suriname360 - Visit Suriname from the comfort of your own home!

After many months of hard work I today finally launched suriname360 - a website that features high resolution 360 degrees panoramas and interactive virtual tours of places in Suriname. I’ve had the idea for this website for a few years now but due to other priorities it wasn’t until March of this year that I could start working on this project. And I did so mostly in my free time while also working on other projects for clients of mine (after all, the bills don’t pay themselves ).

Most of the websites that promote tourism in Suriname focus too much on text and on information. But nothing is capable of attracting people more than nice and interesting visuals. People don’t like to read; they want to see and experience things. People remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. So there was a need for a website promoting tourism to Suriname that focuses on strong visuals and the experience of visiting Suriname. And so with suriname360 I’m hoping that I’ve filled a gap and that the website will deliver a significant contribution to the development of the tourism industry in Suriname.

I’ve enjoyed working on this website and I hope you’ll enjoy viewing the content that’s available so far. I’ve invested a lot of time, money and other resources in this website and I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue to further develop this website in the future. There’s a lot more content coming up and I have a lot of very exciting (long term) plans for suriname360 that I hope to be able to share with you soon.

Visit the suriname360 website and take a look. A good place to start is the tour of the City of Paramaribo.

Natasha Benjamin (Singer)

I recently had a photoshoot with singer Natasha Benjamin from Trinidad and Tobago. I wanted to do some portraits involving extreme/creative make-up and so I naturally teamed up again with painter and make-up artist Megan Fox Carol Chen Poun Joe. I had previously worked with Carol on a test photoshoot involving the Cactus V5 flash triggers and you can read about that here. For this photoshoot Carol was again free to come up with an idea for the make-up, so the artwork you see on Natasha’s face is completely her idea. I only gave some input on the color combinations we would use in combination with Natasha’s outfit. Personally I think it all worked out very well in the end. All the colors match together, even with Natasha’s skin-color. And Natasha actually had a performance scheduled right after the photoshoot and she loved the make-up so much that she decided to leave it on for her performance.

For this photoshoot I used a Canon EOS 40D with the infamous EF 50mm F/1.2L lens. I’ve included a lighting diagram below detailing the setup that was used and some of the gear. Unfortunately I don’t have the power settings of all the flashes. I also had to adjust those settings during the shoot as I was switching from shallow depth of field portraits at f/1.8 to f/5.6 during the photoshoot. At the end of the shoot I also did some shots on a black background, and for those shots I removed the background light. All the lights were Canon 580EX II speedlites in manual mode triggered by the Cactus V5 transceiver. The Cactus V5 performed flawlessly here. I took about 250 shots and all flashes fired for every shot, so I’d say reliability is great. But that was already clear during my tests for the Cactus V5 review. I also used a 14″ bright silver beauty dish from Lumodi as the key light. Gave a nice contrasty effect with a quick fall off when positioned close to the model. I’ve done a few photoshoots with it now and can highly recommend it.

Lighting Setup (click for larger image)

Below you can view a gallery (Adobe Flash required) with some of the shots taken during this photoshoot including some behind the scenes shots of Carol doing the make-up on Natasha from start to finish. Click on the fullscreen button all the way on the right to view larger images.

And if you’re wondering about Natasha’s singing talents, check the Youtube video below. I think she has a wonderful voice.

Canon's new slogan

Canon are at it again and this time they’ve sent a take-down notice to a fan site called Canonfilmmakers.com. The owners of the site have posted some information about the issues on their blog. The exact details of why Canon wants them to take down the website aren’t clear, but what is clear is that the reasons have something to do with claims that the Canonfilmmakers.com website is infringing on Canon’s trademark. I took a look at the website and the only reason I could immediately see why they would claim infringement is the use of the word “canon” in the domain name of the website.

This is not the first time Canon tries to shut down a fan site. A few years ago they also tried to shut down Canonrumors.com, though the owners of that site were later able to work something out and keep the site online. I believe they removed the Canon logos from the site and included a statement saying the site was not affiliated with Canon in any way. Canonrumors.com remains online to this day. Fake Chuck Westfall, who’s blog was also being targeted by Canon lawyers two years ago, has written about this on his blog where he lists some more examples of Canon’s legal attacks and ill behavior towards customers.

A screenshot of the Canonfilmmakers.com website

In the case of Canonfilmmakers.com there was no use of the Canon logo, and no claims being made that the site was affiliated with Canon and I don’t see where there could be any confusion in that regard. You’d have to have a very low IQ to take that site as an official Canon website.

And yet this doesn’t stop companies like Canon from intimidating innocent fans and customers on the Internet. A post on The Blog Herald mentions the issues Canonfilmmakers.com are having, and also details how other companies (the smarter ones) treat these kinds of issues completely different:

The real problem with fan sites isn’t merely the legal aspect of them, it’s that virtually every company and creator has a different set of rules as to what fan sites can and can not do.

For example, where Canon is obviously out to try and stamp out every site that uses their mark, no matter how genuine their intentions, Star Trek actively links to interacts with fan sites in their community and Blizzard entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, even provide an official fan site kit to help fan sites get started and provide clear licensing terms.

In short, no two communities have the same set of rules. Where one artist or one company may routinely go to war with fan communities, often times pushing the boundaries of what the law actually says they can do, others may offer licenses and do everything they can to nurture them.

Trademark law doesn’t so much exist to protect the rights companies have to their trademarks but more to protect consumers:

Trademark law is designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. By identifying the commercial source of products and services, trademarks facilitate identification of products and services which meet the expectations of consumers as to quality and other characteristics.

The problem is that companies, such as Canon, abuse these laws and go out to intimidate people for no good reason. They’ll mention how the use of the word “Canon” in the domain name may confuse people and lead them to think the site is an official Canon website, but that is just bullshit. Canon Inc. didn’t invent the word “canon” and can’t prevent people from using that word, especially not when people need to use it to talk about their products. I mean, if you run a camera club for Canon users, how else will you be able to indicate your club is specifically for Canon users if you can’t use the word “canon” anywhere? How would you run a magazine specifically for Canon gear? Jon Connor, one of the owners of the Canonfilmmakers.com website, made a funny video showing just how difficult things can become when you can’t use a trademark when talking about it:

The purpose of trademark law was certainly not to limit free speech or to limit the way in which people can express themselves. Here’s an example of a case where this is made very clear:

Some courts have recognized a somewhat different, but closely-related, fair-use defense, called nominative use. Nominative use occurs when use of a term is necessary for purposes of identifying another producer’s product, not the user’s own product. For example, in a recent case, the newspaper USA Today ran a telephone poll, asking its readers to vote for their favorite member of the music group New Kids on the Block. The New Kids on the Block sued USA Today for trademark infringement. The court held that the use of the trademark “New Kids on the Block” was a privileged nominative use because: (1) the group was not readily identifiable without using the mark; (2) USA Today used only so much of the mark as reasonably necessary to identify it; and (3) there was no suggestion of endorsement or sponsorship by the group. The basic idea is that use of a trademark is sometimes necessary to identify and talk about another party’s products and services. When the above conditions are met, such a use will be privileged. New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992).

That sounds logical, right? That “the basic idea is that use of a trademark is sometimes necessary to identify and talk about another party’s products and services.” If I want to run a website where I talk only about Canon gear, I should be able to use the word “canon” to talk about their product in all communication and that includes in my domain name and meta data in my webpages. The domain name is what people use to find your site on the Internet, and if you’re running a website for film makers specifically using Canon gear, it makes sense to me to let that be clear immediately to everyone by including it in the domain name, which gets indexed by search engines and will help you reach those film makers using Canon equipment more easily. In the same way, if I want to start a fan club for Canon DSLR users specifically, I should be able to call it the Canon DSLR Fan Club so that it is immediately clear what kind of fan club it is. How else can I communicate to people that the fan club is specifically for users of Canon gear if I can’t use the word “Canon”? How can you start any fan club if you’re not allowed to use the trademarks, and as a result, are not allowed to say what your fan club is for??

Let’s look at nominative use a bit more:

Nominative use may be considered to be either related to, or a type of “trademark fair use” (sometimes called “classic fair use” or “statutory fair use”). All “trademark fair use” doctrines, however classified, are distinct from the fair use doctrine in copyright law. The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if:

1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).
2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).
3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial, and the same test applies for metatags.

Furthermore, if a use is found to be nominative, then by the definition of non-trademark uses, it can not dilute the trademark.[2]

With the above 3 points in mind: Canonfilmmakers.com wouldn’t be able to effectively run their community website if they couldn’t use the Canon trademark in their communications to exactly identify the type/brand of gear they cover or specialize in, so therefore, their use of the word “Canon” in their name (including domain name) is justified (1). They used only as much of the trademark as was necessary, in their case just the word “Canon”, no use of the Canon logo (2). And they did absolutely nothing to suggest that they were being sponsored or endorsed by Canon themselves (3).

So I don’t really see why Canon would insist that Canonfilmmakers.com take down their website. It’s not like their trademark was being diluted or misrepresented in some way or otherwise being abused. On the contrary, you could argue Canonfilmmakers.com only added value to Canon’s products.

What happens when you're being stupid about protecting your trademark. Photo is (c) Anthony Dunn Photography.

I absolutely hate it when people and/or companies abuse the law to unnecessarily limit, attack or intimidate others like in this case with Canon. Often it’s the case that these kinds of threats are being sent out by lawyers even while they know that they don’t really stand a chance in court, but they do it anyway just to see if the victim (yes victim) gets scared and allows him/herself to be intimidated by their threats. Similarly, a while ago I also got a Cease and Desist letter from Amazon/dpreview where they claimed I was infringing on dpreview’s rights. I replied and after more than a year I have yet to hear from them. These companies shouldn’t forget that the victims can also take legal action against them when they make groundless threats of infringement:

Various jurisdictions have laws which are designed to prevent trademark owners from making wrongful threats of trademark infringement action against other parties. These laws are intended to prevent large or powerful companies from intimidating or harassing smaller companies.

Where one party makes a threat to sue another for trademark infringement, but does not have a genuine basis or intention to carry out that threat, or does not carry out the threat at all within a certain period, the threat may itself become a basis for legal action.[17] In this situation, the party receiving such a threat may seek from the Court a declaratory judgment; also known as a declaratory ruling.

I’m sad that I am not the owner of Canonfilmmakers.com because I would have loved this opportunity to defend myself against these claims made by Canon, assuming that their infringement claims are based on the domain name (because so far that’s the only reason that seems likely to me if I look at the website). We need to stand up against this kind of abuse of trademark and copyright laws because if we don’t, it will only get worse in the future. As a photographer, I love that I can have certain rights to my work under copyright law, but I’ll be the last one to abuse those laws for something that I shouldn’t be doing (like in the Amazon/dpreview case where they clearly tried to influence my criticism). I respect their copyrights, but they’re not going to stop me from exercising my right to free speech.

There are many other websites out there using the Canon brand name in their domain name such as Canon-Questions.com and even ACanonLawyer.com. A simple Who-Is lookup reveals thousands more of which hundreds are really related to Canon. So it seems that when Canon’s lawyers have nothing to do, sending out take-down letters to fan sites could give an impression that they’re working hard to earn their money. You may think that this is a silly idea, but these kinds of things really happen. I was told by a lawyer (yes really) a while ago that since it is often the case that they get paid for every letter that they send out, it doesn’t always really matter to them whether the claims they make in those letters are valid or not, and if their client’s position is strong, weak or groundless. They get paid for sending out a letter, so they do it and it’s another $100-$200 earned. Especially if the other party is just a simple person with limited resources where they can have some kind of expectation that he/she will let him/herself be intimidated by the threats made in the letter and give in to the demands. I’ve been the victim of this myself so I know what I’m talking about.

I really hope that the owner of Canonfilmmakers.com lives up to his name (Jon Connor) and decides to fight back and lead the resistance against Canon Inc. He will be doing the entire Canon community and the global population in general a really big favour, especially so when he wins and makes the details public.

Colorful Eyes

I’ve moved my blog to its own subdomain at http://blog.kareldonk.com. If you had subscribed to any of my feeds please make sure that you update the feed URLs in your reader. I’ve made every effort to make sure that old links work and that everything gets redirected to the new location, but I may have missed something in the process. If you find any broken links, please leave a comment or send an email and let me know.

This blog update is part of some changes that will be made to my website in the coming weeks as time permits.  My current website went online in 2007 and an update is long overdue.

Screenshot of the Grumman Ag-Cat G-164A in Microsoft Flight Simulator X

I’ve been searching for a nice version of the Grumman Ag-Cat aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator for a very very very long time. There’s a post here on my blog where I first mentioned it back in January 2006, and another one where I mentioned it again in 2007. And even before that, I was searching for this aircraft for older versions of Flight Simulator. But every time I would search on the Internet, I would end up disappointed because of not finding anything, or, because of finding something that tried to resemble an Ag-Cat but wasn’t quite finished.

By the end of 2009 I thought of searching for the aircraft again on various websites related to Flight Simulator, and you’ll never be able to imagine how excited I got when I found a very nicely done model by Marcel du Plessis from South Africa. The original version that I found was done for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, but I was using what is now the latest version, Flight Simulator X. So I downloaded the aircraft and installed it and was happy to see that most of it worked quite well in the newer version of Flight Simulator even though it was designed for the older version. There were however quite a few things that didn’t function correctly. I sent an email to Marcel asking about his plans for an update for Flight Simulator X, and he basically said that he had no plans to update the aircraft. So I asked if I could have the source files so I could try to update it myself, but unfortunately due to bad experiences in the past he didn’t feel like giving me those files. However, he did give me permission to modify the aircraft as much as I could, and fix it as much as possible with just the files I already had.

So I went ahead and tried to fix as much of the issues as possible. Below is a list of things I had to fix:

• Entries in the aircraft configuration files, coordinates and other data.
• The spray effects needed tweaking to work correctly.
• The panel configuration had to change due to missing gauges. All gauges have been replaced except for the stall light warning which won’t work on Flight Simulator X.
• The Boom Pressure gauge needed tweaking to work in Flight Simulator X.

In addition to this, I’ve also created new sounds for the model that sound more realistic. I used the sounds from the Goose G21A aircraft from Flight Simulator X and modified and remixed them for the Ag-Cat. The new sounds come very very close to what an actual Ag-Cat sounds like!

I’ve also added 5 new repaints for the aircraft, two of them are new and one is a modified version of the original texture by Marcel du Plessis. The repaints and registrations on the aircrafts are from actual aircrafts here in Suriname. You can see the repaints in the pictures below:

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Some of the things I could not fix (because I did not have the source files):

• I could not add new functionality to the aircraft for Flight Simulator X, such as the aircraft casting shadows on itself, etc.
• The glass on the cockpit has a minor rendering issue: dynamic scenery (houses, trees etc.) isn’t visible through it when viewed from the outside.

Download

To download the aircraft simply click on the following link: AgCat.zip. Please note that this file has been updated on July 14th, 2010. In case you downloaded it prior to this date, download it again. Two additional repaints (the green ones seen above) were added.

Installation

After downloading the zip file, extract all files into the main Flight Simulator X folder. If you use Winzip or a similar program and choose to extract the files with the directory structure, then all files will be placed in the right folders. After doing this, you can start Flight Simulator X and you should be able to see the 3 versions of the Ag-Cat when selecting an aircraft. Don’t forget to read the original Ag-Cat Quick Guide PDF document for instructions on how to operate the aircraft, how to activate the spray system and how to make the pilot visible among other things.

If you like the aircraft, please take the time to send an email to Marcel du Plessis and thank him for his incredible work in making such a detailed model for the Ag-Cat. Maybe if he gets enough comments he’ll be motivated to do an update . Also don’t forget to leave a comment below and let me know any feedback you may have.

Video

Screenshots

Below are some more screenshots of the Ag-Cat in Flight Simulator X.

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Distant destinations

So we’ve entered a new year and undoubtedly most people are going to be posting their new year’s resolutions all over the Internet in the next couple of days. I too have been thinking about my life as it has progressed so far, mostly looking at what I’ve been doing wrong and what I’ve been doing right, what worked and what didn’t. I’ve also been looking at some of the posts I’ve written in the past here on my blog, and it occurred to me that I already have a pretty good formula for my approach to life in the new year and I think far beyond. I’m going to list those posts below, but for a detailed explanation click through to read every one of them to get the complete picture. You really have to read the details in order to really understand where I’m coming from.

1. Have absolutely nothing to lose in life.  If you have nothing to lose, you can only win. Stand for what you believe, have principles in life, value your integrity, make your own choices, be free and have some backbone. Make sure you have nothing to lose, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to really have all of those things. Read the details.
2. Listen to the voice inside your head. Our intuition is always there to provide guidance. Learn to isolate it from all the clutter and noise in life and then always listen to it. Read the details.
3. Learn from everyone. You can learn important and valuable things from almost anyone as long as you keep an open mind. The sooner you realize this, and really understand what this means, the sooner you’ll be able to benefit from it. Read the details.
4. Learn how to deal with being wrong. Constantly challenge yourself and/or allow yourself to be challenged by others to find out if you’re on the right track. If not, admit to it as soon as possible and change directions. It will only help you improve and grow much faster. Read the details.
5. See life for what it is. At its core life is a very painful and negative experience. The sooner you realize this, the better you’ll be able to deal with it. Understand what “happiness” is and reset your expectations accordingly. Read the details.
6. Focus on the negative things in life. Don’t fool yourself. Know what’s missing, what could be better and what’s wrong, and focus on those things! It will only make you a better person. Read the details.
7. Understand the world we live in. The world we live in is fundamentally flawed and evil and if you want to be a part of it, it will force you to support that. However indirectly it may be, while you may know it or not. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you’ll be able to deal with it. Read the details.
8. Be prepared to go crazy, but in reverse. You’re going to find out that things are not as they seem, not as you’ve been taught, and not as people want you to believe. In fact, quite often in life the “truth” is a lie and “lies” are true. Read the details.
9. Understand love and relationships.  If you look around you, it should be more than clear that what we’ve been taught about love, and the rules we’ve been told to live by only serve to frustrate our lives, hurt our relationships and make things more difficult for us. Find out what works: Read the details.
10. Watch your weight! I see people everywhere struggling to maintain a healthy weight. The solution is simple: Just follow Donk’s Diet. Read the details.

These are some of the concepts that have so far served me well in life. Upon looking back at the issues I’ve had in my life so far, I’ve noticed that most issues only started and/or got worse when I chose to neglect what I’ve just listed above. Perhaps this information might be useful to you as well in the new year, and hopefully beyond.

Back in 2005 I wrote about the “wonderful” Christmas and holiday season. I invite you to go back with me and read that post again by clicking on the following link: Shiny Happy People.

Nothing has changed.

Dreams of the Past, Dreams of the Future

Today I’ve launched a new design for my blog which was long overdue. The new design matches better with my main website at www.kareldonk.com, which was launched in december last year. It took a while before I finally got some time to redo the design for my blog since I have been so busy with so many things, work and personal life. But things have changed, and it’s a nice coincidence that with the changes in my life, I can now also launch the new design.

I’m quite satisfied with it as it is now, though I might make some minor changes in the coming days. It certainly looks much cleaner and simpler than the previous 3 year old design in my opinion.

And as for the picture above, dreams come and go. With changes in life, dreams you may have had can move to the past to make place for new dreams for the future.

I understand completely if you’re initially very surprised when you see the title of this post. The truth is, in your position, I’d be surprised myself, even though I’ve been known to cover a wide range of topics on my blog. Mostly anything that I feel I should write about. And guess what, it’s time to write about the ultimate weight loss program, which, after many years of research, I’m confident is ready to be revealed today.

Before I go on to explain what it is, let me tell you that there is absolutely nothing like this out there. My theory will put even Atkins Diet and all the other money making, consumption promoting schemes to shame. We live in a world today where consumption, and even more consumption, is being promoted everywhere (for more background on this, watch the first part of a BBC documentary titled “The Century of the Self“). This, as a lot of things that we view as being normal in society today, is by design. It didn’t happen by itself, but it’s being done by a small group who ultimately benefits. People are being manipulated into consumption to make them feel good about themselves. And the more they consume, the more money others make. I’m not going to go into details about this here, just check out the documentary.

The result is that everyone wants more, newer, bigger and “Super Sized!”. If you look at restaurants in the USA, such as the Mc Donalds and Burger Kings, the amount of food that they sell to a single person is unbelievable. Just check out a documentary called “Super Size Me.” And then ask yourself, does a single person really need THAT much food for a single meal? And then, people ask themselves how it is that there’s so much obesity and ask themselves what is causing that problem. Money is being spent on research to find answers to such questions, when it’s fairly obvious what the answers are. You don’t have to be a scientist for this.

And so this brings me to my theory, which if you ask me, is truly groundbreaking and radical in the time we live in today, because with the mindset that most people have today, I think very few would get such an idea. This is the ultimate way to lose weight and to very easily maintain the right weight. Forget everything you’ve learned from other weight loss programs – it’s all bullshit. So what, exactly, is this great theory of mine, you impatiently ask? Here’s what you need to do:

Eat when you’re hungry.

What? That’s it?

That’s it.

Simple, isn’t it? No complex theories about carbs, no complex lists of food and calorie amounts to maintain, no extra work. Simply eating when you’re hungry.

Can you still remember the feeling you get when you’re really hungry? A light pain in your stomach? Well when you feel that, that’s your body telling you that it’s time to eat. If you don’t have that feeling, then you shouldn’t eat because it’s highly likely that most of what you eat then will be too much for your body to process. You should only eat when you feel hungry, and even then, eat only enough to stop you feeling hungry. So no large meals, just what your body needs to keep you going, until you feel hungry again.

Like me, you’ve probably been brought up with the bullshit theories of eating at least 3 times a day, having breakfast at a fixed time in the morning, lunch at noon, etc. It has been taught to you ever since you were a child, and it has become a habit. Now, if you skip lunch you feel like you’re not taking care of yourself, even though you may not feel hungry at all, because you’ve been taught that it’s not healthy. Ofcourse it’s not healthy if you don’t eat when you don’t need it, not for you, but for the corporations who need you to eat/consume so they make even more money. Just look at Atkin’s Diet. Ofcourse everyone loves it, because it promotes eating all you can eat while still losing weight. And that’s exactly what people with their current mindset of consuming like.

Well, it’s crap. All of it. Just forget about it and simply eat when you’re hungry, or in other words, eat when you need it. If you don’t feel that pain in your stomach, you’re not hungry, even though you feel that you could really go for a Big Mac now after seeing that commercial.

And while this is a simple natural concept, I guarantee you that it won’t be easy to follow it. Why not? Because society, right now, and perhaps for centuries now, is designed to encourage you not to follow it.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time now. And today, after reading this article on Jim Gray, I thought of finally writing about him on my blog. If you don’t know who Jim Gray is, and want a little background on him, check this link. He was one of the brightest scientists of our time and a very nice human being, from what I’ve read, and seen from video interviews with him. Check out this interview Robert Scoble did with him back in 2005.

On January 2007, Jim Gray went missing during a solo sailing trip to the Fallon Islands near San Francisco. When you read enough about what happened, you’ll discover that he just suddenly, somehow, vanished from the face of the earth without a trace. There are a lot of things about this that just don’t seem to add up. At least in my opinion. And here’s why:

1. Jim Gray is a very intelligent guy. Him getting into any kind of trouble and not being able to do something about it is not very likely. Him getting into trouble in the first place, especially as a result of his own mistakes, is not very likely.
2. Jim Gray used to make solo boat trips all the time, and so I would assume he has experience with it. This was not his first time ever, alone on his boat. And again, he’s the kind of guy that should be able to take care of himself.
3. The weather on the day he went out sailing was very very good!
4. Gray’s boat was equipped with an automatically deployable EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), which should have deployed and begun transmitting the instant his vessel sank.
5. So, Jim Gray is smart, he certainly had experience sailing alone where he went, the weather was good, the boat had a EPIRB - what the fuck happened? How could he vanish from the face of the planet without a trace?
6. Even if something happened, one of the most massive search and rescue efforts took place after that in order to find any trace of him, just check this out:

The Coast Guard searched for four days using a C-130 plane, helicopters, and patrol boats but found no sign of the vessel.
However, Gray’s boat was equipped with an automatically deployable EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), which should have deployed and begun transmitting the instant his vessel sank. The area around the Farallon Islands where Gray was sailing is also well north of the East-West ship channel used by freighters entering and leaving San Francisco Bay. The weather was clear that day and no ships reported striking his boat, nor were any distress radio transmissions reported.
On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images. The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.
On February 16, 2007, the Friends of Jim Gray Group suspended their search, but continue to follow any important leads. The family ended its search May 31, 2007. The massive high-tech effort did not reveal any new clues.

So, what do we have here? One of the smartest guys on earth goes out sailing in a familiar location, being an experienced solo sailor, during clear weather, and vanishes without a trace. His boat has a EPIRB, which should have started transmitting a distress signal as soon as it sank, but that also didn’t happen. Perhaps it didn’t sink? Thousands of highly detailed satellite images (560,000 images from 3 satellites, covering nearly 3,500 square miles of ocean) revealed absolutely nothing! A 4 day search by plane, helicopters and boats by the coast guard as well as many others (friends, family etc.) revealed nothing. A massive undertaking by Friends of Jim Gray, revealed absolutely nothing.

How the fuck is this possible? It is astonishing to me that apparently nobody has asked this question before. How the fuck is this possible? I mean, what are the odds here?

If you ask me, there are two options here. Either Jim Gray went hiding all by himself, tired of the world and just wanting to be left alone, or, he was abducted. Nothing else makes sense. Apparently someone, somewhere, was in need of a seriously smart database expert to help solve their problems.

If you think I’m kidding, think again.

Burdens of Life

Many people are of the opinion that life is beautiful. Most of them will even take the time to explain to you why they think life is beautiful when you tell them that you have a different opinion about it. They’ll start naming many different things that should be seen as proof that life is beautiful, while conveniently pretending that they don’t see all the cruelty that is taking place around them.

As you can no doubt imagine by now, I don’t think life is beautiful at all. In fact, I even wrote before that there is no happiness in life. I do believe that life can be, or could be, beautiful. But it’s not. There might be some nice moments in everyone’s life, but if you look at the overall picture, it just sucks. Badly. Just look at the way it always ends. Is there anything beautiful about that?

Isn’t it interesting that the first thing that babies do when they get born is that they start crying? If life was so beautiful, wouldn’t you expect babies to start laughing and smiling as soon as they enter the world? Shouldn’t they be happy about it? Why cry instead? Where does that come from? Most babies won’t smile until after they are at least a few weeks old. Why is that? They can’t smile for a few weeks, but are perfectly capable of crying from the moment they are born, and even do so quite frequently!

The reason why this is so, I believe, is because life is full of pain and sadness. The moment a baby gets born, he starts to cry most likely because he feels the hostility around him immediately and can perhaps even feel the sadness and pain that is to come. Maybe he even regrets being born and shows that by starting to cry as soon as he’s born.

The fact that babies are perfectly capable of crying from the moment they are born, and that most of them won’t show their first smile for a few weeks, also shows the nature of life. You get born being perfectly capable to feel pain and sorrow and to react to it, but it isn’t until weeks later when you start to learn how to smile. It’s almost as if the baby needs a few months to get used to the situation, and tries to make the best out of it in the end. It’s like after a few weeks of crying about the tragedy of being born in this world of pain, he starts to get an attitude of “hey, since I can’t do anything about this, I might as well get used to it and try to make the best out of it.”

And I can completely understand.

After all, it is what most people would do in any bad situation: try to make the best out of it. So even though life sucks, why not smile when the moment is there to smile once in a while?

That, however, doesn’t change the nature of life. It doesn’t change the fact that everything in this world seems to be based on the principle of pain and suffering. And it never will.

Blindfolded

When you think about it, it’s amazing how many issues around the world are caused because of people being afraid of what they have to lose, either right now or further in the future. This is not only true on a global scale, but also on a personal level. Many problems can be avoided if you would simply structure your life in such a way where you have nothing to lose, or in the worst case, very little.

Why would you want to do that? One of the important reasons is that if you have nothing to lose, the only option that remains is that anything you do, if it does not leave you in the status quo, will make you win. Very simple reasoning, but the implications are enormous. And when I say “have nothing to lose” it doesn’t literally have to mean that you have nothing to lose. Obviously you may have things that you are capable of losing, but in that case I mean you shouldn’t care about it if you lose those things.

One of the benefits of having nothing to lose is not having to deal with the fear of losing something. Imagine the burden that gets taken off of your shoulders when you realize that you don’t have to worry about losing anything. This in turn gives you more freedom to do the things that you want to do most, without having to worry about losing anything. This is one of the most important benefits you get. Less fear, more choices, more freedom.

Today’s world, and indeed for a very very long time now, is structured in such a way where people are directed, if not forced, to become dependent. Dependent on the system, or dependent on others. When you do enough research, you will find that this is all by design. I won’t go into details in this post, but certainly will in the future. For now it’s enough to note that this is by design. The reason why things are set up in this way is of course to be able to control people and limit their freedoms. When people depend on you, you can manipulate them into behaving the way you want. Because they depend on you, they have little choice but to go along with anything you say because they fear losing what they get from you. By definition if someone depends on someone else, or something else, that person has something to lose.

So one of the important things in life is to be as independent as possible and rely on very few things. After all, when it comes down to it, the only thing you can really and always depend on in life is yourself. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want a lot of things in life. Want and have as much as you like, but require as little as possible. This is the simple rule you can use to guide you in making decisions about what you want to depend on in life.

Want as many things as you like, work hard to get them, but don’t ever be afraid of losing them. In fact, be perfectly capable of living without them. The moment you let yourself be controlled by the fear of losing what you have, you make yourself vulnerable and open yourself up to manipulation.

That job you always wanted? Work hard to get it, but don’t require it. As soon as you require it, you depend on it, and it becomes a vulnerability. People might use this vulnerability against you, knowingly or unknowingly. You might get in all kinds of undesirable situations. For example, if someone knows you desperately need that job, he/she might have you do things you would normally not choose to do. And you would do it because of the fear of losing the chance to get that job you wanted. Another example would be when you depended on the job you currently have. If your employer or your boss knew about this, they could put a lot of pressure on you to get you to do whatever they wanted. As you can imagine, people in such a position soon find themselves doing things, or agreeing with decisions, which are entirely against their principles. If you didn’t depend on that job, and had no fear of possibly losing it, you would disagree with them whenever you felt like it because you would feel absolutely free to do so. After all, you’d have nothing to lose. You’d be free in doing and thinking what you wanted all the time.

So when you finally get that dream job with the great salary, be careful how you handle it. Don’t immediately go out and buy that new expensive car, that big house and take a big loan at the bank. That only makes you depend a lot more on your job and potentially sets you up for losing a lot more if you were to lose that job. The key thing here is to not maneuver yourself into a position where you require that job to be able to live your life. The fact that you have it is great, and you should want even more, but never require it. Only if you know that you will be able to handle it when you lose that job, should you do things like buying that new expensive car, that big house and take that big loan. You should always have a plan B, and even a plan C and D, in place, just in case things don’t go as planned. This will make that you won’t require that job, and you won’t be afraid of losing it as a result. If you have to give up that new car because you lost your job and can’t afford it, you should be perfectly OK with taking the bus again. If you have to lose that big house, you should be perfectly OK with renting a small room somewhere and continue your life as if nothing happened. It’s easy to do this when you require very little in life, even though you may want many things.

This is one of my basic principles in life. There are a lot of things that I want, or already have, but I require very little of them. I quite frankly don’t care if I have to work at some fast food restaurant or even have to become a gardener in the near future. I don’t care if I somehow lose everything I have tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll have to go live in the bushes somewhere, but I’ll try to find a way to live. Besides, seeing how nice and peaceful Indians live here in the Amazon forest often makes me want to do the same. I have nothing to lose. I try to think of something I wouldn’t be able to give up, but can’t come up with anything. Not even my family. As long as I have myself I’ll be just fine. Of course I love my family and always want them around, but I don’t require it and certainly don’t depend on it.

Speaking of family, it always amazed me when watching those movies where some gangsters threaten someone with destroying their family if he/she doesn’t agree with something they want, and then watching that person give in to the threats. These things also happen in reality every day. People get threatened with their jobs and even get threatened with the jobs or businesses of other family members for example. It can happen in many ways or forms. Such a thing would never work on me, since I have nothing to lose. In addition, my family are responsible for themselves. I don’t see why gangsters would want to do something to them because they can’t get me to agree with something. I don’t feel responsible for them; they’re responsible for their own lives. Since I have nothing to lose, doing something to my family wouldn’t change my mind. It would be the same thing if people would kidnap my son (which I don’t have by the way) in order for me to agree with something they wanted. The moment they kidnap my son, he would be their responsibility, not mine. If he died, it would not be my fault. And again, I have nothing to lose. Getting me to do what they want would be the last thing they’d achieve with that.

If most people were like this, imagine how fast the manipulation around the world would cease to exist. It would cease to exist because people would see that it would be no use to do it anymore because it would not be possible to get the results they wanted. It’s that simple.

One of the ways people try to make others afraid of losing what they have is making sure they have little or no choice, or at the very least giving them the impression that they have no choice and that what they are getting is the best there is. Of course, when you think about it, there’s always choice. The problem might be that the other options available at that time may not be as nice. But if you have nothing to lose, you won’t mind giving up the better option and being satisfied with something less, because you didn’t require the better option in the first place. It was nice to have, but not required. Of course you’ll continue to want better and that will make that you’ll work to get it again in the future. Those who like to manipulate and control others know that having a lot of choice means having a lot of freedom and no fear of losing what you have since there’s plenty more to choose from. So when there’s a lack of choice, create choices yourself. You never have to put up with anything you don’t like. Never. And if you have nothing to lose, you’ll never have to.

Is your husband abusing you everyday? You don’t have to put up with it. You have choice; you can just walk away. Don’t depend on him to take care of you or give you whatever you may be getting from that relationship. Become independent and have nothing to lose. People don’t want to pay you enough for your work? Don’t work for them. Go flip burgers for far less money if you have to. Have nothing to lose. When they can value your work well enough, they know where to find you.

And I’m sure you can think of even more examples. The people benefitting from this system of manipulation and control of course will never like the fact that they can’t control you. They don’t like it when people are free to do as they please whenever they please. They don’t like it when people can be independent and rely on themselves. They don’t like it when people have choice, and as a result, freedom. It becomes more difficult for them to manipulate such people. To them, these are dangerous people. And it’s quite easy to understand why. I don’t think I have to explain it anymore at this point.

So have principles in life, value your integrity, make your own choices, be free and have some backbone. Above all, make sure you have nothing to lose, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to really have those things.

I went to my birthplace Nw. Nickerie today. It’s a 3,5 hour drive from Paramaribo where I live now. It’s been more than 6 years since I last went there so it was about time. I stayed for about 5 hours and then came back to Paramaribo. I had to go for work related stuff. While I was there, I used the opportunity to visit the local airstrip in the afternoon. They have some Ag-Cats (agricultural aircraft first built by Grumman, now by Schweizer) there and I was planning to take some pictures. As we were nearing the airstrip, I saw one of the planes landing in the distance, and I got all excited. I didn’t expect them to be working at that time, but this meant I could take even better pictures.

You have to understand that I am crazy about the Ag-Cat. I grew up with some kind of obsession with them. I love airplanes and flying in general, but I have additional special feelings for the Ag-Cat. You probably know the feeling a kid in highschool gets when he sees the girl he has a crush on walk up to him. Multiply that by at least 10, and you have the feeling I get when I see a real Ag-Cat in front of me.

So seeing one of the planes land in the distance, I went absolutely crazy. As soon as we arrived I got out of the car, grabbed my camera and ran up to the plane. They were busy loading it up again with fertilizer or rice seeds (I didn’t really pay attention to what it was because I was too busy admiring the plane).

The design is just beautiful. You can see the pilot and the workers looking at me wondering who I am and why I’m acting so crazy. While it may not look that way in the pictures, the engine was on and idle all the time.

Busy loading up the plane.

Still loading. The pilot seems to be relaxing and enjoying the break.

A peek at the dashboard.

After about 10 minutes it was loaded up and ready to go. The pilot is looking around making sure all is clear and applies thrust. The sight and sound made my heart beat so much faster.

Turning around and heading for the runway.

Taxiing to the end of the runway. (I actually followed the plane on to the runway.)

Turned around and now applying full thrust.

Picking up speed quickly. The noise was incredible as I backed away from the runway.

Simply awesome.

Beginning to lift up from the ground.

And away he goes. Beeee-youtiful!

This alone made my trip worth it. For the next few minutes I was totally high from the experience; my driver must have thought I lost it. I want to go back soon and spend more time there and take more and better pictures.

Another one that’s being worked on in a hangar nearby.

Even more Ag-Cats with the most common colors (yellow/gray).

And that’s it. I’m still very high from all of this, so I think it’s best if I go lie down right now and take some rest.

Update: If anyone from Microsoft reads this, please get this plane into the next version of Flightsimulator!

Update: We now have a very realistic Ag-Cat model for Flight Simulator!!

Update July 10, 2010: If you want to see the exact same airplane above in action right where I made these pictures, check this video on YouTube!

St. Joannes

I’m sure you’ve heard people say before, or perhaps you’ve thought (and maybe still think), that there is one god and that all religions we know today lead to him. Various paths, all leading to the same destination. But is this true? Can this be right? Is it really possible to have various religions, all leading to the same god?

Before you even look at choosing a religion, you have to believe first that there is such a thing as a god. So for the rest of this post I’m going to assume that we’re convinced of the fact that god exists.

Now, even if you were to assume that it’s possible that all religions lead to the same god, you’d have many other questions to answer, one of which would be: Why would god create all those different religions for people to worship him? And if he did, wasn’t he ever worried that it might cause a lot of confusion, among many other problems? Surely he would have been able to foresee that.

If there would merely be differences between all the religions existing today, it would help in trying to argue for the fact that all religions lead to the same destination. But that is not the case. Not only are there differences, but a lot of these differences are in contradiction with each other. Let me illustrate what I mean with a simple example:

Let’s say we have religion A and B. Religion A says that god has blue eyes and a white beard. Religion B says that god has blue eyes and wears a white robe. In this case, I could say that both religions could be true, since god could have blue eyes, a white beard and wearing a white robe.

But if we had a different situation where religion A said that god has blue eyes and a white beard, and religion B said that god has brown eyes and wearing a white robe, we’d have an issue. Obviously both cannot lead to the same destination, since both of them cannot be true. Religion A says that god has blue eyes, and religion B says that god has brown eyes. Both cannot be true. In this case, they are not merely different, but also contradicting. Which one is saying the right thing about god’s eyes?

And so when we look at the many religions we have today, not only are they different, but all of them have various things which are contradicting in relation with other religions. For example, in Christianity, you’re not allowed to worship objects like statues or pictures, and doing so is a sin. But in Hinduism that’s quite normal! In Islam, every person lives just once on earth and faces judgment after death. But in Hinduism, you have reincarnation. In Christianity, Jesus is the son of god and is of great importance, but in Islam, Jesus is just a prophet.

I could go on and on naming contradictions. And these are just obvious contradictions on the surface. When you look deeper, you’ll find even bigger contradictions. You will even find such black and white contradictions, where one religion says something is a sin, while the other encourages it! I gave an example of this in the previous paragraph.

So just look at that! Anyone having to make a choice between these religions faces an enormous problem. Making a bad choice can indeed be quite devastating for you in the end. It could mean choosing to do the right thing, or choosing to sin. If you make the wrong choice, you’re going to be sinning while you probably think you’re worshipping god the right way. For example, if you become a Hindu, you’ll be using statues and pictures while worshipping god, which is a sin in Christianity. And if it later turned out that Christianity was the true religion, that means that you’ve been sinning all your life, while you thought you were worshipping god!

Based on this very simple argument above, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I conclude that because of the contradictions, some of which are very serious, there can only be one true religion.

But just when you thought it was over, you find out that it’s not.

You see, once you decide on a religion another surprise awaits you. Many of the big religions have sub-religions as well, each with their own interpretation of things, differences and contradictions. For example, in Christianity you have Catholics, Protestant Christians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and many more. In Islam you have Sunnis and Shias. You have Orthodox and modern Jews. Even in Hinduism you have groups with their own differences.

How can you ever really know which one to choose? In addition it is impossible to be certain about any choice you make, since many differences are based on interpretation of words in holy books, interpretation of intentions, and sometimes even just belief. It’s impossible to make a choice based on any hard evidence, where things are verifiable and you can be 100% sure about your choice.

And remember that you get to deal with all of this after you’ve made a very important assumption first, namely, that god exists. So you begin with an assumption which cannot be verified in any way and which you just have to believe in based on faith. That already is a very weak beginning. And then, you go on to having to confront all of the issues above.

Isn’t it wonderful? A word of advice, if I may: Before you decide to take on this difficult task, you might want to consult your psychiatrist first. Just in case things get ugly.

The world is a mess, and as it seems, that includes religion.

Have you ever used a (software) product that just felt and/or looked like it wasn’t finished? That had kindof an unpolished feel to it, rough around the edges and minor or even major issues? One that you knew had great potential because you enjoyed using some of its features and could have been a big winner if not for those shortcomings?

Well that is what life feels like to me.

Before I continue, I’d just like to make it clear that for the rest of this post, I’m going to assume that god exists and that I’m going to look at certain things from the perspective of the bible.

With that out of the way, let me state right away that I think god has got to be a very lousy designer and engineer. I’m not sure how they refer to his occupation in heaven, but I’m going to simply compare it to an engineer to make the comparisons I’m going to make easier.

You see, the way I see it, is that god is like one of those smart arrogant programmers who think they created this incredible program that is a testament to how much of a genius they are. They obviously put a lot of work into it, spent days wrestling with some difficult problems, came up with some very clever solutions and finally managed to make it all work. And although the program works, and works well, it is far from ready from an end-user perspective. It only works as intended when you follow the exact procedures given by the programmer in the exact same conditions the programmer expected it to work in. For example, if you press some buttons in the wrong order, or click some menu options you weren’t supposed to click at a given point (even though they were enabled, leading you to think it was okay to click them), the program explodes, possibly in a very spectacular way and in the worst case bringing the whole operating system down with it in the process.

What is clear from this example is that even though major functionality was already implemented by the programmer, from a usability and end-user point of view it still needed work. And depending on the type of program, that could still mean quite a lot of work. It also has to be tested in various situations, all the features have to be tested when used in various sequences and possible combinations etc. Basically everything an end-user might try to do with it. The program also has to protect the end-user from himself by not allowing (disabling) functionality that should not be used at a given moment, especially when you know it might cause unexpected behavior inside the program and cause a lot of inconvenience to the end-user. The smart arrogant programmers don’t like to work on these kinds of ‘unimportant’ and tedious things. If something breaks, obviously the user didn’t follow the right procedures (even though the program actually allows the user to try all the wrong procedures possible).

So with that in mind, when we look at life, there are so many problems to point out from an end-user point of view, us being the end-users. Reality is just full of problems and unexpected and undesired behavior, or just bugs, if you will. For example, sometimes the weather acts up and produces storms causing a lot of destruction to the work of end-users. This, ofcourse, is not normal behavior as the weather is expected to be nice all the time by the end-user, and the bugs just happen sometimes under certain conditions. The same can be said about floods, tsunamis, earthquakes etc. The end-user expects it to rain, yes, and normally it just rains enough to keep life going, but sometimes, under certain conditions, a bug causes too much rainfall causing floods that destroy the work of end-users. In severe cases it even takes the lives of end-users, which, I think, is the worst possible bug a product can have. Imagine the class-action lawsuits that would have been filed if it was possible to sue god. Ofcourse that’s not possible since he can’t be held accountable, which enables him to keep the arrogant attitude of “you’re just going to have to use it as is, and I’m not fixing anything.” Having a monopoly in life also helps. I mean, if we end-users could go to another provider for life, that’d give god some incentive to improve the life he offers, right? As it is now, we’re pretty much stuck with what he offers us.

But okay, I’m moving too far away from the subject. I was talking about the various bugs in life. You often hear people talk about what kind of genius it would take to design something like the human body for example. And yes, I have to admit, it takes a lot of genius to design and build something like the human body. But once again, it is far from finished. There are numerous bugs and even security vulnerabilities. Sometimes bugs cause women to give birth to disabled children. Bugs cause people to get cancer, suffer and die. Due to security vulnerabilities, viruses, for example, are able to install themselves in the human body and cause all kinds of diseases, disabling major functionality, causing system instability and possibly leading to a complete system failure. Etcetera, etcetera. I’m sure you can name thousands of bugs yourself, all of which shouldn’t be part of the user experience, and only cause inconvenience to the end-user. Had god taken the extra time to do some extensive testing before deploying life, we’d probably not be experiencing all of these problems. And I haven’t even mentioned design issues yet. Have you ever heard the joke that asks, with regards to the human body: “What kind of designer would put a waste dumping area next to a recreational area?” Need I say more?

And like any end-user facing such issues with a product, we’re trying to find solutions and work-arounds to the various bugs, but there are limitations to the things we can do as end-users. For one, we do not have the source code to life. It would sure make things easier if we had that. So we’re stuck having to try and reverse engineer as much as we can of life to see how things work, and try to come up with solutions to the bugs we’re having to deal with everyday. It might be difficult for us end-users to repro such bugs and find actual causes, but I can imagine that god almost certainly is able to debug reality and find what is causing all the issues very easily. Not necessarily because he is smart, but simply because he has the tools and the source code. Ofcourse, being as arrogant as he is, and having a monopoly, we shouldn’t be expecting him to put any effort into it.

You see, what actually happened in god’s case, is the worst thing that can happen to one of those smart but arrogant programmers who don’t like to work on the small ‘unimportant’ and tedious things. God created this really great product, started boasting about how he’s so cool and smart, and how incredible life is going to be, when the product wasn’t even tested yet. In addition, god designed life with the intention to be very scalable, but never actually did any tests to make sure it would scale well to billions of users. What he did was do an initial deployment in a very small environment (Eden) with only two users (Adam and Eve) who just followed the exact operating procedures and used life exactly the way god intended it to be used, at least in the beginning. And as we all know end-users are very unpredictable, and given the possibilities to use a feature or combination of features in a given way that makes sense to them, they’ll do it and expect it to work properly.

So after the initial deployment, things worked well in the beginning, and god was proud of himself, boasted about how big of a genius he was, how he was almighty etc. But then the users got more experienced and didn’t feel like constantly reading the manual anymore. And as we all know at this point, then things started to get more interesting. In addition to that, more users started to use life, and the weaknesses became more evident as the number of users grew. The growing amount of users made it necessary to expand the deployment of life beyond Eden and to the rest of the world, which brought along other problems with it. You see, it’s one thing to do a small deployment of a product on 2 computers for example, but it’s an entirely different story to deploy to an enterprise with thousands of users around the world in various locations. And in god’s case, it was far, far, faaaaar worse, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Imagine the technical support nightmare god created for himself. Just imagine the scale of it. When was the last time you called for support, or prayed, and actually got an answer from god? He doesn’t even have an answering machine! And he’s supposed to be almighty? With billions of people, and who knows what other creatures, calling in for help at any given moment because of the countless issues with their life, it should be easy to imagine why god never answers.

So what can we learn from all of this? Apart from the fact that one can clearly see that I have way too much free time, we can also see that it can sometimes be easy to make mistakes. Sometimes we even knowingly make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are because of our own stupidity. Sometimes we make mistakes, but have too big an ego to admit it and correct it. Everyone makes mistakes, but the important thing is to be able to realize you’re making a mistake as quickly as possible, as early as possible, and have the guts to immediately admit to it, and having done that do everything possible to correct it or minimize the damage done by it.

If god had admitted to himself and all his users that life wasn’t ready for universal deployment, and had he then stopped the deployment to work on fixing issues when it was already clear there were issues during the initial smaller deployment in Eden, we would not have this mess today. Instead, he was arrogant, didn’t want to admit that the problems existed, and went ahead with the deployment. Now it will take a much greater effort on his part to fix the user experience for the billions of users he has today. This is ofcourse assuming he will admit that life as it is now sucks, and that he will listen to his users. A service pack to this version of life is long overdue in my opinion.

But I have to admit that when I look at life, I see great potential. I see a runaway hit. If only god would work on fixing the bugs and polishing it a bit more so we could have a much more improved overall user experience…

I’m sure you know the story about the race between the rabbit and the turtle, where the cocky rabbit took a nap after confirming he was well ahead and woke up only to see the diligent turtle cross the finish line first and win the race. The moral of this story was that you should not be conceited in life.

A few years ago, I got to know about a different version of the story. I got that version from someone very special, someone who taught me how to love. I think it gives a more important lesson than the real story (or what we think is the real story). It goes as follows:

Once upon a time, there lived a rabbit and a turtle. The turtle did not know the fact, but the rabbit loved the turtle. It was the rabbit’s precious and pure love, which nobody else knew about.

One day, the rabbit saw the turtle and felt so much pain in its heart because of seeing the turtle self-reproaching itself for being too late very often. For being too late and slow in everything. The rabbit loved the turtle and wanted to give self-confidence to the turtle using whatever method possible.

“Hey dawdler turtle! Do you want to run a race with me? I bet you are no match for me, though. How about it?” asked the rabbit. “Rabbit, although I’m slow… I’ll do the race with you. I will show you that being fast is not always the best,” answered the turtle. And so the rabbit was happy the turtle accepted.

The race started. It was a race to the top of the hill. Ofcourse, the turtle couldn’t catch up with the rabbit. The rabbit got far ahead of the turtle, and as he was running he thought: “Would the turtle follow me? Wouldn’t he give up?” The rabbit only thought of the turtle while running. And not after long, the gap between them became too big, and so the rabbit decided to wait for the turtle. But the rabbit couldn’t just stand still and wait, so the rabbit decided to pretend to sleep on the road, and wished that the turtle would come and wake him up to continue the race. And then they would be able to run together to the top.

And what happened next? We all know what happened next. The turtle passed the rabbit, who was sleeping on the road, and won the race. But nobody knew… the tears of the rabbit who was lying on the road, pretending to be asleep…

After the race, the turtle became the symbol of diligence and sincerity. However, the rabbit was branded for its self conceit and overconfidence. But the rabbit swallowed the blame and insult. The rabbit wanted to see the turtle being happy, even like that…

Once upon a time, there lived a rabbit and a turtle. The turtle did not know the fact, but the rabbit loved the turtle. And that was the rabbit’s own sadness.

And the moral of the story, as she explained to me, is that we always tend to believe what we only see, hear or verify. But have you ever thought about the fact that sometimes, even if things are not seen, heard or verified, there can be a hidden truth… ?

I saw over at Businessweek that a judge has said that a worker can’t be fired for surfing the web at work. He compares it with reading a newspaper and talking on the phone:

In his decision, Spooner wrote: “It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

He added: “For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes.”

He might have added that the Internet today is no luxury, even though most companies and people still see it as such. It is as essential as having access to clean water, electricity and means of communication. I am never going to work for any company where I have a computer on my desk, but can’t access the Internet without restrictions, especially if it is a technology company. If you come across a company with such policies, it is a clear indication that they’re stuck somewhere in the stone age.

I’ve always wondered why companies still insist on limiting access to the Internet for their employees or banning instant messaging programs. If an employee doesn’t get his job done, limiting access to the Internet because he might be browsing all day long won’t solve the problem. He’s just going to find something else to do if he really doesn’t feel like working. Limiting access to Internet and restricting employees more and more based on a lack of performance is a very childish approach to solving the problem.

I’ve always had the belief that you should be able to trust an employee (if not, why did you hire him anyway?), and allow sufficient flexibility so that he can feel free at work and do his job. You should be able to trust him in that he is responsible and that he will get the job done properly. If he wants to browse the Internet or chat often, no problem, as long as his performance at work is excellent. And even if his performance is not very good, limitations of any kind won’t solve the problem. You’re better off trying to find out why he’s not motivated to work and see if that can be solved. And if not, you should be looking for a replacement.

A few days ago I saw a documentary titled “The revolution will not be televised.” It’s about the political situation inside Venezuela around 2001-2002. A review which can be found on IMDB sums it up nicely:

This is something new.

There’s a coup d’etat and a couple of irish documentary filmmakers are right inside of it.

A democratically elected president who uses his power to bring literacy to his people and encourages them to read the constitution is being slandered by the private media openly as dictator, mentally unstable, new hitler, etc. without repercussion from the governments side (like, say, silencing them via bullets and other traditional dictatorial methods). Oh, and they still claim that they are being suppressed, of course.

See how the media gloats about their own role in the coup d’etat on TV after they toppled the government with the help of rouge generals (how much more stupid can you get?? ).

And see how the people of Venezuela march to the palace, holding the constitution in their hands, and reinstall their elected government.

This sounds like a Hollywood fairytale, but it happened for real, against the explicit wishes of the USA. The documentary is a historical masterpiece, shot from the center of the action, acute and totally embarrassing for the prime supporters of the coup: The good, democratic, freedom loving, benevolent USA (who still channel large amounts of money to Chavez’ political opponents).

Also highly entertaining and exciting. 10 points.

I agree with the reviewer, and I highly recommend you try and see the documentary. It’s a real eye-opener on various levels. What you will see among other things:

1. How the privately owned media, funded by the rich minority, can put out wrong information and blatantly lie to influence public opinion and forward the agenda of their (financial) backers.
2. How the US government openly discusses who they don’t like in another country and who needs to be taken care of because they don’t have the US interest in mind (read: because they won’t allow themselves to become a puppet of the US government).
3. How the US government then proceeds to fund and back the opposition to create chaos and try to bring down the government they don’t like to put their own. The CIA plays a major role in this. Ofcourse, this is not something new. They’ve been doing it for many years now in many countries.
4. What a real leader looks like, who has the interests of the all the people of the country in general in mind. I often say that no matter what you may hear about a person from others, you can always look at the way that person talks and behaves, and easily know which of the things you’ve heard about him are right and which are wrong. Just look at Chavez’s behavior and listen to his words after he has won from his opponents.
5. That these days you have to be very careful with where you get your news from, and that you have to be really paranoid about what information you believe. Be prepared to take time to do some of your own research before you blindly accept and believe information you get from the press, and be very critical about it. You can just blindly rule out Fox News and most of CNN. Today most people in the US fail to realize what their government is doing to the world, and even to them, because they are programmed by the corporate media into believing a totally different kind of reality compared to what really exists. For example, you hear Bush talking about trying to protect the freedoms of America from evil terrorists, and that those people envy the freedoms of the USA, while he is essentially taking freedoms away from the american people behind their backs, while most of them don’t even realize it at all. He’s doing the complete opposite all while fooling people that he’s doing what he says.
6. That when you have most of the people in a country behind you, you have all the power you need.

One year ago from today, I published my first article here where I gave my opinion on why I thought Microsoft was winning. And one year later, I still think what I wrote there is true. But that’s not really the reason for this post.

The real reason is to look back at one year of ‘blogging.’ I put blogging between quotes because I wouldn’t exactly call this blogging. I also never refer to this website as my blog. When I mention it, I just call it my homepage. I think it is more than just a blog about specific topics, since I also have lots of other things related to me on this site. I also use this website to write down my thoughts on any subject that may interest me at a given moment. It’s easy when discussing things with people to just give them a link to a post on my website so they can read up on my opinion on that specific subject, instead of just having to explain the whole thing again to them.

When I launched the website, most posts were related to Information Technology. And as you’ve probably noticed, the latest posts were about 9/11 and global politics, with a few posts on other subjects in between. This doesn’t mean that I’ll be concentrating more on politics and related things in the future however. Like I said before, I just post about things that interest me the most at a specific moment. The truth is that I have many things I want to talk about on various subjects, but there’s little time to do all of them. So some things get pushed back while I post the things I find most interesting and important first.

When I started this website, I didn’t really care about things like attracting lots of visitors and traffic, afterall it’s just a homepage. But I am pleased to say that the number of visitors has grown more than I would expect during the last year, and that there even seem to be people who are subscribed to the feeds here.

I should also mention my host Webcore Labs, who have been great ever since I started hosting my site with them in 2004. Very reliable and the support is excellent. I also want to thank Alan personally for his help and his quick response to provide me with anything that I need.

Looking forward to another year of ‘blogging.’

A lot of people seem to admit to the fact that you can learn something from anyone. But in reality, they don’t behave accordingly. It is nice to admit to this fact, but do you also realize what it really means and what it takes to be able to learn from anyone? It seems that a lot of people don’t know this.

To be able to learn something from anyone or anything means that you first have to be open to alternative information and possibilities. You can’t pretend that you already know everything about a subject or situation. You can’t simply brush off opinions or information coming from someone without making sure that you’ve carefully looked at it. You will have to open yourself up to all of the information coming towards you, look at it and carefully evaluate it against anything you think you know about the subject.

And this is not an easy thing to do because often it can take a lot of time. And apart from time and willingness to be open to the information, there are other difficulties as well. One of them is objectivity. It is not easy to be objective when you consider alternative information. And this can be because of various reasons. One of them is that looking at alternative information could mean that you can come to the conclusion that the information is correct, and that what you knew is wrong and that you will have to admit to this. And people don’t like to admit that they are wrong. If it was in a discussion or argument, it would mean losing the discussion or argument. And people don’t like this. There is ofcourse nothing wrong with not liking it, but you should not take the wrong decision because of that, namely lying and refusing to admit that you are wrong. I’ll write more on this in the future.

Another reason is that people may have certain prejudice towards something or someone. For example, they may hear someone who is considered to be a bad person, or someone they just don’t like, talk about something and without giving it some more thought, just automatically dismiss everything that person may have to say. Which ofcourse is a foolish thing to do, because that person, even if it is just for once, might be saying something good. Or they may think that the person giving their opinion on something can’t possibly be taken seriously because he has no experience, is too young, doesn’t have a degree in the subject, etc. In such a case, a teacher would never be able to learn from his students, and one could say that Hitler never did anything that we might positively learn from. Anyone has good and bad qualities, and anyone can be right or wrong. Nobody is perfect. The skill is the ability to be able to honestly identify the good things in a person, learn from those things and use them to your advantage.

Another reason can also be that when people would have to admit that alternative information is correct, this means that they would have to accept it, which could have an impact on a lot of other things that may affect their worldview and their lives. The implications can be so outrageous compared to what they are used to, or it can cause so many inconveniences, that their mind simply closes up to the possibilities the alternative information suggests, and as a result they can’t objectively evaluate it. In such a case it is much more convenient to just dismiss the information, pretend it doesn’t exist or simply deny that it is correct.

And there can be many other reasons still. I think that one of the most important things you can learn to do in life, is to be able to objectively evaluate an opinion, or information in general and once you’ve reached a conclusion, honestly act upon it. I don’t think I can ever completely describe the huge benefits that this gives you. Once you are able to do this, you can identify and take the good things around you from anything and anyone, learn from them and use them to your advantage (this includes finding out that you were wrong), while you eliminate or improve the bad things. It only makes you a better, smarter and stronger person.

For example, there may be someone you really don’t like. Perhaps you even hate that person. To be able to objectively evaluate something this person says that is contrary to your beliefs, and to be able to honestly admit that he or she is right, and that you were wrong is very powerful. Simply because not everyone can do this, and when you can, this gives you a powerful advantage. You will be able to learn much more much quicker compared to everyone else, because, while they can’t, you are able to consider any and all sources and identify the good things and use them to your advantage. And because you are open to alternative information and possibilities from anywhere, you are more likely to discover where you are wrong, and are more likely to act upon it which in turn helps to improve yourself much quicker and much more than anyone else. And the beautiful thing about this is that this benefits not only you, but everyone else around you.

Just think about.

Before reading the rest of this post, you may want to first read this post, and for some background on the title, also this post. Both posts are by Kathy Sierra.

Based on her post, I wanted to give my own opinion on cluelessness. When I read her post, something just didn’t feel right. This in contrast to the many people who did feel right when they read it.

My theory is as follows, using the idea of another one of Kathy’s own posts : The state your thinking and your actions based on your thinking put you in, cannot be described as cluelessness, unless the result does prove it to be cluelessness. So if you think something, and act accordingly contrary to what others say, nobody can say you are clueless unless you get a bad result out of it. And if you get a good result, chances are it’s everyone else who was clueless.

To use an example from Kathy’s post:

It’s the naive guy asking the one dumb question any clued-in person would diss. And it’s that question that leads to the answer no expert would have found.

If the question that naive guy was asking led to something none of those supposedly clued-in persons could come up with, they are the ones who were clueless. If for example, they were saying, based on their experience and knowledge that there is only one good way of doing something, and this guy comes up with another way, they are the ones who were clueless. Because obviously there’s at least one other way of doing it. The guy who came up with the other way of doing it cannot be called clueless in this case.

However, if this naive guy ignored everything, tried to find a new way of doing something and failed at it, he’d be the one who was clueless. Because obviously the people saying that there’s only one way of doing that thing, were right. They seem to be clued-in.

So this is also not right:

The clueless accomplish amazing things–not necessarily because we’re bold, brilliant innovators, but perhaps because we just don’t know any better.

The fact is, that if you accomplish something amazing, obviously you knew better. The people who were clueless, were the ones who assumed they knew everything and made that limit their achievements, when clearly, you’ve proven them wrong.

Another problem I had with Kathy’s post, is that it tries to make being clueless seem like something positive. It could give people the impression that being clueless is often good. This is just wrong. The word clueless in itself is negative. The meaning is negative. If you are really proven to be clueless, as described above, it’s not something positive. Clueless is not something you should want to be (most of the time).

You should not make the thought that “being clueless helps to achieve amazing things” drive you into paying no attention to other thoughts and knowledge and take you into unnecessary risks. If I had the possibility to know about something, I’d want to know about it, even if it is potentially not (totally) correct information, just to be able to consider it. I’ll make my own judgments about it.

For example, if people say there is only one way of doing something based on their knowledge and experience, I’d want to know that and know why they say so, so that I can consider the possibility of them being right. I can then better assess the risks I am taking if I want to try to do it in a different way. Just ignoring them on purpose doesn’t seem right to me. Instead of ignoring them and being overly optimistic about what I can achieve, I’d rather know their thoughts, also consider them and be more realistic about things.

And knowing their thoughts and why they say there’s only one way of doing something, might actually help you to find another way of doing it much faster! Perhaps you’ll be able to spot what they were doing wrong, or you’ll be able to see the things they have already tried and you’ll know what not to repeat so you can focus on new approaches to solve the problem etc.

And knowing the fact that they think it is impossible to find another way to do something, doesn’t have to stop you from trying to find another way and achieve something amazing. It’s your choice to accept their opinion to be true and correct or not. It’s just that when you still decide to try and find another way, you’ll be able to be more realistic about things and you’ll be able to better know the risks involved. And again, if you know their opinion but still try to find another way of doing something, and you actually find it, then they were the ones who were clueless. If you fail, you’re the clueless one.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that you shouldn’t focus too much on the negative things in life, but rather that you should focus on the positive things instead. Instead of looking at the negative side of things, they say, you should look at the positive side and try to appreciate that. Perhaps you are also someone who shares the same opinion. I however have a different opinion: We should focus on the negative things instead. And I’ll explain why.

Focusing on the positive things in life seems to be human nature. When I see people doing this, I don’t blame them at all. In fact, I can very much understand why they do this. Imagine if you didn’t focus on all those small positive things in life, where would you get the inspiration and energy to keep on living? Life is so full of problems and it’s not easy to be happy and optimistic. In fact, it is quite impossible to be happy in life when you realize certain things and when you want to be really honest to yourself.

So this just makes the need even bigger for people to focus on the positive things. Even if those positive things sometimes don’t exist, they try to make them up instead. Religion is a perfect example of this. It serves to give people something positive to think about in life, something to hold onto, something to give them hope for the future, something to give their lives a purpose, something to explain the unknown to them to make them feel like they are in control and know what’s going on. Imagine if there were no religions, how would most people think of life? How would most people be able to live life without the comfort that religion offers them?

Another example is death. For as long as humans exist, they have been trying to put a positive spin around death. Religion has also been a great help in doing this. Death is another case where people have tried to make things up around it to make it look like something positive. “Yes, it sucks to die, but look at the bright side, you’re going to heaven!” Nobody is fooling me with this. Death is something negative. Nothing can explain that away. I’ll never accept it “as a normal part of life.” The sooner people stop fooling themselves and believing in all kinds of explanations for it, the sooner we’ll be more effective at looking for ways to solve this problem.

When something bad happens, or someone struggles with bad results or outcomes, people always say “Well I know it sucks, but look at the bright side…”, or, “It could have been worse, look at the positive side…” etc. That just serves as comfort. It serves to take our eyes away from the problem and to have us focus on something positive. It serves to make us think good about the situation or about ourselves. It serves to fool us.

We shouldn’t focus on the positive things so much. Instead, we should focus a lot more on the negative things in life. Why? It’s quite simple: Because those are the things that require our attention. We want to get better, don’t we? The positive things are already good and probably more or less where we want them to be. We should use our energy to get the negative things where we want them to be. It is unproductive and not of much use to keep ourselves occupied with the positive things in life and allow ourselves to be blinded by those things. It just serves to paralyze us to some extent to address the real issues. The problem is that people willfully do this most of the time. People would rather fool themselves to feel good, instead of facing the problems.

I see it happening around me every day. And what this does is limit the speed at which things can get better in life. Afterall, as long as people keep focusing too much on the positive things, they don’t sufficiently realize the need and urgency to take on solving or improving the negative things. And this isn’t just about improving life in the broad sense, but it starts at home, at the workplace, on a personal level. Sometimes I see people putting too much emphasis on the things they have achieved so far and what they currently have, instead of putting the most emphasis on what they have not (yet) achieved and what they don’t (yet) have. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t give yourself a pat on the back when you achieve something, but you shouldn’t be blinded by it. Give yourself a pat on the back for a few minutes and then forget about it and see the things you haven’t yet achieved or the problems that still exist and do something about them.

The important thing is that you have to know what you want in life or in a given situation. And if you don’t have it yet, do everything you possibly can to get it. Don’t be afraid to admit to yourself that there are things you’ve lost or don’t yet have, but really want. Especially don’t do this to make yourself feel like you have (achieved) everything you want in order to feel happy about it. Don’t look at what you DO have and try to think about that in a positive way. It doesn’t benefit you in any real way, other than to give you comfort, and to try to make you feel satisfied.

Don’t fool yourself. Know what’s missing, what could be better and what’s wrong, and focus on those things! It will only make you a better person. Be honest to yourself and be realistic about your expectations.

I wrote about this before, but the story seems to be getting more publicity now.

(PRWEB) – Duluth, MN (PRWEB) January 30, 2006 — A group of distinguished experts and scholars, including Robert M. Bowman, James H. Fetzer, Wayne Madsen, John McMurtry, Morgan Reynolds, and Andreas von Buelow, have concluded that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11.

They have joined with others in common cause as members of “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” (S9/11T), because they are convinced, based on their own research, that the administration has been deceiving the nation about critical events in New York and Washington, D.C.

These experts suggest these events may have been orchestrated by elements within the administration to manipulate Americans into supporting policies at home and abroad they would never have condoned absent “another Pearl Harbor.”

They believe that this White House is incapable of investigating itself and hope the possibility that Congress might hold an unaccountable administration accountable is not merely naive or wishful thinking.

Read the full story here. For more information and for links to some documentaries discussing the problems with the official story, view my earlier post on this subject.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress version 2.0 moments ago, and I have to say that it was very easy. I just followed some instructions, actually skipped the first 5 steps , and had it installed in a few minutes. I didn’t even have to change my custom theme to work with it. Everything just magically worked as it used to, while I got the brand new 2.0 features.

The backend is completely redesigned and works much faster and we now have WYSIWYG editing! If you notice anything strange on the website, or find something that is broken, please let me know.

Merry Christmas

It’s that time of the year again, when everybody pretends that all is nice and well and they all pretend to be happy and are nice to each other. It’s the time of the year when people pretend to have a heart, the time when they wish each other the best things in life, give away presents to each other and do good deeds.

I find it amazing that people can be like this, that they can forget all the bad things happening in the world and pretend that everything is nice and well, forget about the people dying on the other side of the world for completely unnecessary reasons, forget about the many children suffering and about the many problems we have to face. They forget about all that and about the bad things they have been doing all year long and go on to pretend to be nice and caring. And in January next year it’s business as usual again. They behave bad again, treat people bad, pursue their own selfish goals without thinking of others, fighting continues etc.

Merry Christmas

Who are they fooling? Not me in any case. Why can’t people behave like this during the whole year? Why can’t people be nice to each other, give away presents and think of the poor all year long? Why do we have to wait until christmas to pretend to care about others? The world would probably be better off if everyday could be christmas.

Apart from that, the holiday season is just one big marketing season. That’s all it is. Marketing. From the end of November you can already see the ads on TV. Businesses just want to sell as much as possible. All the “feel good” things around their promotions are just to get you to buy. Companies plan their entire product releases and marketing campaigns around this season. You have got to buy stuff and give to others, otherwise you’re bad, selfish or scrooged. If you don’t go along, you could also be considered weird and be rejected.

Giving and caring during this time of the year has become some kind of formality. Something people have just agreed to do during this time of the year. There’s mostly no real feeling behind all of it. It’s almost like an obligation.
If you get a present during this time of the year or people seem to care about you, you should wonder if they really wanted to give you something or help you from the bottom of their hearts, or if they just did it because it’s the season where everyone is expected to do it. If you’re homeless, nobody probably looked at you during the year. People walked around you and paid no attention. Around christmas, suddenly people seem to notice you, offer you food and money. Do they really care? Or do they want to feel good about themselves during the “feel good, give and be nice” season? You’ll know as soon as it’s January 2nd.

Does he mean it?

I don’t even want to get started about the religious reasons behind celebrating christmas. I keep wondering what Santa Claus has to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, for example.

So while I look at all the shiny happy people around me giving each other presents and pretending to care in the next few days, I’ll look at the news and see people dying and/or living in poverty, I’ll see homeless children suffering, I’ll see people around me being repressed, being fooled and being denied a good or better life all because of those same shiny happy people. And while witnessing all of this, I’ll be listening to “Shiny Happy People” by R.E.M.

Michael Moore writes:

As a rule, we are instructed from childhood that serious consequences shall arise if we dare to rock the boat. We learn instinctually that it is always better to go along so that we get along. To slip off the assembly line of groupthink means to risk ridicule, rejection, banishment. Being alone sucks, but being alone while you are attacked, smeared, and scorned is about the same as picking up a hot poker and jamming it in your eye. Who in their right mind would want to do that? Especially when conformity to the community offers as its reward acceptance, support, love and the chance to be comfortably numb.

I guess we can all admit that there’s a lot of truth to that. There are few people who have enough courage to really stand for what they believe, to openly question things and to risk having themselves ridiculed and rejected because they have different opinions or views about certain things. It’s not always easy to do this, but it is something everyone should do.

We all want to achieve things in life. But at the end, you’re going to have to ask yourself: “What personal sacrifices did I have to make to achieve all of this, and were they worth it?” And especially, you’re going to have to ask yourself what sacrifices you had to make in your personality, in your beliefs and basically in the person you believed you were. How much did you have to change, perhaps to be accepted or to be regarded as part of the group, to be able to get what you wanted? And was it worth it?

Examples can range from things like trying to change to be accepted by a boy-or girlfriend, to things like trying to conform to your boss in order to benefit from it (even if you don’t always agree or things are against your principles) or to not lose your job.

Always be who you are, stand behind your beliefs and never stop questioning things that don’t seem right. To be able to make a difference requires that you sometimes don’t conform to what Michael Moore calls “the assembly line of groupthink.”

About 4 years ago, when it was still possible for me to have a lot of free time to waste on unproductive things, I fooled around with a sound recording program and made an MP3 to show off my voice acting talents. Ahem. The truth is, I was just having some fun. I took the soundtrack from the game “Delta Force” (which by the way is a very nice game), recorded some dialogue and put it all together. And today, much to your regret I can imagine, it is my distinct honor to present it to all of you for download. So without wasting more of your time, here is “United Earth War”. Download it. Now.

Although the mainstream media seems to be keeping very quiet about this, there seems to be a lot of movement going on in the USA and even in other countries around the world as to whether it is clear what happened on 11 September 2001. When you look at certain information and evidence that is available online, it is easy to doubt the official story the US government and 9/11 commission put out as to what happened on 9/11.

It also seems that the corporate media is simply ignoring all of this. It looks like they don’t want to get this information to the public. Perhaps more than 10 years ago, this would have been effective. But today we have the internet, we have peer-to-peer technology, we have bloggers, we have the technology we need to be our own journalists and do our own research. And this enables us to reach people a lot easier around the world with anything we do. We can easily share information and make sure the right information gets out there. Right now it may not be as fast and effective compared to when the corporate media would launch a massive media campaign on a certain subject, but it does eventually work even if it takes a little longer for the information to reach people.

On the subject of 9/11, for years now there have been various problems with the official story as to what happened that day. There are simply so many things that just make you wonder and start to ask questions. Really difficult questions, because I think that finding the answers will change the world as we know it today. It will change what we are used to, what we thought we knew and our understanding of the world.

If you think you can handle it, download the movie clips below and start to question what you’ve been told about 9/11. You’ll need a bittorrent client to be able to download the movies. Some of them also require the XVid codec.

• 9/11 Painful Deceptions
• 9/11 The Great Conspiracy
• 9/11 Confronting the Evidence
• 9/11 Attack or Gift from Heaven
• 9/11 The Great Illusion

Burdens of Life

Today is my 27th birthday, and believe it or not, people around me seem to be making a much bigger deal out of it than I do. As you might have guessed while reading this website, I’m a little different. You can also use the word “strange” if you want to. I don’t like celebrating my birthdays. In fact, I don’t understand why people do. Why would you want to celebrate getting older? It’s like people don’t realize the disadvantages that come with becoming older. If you ask me, you can only justify celebrating birthdays when you’re not 21 yet and you can look forward to becoming an adult. After that there’s no advantage in getting older. Celebrating the fact that you got one year closer to your natural death and the period of being able to enjoy life with various disabilities doesn’t make sense to me.

But let’s leave the advantages or disadvantages of getting older for a moment. What also amazes me is that people can just temporarily forget all the bad things happening in their lives, with their family, around them, in their country and on this planet, to celebrate and pretend to be happy for a few hours. I honestly can’t do that. Life is just full of problems. And at any given moment you can unexpectedly get confronted with even more problems. How can you ever be happy when you have to live with the fact that at any given moment you can lose someone in your family? How can you live with the certainty that one day you’ll be burying your parents? You can never be truly happy in life when you sit down and realize these things. Not unless you’re willing to turn a blind eye to a lot of things happening with and around you.

It’s like playing an ostrich. The ostrich likes to pretend that by just sticking his head into a hole in the ground while the rest of his body is visible he is hiding and that nobody can see him, because he can’t see anything either. You can see how naive that is. I can’t be an ostrich. I can’t pretend that certain issues don’t exist, not even for a while. I can’t do that because I don’t like to fool myself. I can’t selectively forget about things for a few hours or a day and pretend all is nice and well. To me, it doesn’t make sense to do that. Once you’re done pretending to be happy and done partying, you’ll get confronted with the same problems again, and are going to have to deal with them one way or the other. Pretending to be happy for a while doesn’t solve anything.

Knowing the tons of problems that you will get confronted with in life in the future, in my opinion, you can’t possibly ever be happy. If you just look around you, you can’t be happy. If you look at the news, you can’t be happy. There’s too much pain and suffering in life. Pain and suffering almost seem to be the purpose of life. You get born with the knowledge that you’ll die. You get born with the knowledge that you’ll certainly lose the people and the things you love. You basically get born with the knowledge that you’ll suffer one way or the other. There will always be something. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

So does happiness really exist?

There is no such thing as free software. Period. It does not exist. Certainly not in this world where everything seems to come at a certain price. There is no such thing as a free product or a free service. Forget about it. The following comes from that Schwarzenegger movie called “Commando”, but it fits very well with the idea of “free” software: Somewhere, somehow, someone… is going to pay.

So they say it’s free software? Take a good look again. I’m sure you’ll find that somewhere, somehow, someone is actually paying for it. It might even be you! Yep, but ya just don’t realize it….yet. You see, it’s all about the business model. There can be many various ways you can choose to do business. But at the end of the day, someone is going to have to pay for it one way or the other, if you want to keep doing business. Some people may choose to tell their customers their product is actually “free”…..but that they need to pay for the service, or in other words, to be able to use it. Other people just charge a certain amount for their product……and that’s it. These are just two examples. And I don’t have a problem with either one of them. It’s just that the first example often gets abused by people to fool their customers. People always seem to like the idea of “free” stuff. And perhaps you can’t blame them, but it can get them into trouble when they later get confronted with the costs to be able to use their “free” product. This can cumulate to quite some cash after a while. And this is when, if they didn’t know about it before, they get introduced to the concept of Total Cost of Ownership. And if they already knew about it, they get to really know about it.

Take Google for example. Right now all of their services are “free”. That’s right, you can log onto the Internet and just start searching stuff on Google, use Gmail and many other Google services without paying anything. But is it really free? If it was, how would Google be able to make enough money to keep their servers running? How would they be able to make enough money to pay all those Ph.Ds? It’s not free, someone is paying. And in Google’s case, their advertisers are paying for it, and indirectly, you are too. You see, Google’s product isn’t search, or email or other services. Their product is viewers. And that’s what they are selling to advertisers. And every time you search for something on Google, you’re helping them, and in fact, working for them, to sell their product. So the fact that you think you’re using a free product is just an illusion.

Some mobile phone providers give their customers a “free” cell phone. Others throw in various other stuff like a “free” MP3 player, a “free” DVD player etc. Do you honestly think it’s free? Do you believe they are really giving away free stuff just because they want you as a customer? If you believe so, you’re naive, and chances are you’re often very happy in the world you live in. No my dear reader, it is not free. As soon as you sign up for their service, they’re making money on you and without you realizing it, you and many other customers are going to be paying for all the “free” stuff you got from them. In fact, they are going to be making muuuuch more than just the costs of the free stuff you got from them. And there are many more examples like this, I’m sure you can name a few yourself.

No business is going to be giving away things for free; you can bet they will be making money off of it somehow, somewhere. And someone is going to be giving that money to them.

Take Sun for example. Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun, would like nothing else than for you to believe that Sun is giving away free software and hardware. He writes:

Free is a compelling price to drive adoption. Best of all, it’s not subject to bizarre multipliers based on the number of cores or threads on a computer’s microprocessor.

And as much as my friend Linus helped change the world of operating systems, something tells me Postgres and MySQL are going to have an interesting blowback effect on the database marketplace – and JES (stay tuned for a momentum update) will bring the same to web application platforms.

After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records.

So tell me, Mr. Schwa…may I call you Jonathan? – thanks, so tell me, Jonathan, if nobody spends a single dime on all of this “free” software, one way or the other, how exactly are you going to keep that business running? How exactly does Sun make enough money to be able to pay you every month? What? Oh, you make money selling services based on the “free” software? Aaaah…I see. So that’s how people pay for your software. Do you think it’s really free software when you expect people to pay for the services? And he went on to say:

Do I worry about enterprises or corporate customers taking OpenSolaris and not acquiring a subscription to someone’s (hopefully our) service contract? No, not in the least. Do you really think a hospital, or an air traffic control authority or a Minister from an African nation would run their institution on unsupported software? No. No way.

I’m sorry, what? I thought you said a while ago: “After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records”. So do you think that the Minister from that African nation who is, like you said, likely to buy support for their “free” software, is not spending money doing so? Because I don’t understand why you ask “why spend money?” when you’re saying they will be spending money anyway. I’m confused.

Anyway, you see my good reader, how people can easily get fooled into thinking they are getting free stuff. Linux is just another example. A lot of people are going to want to make you believe all that open source software is free. It’s not. You’re going to be paying for it one way or the other, and often much more than their alternatives. How do you think Red Hat is making all that money right now if Red Hat Linux was really free?

You know, in an ideal world, most people would actually stop and think about it some more when someone tells them they can give them something for free. Especially when you know normally you’d have to pay for it. But not in this world, instead people often jump at any opportunity where they have the impression they are getting a good deal and free stuff. And a lot of people and businesses are abusing this.
Do you think customers will worry if businesses are able to make enough money to support themselves, when they can get free stuff from them? Most of them probably don’t even think about continuity. They don’t realize that if they don’t pay (enough) for the product, the manufacturer won’t be able to make enough money to be able to keep making the product and to support it. Frankly, they don’t even care about that or don’t realize it. The customer is always going to want to pay as little as possible, and they won?t care if they screw you over. They don’t realize that in the end, they’re going to lose as well.

In the world we live in, nothing seems to be free. Not even freedom is free. Everything comes at a price. And so does software. The sooner you realize this, and keep remembering it when you see the “free” software ads, the sooner you’ll be able to benefit from that knowledge. Just remember: Somewhere, somehow, someone is always paying.