Info about and links to the stuff I entertain myself with.

Non-geek

• Photography. I don't do enough of it, but getting better. I have much more than I put up here because it takes too much time. My collection of cameras keeps growing as I recently went auto focus with a Canon EOS 33, but I don't think I will soon get rid of my trusted Olympus OM-4, it's just a great piece of engineering that lets you take the best pictures you can. Digital cameras are not for me yet, the SLRs are just to expensive still. That said: I did snap a nifty little Olympus C-2 point and shoot digital up from eBay as a replacement for my film pocket camera.
• Travel. I don't do enough of it, but getting better. So far I have set foot on 4 different continents, but realy need to spend some time in South America and Asia.
• Music. People that know me would wonder why this is third on the list and not on top. The reason is that it's so obvious I hardly think about it. I love a lot of different bands and styles. I'm a sucker for eighties music, too bad it's not on the radio that much, so I have to make do with home made compilation CDs of what I get my hands on. For newer music I'm mostly into rock, with bands like Counting Crows, Blessid Union Of Souls, Matchbox 20 and The Goo Goo Dolls. And many more. But some 'lighter' music can be found in my CD player very often as well: Amanda Marshal, Edwin McCain, Everything But The Girl, Beautiful South, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Crowded House, Sister Hazel and even the Dawson's Creek soundtrack album. I could go on forever. And then there's some hard to define styles from bands like Tower Of Power and Black Grape. The only things I really don't like are simplistic electronic instrumental house music (I get it a lot better once someone starts singing), hardcore house, hard rock, heavy metal. And even though I worked a Classic FM for over 3 years, I don't like classical music a lot. But through it all there's Billy Joel. I own most of his albums and there's always some in the car, just in case I might need it. So many styles over so many years, even before I was born, and I still like most of it. Except 'The Nylon Curtain', but nobody likes that album. Even though I have large collection of CDs, most of the time I have the radio on and although I wouldn't buy the albums, I can be found to turn it up for anything from Britney Spears to Abba, Queen to the Foo Fighters and Go West to Steve Winwood.
• Movies. I like to go to the movies, or just rent the DVD or watch them on TV. I also have a growing DVD collection of my own. Some of my favorites are 'The Shawshank Redemption', 'The Firm', 'The Wedding Singer' (eighties music!) and 'A Few Good Men'. Science fiction is also a genre I like. Star Wars rules and Starship Troopers is a classic if you ask me. Especially the shower scene, you'd have to be a Dutch director to do that. 'High school movies' like the classic 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' and more recent '10 Things I hate About You' always do well with me. Action is not my favorite genre, although there sometimes is a real good one like 'Die Hard With A Vengeance'. I also love a good romantic comedy.
• Television. We have Sky, 300 channels and nothing on. Usualy it's The Discovery Channel or similar for me. As far as 'light entertainment' goes, I like Friends, Star Trek: Enterprise, The Simpsons, Futurama and many others. European broadcasters' inability to stick with a show season after season without switching it between networks, starting back at episode one for no reason and scheduling the best shows at times nobody will watch them makes it a pain in butt to keep up.
• Radio. Like I said in the music section, it's on most of the time and I once had something of a career going in that as well. Until I realized that for me there was more of a future in the Internet. I still don't visit any country or city without a radio and scanning the dial to see what's going on and a 300 meter high radio tower still makes my heart skip a beat. I love radio in the US, so much better than anything we have here. Actually lots of counties have far better stations than we have here. And I guess once I found that wasn't going to change here any time soon it made the decision to leave radio behind as a job a lot easier.
• Wavefront Guided LASIK. It made me see clear without aids for the first time in my life!

Geek

• My Own Server. My brother and I maintain a box sitting at an ISP in Hilversum, the Netherland. Why? Well, this website is on it for one and so are more and more others. But the most important thing for me is that for a modest fee each month I am no longer at the mercy of some ISP for my email account.
• Coding. That's what I do for a living and sometimes just for fun. Web applications is what I do best and the best languages to do it in are Tcl (AOLserver) and PHP. The latter only in Apache and in cmbination with mod_rewrite, which makes it possible to have one script server many pages, like servlets in Java, which serve every URL from their mount point down. This allows you to have URLs like '/news/world/europe/economy/12345.html' instead of '/news/story.php?cat=4873&id=12345', something which search engines don't rank very high and can hardly be called intuitive or memorable. Why is Java not a favourite? Java is a great language, but it seriously lacks string processing capabilities and it is therefore a pain to put a lot of text and HTML layout inside methods. That leaves JSPs, which work quite well combined with (Enterprise) Beans, but it's still too much a mixing of HTML and code in a nasty syntax. If you do want to use Java, there is only one server: Orion.

Web

• Photo.net. Most things you need to know about photography.
• dpreview.com. Making sense of which digital cameras are out there.
• User Friendly. Your daily laughs about what goes on behind the scenes of an ISP.
• Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Well, sometimes.
• Wired News. Interesting at times. More business than tech.
• CD-WOW. Cheap CDs and DVDs. Expect to get a Australian region 4 DVD sent from Hong Kong to be in your London home within 4 days.
• 7dayshop.com. Cheap film from the Channel Islands