Classics

Cycling is the second most important sport in Belgium. This time of the year, various one day races captivate the country in front of their television, often twice a week. They are known as "the classics". Many of the spring one day races happen in Belgium: take a look at the calendar of one day races. Among them Gent-Wevelgem, Brabantse Pijl, Ronde van Vlaanderen, Waalse Pijl Liege-Bastogne-Liege and others.

My top three classic races are: (1) Ronde van Vlaanderen - tour of Flanders (rvv.be) (2) Paris - Roubaix and (3) Liege-Bastogne-Liege.

Naturally I try to follow the races on the internet. There are various ways to follow the races. Cycling.tv provides a subscription video feed. Sporza Radio broadcasts the races live. (Sporza, part of VRT, is the sport channel of the publicly funded national Belgian broadcasting station in Flemish). Unfortunately, the Sporza video stream is only if you live in Belgium, as the contracts with the race organizers prohibit broadcast to other countries.

Voor wie niet in België woont...
De livestreaming van sporza.be is in het buitenland niet te bekijken, omdat er rechten op de beelden rusten. De eigenaars van de contracten (de organisatoren van de evenementen) zeggen uitdrukkelijk dat de beelden alleen op het Belgische grondgebied te bekijken mogen zijn

Anonymous internet proxies to the rescue! With any luck I will be able to follow the Ronde van Vlaanderen with the help of an anonymous internet proxy in Belgium (e.g. from aliveProxy). If you know any good ones, let me know.

IM client galore

Since a few days I switched at work from Pidgin to Trillian instant messenger client.

We use Yahoo Instant Messenger as the company standard. I do not like the YIM client because too much real estate is spent on commercials and useless buttons. To consolidate various clients, I had switched to Pidgin. I still run Google Talk and Skype because unifying instant messenger clients do not handle voice and video well. Here's a couple of reasons why I liked Pidgin and have become a big fan of Trillian.

1. Both clients support various instant messenger protocols: Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Jabber (although Trillian requires you to buy the pro version).
   
2. Tab windows. At any moment, I have multiple chat sessions open. I do not like to have four or five windows on my desktop. (For the same reasons Firefox tab browsing is key feature of a browser.)
3. Both clients support various skins. Trillian is a windows application and looks a little smoother. I use the minimal GuiStyle Skin.
4. Although Pidgin supports also IRC, I never installed the plugin. Trillian IRC support is great. I have several IRC channels running from the rhel, linuxnewbies IRC channels to the Netbeans IRC. The good old protocol (anno 1988) is the perfect group chat protocol. I don't know why we don't use it internally. (It could replace many quickly evolving email threads.)
   
5. Support from Google Desktop to index my chat logs.
   

Give Trillian a try. (On Mac, check out Adium)

UPDATE: 04/02/2008 - LifeHacker Five Best Instant Messengers has high praise for Digsby

Fubar or foobar

Last night I watched a great documentary about the war on narcotics in Miami during the 1980s: Cocaine Cowboys. It is the story behind Scarface and the Mariel boatlift. It is also the background for Miami Vice. Coincidently, the music for the documentary was composed by the same composer of the Miami Vice Theme: Jan Hammer. Ever since arriving to the US, my first name has been difficult to pronounce: Jan. More often it is also mistaken for a woman's name -I have gotten samples for female products in the mail-. In my first weeks in the US, I tried various ways, including almost changing my email alias to 'ian', as it was phonetically closer to my name. Then, Jan Hammer came to my rescue. People knew how to pronounce his name, and knew he was a male.

The documentary taught me a new phrase: fubar. Over and over it was mentioned. Being an engineer, I immediately thought of foobar, a common place holder name in programming. It didn't make any sense in the movie. During Frontline tonight, the term fubar came up again. Now I was really intrigued. I had to look it up: fubar - fucked up beyond all recognition/repair.

• RFC3092 - Etymology of Foo
  

Amazon fulfillment

As my son is hard at work building his new Lego Beach House, I had some time to look into how the box arrived at our doorstep.

I bought the item on Ebay in new and sealed condition. There was something odd about the shipping: (1) It arrived super fast: 2 days after purchasing. (2) It was shipped in an Amazon box and by Amazon. The Amazon labeled stated: ship to me; shipping is billed to the Ebay seller. That looked odd.

Was the seller just a front for Amazon? Nope, as the billing address was a private party in New York.

Was the eBay seller buying his items on Amazon? Doubtful, since the items is purchased on auction, there is no guarantee of making money if he has to buy it full price on Amazon. Let's run down the numbers:

• Lego store cost: $30
• Amazon store cost: $25 + shipping ($9.99 for comparable 2 day shipping) = $34.99
• Final bid price: $16.75 + $8.99 (shipping) = $25.74

Yesterday I read a blog post (Techcrunch: Amazon takes the humans out of fulfillment) on the missing puzzle piece: Amazon Fulfillment. In simple terms: Amazon becomes your personal climate controlled warehouse, while providing you with software hooks to ship and track your shipments. You would think this was the turf of Fedex or UPS.


Such services do not come free. Is my Ebay seller making any money?

First, let's look at the Amazon Fulfillment Pricing.

• Storage: $0.45 (assuming it was only stored for one month)
• Order Handling: $1.00
• Pick and Pack: $0.75
• Weight Hanlding: $0.88 (2.2 pounds)
• Total shipping to customer: $3.08

Secondly, It is unknown how much the seller sold to ship it his items to Amazon. Let's assume he is charged $2 per item.

Total shipping costs: $5.08 (Note he charged $8.99 on Ebay. Amazon Fulfillment definitely appears cost effective for my seller.)

Finally, I estimate the New York Sales tax (4%) : $1.

Since this was a new item, my Ebay seller must have purchased the item gross for no more than $19.50 to make any money. This is probably a close call. Lego profit margins are just north of 30%. So for a $30 item, the whole sale price must be around $17-$18. Just a guess. He must be selling a whole lot of Lego sets to make a living.

From the looks of it, Amazon Fulfillment API will make it easier and faster for Ebay powersellers to increase volume, while lowering shipping rates. Definitely, a missed opportunity for UPS, Fedex or UPS.

Spring tomatoes

As fall arrived near the end of September, a new crop of tomatoes start growing in our garden. The tomato plants on the side of the house are in shock throughout the hot summer days. During the Indian summer in October, these plants start bearing new fruits. Some plants will last through the winter. Tonight, on the first evening of spring, we ate two delicious tomatoes which my daughter harvested in the garden. And there are more to come.

Unfortunately, fall also meant that our garden would be overrun again by clover. In the next weeks I'll start the yearly spring clover clean up. There's lots of clover. And none of that lucky clover. I wish.

Anyone know a non-toxic approach to getting rid of clover?

The unfriendly shopping cart

R99: "Ranch 99 customer service."
Me: "Hi, I am calling because one of your shopping carts is parked in front of my house." (I live about 1 mile from the nearest Ranch 99)
R99: "My driver will pick it up." Click

Click? Did she hang up on me?

R99: "Ranch 99 customer service."
Me: "Hi, I just spoke with you about the shopping cart. I did not tell you the name of my street yet."
R99: "We check every street." Click.

Click again? Wow. Why would one want to shop at such a friendly store? It also tells you something about how its customers use the shopping carts as personal dollies to their houses.

New rule: if you find a shopping cart outside of the parking lot of the supermarket, you get to fill it up for free at that supermarket.

A perfect match (Man zkt vrouw)

The Belgian movie, Man zkt vrouw, (the English title is A Perfect Match) (wikipedia), made its North American premiere as part of the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose on Friday Feb 29. The film is directed by Miel van Hoogenbemt and was written by Pierre De Clercq and Jean-Claude Van Rijckeghem.

Man zoekt vrouw - De trailer

I met up with Miel and Pierre at the Paragon Bar in San Jose, prior to the movie. They had arrived the night before and were still jetlagged. Although both are experienced film makers (IMDB: Pierre De Clercq, Miel van Hoogenbemt), they appeared a little anxious about what was to come. How would America like the movie? What would the audience ask during the Q&A section at the end of the movie?

The movie is a romantic comedy and stars famous Belgian actors. It is located in Ghent, Belgium.

On the day of his forced retirement, a school principal (Jan Decleir) decides to look for a wife on the Internet. It's not love he is after, but merely companionship. He meets a lot of women but can't seem to make up his mind. Until his new housekeeper (Maria Popistasu) arrives: she is almost forty years younger than him and a total disaster at housekeeping. For the first time in what seems a lifetime, he falls totally and desperately in love.

The movie is very well done, with witty comments. The plot is simple - it doesn't try to weave a complex story -. Yet, they story leaves enough unanswered which makes you wonder what will happen past the end of the movie.

Also the cinequest visitors appeared to like the movie. Throughout the movie, you could hear the entire audience crack up. And during the Q&A section, many had compliments and questions about the movie: about the languages, the location, the music, the actors and about the plot, (I won't list the questions not to give a way the plot.) As for the music, it was created by Spinvis. From the Man zkt vrouw blog:

Het was Wim Opbrouck die ons nog tijdens de opnamen de Nederlandse componist aanraadde. “Ga bij Spinvis.in Holland,” fluisterde hij ons toe, “die gast maakt geweldige muziek. We hebben wat van zijn materiaal gebruikt voor De Bende van Wim.” Wij dus naar Utrecht waar we aan Spinvis (het alter ego van de zeer aimabele muzikant Erik de Jong) onze film toonden en hij was meteen dol enthousiast om er de muziek voor te schrijven. Bedankt voor de tip, Wim!

Prior to the movie, Pierre had worried how our group of Belgians would receive the movie. Would we still be proud of Belgian cinema? We were! We stuck around until the end and I was happy the film was a success.

• Official website Man Zkt Vrouw
• Review: European-films.net
• Review: 9Lives
  (Dutch)
• Review: Humo (Dutch)