Through Stephen Fry’s twitter account, I came to Robert Llewellyn’s site: Llewtube. Llewellyn is of course the guy who played Kryten in Red Dwarf, a hilarious tv series from the eighties and nineties. On his Llewtube site he drives around some interesting people. Stephen Fry will be in his car too.

When I was browsing the specs of NAS products I was pondering running a Subversion server on my prospective NAS. At my client I’ve helped set up the method for doing version control and of course I used Subversion as the tool.

Despite concise specification pages you’re never really sure what you are going to get, when you buy a product you don’t know anything about. I knew nothing about NAS products, so I did not know at all how it would turn out. A fresh untampered with unit is what I started out with and it clearly didn’t offer Subversion functionality. Soon I found out it was just a Linux box on slightly exotic hardware.

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I haven’t discussed my latest toy yet. I bet some of my more nerdy friends would like to know about it though. I got a NAS (Network Attached Storage). It’s a Synology DS408. Of course a week or so after I ordered mine a new model came out, but oh well, these things happen. I put 4 1TB Western Digital Green drives in there in a RAID 6 configuration. Giving me close to 2 terabyte of safe storage. Two drives can drop dead and I still won’t lose any data. It’s actually a little computer with a small processor and a little bit of memory which has a version of Linux and proprietary admin software.  So it uses a lot less energy than a normal pc.

Unfortunately in the first week the power supply died… I still have to return it. I did buy a spare one though, which I am using now. Don’t want to be caught with a dead NAS again. For days I wasn’t able to watch Futurama. The horror…

All the computers in the house now have access to it and can access the multimedia files stored on there and also use it for backups.

Today I read an interesting article by Russell Shorto in the NRC Handelsblad. It’s an adaptation of an article he wrote for the New York Times. You can read the latter one here. In it Shorto discusses several aspects of American and Dutch society, mainly the attitudes towards welfare and taxation and the balance between government intrusion/intervention and freedom. I like articles like this. They offer me more information on issues that I am pondering already. For example it made in part clear why American society is the way it is and why Americans have such a different attitude towards inequality compared to us.

It took me more than 45 minutes to drive the 20 kilometres from my home to Amsterdam… In the background I hear a project manager say a high ranking manager has said her project is of strategic importance, which means she’ll fuck up the planning that took us weeks to make… A guy in my team think it’s a good idea to start the week browsing the Internet for the latest news… Another guy in my team that I told to help the browsing guy out is acting like he’s in his own little world… It’s sunny outside and I have to spend the day inside with a bunch of IT guys… I’ll have to contact a lot of unwilling people because nobody seems to be interested in holding any speeches… Yup, the week has started…

Just a little over five weeks and we’re off to Berlin. I’m looking forward to it more and more. Look at this. The building on the left is Berliner Dom, one of the biggest cathedrals in Berlin and the building on the right is our hotel. Not bad. The cathedral is situated on the museum island. So we have some nice museums closeby.

In the lobby of our hotel there’s an aquarium, the aquadome. The largest cylindrical aquarium in the world. Hilarious.

The first bottles of Prosecco and rosé wine have been drunk. The sun has shown itself and the pheasants, bunnies and hares have started running around on the fields around my house and offices again in large numbers. I’ve sailed again and it was warm enough to be in swimming clothes. It’s clear: spring has come. Finally…

Just testing out a new plugin I installed. Click the castle or landscape.

The Apple store is down. This usually means new producs are arriving. I really do wonder though if it’s necessary to bring down the whole site. I think it’s just a smart marketing trick. As soon as it’s down the rumor mill starts and the whole world starts blogging about it.

Having said that, I hope it’s the xMac that’s arriving.

Update: Well, just a 4GB very small iPod.