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

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.

Update: i’ve redone the clip in vimeo, which is 30 times better than Youtube.

Ofcourse i’ll write some more about Velocity later on (we had some more nice sessions to write about). However, i just created a little clip of Bart and me renting a Ford Focus (see below). I’m not going to get some sleep. Tomorrow i’ll change hotels to one close to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Another day at Velocity has started! We’re now looking at how Faceball should be done correctly. This is the howto video. Everybody get their thanks (as if the conference is over already!) More later!

So, we’re still alive and kicking here at Velocity.. altough the jetlag is getting to us right now and people around us have to start talking slowly for u to be able to understand

As a roundup; it was a nice day, a few good speaker, some not so good. I think i’m a bit spoiled by TED at which every speaker was marvelous there were no dull moments to be found. Anyways, i’m looking forward to tomorrow which, looking at the schedule, has some nice sessions. At this time we’re waiting for the Ignite sessions to start. These sessions feature startups that can present their idea’s to an expert audience (us). Tomorrow morning one of the ignitees wil be the winner. No idea what they’ll be winning though.

Below is a little clip i shot on our way from Velocity to Beni Hana’s. Bart and Justin conclude the first day of Velocity in this clip. Have fun!

I’ve created a little clip about the first morning here at Velocity (all the way down in this post). I must say, some of the items are interesting; Javier from Hyperic announced a very nice platform (Cloudstatus) that measure cloud performance. Since cloud computing is a center point in our new Jitscale service (site will be available soon) the measurement of the quality of the cloud is very important for both the quality of the service as well as monitoring the area’s of improvement. Other items are not too good to handle while having a jetlag. I’m blaming it on the jetlag for now.. Currently we’re attending a session about Content Distribution Networks (like Akamai, Limelight). It’s not too bad but because it a panel based session it’s not really a coherent story.

To describe the quality of the session: Bart has grabed and put down his laptop for about six times already

More later!

Update: Whoops forgot to include the movie!

Bart just posted a video we just saw here at Velocity, extremely cool: