When Julie and I first got together, whenever we went out to the city center of Amsterdam a guy would be playing music on the Leidseplein. Every time we saw him, we stayed and listened, even though he only ever played one song as far as we know. That song was “Stand by Me”. The song got utterly stuck in our head for a long time, and even till this day, if one of us gets something stuck in our head the other hums “Stand By Me” as a joke. So when I saw this video, it really brought back memories. Very cool project, “Playing for Change” . Make sure you watch the whole thing.

I’m on my 4th Mac. I’ve had a Powerbook, a 2nd gen MBP, a 2nd gen mac mini, and now a new Unibody MBP. I received it yesterday, and I’ve been utterly disappointed. Visually it’s very pretty, and it’s extremely fast as well, but it’s got one little problem. The screen won’t stay up! This is really unacceptable, and I’m trying to send it back as I can’t use it like this. What a let down.

For many years XS4ALL was on the front lines of the fight for privacy on the internet. Lately this has been slipping from us, partly because people just don’t seem interested in the topic anymore. We had this movie made to show that the subject is far from gone. Privacy is fast becoming a thing of the past. Now finally with english subtitles (turn on captions in the YouTube options).

16 years ago 4 of us started a small internet company. It was the first ISP in The Netherlands, before anyone even knew what internet was. I still work there, because it’s a very cool place to work. Recently our colo people had a video made, and it just reminds me how far we’ve come in those years.

For a while now we’ve had our eyes on a horse named Rumba. We leased him for 2 months, and this week we finally bought him. He has been vetted, passed inspection, and is now 100% ours.

Today I did my first solo ride on him. Normally we take lessons and an instructor is there to teach you, but part of the fun of owning a horse is that you can just go out and ride when and where you want. It was a very nice and sunny day, and Rumba behaved very well. Next phase is to take him out into the forest thats adjacent to the stable.

Rumba is a KWPN horse, or a  “Royal Warmblood Studbook of the Netherlands“. He’s got papers with a nice lineage, including a well known father named Great Pleasure. He’s a much higher level than we are, but he was a stable/lesson horse for many years, so he’s used to people fumbling on him. At the same time,  as we become better, we will be able to find his old schooling again. This is already happening, as we have him ridden once a week by a very experienced instructor who is bringing it all back up. It’s so much fun!

Julie and I just returned from a 45 day dive trip in Indonesia. This is pretty long even for us. We did 40 consecutive days of diving, and did well over 100 dives in total. The trip took us from Lembeh in North Sulawesi to North-West Papua, Raja Ampat, Halmahera, Ambon, Banda, Alor and Flores. We saw many things we’d never seen before, including Harlequin Shrimps, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, mating Cuttlefish, and much more. We had great company, including fellow Wetpixel Administrators Eric Cheng, Matt Segal and Craig Jones. We’ll soon have a gallery online, but until then read our tripreport which includes some of our images. For dutch photographers Cor is doing a talk about this trip on the next AquaShot evening on April 17.