I am just taking a guess here, but I am pretty sure I am not the only one who is not the biggest fan of mondays. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love my job, I just love my weekends more! And somehow I never catch up on all the sleep I plan on catching up. But since I am a firm believer in the motto: 'When life gives you lemons better make lemonade', I try to smile my way through even the worst monday.

So this morning I had to be creative to get that smile back on my face, but I managed it by means of music. Many essays have been written on the effect of music on moods, although I don't think you need much research to admit that following song can make even the most grumpy monday-sucks mood disappear.

And there is even more good news, this young lady has a whole album filled with songs that will make you whistle away that manic monday. Not only covers of existing songs like this one but also all fresh and new songs to make your heart jump. This might look like outright advertising but somehow I felt the need to share this music with the world and I really hope you will find Lady Linn's album 'Here we go again' just as delightful as I did.

Oh and well arriving in work and finding a buffet of miniature croissants, chocolate breads and chocolate mousse pie did make this monday a bit more bearable...(still would have preferred staying in bed all day though ;) )

Expect a bit more robust post about my friday-the-weekend-is-near music really soon!

Have a good monday all and hope you enjoyed this little piece of music if you listened to it.

The end of console gaming?

My daily Reddit browsing session led me to this article stating the end of game consoles like Wii, Xbox and PS3 is near.

It gets my back up when I hear people raving about the idea to do everything online and remote. It makes me wonder if any of these people actually ever tried any online gaming. As a wowcrack (world of warcraft) addict I only depend for a small part of the game content on the web and still I hear a lot of complaining and nagging about latency, slowness in loading of other characters in the realm, uptime of the servers, instance servers being full and queues of people using servers. And this for a game that has the main stress of processing still on your own pc. This is not the only example even players on the current consoles like xbox and PS3 are complaining about latency in online multi-player games. Imagine depending on one of these shared servers to remotely power your game, it will give you the advantage of not needing a state of the art pc but you will need one hell of a broadband line. "We were a little suspicious of OnLive's capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work." was a remark of one of the critics, my suggestion is try that again at home with a few more million users using the servers. When playing beta's of mmorpg's I've never had the smallest bit of lag ... but do the same things you did in the beta's on the first release day of the same game and chances are real that you end up smashing your keyboard on the desk in frustration because what you see and what you do is more out of sync than a pair of chimps trying out for synchronous swimming.

Call me a non-believer ...

It's Ada Lovelace Day!

I can hear from a far a load of people going.. Ada who?

Well, that asks for a little history lesson, I am not going to type it all out when you have the wonderful wikipedia that can tell more about this fascinating lady. Ada Lovelace in short was the first female programmer, this in the 19th century when she created a theoretical program that would give you the a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

So today we remember her and want to shine an extra spotlight on women in technology. Being a programmer myself I had a hard time choosing one of the many fantastic examples out there. But a few weeks ago a colleague posted a link on our company Yammer and it caused that feeling that you get as a little girl when you know when you know what you wanna be when you grow up. Well when I grow up I want to be like Pattie Maes!

For the people not knowing Pattie Maes, she is a belgian lady who is currently an associate professor at MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Apart from that awesome job title Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called "collaborative filtering" and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they’d never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.

The movie clip that introduced this remarkable lady to me, you can find here.

It shows Patty demoing a new way in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes' world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. This can vary from product information while shopping, to taking pictures and all this information visualised on any surface!

I was gobsmacked by the advanced state of the technology demoed and can see the world changing with the actual introduction of it. The possibilities are too many to think up in a few days.

So on this Ada Lovelace Day I would like to share with the world my own personal Ada being Pattie Maes. Keep up the good work and thanks for reminding me that with hard work even a woman from a country as little as Belgium can make that big an impact on the world!

TIC - an imminent threat

Compelled by the number of victims of a yet to be officially recognized health risk I want to warn you all for TIC or in full "Traumatic Intellectual Coma".

What is TIC?

TIC is caused by the repeated digestion of bullshit, malarkey, nonsense, idiocy in either verbal or written form. Both the amount of exposure and the grade of idiocy can induce mild to severe forms of TIC.

A TIC sufferer will go through following phases:

• denial: This just can't be true.
• anger: How is it possible!
• doubt: I must have misunderstood this or just read it wrong.
• depression: Is this really the kind of world we are living in !?
• acceptance: I can't change it so let's just not think about it anymore.

All 5 phases will be present in a mild to normal case of TIC. However in more severe cases a 6th phase can appear, this is where the TIC gains its power to spread its mind numbing grip on the worlds population. In the dreaded phase 6 the patient will take the ludicrous information and accept it as a truth. Convinced he has discovered something, he will want to share his fellow men and hereby spread the TIC causing bit of nonsensical information. Once in phase 6 an individual might become immune to TIC causing information and skip straight to the spreading phase.

I am sad to report that the only way to prevent lasting brain damage caused by TIC is keep getting annoyed by the amounts of bull you can find in the world. Please keep vigilant and remain a skeptic when it comes to hard to believe stories you read all over the place.

A TIC Case Study

I can present you with the case that made me realize the existence of this horrible condition.

Unaware of any danger I was reading my new version of my monthly magazine called "Electronics and Embedded Systems", when, in between articles called "a chip-scaled atomic clock", "broadband sampling oscilloscope" and "MED's views on multiprocessor-ASIC", I found an article that induced my eye-opening TIC experience:

!! Beware, reading the following article might induce TIC. Read further at own risk !!

Forget implants: the breast enlarging ringtone

So Hideto Tomabechi, one of the guys who helped deprogram members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, has started selling a ringtone that will make your breasts grow larger just by listening to it, something which should make it very popular with the ladies . Fortunately there are customer testimonials in case you were worried about this thing being legit or not, and Tomabechi says it's really simple, that he just uses sounds that "make the brain and body move unconsciously. It's a technique involving subliminal effects," that's like "positive brainwashing." If getting all busty through a ringtone isn't your bag, he also ringtones on the way that'll improve your memory, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, cure baldness, and help you give up smoking.

Reading this article and the customer testimonials made me rush through a quick succession of TIC phases.

I hope this little blog post will make you too recognize TIC when you witness it first hand and share this knowledge with the world. Awaken your friends and family that start spreading TIC information so information spreading through various media will not have a global dumbing down effect.

The time has come to...

Push the button? In a way yes, push the buttons. I decided today that I am going to commit myself to a new life as blogger. What to expect on this blog? I hope to be a source of 'aaah's , 'oooh's, some 'haha' and lol's too. A mix of things that I find worth telling the world about and stuff I just don't ever want to forget.

Why now? I only have one answer to that and that is why not?

I hope you will find this blog as entertaining to read as it is for me to write.