News

Last week ClanBase put some old EuroCup movies on Google Video for easy nostalgic viewing. The EuroCups are the European championships of online gaming that I set up with ClanBase founders Talita and Wob back in 2000. Last year we sold ClanBase but the EuroCups still go on; two months ago the finalists of the 12th season were flown to New York to play against the finalists of a new American mirror-version, the AmeriCup.

ClanBase and the EuroCup represent a past part of my life, so allow me to self-indulge and refer to some clips that show me as an organiser, a commentator and a participant in the olden days of the EuroCup. Click on "More..." to see them.

I put up part 9 of my India & Nepal travel report. This is about Punjab, where we visited Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, and the Pakistani border at Wagah.


That completes the India & Nepal report, finally! I don't know what and when my next trip will be. I'd like to go to Iran or to black Africa, but I don't really feel a strong urge to travel at the moment and want to make sure I first finish the project I'm working on (my Antwerp language book).

In case you didn't hear about it: comedian Stephen Colbert (who you may know from Jon Stewart's the Daily Show) was invited to speak at the annual dinner of White House correspondents, which is traditionally attended by the president himself. Instead of doing a tongue-in-cheek comic routine as would be expected, he delivered a biting mockery of Bush and the American media - so basically everyone present - for a full 20 minutes. While not funny all the time, it was a glorious performance that stunned most of the audience, because Colbert was ridiculing Bush right in his face the whole time.

As a result Stephen Colbert is now credited with having the biggest balls in the universe and has become the new champion of all those Americans who despice Bush as much as the rest of the world does. Watch his speech right here!

Concert season has begun! Last Saturday I went to the Radio Soulwax event here in Gent, which includes Soulwax playing their Nite Versions album, other DJ's doing sets, and then the Soulwax boys doing their 2manyDJ's thing. It was all pretty good, but the fact that the highlight was one of the DJ's mixing in some Rage Against The Machine just reminds me of the desparate lack of rock parties in Belgium.

In June I will get to see Nitzer Ebb in Hof ter Lo in Antwerp. Nitzer Ebb are one of my 10 all-time favourite bands and considering they stopped 10 years ago, I'm very happy I get a chance to see them perform. They're doing a tour to celebrate the release of a compilation.

Then in early July I'm going to all four days of the Werchter festival, which has the best line-up ever. Most years there are only a handful of bands I care about, but this year there are many, many I'm looking forward to. Most importantly I'll finally get to see Depeche Mode live, as well as see Tool again - that's two more of my ten favourites. Then there are also Deftones!, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas, the Editors!, Live, Anouk, Muse!, the Who, Soulwax again, Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand!, Placebo, dEUS!, Goldfrapp, Sigur Ros!, Eels, Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin!), Hooverphonic, Calexico and Laurent Garnier.

After more than two years I'm competing on ClanBase again! This time not in Quake but in Trackmania Nations, the freeware racing game I'm somewhat addicted to. I'm in the 2on2 cup with Danny, our team is tastefully called the Paris Hilton Fan Club (PHFC), and we just won our first race against a Dutch team gloriously - here's the match report!

You may have noticed a bunch of comments on this site with spam that advertises viagra and valium etc. I've made a filter against that stuff now, hopefully the lowlife who makes a living ruining other people's sites is not going to waste more of my time with a lame cat and mouse game. I only have some 20 visitors a day dude, and they're all very potent and happy, so get lost.

I just have to rave about South Park again. After taking on Scientology and being the first to expose the nutty mythology of that scam religion in the mainstream, South Park creators Trey Parker & Matt Stone have now dedicated a double episode ("Cartoon Wars I & II", episodes 1003 & 1004) to slamming American media in general, and their own network Comedy Central in particular, for its cowardice and hypochrisy in dealing with the Mohammed cartoons.

Every now and then I get nostalgic and look back on one of my past passions: the Commodore 64. That computer was released in 1981 and almost everyone who had one still thinks fondly of it, because it was a technical marvel for its time and because you could hack it endlessly if you knew machine code. I had endless fun with that when I was 12-14, and if after studying everything but IT I still ended up working in IT, it's because of that.

The C64's strongest point was perhaps its sound chip, the SID 6581, which was a genuine synthesizer that could generate an amazing array of sounds. Over the years C64 musicians got better and better with it, and their compositions (which were mostly made for games) are still being enjoyed today through PC emulators and sites like the High Voltage SID Collection, which has collected all C64 music.

Since the C64 only had 64 kilobytes of memory, the entire music track of a game, including the sound definitions and the machine code to play the whole thing, typically had to fit into 5 kilobytes, which corresponds to about 0.3 seconds of average quality mp3 sound. Such was the quality of the SID chip though that that tiny bit of memory sufficed to make some amazing soundtracks.

In a fit of nostalgia I spent yesterday evening figuring out how to convert my old favourites to mp3. Though the HVSC only ranks it 12th, my all-time favourite was the music for the Last Ninja 2 by Matt Gray, and here's one of the 13 tracks he wrote for that game: Central Park (5.5Mb). Remember, all this originally fit into less than 5kb!

Check out this movie (10 Mb) of little robots fighting at a competition in Tokyo, it's amazing. Found on Engadget.

Part 8 of my India & Nepal travel report is about Rajasthan, where we visited the two main cities Jaipur and Jodhpur.


That just leaves Punjab, our last destination.

This is just too funny :)

Wee I'm on a roll, here's Part 7 of my India & Nepal travel report with 58 pictures of Gwalior and Agra.

Gwalior has a huge citadel with a lot of great monuments on it; it was the surprise of this trip and one of the top three destinations along with Agra and Delhi.


Agra was the capital of the Mughal empire and has that famous white grave thingy. Nearby there's the monumental city of Fatehpur Sikri which was deserted only 15 years after it was built.


Up next: Jaipur and Jodhpur, the two main cities of Rajasthan.

Interesting news from the war in Iraq: the Pentagon has opened a criminal investigation into the alleged murder in the town of Haditha in November 2005 of 15 random Iraqi civilians, among whom a 3 year old girl, by US Marines who were seeking revenge after a bomb blast.

Originally the US military reported these 15 civilian deaths as casualties of the bomb blast itself. When Time magazine investigated the matter two months ago, the report was changed and now the civilians were caught in the crossfire between the marines and insurgents after the bomb blast. Now Time has obtained video footage which shows the victims were wearing pyjamas when they were killed, and the Pentagon has finally launched an investigation.

If the allegation of murder turns out to be true, you cannot blame Bush or the US military at large for it - such an atrocity is the responsibility of those who committed it. What you can blame the US military for is covering it up until journalists forced them to acknowledge it. You can also wonder, if the US military has the habit of allowing atrocities committed by its personnel to be covered up, how many more such atrocities have occurred that have not been discovered by journalists.

When news like this breaks, there is an interesting exercise to be done that teaches a lot about American media.

There's this site I discovered a while ago and want to recommend: Engadget, which has daily news about things like mobile phones, digital cameras, mp3 players, and all kinds of weird devices noone needs. I personally don't care much for gadgets - I get teased with my ancient mobile for example - but this site has such good writing and so much wit that I've come to enjoy reading about them. Their coverage of keynote speeches and Apple product announcements is especially fun to follow; they attend those with laptops and some mobile internet solution and report everything while it's happening, pictures included.

I have two new parts of my India travel report for you.

Part 5 is mostly text and tells about our adventures crossing the border from Nepal and being stuck in the most miserable place I've ever been, and about our visits to Bodhgaya and Varanasi, the holiest places of Buddhism and Hinduism respectively.


Part 6 has lots of pictures of three historic sites we visited in the state of Madhya Pradesh: Khajuraho with its "Kama Sutra temples", Orchha with its deserted palaces, and Sanchi which showcases Buddhist sculpture that is over 2000 years old.


Up next: Gwalior and Agra, the two best places we visited.