Just removed some stuff

Welcome and a happy New Year to all my visitors!

I just removed the Neo Counter- and the Neo Earth- banners. I knew when I signed in I could try the paid version for two weeks and after that it would change to the free version. But I didn't expect that the free version would look that crappy, so I just removed the banners. Although the paid version looked nice, there is no way I'm going to pay 30 Dollars ( a year) for some nice banners.

Some maintenance and Blogger trouble

The past three, four days I had trouble logging in at Blogger. This is pretty annoying. The past weeks I hardly had time to post and now I have time I can't log in to post. I'll keep it short for now. You never know how long this will be working.

I did some maintenance on the template. I removed a banner on the right side, which was slowing down the loading time of the weblog very much. Instead of this banner I add banners from Neo counter and Neo earth. These banners show the flags of the countries of your visitors and the Neo Earth banner shows a map with the location of the city of your visitors. You have some flexibility to change the lay out of the banners. I think they look pretty nice.

To all my viewers/visitors I wish everybody a merry X-mas and for later of course a Happy, Healthy and prosperous New Year.

See you later!

Update: The problems still remain. I had to post from a different computer. Have no idea what the bottleneck is which cause this problem. Anti-virus/firewall software, provider, hardware (modem/router)?? I'll hope this will be solved soon.

Anyway, have a great New year celebration and see you back next year.

Advertising other websites/blogs

I didn't took much new pictures the past weeks and I also didn't scan much slides or negatives. So this time I would like to make some advertisement for two weblogs. I also added their URL's on the sidebar on the right.

The first one is a cartoonweblog made by my partner and future wife Noriko. I copied three images from her cartoonweblog. The rest of her cartoonweblog can be checked here. The story based on the daily life in Utrecht is in Japanese right now, but maybe there will be an English version in the near future.

The style of the comic is known as Manga, the Japanese word for comics or print cartoons.

This is just an example of three images of the cartoon. the rest of the cartoon can be seen here.

The second weblog is a photoweblog run by my mother in law in Tokyo.

I copied a few images to here but there are loads of pictures overthere, so if these copied pictures here made you curious, you can check the rest here.

There are some really nice pictures on my mother in law's photoweblog. Photography is one of her hobbies and I think she often has a good eye for things.

Christmas atmosphere in Tokyo, Japan.

I have no idea where this picture was taken, but I like it for some reason.

A gorgeous autumn view from Japan.

This one was taken at Lafayette a huge departmentstore in Paris.

This is Hana-chan a semi-straycat that's getting feed for some years now by my mother in law. In the beginning she was a bit frightened for people, but nowadays she is less shy.

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The past few weeks I've been posting pictures from different fortresses that we visited. All those fortresses belong to the so called (Nieuwe) Hollandse Waterlinie, a unique defense line developed between the 17th and 19th century and made up of fortresses and waterworks to inundate (flood) areas in times of invading enemies to hold them back.

I'll post some more pics later from other fortresses we visited and tomorrow we will visit some more forts with my brother in law.

Noriko is absorbing all these books and information about the "Hollandse Waterlinie". She noticed that there is almost no Japanese information about this subject, so she launched a Japanese website about the "Hollandese Waterlinie". Some parts of the website are still under construction and even if your not understanding Japanese it´s worth a visit, because it also contains a lot of pictures from the fortresses that have been visited so far.

If you´re using Mozilla Firefox you might have some trouble because not all pics will be shown when you open pages from the website. Don´t know the reason, but if you download the Firefox-add-on IE-view you can open the page with one click in Internet Explorer. An useful add-on when you have an incompatible webpage.

This is the card that Noriko designed to promote her website:

The reason why Noriko used a bat in her design is that most of the fortresses nowadays are perfect places with their niches and irregular surfaces for bats when they are having their wintersleep, because the temerature is pretty constant. Thursdaynight we went on a bat excursion at Fort Rijnauwen which was interesting. We managed to see some bats.

Introducing new search engine

Since last Thursday I add a new search engine to my weblog in the right frame just below my profile and webstats. There used to be one of Technorati, but after I tried to find something in my archives and not getting the result that I expected I decided to look out on the internet and see if there was a good alternative. It took some time to find what I wanted, but finally I ended up with a service from Google, called Google Free Way. On this page you can find some HTML-code which can be copied into your website/weblog template. You can choose from three options, depending what you want. But on this page they also offered a fourth option.

In this fourth option you can customize the HTML-code through some wizard and give the Google website/weblog search-box the look of your own website/weblog. Also the searchresults will be presented in the look and feel of your own website/weblog. This fourth option can be found here. It cost me some time and some trial and error with the HTML code (long time ago I did some basic HTML-course, but most of it is forgotten) to get it exactly the way I wanted, but it works now.

You only need to register and they show some sponsored links on the page with the searchresults (Google also does that on their regular searchpages, so that's no big deal I think). But apart from that it's totally free.

Later this week some more pics will be posted. This time from the Shichi Festival at Oriomote Island at Okinawa, Japan. So stay tuned.

Scanning pictures

I've tried to re-install my flatbedscanner under XP, because I wanted to scan some pics from my huge photocollection that I shot since I started with photography (that was in 1991 during my first trip to Israel). There seem to be a hardwareproblem, which I haven't been able to solve yet. Yesterday I installed an all in one scanner/copier/printerer/fax at my sister's place, so I used it to scan a few of my pics, so I could post a few here.

Finally I want to scan my complete negative archive (35 mm and APS-film). With my current flatbedscanner I could scan 35 mm films and slides, but that would be very time consuming, because it takes about 4 to 5 minutes to get a high resolution and high quality scan of each picture. Imagine how much time that would cost if I want to scan around 15.000 photos. With the flatbedscanner I also can't scan APS-film. So later this year I'm planning to buy a filmscanner. This is the one I have in mind. Besides my 35 mm and APS-film I also could scan my parents slide collection. This collection contains lots of slides when I was a kid, so that should be fun.

Anyway, here are the first two pics that I scanned Sunday. They were made in March 2001 during one of my stays in Japan. I remembered it was a very nice day in Springtime and cherry blossom was blooming everywhere. I took these pics of the two gentlemen from a distance in the park where we were taking a walk. I admit I have a bit of a voyeur in me (in a decent way), but I like portraits, especially when the people in the picture don't pose too much. The best way to achieve that is when people are not aware of it when their picture is taken.

For now I'll post two pics, but soon there will be more.