Alef Arendsen

SpringOne wil be held in June again this year. Fortunately this time, it won’t be on my birthday, but exactly one week later.

Registration has been open for a while already and can be found here. More news will be posted later on.

I’m hosting another Amsterdam Java Meetup next month. We’re doing it at the Jaren again, which is in the centre of Amsterdam. This is the sixth time we’re doing this already and so far it has always proven to be a big success.

Bring along anybody you know that has anything to do with Java, if even remotely! Again, don’t expect any talks or presentations, it’s just drinks and chit-chat.

As always, first few beers are covered for.

What: Amsterdam Java Meetup
Where: De Jaren, Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam
When: April 13, 2007 — starting at 6pm

Bonus points (free beer at the next Java Meetup maybe) for the one knowing the correct way of saying ‘pink uit de kom’. The direct translation if ‘out of the cup’, but this definitely does not make sense.

p.s. yes, soccer did it again… Typing speed reduced to 50% of what is used to be for the next two weeks (in other words, two fingers rendered useless during last night’s training session). Other than that, I had fun

Recently I’ve re-arranged the layout of my living room. My desk is now on the other end near the window, so I can actually look outside when I’m working at home now. The thing also is that my Sonos system has always been standing in this corner of my living room and now that my desk is there as well, I can connect my computer to it.

This means that I can now push Pandora, Last.FM or whatever stream through my house. This is already possible of course using Sonos’ built-in Internet support through which you can just listen to any streaming medium, but not to Last.FM and Pandora, because they require installing an application or having a Flashy browser window opened. Of course there are ways around this, but I’m not that much of a hacker with proxies, et cetera.

Anyway, I’ve listened to Last.FM for a few days now and since yesterday evening I’ve switched back to Pandora again. So far, Pandora is way better!

Last.FM is good, but somehow the amount of music I like with Last.FM is significantly less than what I have setup in and get from Pandora. One other thing that I noticed was that Last.FM gives you a lot more top-40-like music than Pandora. With the latter I really get served with artists I’ve never heard of and this isn’t the case with Last.FM actually.

Of course the two differ a lot in their approach to serving you with good music. Last.FM is community-based while Pandora is based on the music gnome project that analyses music…

Okay, so far for a rough comparison–I’m sticking with Pandora.

(sorry Costin, I promised you not to, but here we go…)
I remember being ping’d by Costin a while ago after I set my Skype message to: “Okay, Arjen won, I got a Mac”. I told him Arjen kept on bothering me with his stupid Mac stories, especially when I was searching for some files on my Windows ThinkPad (oh, at one point I did have Ubuntu installed on it, but whatever Adrian might say, Ubuntu is not ready for it yet). Anyway, where was I… Ah, yeah, so Arjen constantly told me he had spotlight, QuickSilver, TextMate and all these other magical applications. And I told Costin that I’d finally given in to Arjen’s blabbering…

So Costin said: argghhh, you’re not going to be one of those guys that’s going to blog about his Mac experience, like all of the other opensource Mac billies, are you????

Well, one month later and there we are… Everytime I drop by at the Mac store I have to buy something; it’s awful! It’s like I’m addicted… Another two months and you’ll see me walking around with a tattoo on my arm…

Okay, that’s enough! If there’s anyone that has some meds against this awful Mac disease, please let me know. It’s not only that I’m just as all the others now, it’s also costing me a lot of money .

I just wanted to let you know that I’m no longer posting all of my Spring-related posts on this blog. As of this weekend, I’m one of the many bloggers on the Interface21 blog. I meant to do start blogging there a long time already, but never came around to it really.

This also gives me the chance to post some more personal entries on this blog. I’m not really that type of guy that goes on about his personal endeavours on his blog all the time, but now it’s no longer a mostly technical blog anyway…

Announcements about events that I’m organizing such as the Amsterdam Java Meetup will continue to be posted on this blog, as well as the Interface21 blog.

For more posts by me, refer to blog.interface21.com/main/author/alefa or for posts by all Interface21 gents, go to blog.interface21.com.

Part business, part leisure, I visited Helsinki last February. The trip was organized by my friends from Higherlevel, an online community for entrepreneurs. Back in 2002 and 2003 I did a lot of work for them as a volunteer to build up the community and to help entrepreneurs that were starting up a business with the most trivial, but also more complex questions.

Anyway, as an incentive, we visited places every other year and this year they guys and girls invited me again even though I’m not involved that much anymore.

We visited a few companies, had some interesting conversations with innovation officers from various funds and institutions and were guided around town by the Dutch technical and science attache of the embassy in Helsinki.

I liked Helsinki, although it was terribly cold (-20 celcius) at the time. The city has a good vibe. A bit like Oslo, but with a little twist. There are some good bars and pubs and the clubs are also good. Architectue and outdoor scenery is also great. Definitely a place to visit again (in summer then of course). The people are a bit weird (this is also the prejudice we have of Finnish people in other parts of Europe). They seem a bit closed to outsiders somehow.

After some days of visits to company, we also went for a day of snow scootering on one of the many lakes in Finland. This was unbelievably cool! I didn’t know normal snowmobiles had up to 800cc engines. This makes them go up to 150 km/h. There’s a lot less friction of course, so you can easily compare the power with that of a motor cycle. Fortunately nobody got injured (this happens a lot I was told) and we safely returned home.

All-in-all, a trip worth making and I will definitely be back some day.