Today I went to Amsterdam with some people from Cre-Aid (the student organization with which I went to Venice) to photograph random things. I was almost a bit ashamed of my little consumer camera, while they all had expensive cameras with very long lenses. Anyway I managed to make some good pictures, which you can find over here.
I’ve also uploaded some Venice photos.
I went to the new film Stardust this evening, and wow what a great movie is that.
The story is about a man called Tristan, who lives in the village of Wall in England. This village is situated next to a wall, which seperates the realms of England and Stormhold. Tristan travels to Stormhold to retrieve a fallen star for his crush Victoria. It turns out the star is a woman, and she is in danger. After that many things happen, which you’ll have to see for yourself.
Stardust has everything: action, adventure, comedy and romance, and that all in a fantasy setting, the ultimate mix. The acting is great, the music is great, the setting is great, the story is original. If you think this is a children’s movie, think again. In fact many of the jokes and other things wouldn’t be understood by children at all.
The only thing not so great is the marketing, because this is one of those movies that actually deserve to be hyped.
Yay, I bought a new USB 2.0 PCI card and everything works fine now!
Now I can begin editing my video of the Venice trip.
As you read yesterday, I just installed a hard disk drive on my server. I thought everything was OK, but when I tried to capture some stuff with Adobe Premiere, I got another bunch of I/O errors.
As it turns out, there’s something wrong with the USB 2.0 PCI Card I also installed to connect the new drive (and the heat thing from yesterday has nothing to do with it). Now the drive is working fine on the server’s old USB 1 port, unfortunately that’s much, muuuch too slow for video editing (or even viewing). So now I have to find out what’s wrong with this PCI Card. (Sigh) If I fix it tommorrow, I’ll have spent 3 days just on installing a disk.
To make things worse, I experienced a weird crash on my PC and lost my Firefox profile with many settings. Now that’s a pain in the ***. Luckily I at least found a backup of the bookmarks.
The road goes ever on and on…
Unfortunately I spent most of the day trying to install a new external 500GB harddisk on my Linux home server. After I bought it and plugged it in, all went well. However, when I started copying over all the files from my old hard disk (which is going to move to my father), I suddenly got I/O errors…
Turns out the disks (presumably) got a bit too hot. I stacked them on top of eachother, in a small space, which apparently isn’t such a good idea, especially when you’re going to copy almost 250 GB of files.
So I spent most of the day and evening trying to fix them. I managed to fix the new disk by reformatting and repartitioning a few times, with different programs (fdisk, cfdisk, even PartitionMagic on Windows), but I couldn’t do this with the old one since it had data.
Finally I found a solution, which is to plug the old disk to a Windows PC (which for some reason can still read it), and move all the files to the server from there. A long, painful process, which is running now and will probably take the rest of the night.
Long story short: Don’t stack harddisks in a small space, they don’t like that!
Yesterday I returned from a 4 days (3 nights) long trip to Venice, which I made with a student organisation at my school. What can I say…it was one of the most interesting and fun weekends I’ve had.
We landed on Treviso Airport at around 20:00 on friday evening. From there we took a bus to the center of Venice (Piazzale Roma) where we stepped aboard a boatbus (the common way of transport in Venice) for a trip trough the canales, from which we could see the beatiful buildings and “coastline” of the city. After a while we arrived at the southernmost point of the city, Lido. There we took a larger boat to Punta Sabbioni, near our sleeping location, Camping Miramare.
The next day we got up early to go back to the city, where we visited the Arsenale, part of the Bienalle. We saw a lot of interesting art there (though many things were very abstract, something I can’t really appreciate), after which we went into the beatiful city itself. I had my videocamera with me, but I only wish I had more tape. There’s so much to see there, and it’s all equally amazing, it’s hard to make a selection.
On Sunday we went to another part of the Bienalle, the Giardini (Garden). This park consisted of several buildings, each filled with art contributed by a specific country. While I liked the outside bit of the park more than the Arsenale, I think many of it’s buildings are too clean and white inside. If you ever visit it, be sure not to visit the Hungary Pavillion.
In the afternoon we went for another walk trough the city, arriving at the very, very busy Piazza San Marco. In the evening we ate at a self-service restaurant (which was ok), after which most people decided to return to the camping. A friend and I thought this to be extremely lame, so we went to the northern part of the city (near Ca’ d’Oro), which is less touristic. Here we walked trough shopping streets were we absolutely needed our Italian language book. The further north we went, the smaller the alleys we went trough became. At a certain point only 1 person could walk trough one at once. We sat for a drink at the northern coast, after which we took the boat to the camping (where we spent the rest of the night sitting on the balcony of one of our cabins).
On monday we went to the nearby island Murano, world famous for it’s glass. While in some ways similar to Venice, I think it was in fact even more beatiful. It was more sunny and less touristic. To live there would be like living in Utopia. In the evening we took the plane back to Airport Dusseldorf-Weeze. While I was somewhat glad to sleep in my own bed that night, I felt sad that I was back in reality.
Just a few days ago I finished a short video-editing practice clip. I took the flight scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (when the Order rescues Harry) and edited it to mix with the music of the Rollercoaster “Vogel Rok” in the Efteling theme park, here in the Netherlands.
Hi, welcome to my new website, now with blog. From now on I will use this site to post about my projects, adventures or whatever other things I would like to share with the world (such as a movie review).
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See you in the comments!
