Fietsplannen blog: Van Durgerdam via Aart naar de indrukwekkenste eik van Europa

Een nieuw fietsverhaal op de befaamde Fietsplannen blog. Dit keer over indrukwekkende eiken en sympathieke wielrenners.

Lees: Van Durgerdam via Aart naar de indrukwekkenste eik van Europa.

Knife

Of course everybody needs a multi-purpose Swiss Army pocket knife. Myself, I am very pleased with my Victorinox Cybertool 34 with it's very handy DIP switch setter. Give me a DIP switch and I'll set it!

But there is always a knife that beats them all. And this has to be the Wenger "Giant Knife version 1.0”:


The photo speaks for itself.. I can't wait for version 2.0 to come out!

I got this through an article on the Atlassian developer's blog.

Country

What is going on??

The Dixie Chicks have replaced Boston on my Weekly Top Artists list on Last.fm!



This is what you get when you travel with The Dude in a camper van for a month.. It is like The Dude says:

Sooner or later everyone listens to country music.

Yeehaw!

Feedz

Blogger never used to have comment feeds. It does now but apparently this functionality seems to be somewhat broken for migrated blogs (from the old Blogger templates to the new ones).

Anyway, the old beta comment feed URLs of the form:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/comments/full

still seem to be working.

Oh, and this also simply works..:
http://.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default


So I updated my two Hot Banana Feedburner feeds to receive their input from this (temporary?) Hot Banana Blogger blog of mine. You can subscribe to these RSS feeds:

• Hot Banana Posts


• Hot Banana Comments

Also in the same article about Blogger Beta Feeds I found out how to create a "Recent Comments" sidebar thingy.

Black Butts

Because we like Black Butts Alex has created a shirt for us to wear when playing snooker. The boys in Utrecht will be so distracted while we pot blue in the middle pocket..

B33

So me and Alex bought ourselves a snooker cue today. I got the Cue Craft B33, Alex the B32. We both like Black Butts and we cannot lie.

I had not really paid attention in the shop but when I got home I did notice the cue was not perfectly straight. Then again, according to the Cue Doctor, many cues have bends and in any case:

it shouldn't affect your game

So the time has come to give our snooker friends in Utrecht some (black) butt-kicking!

Poke In The Eye

Maybe Vic was right after all:

If you see a shark larger than yourself, slowly leave the water.

In Australia a man escaped from the jaws of a white pointer (= great white) by poking the animal in the eye:

A man who managed to fight off a three-metre shark by poking its eye is being operated on in Wollongong Hospital after being mauled by a white pointer shark.

Some people we talked to down under were of the impression that Vic was "stuck in the seventies" with his unrelenting quest to hunt down great white sharks. According to Vic however great whites are too large in number and are responsible for the death of many missing persons of the coast of Australia and also for the deaths of many dolphins and other (if I remember correctly) "family oriented sea-loving mammals". Thanks for the fish. Maybe the "ultimate killing machine" is not the great white but Vic hunting it down.

Australia - More Photos

Awesome!

Both Lude, The Dude, and Rolphie have posted their photos of our trip to Australia to Flickr as well.

A very small selection: the party people on the Sundowner Cruise in Airlie Beach:


Wally and Rolph, love at first sight:


Our little possum friend:

Driza-Bone

So as promised I bought myself a Driza-Bone oilskin coat and a matching hat down under. Now where's my horse?

Me, Lude and Rolph spent a very enjoyable (awesome) four weeks in Australia. After some hassles to get a rental campervan that actually fitted the three of us (one tall, one skinny and one slightly less skinny Dutchie only fitted in the old model Toyota HiTop, not the new) we started off from Sydney having first spent a few days there.

The first stop was the Blue Mountains where we found the Jenolan Caves township through rain and very thick mist (visibility of maybe 10 meters). We camped at car park number 2 because we heard car park number 1 would be full of tourists the next morning and also because there was a power cable there that we could use to keep our beer cold.

Having done the cave-thing and having spotted our first kangaroos we drove north towards Singleton on highway 69. But not before we had dinner in the bizarre and almost empty The Shining-like setting of the Jenolan Caves hotel (although the following weekend it was supposed to be very busy in the hotel..).

After a night at Lake Liddell where we camped on the recreation area with a lovely view of the huge Bayswater power station we stopped to see the town of Tamworth, Country Capital of Australia (but only during the yearly country music festival). During a good night out we saw the Disco Daddies as well as the excellent Blues Bombers play but we did get refused into a club because we "had enough to drink" (which was not true btw).

A long drive the next day to the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge. On the way we stopped at "The Koala Capital of the World", Gunnedah, but alas, no koala's to be found (only toilets). The roads that day were pretty much empty apart from the occasional crossing kangaroo or flock of sheep or cattle. We spent Christmas day in Lightning Ridge. Of course there was absolutely nothing to do in town apart from sitting in the 31 degree C hot water pool and driving around the mining sites looking for some black opal.


I will write up the rest of our trip in another post. In the meantime check out my photos and videos. I geotagged most of the photos using Flickr's mapping tool so you can follow the map around. I also geotagged a few photos using the excellent loc.alize.us so you can spot some of my photos using Google Maps. See for example the Crocodile Park photo above on loc.alize.us.

It was good fun using Jaiku to update my presence and upload some photos to Flickr whilst on holiday. Especially when you're having a (well deserved) gin-tonic down under while your colleagues are at work.

Down Under

I'm off to Australia for a four-week holiday with friends!


We will start off in Sydney, rent a campervan there and drive it up to Cairns whilst enjoying ourselves along the way with activities such as camping, diving, snorkling, mountainbiking, hiking, partying, and in case we get bored we could have a game of Zombies or Puerto Rico. Nude of course. From Cairns the idea is to get a flight back to Sydney. On the way back to Holland we will also spend a night in Tokyo. And I am afraid The Dude knows exactly where to go..


Along the way we will try to look out for the Yowie (thanks for the warning Kaeru).

My plan was to finally get one of those oilskin coats down there. So when I come back I could look something like this:


I may try to update my Jaiku presence every now and then so keep an eye out for that.

Finally a chance to use my stubby holder again!

Hot Banana Down

My Hot Banana weblog is down. :-(

I was running it on my own old Pentium III 450 computer at home. I think one of the hard drives finally broke down. But of course I have a nightly back up.. (ehm...)

Anyway, I will be posting on my Blogger blog for the time being. Maybe I should switch to a hosted service anyway since some of my readers have been complaining about the slow responsiveness of my blog.

Hot Banana

Nothing to see here.

Visit Hot Banana instead.