Douwe Osinga's Blog: 2006

Saturday, December 23, 2006

7 Rules for Traveling

I haven't blogged in a long time. I promised a further explanation about why my blog went away for two weeks, but now I am thinking, who...

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Near Death Experience

Frequent visitors to this blog might have noticed - it was gone for a good two weeks. Sigh. Things are better now -  but probably still not ...

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

27

I just claimed my blog at technorati. I did it a long time ago, but something had gone wrong back then and now I saw that they had something...

Please ignore

Technorati Profile

Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Learning languages 4 at a time

I wrote a program that scrapes a database of languages to calculate how many you need to learn to be able to speak with most people. Dependi...

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Pets.com 2.0

What goes around comes around. Pets.com, the company selling dogfood over the internet became the poster child of the previous dot  com bubb...

Sunday, October 1, 2006

Genocide and Freedom

The Dutch are often proud of their freedoms and tolerance. Gay marriage, tolerance of soft drugs, abortion and euthanasia laws paint a pictu...

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Cheaper Airfares

I wonder whether any economist has ever studied the prices of public toilets. The prices are of course usually pretty low, but there doesn&#...

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Life expectancy of famous people

First of all, I must say I am a little disappointed in either the intelligence of my readers or my ability of explaining the abracadabra puz...

Monday, August 28, 2006

Typing monkeys

A long time ago a good friend of mi ne told me this puzzle. Let’s say there is a monkey hitting a typewriter at random. And let’s assume...

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Astrology and Pluto

Astronomers just voted and alas, Pluto no longer has the status of a planet. A sad day for the Pluto fans, but as we find more and more Plu...

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Zurich, Sweden

In the US it seems quite common to confuse Switzerland with Sweden. Visitors to the Zurich office kept remarking how that town was the prett...

Saturday, August 5, 2006

The rich getting richer

Bill Gates has been the richest man in the world since for forever of course, but the last years it sometimes seemed like he could lose that...

Monday, July 3, 2006

Finally being someone

Google Alerts are an excellent way of keeping track how something is doing on the Internet. Any self respecting blogger probably has one wit...

Thursday, June 29, 2006

The last train to Milan

One thing I am not particulary good at, is to accept things that are not very logical. Last weekend I was in Milan and I needed to get back ...

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The rumors of this blogs death are exaggerated

From the looks it seems this blog might be nearing its end. Postings are further and further apart and are much lacking a uniform theme. It ...

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Helping a brother out

My brother is a writer and created an innovative way to promote his latest book. Read a fragment here (in Dutch) Dit is fragment nummer 5...

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Google Trends

Every now and then the Economist publishes interesting graphs where they show how the count of the word 'Recession' in selected news...

Thursday, May 4, 2006

Foosball

The first time I heard the term Foosball it was during an episode of Friends. I thought it was some sort of joke, the Americans using the Ge...

Monday, April 24, 2006

The stolen Böögg and the Nazis

Back in the day when Usenet was the place to go for a good flame war, Mike Godwin came up with what has been called since, well, Godwin'...

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Who is Heinz supporting?

During a ski trip last weekend I came accross a bottle of Heinz ketchup. It had an interesting label: Excuse the bad quality I had the setti...

Thursday, April 6, 2006

The cost of mobile data

Long time no blogging, I am afraid. I don't know. Anyway, I am still playing around with my cell phone . GMail works pretty well, the st...

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Life imitating art, eh Dilbert

So we're back in Europe. And even though we booked a flight on Swiss, we were actually transported on American Airlines. Oh boy. You can...

Monday, February 27, 2006

Big City Mountain View

I'm currently at the Googleplex in Mountain View California. It is interesting to be back at headquarters; it is so big compared to the ...

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Read-only Chinese

With the Chinese economy showing no signs of slowing down, it seems everybody is trying to master their language, whether from a general int...

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Music Everywhere

This is one of those blog posts where I am going to complain about how something doesn't exist but at the same type hoping that somebody...

Monday, February 6, 2006

Are you there God? It's me Mohammed

Yesterday I was watching an old South Park episode with the title 'Are you there God? It's me, Jesus.' It is quite funny. Jesus ...

Friday, January 13, 2006

The Heidi Song

At the end of every Friday at the Google campus in Mountain View, Larry or Sergey present TGIF. A nice look back at what has happened last w...

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Ikea hacks

A lot of the furniture in my home in Amsterdam was more or less self build. I like working with wood and designing something and then actual...

Sunday, January 8, 2006

Penguins and children

Long time no blogging. I switched servers - which was more painful than I thought, because basically everything stopped working. Plus I had ...