Buying two Wiis took me all of about 10 minutes. Part of those minutes were spent walking between three stores.

Actually that’s not entirely truthful. My friend Nadya and I had tried Wednesday afternoon at Schiphol after a store clerk said on the phone that they had Wiis in stock, only to return empty-handed and one of us somewhat depressed. I suppose trying to get one two days before the launch was pushing our luck.

Skip to thursday, one day before the release. I’m buying a bluetooth headset in Haarlem to try out for a project at work, and on my way back to the bus I pass the Vroom en Dreesmann. I figure ‘Hey, may as well try’ and go inside. After asking the clerk if he had any Wiis he said ‘yep’, and opened the box he had received them in, which was right in front of him. He must have just gotten them himself. Unfortunately he could only sell me one of them as the rest were reserved. Better than none, I figure, so I buy it. Of course that still leaves one to find for Nadya, who would have been very very depressed if I had managed to find myself a Wii while she would have to wait. So I try Van Leest, the closest store that might have them. “We’re getting them only this afternoon”. Ok, crap. Next. Free Record Shop, 10 meters onwards (even though it’s the one shop I never go to because they overcharge on CDs). They have four on display at the counter. I ask the clerk for one, he packs it up and I leave the store with a second Wii.

No waiting lines involved, no pre-orders, no angry crowds trying to start a fight and no robbing of goods. I have m4d shopping sk1llz.

Next I’ll try my luck at getting some actual games. I’m ogling Wii Play at least, which appears to be fairly popular. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that it comes with a free Wiimote.

Oh, and it’s really fun to play with. The Wii may not stack up to the raw processing power of the PS3 and XBOX360, but the Wiimote makes it a lot more fun to play with. The PS3 and the 360 are pretty much the same as the previous models, except they can do better graphics and such. The same goes for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. (Though granted, I prefer the PSP). It’s innovation versus brute force. In this case, innovation wins for me. As a plus side to this lesser processing power: the Wii is much cheaper, at EUR 249,- here in .nl.

And then in the morning when you want to listen to one on the bus, you find out that all you brought with you were the earbuds.

Gah.

Not a good idea: taking the 06:40 train on Sunday from Amsterdam to Haarlem and then falling asleep and waking up just as you’re approaching Heemstede-Aerdenhout. Because the next train back (a 5-minute trip) will be 45 minutes later and at that time in the morning, in a place you don’t know with no stores in sight open there’s not really anything to do. Besides slamming your head into the wall for half an hour because the falling asleep part was stupid.

I’ve never made a secret of not liking the ‘MacBook Pro’ name. PowerBook just had a better ring to it. It said ‘This is a powerful machine, in book form’. And the ‘Power’ part never had anything to do with the PowerPC: they were called PowerBooks even when motorola m68k chips still made them spin.

So now that I have one, how am I going to get around this? The answer is quite simple. You see, the G3, G4 and G5 don’t really exist. They’re just marketing-friendly names for the PowerPC 750, 74xx and 970 respectively. The G standing for ‘Generation’ and the number having an obvious use in that classification.

So I want you to meet Portia, my Macintosh PowerBook G6:

She has a 2.0GHz G6 (Also known as Intel Core Duo) processor, with 2 gigs of memory and an 80 gig hard drive. And so far she’s been wonderful.

Having not attended last year’s highly successful (or so I heard) BarCamp Amsterdam, I felt I had to make up. By being late every day. But anyway. It was an interesting experience.

I intended to code somewhat on a DNS based remote Growl Notification Thingo I’m working on. In practise, that never actually happened. Between running around with my camera and talking to other people, there was just no time.

I did meet some interesting people, among which were Matt Biddulph and Deb Bassett. They both brought Canon 350Ds, which I also happen to own, so we had this little unphotoclub thing going on. Matt instantly handed over his newly acquired (same morning, in fact) Canon EF-S 10-22 lens when I, at that point a total stranger, asked for it. That’s the kind of trustingness that I like in people. I think at this point I’ve used his new lens more than he has. (Sorry about that.) Deb has a sixth sense for cameras. She is able to tell if any camera in a fifty meter radius is pointed at her and will break out a big smile (barely contained, here). We tried to see what would happen if we overloaded it by pointing 5 cameras at her, but she’s pretty resistant to that. I gave them my lensbaby to try. There was ‘oooh’-ing.

I also had a quick go at iRex’s e-ink device, the iLiad, handily brought by Edwin Mons. At first I thought the device was just an empty fake one, as seen with cellphones and PDAs in stores because the display looked like it was just printed plastic. But then it changed. This is what it looks like. Look at the screen, it’s beautiful. If it weren’t glossy, it could have been actual paper. (iRex: hint, hint.)

Anyway, of course the usual suspects were there, as were lots of other
interesting people. The list is at the BarCampAmsterdamII wiki and above-mentioned Matt has one too, so I’m not going to duplicate those.

I think everything went rather well. Some initial trouble with the WiFi on friday night after a thinko on my side causing everyone on the second Base Station I added not to be able to get DHCP going. Got an epiphany after the second Mac user complained and fixed it. No more complaints after that, except for Gijs Kruitbosch, who was reinstalling his laptop and was having trouble even getting Ethernet going, most probably due to something Ubuntu did wrong. Oh well.

So I had a good time at least, hope we’ll do this again soonish.

Even with just a pianist and (excellent, I might add) violinist accompanying her, she rocked.

Seats Smack-dab in the middle on row 6. Very nice. (Well actually smack-dab in the middle was an aisle of stairs, but the seat next to that? Mine.)

Also apparently neither pepsi stage nor heather’s management mind people bringing their large cameras, at least not to seated events, so I capitalised on that and took some proper pictures.

Went to amsterdam, got great noodles, missed the train, ate noodles, got to brussels, got to hotel, found cool small bar in dark alley, went to bed, woke up ridiculously early, went to ULB campus, saw RMS, had WiFi, stopped having WiFi, met some friends, had surprisingly nice tuna sandwich, saw more talks, had lots and lots of dinner with mozilla people, went to as many bars as possible in one night, went back to hotel, got up at 8, got up again at 9:15, went to see andy talk, left for lots and lots of lunch, had awesome cake, almost missed train home, got back home.

Nicely condensed, I’d say.

After the third train derailment at Amsterdam Central Station in two months, I was forced, yet again, to consider alternative ways of getting to Amsterdam. Today, I thought it would be fun to take the ferry from IJmuiden. All was smooth in the morning. The nice girl behind the counter even saved me 3 euros by reminding me that my Student’s Public Transport card (OV-Studentenkaart) was valid there, too.

Some funny things happened on the way back, though. First, I ran in to this:

This is a promotional thing from NS, to be used during SAIL ‘05. I knew it existed, though I hadn’t seen it up close before.

After getting on the boat (took some time, because there were too many people so I had to wait for the next one) we went on our way. About five minutes later, the captain asked all the people in the front part of the boat (12, including me) if we could please move to the back of the thing because it couldn’t get the nose upwards (it was one of those flying boats, for lack of knowing the real name). It made some speed, got the nose up and we could all move back. People applauded.

Some ten to fifteen minutes later, we cross a submarine. Didn’t see that coming (snigger). Complete with 30-or-so marines waving at us.

And about that waving– what is it with boats and people on them? Damn near every boat we crossed or passed got waved at by the people with me. And it’s not just that those people were imbiciles, the people on the other boats all returned the favour. I just found that really odd.

Sony busts out version 2.0 of PSP firmware + new ceramic white PSP:

I want one. This is so much cooler than the (already infinitely cool) black one. Shame they aren’t officially available in europe yet, at least as far as I know. Sony needs to get with the program and release these things at the same time, or nearly so, worldwide.

(Via Engadget.)

If you’ve ever used public transport in Amsterdam, you’ll know that the drivers have a somewhat different attitude compared to PT in other cities. I was confronted with that again, this morning.

Getting to work for me involves getting on a bus, then switching to a train, and lastly I get on a tram. The bus isn’t from Amsterdam. That makes it easy: you wait for it to appear and get on. If you’re still approaching the bus stop when that bus is appearing, you run at it and it’ll stay there so you can still get on. The trains go at regular intervals (or are delayed, but never too early) so you shouldn’t have any trouble making it there in time.

Now the public transport in Amsterdam. They will not wait. At all. Not even a single second. Just this morning, I was approaching the tram. I was literally less than 50cm away from the door when it closed and the tram rode away.

Well, at least I had some time to get something to drink.