lo-ga-rie words, lines .. life

what a nice long weekend

This weekend was great! Not only (but surely partyly due to) because of the Beyer Dynamic Tesla I that i received friday. First the other part: My family!

Saturday i met my brother Niels in Rotterdam, he and his family were visiting the netherlands the last week; being the total tourist by visiting de efteling, de keukenhof and de euromast to name a few. He's been living in Madrid for the last few years and I visited him last year. This time we all got together at my moms house in Rotterdam. He brought his kids with him, both are so adorable and so Immink and both will celebrate their birthdays soon so I got them both a small gift, they seemed to like it. They found a dogtag with my name on it but both read other names on the tag ofcourse, so next time it spells L.u.c.i.e.n. i can read both A.l.e.x. or E.l.e.n.a. and get away with it ;)

We went to dinner and their we met my other brother, Vincent and his wife; too bad their children weren't there but man ,we had a blast! Being together with my brothers really made it a wonderfull evening, I saw my mom was totally shining and being so proud of what we've all become (yes she's even proud of me ffs :P) but like Nelly Furtado sang: all good things come to an end and so did that evening. They're back in Madrid and Tilburg I'm back in amersfoort.

For one that never likes to celebrate anything that involves me I surpised myself by saying everyone was invited to visit me the 24th when I do nothing that concerns by birthday. Family is a wonderfull thing and i must really do more with them.

The rest of the weekend i played some wow, slept a lot, drank beer and been listening to the Beyer Dynamic Tesla I. What a great headphone! I've been listening to the Ultrasone Edition 8 (also a mighty good headphone) before and they are 2 completely different beasts while both being in the top tier of dynamic headphones. The closed back Edition 8 sounds rich and full with a killer bass the Tesla 1 is open and fresh and surpised me how neutral they are.

Neutral? Yes, when you get yourself looking behind yourself because you hear a sound of which you think is outside your head means the headphones have a wide and most notable a neutral soundstage. While i do have to get used to having an open soundsystem again (turn of the TV or it will annoy you) for now I do believe they suit my listening needs more then the Edition 8; but in the end time will tell. I won't sell either of them cause they are just so good (yes that leaves me with 4 headphones with a price > €1000,- but I don't care).

Coming week i have to work and will receive my new phone the HTC Desire (hopefully). Next week I'm revamping my living room and study with some new colours and furniture, Since I have to move a lot around this website could be offline from time to time, but it will be worth it (for me :P)

Beyer Dynamic Tesla 1

It's in, on my head, listening to some mighty fine tunes at work now.
Sounds like heaven already, can't wait till i get home and plug it in a real amp (rudistor rpx-33).
More will follow, now i'm back to enjoying the new headphones :)

music; the 1st 3 months of 2010

Since evilnickname is known for his bright idea's (even is he steals them); here's my "what's been listening to"

Artists:

1. Epica (152)
2. Agua de Annique (151)
3. 30 seconds to mars (149)
4. Amy macdonald (113)
5. the gathering (93)

Songs:

1. 30 Seconds to Mars – Vox Populi (24)
2. Epica – Martyr of the Free Word (17)
3. Linkin Park – The Little Things Give You Away (15)
4. Simon & Garfunkel – The Boxer (15)
5. Delain – Nothing Left (15)

Apperently "Design your universe" by Epica is still my favorite album while "Vox populi" is the song i've listened to most the last 3 months.

Redesign logarie

Mental note: J (part of the infamous couple LL and cool J) promised me to make a new design for my website; let's see how long it takes :)

J is one of my finer collegues that always surprises me with nice/good/fantastic designs fully featured including a lot of dropshadows and panels 'just outside the border' and i fully intend to make the design he makes for me totally IE unproof by using css3 and just testing stuff in a normal browser (like chrome; the safari for ppl not running osx). So J before you use my soundboard again remember this: make my new design mofo!

Upgrading phone

I've been using a motorola milestone for roughly 3 months as my main phone now but just like headphones I need moar! Better! Faster! So thought it all over and just sold my milestone and ordered a htc desire to replace it.

Android phones are rather open and there are a lot op people cooking roms for various android based phones, motorola says that these are consumer phones and locked the firmware with a rsa-128 key they won't share. I can understand why they do it, but it's not for me then. The htc phones allow you to install custom firmware; that the only reason why my htc hero is so fast now; bundled with android 2.1; because the community took the development in their own hands! A stock hero is still bound to android 1.5 and is rather slow.

Hopefully the desire won't let me down; so I can spend my money on something else, like headphones ;)

Game security part II

I applaud blizzard, i really do. After i scanned my passport and send the request to remove my authenticator login from battle.net i had to wait exactly 3 hours before it was done.
They make a lot of money every month (12 euro * 11 million gamers is a lot) it's nice to see they spend some of it in customer support :)

To celebrate this I orderd the 2 new pets from the store along with 3 new books to read

www.logarie.nl/blog

By the powers* that might be I introduce the new main URL of this blog: http://www.logarie.nl/blog

The old URL will still work so you don't have to update your bookmarks ;)

*read: Stephan and me figured out that in the end all that was needed was a CNAME entry in bind :)

The very best of, part 6!

Every once in a while Willie, dappie and me create a monster of a cd filled with mp3 and ogg vorbis files with songs we like, we like so much we want the other 2 to hear them.
We've set a date for the new release at 14 feb. So instead of feeling sad we didn't make it to the 2nd round in someones valentine show we can enjoy fresh new tunes; some godly some just plain crap (most of them deliverd by Dappie btw).
Today i finalized my part and here's the list:

my first SSD

Yesterday i got my new SSD (Solid State Drive) from intel and installed it in my XPS 430. Went smooth though i had to tell my bios to check for sata port 2 as well. Afterwards I swapped the SSD and my old boot drive, installed Windows 7 Ultimate (fresh legal copy courtesy of my brother) and was set off to play wow in less then an hour! After a few instances; checking loading times and damn! it's faster, I dived into the world of AHCI vs. IDE and how to enable it. Apperently the XPS 430 doesn't have AHCI (can choose between IDE/RAID and RAID) and in RAID mode the controller is shown as a RAID controller not an AHCI controller so i guess it's no AHCI for me (or am i just confused about all of it?).

This evening i plugged in the trusty USB pen drive (nicknamed usb stok) and booted into Ubuntu live to repartition the old HD. That's where I made a "mistake" by *not* unchecking the read-only test drive and now I have to wait 3 hours before I'm done moving 500GB from the end of the drive to the beginning of the drive ...

Should be done in about an hour so I'm going to send the PC a

shutdown -h 2:00

To save some money ;) On the saving: I'm currently trying to get the most out of one battery run on the milestone and hero mobile devices by using JuiceDefender/UltimateJuice; That nifty program can shutdown 3g/wifi for some time and then enable it again to sync before it shuts down again; pretty smart if you ask me.

Before JuiceDefender my milestone lasted up to 29 hours with sync on, wifi off, normal usage, last run it was well over 46 hours (which is still only 2 days ofc :P)!
The Hero (which is just syncing 3g' ing but being overly used) is getting around 110 hours atm! A whopping 4.5 days; When the hero was my main device i had to rejuice it every day.

Another great program is Battery Booster: Turn of 3g/wifi at night and turn it back on in the morning (this feature is also enabled in JuiceDefender if you buy UltimateJuice).

For Android users i highly recommend JuiceDefender: Use the Juice when you need it, save it when you don't!