Redlettermedia has the most disturbing, yet most humorist -and very true- review of the Phantom Menace, you'll ever have seen.
Also : review of Attack of the clones and Revenge of the Sith

Yamaha keyboard owners are spoiled, it seems, with their keyboard sounds quality. This was demonstrated lately in music school when I had the change to play on a - rather old & battered, I must admit - Roland keyboard. The piano sounded like I was killing a kitten.


I've always been very content with my PSR-E413 keyboard, piano sounds on it are truly excellent. However, 32 note polyphony is quite a limitation. And as one progresses, and starts using arpeggios, this limit got hit quite frequently. And as my keyboard playing interest seemed something that wasn't a passing fling, I was looking around for more professional gear.


The Tyros 4 was just released, but its price tag was way beyond my reach, just as the Motif XF. I wanted a keyboard/synth with 70+ keys, both with keyboard accompaniment and virtual analog synth sounds. The Korg M3 and the Motif XS7 remained, from which I eventually chose the Motif.


Truly a great machine. It would take me over 2 days only to try out all presets on this machine. It has more than 6000 arpeggio's, which is amazing. Trying out all of these for half a minute would take me about 3 days.


Seems that I'm well-equipped now to take over the charts ;)

Het zomerconcert is altijd een hoogtepunt van de muziekschool : 3 dagen optredens van jong & oud, in een aardige mix van muziekstijlen en - instrumenten. Dit jaar werd voor mij persoonlijk gekenmerkt in het puur piano leren spelen (dus zonder keyboard begeleiding, waarbij linker- en rechterhand een verschillende melodie - en vaak een ander ritme ! - spelen).


Het gebrachte nummer was Conquest of Paradise van Vangelis, in een piano uitvoering op een voor mij onbekende Casio stage piano. Ik ben redelijk in mijn nopjes : 2 kleinere fouten die zo goed als onopgemerkt weggemoffeld konden worden.


Terug een pluim aan de organisatoren en de medewerkers voor een uiterst geslaagd concert !

I've upgraded my machines to Natty, the latest (I avoid greatest with a reason here) Ubuntu release. As usual, upgrading Ubuntu is putting 2 steps backwards, and 3 steps forwards, and this release is not different :


- on my desktop, I got the usual crap with the Nvidia driver, but it seems that I'm getting more and more experienced in getting this fixed. One issue remains, and that is that the screen is garbled when resuming the computer. Restarting GDM fixes this temporarily. Will get fixed by the next kernel update. Also Grub config got updated, resulting in a incompatible framebuffer setting for my NVidia card.


- For one or other reason, my (personal) sane scanner config got reset, resulting in lots of trouble when scanning in some documents. After resetting all to gray-and-white, everything worked again. Why is an Ubuntu upgrade messing around with user settings, is completely incomprehensible to me.


- On my netbook, the desktop got upgraded to Unity. Now, there's a bunch talked and written about Unity, resulting in avid haters & lovers for this desktop environment. I find Unity pretty okay wrt features (it reminds me a bit of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which I was quite fond of). However, the thing is slow as a dog on low-end machines (as netbooks - opening the so-called lenses is enough to hang my Sammy netbook) and sometimes it takes ages to start up.


Also, it is heavily integrated into CompizConfig, which means that

1. my whole Compiz configuration got changed,


2. Fiddling with Compiz settings is enough to render your whole desktop unusable

The upgrade to Unity marks a first stage in the major upcoming changes for the desktop for Gnome users. I'm not sure if I'm willing to follow either Canonical or the Gnome folks into their direction. I hope Unity gets mature during the Natty release. If not, XFCE might become a serious desktop environment alternative...

Vrijdag avond ll konden waarnemers in Brabant & Antwerpen één van de meest complexe zonne halo's zien van de laatste decennia. Wie 's avonds naar het westen keek, kon daar rond de zon 2 concentrische cirkels zien, met daartussenin een vreemde parabolische boog. Ook 2 bijzonnen links & rechts van de zon waren zichtbaar.


Halo's rond de zon zijn niet echt zeldzaam : ze worden gevormd door reflecties van zonlicht in kleine ijskristallen in de bovenste luchtlagen. Meestal zijn de bijzonnen zichtbaar. De complexiteit van het fenomeen van vrijdagavond was echter nooitgezien. De grote buitenste boog was de zeldzame 46° halo, al was het maar omdat de bijzonnen er netjes binnenin stonden (en natuurlijk omwille van hun afmetingen - de 22°-halo was trouwens ook wel te zien, maar véél minder opvallend.


Voor meer diepgaande info: zie Atopics.co.uk. Zo'n beetje dé referentie als het gaat over atmosferische fenomenen.


Nog zo'n verschil:
- regenbogen zijn zichtbaar TEGENOVER de Zon (rond het 'tegenpunt' van de Zon).
- halo-fenomenen zijn zichtbaar ROND de Zon (hoewel de meest complexe wel héél ver van de Zon kunnen staan, zelfs tegenover), doordat er in die ijskristallen niet enkel breking (zoals in waterdruppels) maar ook nog een extra reflectie ontstaat.

Vandaag was het clubmatch op de hondenschool, een jaarlijks evenement waar per (hogere) klas de rangschikking bepaald wordt van de honden. Onze Berner Sennen Hayke werd er tot onze grote verbazing club kampioen in de C-klas !
We hadden het helemaal niet verwacht, en hadden dan ook de prijsuitreiking niet afgewacht om naar huis te gaan. De beker moeten we dus nog afhalen op devolgende les. We zijn benieuwd !

Bash junkie ? You need to read this : power shell usage for power users.

Asteroid 2011 CQ1 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on February 4 and made a record close Earth approach 14 hours later on February 4 at 19:39 UT. It passed to within 0.85 Earth radii (only 5480 km !) of the Earth's surface over a region in the mid-Pacific. This object, only about one meter in diameter, is the closest non-impacting object in our asteroid catalog to date !


Prior to the Earth close approach, this object was in a so-called Apollo-class orbit that was mostly outside the Earth's orbit. Following the close approach, the Earth's gravitational attraction modified the object's orbit to an Aten-class orbit where the asteroid spends almost all of its time inside the Earth's orbit.

In the ol'e days, everything was better, even synthesizers, apparently. The Vintage Synth Explorer was established back in 1996 in order to provide a fast and easy way to learn about vintage synthesizers. It has grown to include modern digital and analog emulators, software synths, plug-ins, and other new types of synthesizers and samplers, now containing over more than 600 instruments, such as the famous Korg Radias or the Roland Juno-160.

One of the drawbacks of the gaining popularity of whisky, is the increasing amount of wannabe-connoisseurs. How to recognize them ? Simply, they're the ones sending back a perfectly good single malt because there's a tiny ice block in it. Because "it's diluted with water" ! Dude, just go back to your bottles of Chivas or Jameson, shees !


That issue been vented, time for another tasting of one of my favorites : Highland Park, this time the 16yo variant. This Highland Park was created exclusively for global travel retail and duty free markets and was first released in October 2005, it was withdrawn in April 2010. I found this one liter treat while waiting for my plane in Budapest. One of the advantages of duty-free shops, is that they provide a more cheaper provisioning as whisky gets more and more expensive.


The color : amber
The nose : a wealth of floral bouquet, a speck of peat, layered with a thick honey aroma. This is gonna be a real treat !
The taste : oily, then some malt and full of pepper; and after that, spices and flowers. A loooong gentle aftertaste that keeps caressing your taste buds with marvelous caramelized fruit and honey.


Again a clear winner, but that's no surprise from a Highland Park.