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The day before the day before yesterday, which in this timezone would be monday, we went to SeaWorld Orlando. I always love SeaWorld. It’s a clean and beautiful park with marvelous dolphin and killer whale shows. The only thing I don’t get is all the Budweiser stuff (I know the park is owned by Anheuser Bush, but that doesn’t really makes it logical to add all the beer stuff to an sea based theme park).
We went with our good friends Quintijn and Nadine. Quintijn is ofcourse the guy I did LasVegas2Miami with and Nadine is his girlfriend. They’re on a trip from Orlando to New York and since we rented a (big, small seems to be impossible here) and they wanted to see a bit of the Orlando/Tampa area we figured it would be fun if they’d stay with us. Quintijn is the anti-christ of theme parks, he really dislikes them just for what they are (he’s a really weird guy; loves clothing, shoes and stuff like house decoration. Hates theme parks, but loves cars and sports). But, he said he actually liked SeaWorld and that he proved it by staying at the park for more than 4 hours We (Kyan, Marloes and I), being total Orlando-based-themeparks-lovers, ofcourse stayed until the fireworks (which is 9pm).

Below is the footage i’ve shot from that day. It’s a bit crappy, i’ve got Final Cut Express on my laptop, and my laptop has only 120gig of diskspace. Since the content is in 1080i HD format, this is both nearly enough on the cpu/memory and diskspace side. I’ve shot all of it on my Sony TG3E. Have Fun!

Update: It seems Vimeo won’t allow embedded HD. So you should see the video here (which is the HD version).

A little clip with my son having fun in the car here in Florida!

I’ve promised updates but, so far, none we’re needed. We’ve had some rain and wind here the last night (nothing bad though, not much more than what we in Dutch would called “een stevig buitje met wat wind”. Apart from the clouds, the weather is fine. No rain since 5 in the morning and the temperature is fine. Supposedly Fay is going to boomerang back over Florida. As it seems not this part (Polk County) though, so we’ll only be experiencing some rain or at least clouds. If something exciting happends i’ll get back here.

As said before, we’re enjoying our vacation in Florida.. however, There’s this nasty storm coming along which is causing a lot of wind and flooding. For people from the Netherlands, who are used to nothing in this regards, this storm is quite exciting. Currently nothing much is happening at this time (just a lot of rain and a little wind), but on our trusty channel 9 Bay News they just told that flooding will be quite severe in the Polk county (which is the county we’re in). They’re using the Doppler 9000 and the VIPIR radar systems to predict the follow up on the storm. They just told that the storm might boomerang back when it gets to the atlantic.

Anyways, we’re doing some monitoring of our own using the Sony TG3E (for high definition imaging) and the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA65 for outdoor imaging (SD). Below is our first clip @ 18:05 Florida time. Stay with us as this story develops further.

It has been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. Since a couple of days my son, wife and me are hanging out here in Orlando Florida. We’ve flown with Lufthansa. First we had to go to Frankfurt then a direct flight from Frankfurt to Orlando. The flight was great, mostly due to the fact that our son (who’s 2 years and 3 months old) was behaving wonderfull.
I’ve flown with (for me a lot of) different companies lately so i’ve come up with this little table (comparing Delta, British Airways, KLM and Lufthansa) which shows my experience. These experiences are based upon the luxury i’ve had to be flying business class. When compared to economy nobody wins, Singapore Airlines is the biggest winner of them all (like i said to a KLM hostess, Singapore Airlines Economy is much better than all of the business classes below). They’ve made a 23 hour flight to Australia feel like a 2 hour flight.

FYI: Since i get airsick easily eating on a plane is not my favorite thing to do. So that’s why i do not like those specially created Chef’s dinners with all the fancy cooking stuff. I love this in a restaurant but that’s because in a restaurant it is served fresh. At a plane, it needs to be conserved which kills the taste and makes everything smell like catfood (sometimes it tastes like that too). Pizza was invented for this reason, that’s why Delta is my friend. You might wonder how Singapore Airline fixed this for me? Well, i told them i didn’t wanted the food and after telling the reason why they made me a fresh salmon sandwhich (they had a chef cooking for the people in first class). This is how you make friends

So, back to Florida. We’re in a wonderful house, so wonderful in fact that i didn’t want to keep it from the world so below is a video of the whole place (the video is in Dutch).

Last week me and my good friend Quintijn (with whom I also did Lasvegas2Miami) went to the famous Goodwood Festival of Speed. A few things we learned: the city Brighton sucks a lot (it’s old, everything is broken and the hotels are the worst in the world), old cars can be really fast too (we saw 80+ year old cars with over 200 hp doing extreme speeds), dragcars are really noisy, Brighton sucks a lot (did i say this already??) and the BMW 650i Cabrio which was provided by my BMW dealer Hans Severs drove excellent!
The video below shows it all. Quintijn made a lot of pictures, you can find them on my flickr account.

Update: I’m putting on a new version of the video, this one doesn’t look to good and has trouble running smoothly. Probably because of the high resolution original. I’m putting up a downscaled one right now.

One thing is very important to mention, since i don’t want other people to have this same problem. THE HILTON HOTEL IN BRIGHTON IS THE WORST HOTEL IN THE WORLD. Everything is dirty, rooms are extremely small. I’m not kidding, i’ve been to a lot of hotels and hostels and even the worst hostels in the smallest an dirtiest villages in Australia didn’t even come close to this hotel. The even worst part is still to come, we had to pay 130 pounds per night per room!! Don’t EVER go there, not only will you be very dissapointed, you’ll also be ripped of. To make my point I included some pictures of my room below.

So, this morning when walking up to the car to drive our son to the child daycare center (we had to go to work) we bumped into our neighbour who as he said so himself was “on his way to check out this whale on the beach”. I live in Scheveningen, the coolest beach village in the Netherlands. Since we’re at a beach it rarely happends that special animals wash ashore. In my opinion it’s always a sad happening but i was very curious about the whale itself. How big would it be? Would it be decomposing (you always hear those stories about whales blowing up because of the gas buildup inside)?

So, we got there. There was a very fishy smell and the whale looked kind of real. Since we didn’t have anything to compare to (it was our first dead whale on the beach moment) we figured it was probably real.

Back at the office, Marloes started searching online and as it turned out, the whale was an art project from some Belgium guy who wanted to see how many people would think it would be real. A little to morbid for my taste.

You can check out some more pictures at my flickr account.

I was browsing through my video sources yesterday and i found something i totally forgot to put online: our corvette testdrive! Enjoy!

The movie says it all!

Update: Arghhh.. why did they pick this frame as startframe?!!!