No more bore-blogging

Blogging is hip. Everyone who first discovers blogging - including this author - immediately remembers his dreams of being a great writer, registers for a free blog, and then seriously starts rambling about all those personal thoughts never meant to leave the walls of their toilet.
This is a serious issue, and has strinking similarity to the garbage produced by the flood of personal websites clogging the web in the late 80ies. Remember "Jasons homepage", or even better the German equivalent: "Ralf´s Heimseite"? Always adorned with a big and badly animated "under construction" sign to remind us that the content was just rubbish and desparately needed an overhaul.
These homepages almost always contained a section with pictures of the writer (called "yours truly"), and a section with pics of his family members, especially the kids: A ton of pics like "baby John lauging", "baby John crapping", "baby John ... umm ... doing nothing", "baby John doing nothing ... again". You remember, right?
At first it was neat, then you got bored, then annoyed, and then there was that point where all your guy friends - especially those who never got around to having a career - gave you a "business card" with their "homepage" URL imprinted in Times new roman bold italics. Printed at home with their 300dpi color inkjet. That was point when you sold your shot gun and turned to far-eastern Zen-meditation, because you just couldn´t take it anymore. I sure remember those days.
Nobody wants this to come back. And blogging is even more immanent than just having a static homepage. The artist/writer can post his thoughts to his blog anytime, anywhere. From work, from their mobile phone, from the toilet. Whenever "it" happens - a thought, any thought - he can just forward it to his blog. Text, pics and all.
And he will. Who needs that? The reason people at work fight to get a single office is because they don´t want to hear their colleage´s thoughts. They want to be left alone. And I agree. Please, just leave me alone, too.
But I - just as all these other wannabe-writers before me - think my thoughts are different, somehow. I write stuff that matters. All the other stuff is bunk, it needs a global forward to dev/null if you know what I mean. But this, this specific blog entry you are reading matters. I don´t know why. Maybe it´s the vodka, again, this time mixed with bitter lemon. Third glass. The blank walls I am staring at begin to matter. So I´ll toast to you, my sober friend, in the hope that this entry has made you just that little bit wiser. If not just go and have a vodka or two. It works!

Cheers

Zen-monkey

Scanning my ass for kicks at a self-service cash register

Wow, them Dutch are whacky! I was driving around aimlessly (again) tonight, when I stumbled across a fuckin´ awesome piece of innovation: In a supermarket in Delft I witnessed my first self-service cash-register.
"Self-service what-what?" the inquiring mind might ask. It is a cash register without a living cashier. Instead of having a cashier ring up your stuff you just get to do it yourself!
This is how it works: You take each product you bought from your shopping cart, hold it against one of those laser-scanner-thingies (works best if you point the barcode at the scanner ;-), have it scanned, and then place the scanned item onto a conveyor belt leading past a gate. Once you´re finished scanning your whole shopping cart you either pay with your bank card or print out the bill and pay a central cashier. You walk through the gate (without any stolen goods in your pockets of course) and pick up the shit you paid for from the conveyour belt. Done!
I only bought three items because I was broke, but I can tell you: Scanning stuff is fun. I almost went back to get a bottle of anything just so I can scan it! The cool thing is: There never be half of the register lanes closed because they don´t have enough cashiers. It´s brilliant. I love it. Hoorray for new technology.

Cheers

Scan-boy

Doing brain surgery on a go-cart

Cart racing is top! Tonite the some of the entory expat crew (technically I work for entory, and entory works for the EPO) and went to RACEPLANET, a cart track near Den Haag spread out over four building levels!


The surgeon crew Awlrighty, them Dutch sure know how to have fun! This is some wicked cart experience. The track is very curvy, so experience and driving skills are needed to succeed here, not just a lead foot. It´s a pro track.

To clear things up let´s make a qualitative comparison:
Normal cart racing is to Delft cart racing as construction work is to?
a) Huh?
b) I don´t get it
c) brain surgery.
Remember SATs? The answer is: c) brain surgery. That´s why they handed out hospital-green outfits and matching hair-nets here at the track to protect us while driving, just as brain surgeons protect themselves when driving. Don´t get it? Check out the pics I made.. Maybe that´ll clear things up. Until then ...

See ya (in the rear view mirror that is :-)

Speedy Marco

WWWB - Why Waste Web Bandwidth?

This is the beginning of a new area, the blog phase as it will be known as after I have become famous. How do you make a blog interesting, though?

Blogging sure invites to rambling over things that nobody besides the author really cares about. I have written, edited, re-edited, and later deleted enough blog entries here already to know what I am talking about. I guess that makes the name jive talkin' fitting.

Yesterday night I grabbed my trusty bottle of Vodka, mixed in a little Sprite®, and decided what I want to use this blog for. So here it goes: K.I.T.W.A.T.P. - Keep in touch, with a twist of philosophy. W.T.F. is that?
Since so many of my friends have decided to take on the world - do I need to mention Paris, Berlin, Turino, Hamburg, Miami, Wolfsburg - I want to use this as a platform to let them know what kind of trouble I have currently gotten myself into. But I am realistic enough to know, once the Vodka hits the spot, I can´t just keep it short.
I start to philosophize. A lot. The worst ting about it: I start thinking that somebody might be interestend in hearing what I have to say. So that´s why I added the twist. Expect to be able to keep abreast with my life and crazy ideas reading my jive talk. I´ll be sure to add a pic or two to keep things interesting.

Ciao-sito babies

Marc