December 29, 2006

• Friday 29 december 2006
  Amsterdam, Netherlands

  
  

  Only 5 hours in the office today - we closed at 2 pm, our last working day of the year. What a lovely feeling, to cycle back to Amsterdam, in nice sunshine, knowing that I'll see Amstelveen again only in the next year. Still far away. It's actually been a short but lovely working week. The office has been very quiet (today about 1 in 4 was there - 13 people in total) and that gave me a lot of time to deal with unfinished business that needed to be cleared of my desk before the end of the year. Besides that I was also able to experiment a bit with SQL Server 2005, for which I did the course in San Jose. Goodness. California is just a couple of weeks ago but it seems like an eternity again. Time to go back soon... Kidding.

  
  

  Cycling back took me past the building of the Rietveld Academy, the foremost school of design in the Netherlands. It was completely covered in advertisements. Undoubtedly it was inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, which I think is one of the best ideas I've ever heard of as a way to make money fast. The owner of the site just decided that he would sell space on his homepage for one dollar per pixel, and pixels could be bought separately. And he had 1,000,000 pixels on offer, which meant that as soon as all pixels were sold out, he'd be a millionaire. And it worked! The complete square was filled. It's brilliant, and as a spin-off  the Rietveld Academy had decided to do the same with their building (which next to a very busy motorway). The result, you can see in the picture above. It's actually a composition picture of 4 separate pictures, combined in Photoshop Elements 4.0. Still not too happy with that programme. The merge looks fine in the preview screen but the final version is different from the preview, resulting in not matching stitches of the pictures (such as in the IKEA sign above). Hopefully they solved that in version 5.0.

  • 4:25 pm
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