And who wouldn’t want to visit Sin City, the world’s playground, good old Vegas? In my opinion everyone should have been there at least once in their life. In Las Vegas there is something for everyone. You name it, they have it and that’s the great thing about Vegas.

Besides the obvious stuff (gambling, hot chicks, strippers, sex, shows) I also like Las Vegas because of it’s architecture. Ever since I was a little boy I’ve always been busy building stuff. First with Duplo (the toddler, big brick version of Lego), then with Lego and when I got my first computer one of the first modern games I got for it was The Sims. In fact, sometimes I ask myself why I never considered studying to be an architect. But I think that a desk job like that and having to deal with tons of math never really made architecture an attractive study for me.

I enjoy looking at other people’s work though, which is why I love Vegas. Las Vegas is one of the fastest changing cities in the world with new hotels being built and opened every couple of years. Not a day goes by in Vegas where you can’t see at least one crane hovering over a building site. And with the opening of The Mirrage, built by Steven Wynn, in 1989, a new trend was set to design and built the biggest and most luxurious hotel on the Las Vegas strip. This trend has since then spawned some of the most incredible and original buildings such as The Luxor, a hotel built in the shape of a pyramid and has a completely Egyptian theme. For New York New York they recreated a part of the New York skyline. For hotel Paris they recreated the Eiffel Tower and inside The Venetian, you guessed it, they remade the actual Venetian canals.

Because of the constant change a lot of old hotels who can no longer keep up with the ‘bigger is better’ trend are subject for removal. They are often bought by a big developer who has plans for a new building on the site of the old one. The hotel is imploded and construction on the new mega resort begins as soon as possible. Of course an old building making way for a new building isn’t that weird. But only in Las Vegas the implosion is an actual attraction and an actual party. Because if the old hotel has to go, it will go out in style.

In my search for Las Vegas info I came across the blog of someone who has a similar love for Las Vegas architecture. Mark Adams owns the website/blog Vegas Today and Tommorow on which he constantly provides his audience with updates about current construction projects in Vegas. I especially find the construction of the Echelon very interesting to follow.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas

Now for the really awesome part. Upcoming October me and my girlfriend will be visiting Las Vegas for the first (and hopefully not last) time! I’m already very excited about it all, even though the journey there will involve me sitting on an airplane for 11 hours straight, being in my dream town Las Vegas makes up for just about anything.

We will be staying at the previously mentioned Luxor. Although not the most classy place you can find yourself, it is one of the cheaper hotels directly on the strip (and the airport, I forgot about that when I booked it, haha).

Of course I will be making lots and lots of pictures there and hopefully walk away with some decent winnings from the casinos. One can always dream! Expect to see a lot of my adventures on this blog when I get back.

Finally I have a question for any Vegas natives or regulars who happen to read this. What are, in your opinion, places me and the girlfriend MUST under any circumstances visit? The Secret Garden, Bellagio fountains and Grand Canyon are already on my list but I’m sure there’s lots and lots and lots more to be seen in Vegas.

Robin

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I have been using the car to go to school. Not because it’s so far away or because there is no public transport available (heck I have three bus stops near my house, none of which have a bus that goes past my school), but simply because it’s faster. I live maybe ten minutes away from the train station. From station to station it’s a little under three minutes, yet it’s still faster for me to take the car in the middle of rush hour. Funny how time works sometimes, huh?

Now, I have been driving the same damn route for the entire year. I know the choke points in my route. There is a junction with retarded traffic lights and a railway crossing which I have to wait in front of if I leave the house a few minutes late (given the train is actually running on time). When I’m past the railway crossing it’s usually smooth sailing to school.

But wouldn’t you know it. Out of every day and every place a terrible accident can happen in this city, this idiot driver choose this morning and that particular junction to park his car into someone else’s with 70mph. The entire thing was locked down, traffic jams were forming in every direction and you didn’t realize what was going on until you were stuck in the middle of it with no way out.

Since I had exams I was supposed to be there strictly on time, otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to make the exam. And for a moment I thought the gods were with me because I managed to drive onto the school parking lot at 8:55AM, 5 minutes before starting time. At least on my watch. By the time I got to class it was 9:02AM and I was late for my exam. Access denied.

Luckily I can still do the exam, though I won’t have a second chance to do it in case I fuck up. So I better not fuck up.

I hate strict times. I hate how you can leave your house well in advance and still manage to be fucked over because of circumstances you have no control over. I hate god for hating me for hating him. But then again I probably had it coming.

Robin

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I had this problem myself. Especialy because my console is inside a cabinet it got hot very fast so I would hear the fans goig in less then 10 minutes of gaming. Wanting to silence the damn thing I decided to look for solutions on the internet and quickly found a guide to hacking your 360’s fan. Hacking might not be the right term though, it’s more like replacing.

Anyway after ordering the fan online I got to work on my Xbox using the above guide as reference. I didn’t have the unlock tool they had handy here so I had to use a screwdriver to pry things open here and there. It wasn’t as easy as the guide made it out to be (though the unlock tool might have made things a lot easier, I dunno). To open up certain areas of the Xbox I had to use some force which resulted in some minor damage to the back of the case. It’s not really a problem since you don’t see it anyway, but it’s still anoying that you have to damage your console just to open it up.

But once it was open replacing the fan was easy. Take the old one out, put the new shiny one in and put the entire box back together. To my own surprise the thing actualy still worked when I turned it on again. The quality of the fan was a bit disappointing, as I had hoped it would be even quieter then it is. But it’s absolutely an improvement over the noisy fan that comes standard with the Xbox 360.

You can order the fan, toolkit and unlock kit at this store. And while you’re there also have a quick look at all the fancy cases and mods they have there. I’m considering replacing the case sometime. White is about the worst color for any console.

Robin

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“Yea don’t mind those Iraqies, it’s Christmas afterall and we can’t bomb them untill it’s over. Christmas is a time in which we need to love each other, afterall,”

It’s a stupid tradition in my eyes which comes with the biggest non-sense ever created. We pretend to love each other, give each other expensive presents, invite each other to Christmas dinners where we eat food so classy we don’t dare touch it. And most of us don’t even like the Christmas dinner but we keep eating and smile nicely to the hostess while in reality, we keep thinking back to that frozen pizza in the back of the freezer. At the end of the night half of the food gets thrown out and ends up on the landfill and at the end of the month December we will have spent millions of dollars extra around the world on presents and food.

Yeah you go Christmas spirit. Be nice to each other, think about others, help each other out! I wonder if they have Christmas trees in Africa.

Anyway, I’m getting a little caried away. I meant to write a simple intro about Christmas and here I go ranting about how it sucks. Oh well. Like I said, I’m not really a Christmassy type, but my girlfriend loves it and so I’m forced to participate. We had it all, lights in the yard, fancy food (frozen, but fancy (and unedible) non the less) and a sort of Christmas tree (we just moved, afterall). So not to be outdone I decided to take the girlfriend out to see a movie on the second day of Christmas. I kept her in the dark about which movie exactly, so I hoped I made a good choice when I reserved the tickets for Australia. I had read a good word about the movie here and there on the internet and since there weren’t a whole lot of other movies that seemed worth my money I decided on that one.

Reserving the tickets was a good idea by the way, because the theater was packed right up to the very last chair and I was sitting somewhere near the front row, which doesn’t make for nice viewing might I add. But despite all that I did have a great time. It’s an absolutely great movie which mixes a bit of everything. If you’re ever in a dispute about wanting to see an action movie or a romantic movie with your girl or boyfriend, then Australia isn’t a bad choice to go with.

I won’t go into the detail of the storyline, since this movie deserves to be seen without any knowledge of what it’s about. That way, you’ll be blown away a couple of times by the constant surprises and adventures. I was kind of sceptical about the movie I had chosen, since I chose it primarily for my girlfriend. But I came out with a smile and a tear on my cheek so for me it was a great experience. One which I can absolutely recommend.

Robin

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The painting is done (by someone else, might I add…) and I got around to putting some stuff in place today. This post, in fact, is the first one in about three weeks which is written on my very own computer. Not some school piece of crap, not some tiny laptop, but my very own powerhorse of a computer that weighs in with at least 15 kilo’s (you should have seen the look on the mover’s faces. They thought it would be ‘just another computer’).

After most of the hardware was in place I wanted to start pulling internet wires through pipes in the walls meant for such occasions. My modem is in the electrics closet (I have NO idea what that’s called in English, so electrics closet will have to do, and it’s got a nice ring to it) and following logic I decided to put my router there as well and use as little wired connections as possible. I did, afterall, buy a new fancy router especially for it’s awsome wireless capabilities (and it works very much as expected, D-Link Xtreme Gaming Router, recommended by yours truly). Anyway, since wireless connections do eat some of your download limit I prefer to have my Mainframe computer (yes, it’s actually called Mainframe) wired to the router.

Everything seemed so easy when I started. This modern house actualy has pipes running from the electrics box to pretty much every room in the house so you can pull your own wires through as you see fit. So I had this awsome idea to just pull the internet cable through the wall, to my office and connect my computer there. However things did not work out so well between me and the wirepuller thing. It either got stuck midpipe, broke, twisted or whatever and after 4 hours of torment I still don’t have my internet coming from the wall!

How does he have internet to post this you ask?

I ran the wire underneath the door, down the stairs and straight into the electrics closet into the router. It looks like shit but tommorow I shall try once again.

Wish me luck!

Robin

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And damn can I use it. Like I’ve said before I used to be a very lazy person. I wasn’t doing anything, spent most of my time behind the computer (gaming day and night). I didn’t go to school, I didn’t have a job. I had the life most working people dream about. Trust me though, it gets boring quickly.

Anyway, now that I’m actualy doing something full time reality is starting to hit like a brick. Combined with the stress of moving in the past few weeks the daily routine of going to school has really wrecked me. I think that it’s adapting to the new life mostly but the moving stress is certainly a big part of it. Every day since I started planning the move to the new house I felt exausted when I came home and fell asleep on the couch after dinner on more then one occasion.

Today when I came home from the last day of school before the christmas break I just collapsed on the bed and didn’t wake up until my girlfriend came home from work, which was a good four hours later. That’s just an indicator on how tired I was from only five hours of school.

In any case I’ve gotten a lot more respect for people who work their asses off. I used to think; work, how hard can it be. But now that I have a daily ‘job’ myself (which isn’t even close to the hours I’ll be making when working with a real media company) I have certainly gotten a lot more respect for working and a lot more appreciation for the weekends and vacation.

But on the flip side, no school means no posts related to school. So that’s going to have to wait till next year. In the mean time I’ll make a random post or two.

Enjoy your vacations (if you have one) everyone! Have a nice Christmas and a happy new year!

Robin

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The assignment given to us was to make small groups and perform interviews with each other where 1 person handles the camera, another asks the question and another is the person being interviewed. Of course if you give a class full of teenagers an assignment like that things are bound to go wrong, especially if you’re doing the interview with classmates.

Hilarity and chaos soon ensued and after everyone was done the teacher showed the tapes in front of the class. I think most of the material had a higher humor ratio then most comedies. It’s a shame I couldn’t get a hold of our footage, otherwise I would have posted it on Youtube for you all to see.

Mission Accomplished

In other news, the big move took place last Monday and everything went pretty smooth. 90% of our stuff is now in the new house, including the dog and the cat who are bouncing off the walls and investigating every crack and hole they can find in their new home. The cat is quikly adapting to his life on the litterbox as well, which is better then I expected.

Yesterday we started putting together the Ikea table and chairs that we bought a while ago. But as we started on the table the nightmare of all Ikea buyers came true: missing parts. And it were to two smallest pieces too! So we hopped in the car, drove back to Ikea and retrieved the two missing pieces. But after a long night of frustration of the Ikea furniture the table and it’s respective chairs are finally standing and it doesn’t look half bad.

Unfortunatly I still don’t have the internet connected at the new house, which is mostly because I havn’t been able to find the time to do it yet. I might be able to do it tonight though. And yes I am posting this from a school computer during computer class.

Robin

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However this will also mean I’ll be cut off from the internet for about a week. I might be able to make a quick post at school but I won’t make any promises!

Wish me luck and see you all in a week!

Robin

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By the end of the lesson we got some homework. Take our notes and go create a checklist on the computer which we can use during every AV lesson. I’m suspecting that the creation of this checklist is sort of an exam that will allow (or disallow) us to use the expensive camera’s on our own. At least it will be one step closer.

The movie project we’re doing was originally planned to be filmed with normal household handy cams, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we could do it with the big cameras? One can always hope.

Moving Problems

I think I got what they call a burn-out today. A very light one but a burn-out non the less. I was at the new house, doing some paint work in one of the rooms. Only problem was that the stupid paint roller AND the paint I was using both wouldn’t cooperate. This was frustrating me like no tommorow and it didn’t take long before I threw the roller down, put the paint back in the bucket and just cleaned all the painting equipment out of the room with the mindset to just hire someone who DOES know what he’s doing and has more then some random low grade equipment from the closest home improvement shop. However that was not the reason I got burned-out.

After I cleaned up the room a bit I realized that I would be moving in less then 4 days. So, since in my mind everything still had to be done BEFORE the move, I would have to arrange a painter to come look at the place, have him paint everything in a day during the weekend AND wrap things up at the old house. All in 4 days. Then I thought about how I was planning on doing the painting myself and had to wrap up the old house just the same and then I slammed myself in the head for thinking I could have done that in just 4 days.
Angry as I was I went home, letting the realization sink in that getting this all done before the big move is never going to work and that my dream of quietly unpacking my stuff after the move would be shattered since I’d be in mess for days or even weeks after the fact. There is one upside though and that is that there are only two rooms that need painting and neither of those rooms are vital rooms I need to survive, I can cook, live, sleep and wash myself so it’s all good. Just a little frustrating to have my planning screwed up.

As for the burn-out part. After fixing up the painter I just felt all juice flowing out of me, so many things to do, so little time. As I tried to reorganize my scedual I just lost it for a moment and became extremely tired in an instant. So, deciding to lie down I fell asleep and awoke 4 hours later. But I’m okay now. I’m sure the move will work out fine, I need to stop worrying!

Robin

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