Today, I ran into a "little" annoyance regarding the forgotten password thing on Yahoo / Flickr. I access my Flickr Pro account from several PC's and use (don't ask why) different browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari). Somehow, my main PC "forgot" the password (or misplaced the cookie) for my Flickr account, so I needed to log in again. For some reason, my password didn't do the trick, so I thought; "let's reset it then"... Well there's a challenge. You need to know exactly what (personal) data you entered when you signed up. Thagt is date of birth, ZIP code, country etc. As if everyone tells the truth on the Internet??? Fortunately, I gave the proper dates etc. when I signed up. So that wasn't hard to remember. Anyway the first challenge was to get the right ZIP code into the form. In Holland we use 4 digits followed by 2 characters (e.g. 1234AB), but this is used in two ways. Namely with or without a space between the numbers and characters.... So what did I use? Furthermore, is this case-sensitive? Is it "1234ab", or "1234 ab", or "1234AB", or "1234 AB"??? I tried them all, and every time there was the error about not filling in things correctly AND not entering the security code correctly. So after a few retries, my account got locked :x :x, so don't expect any new photos on my Flickr PRO page soon...... Why not simply have an e-mail sent to the e-mail address you used when you signed up?? Almost every other service uses this method. UPDATE: Well, with no thanks to Yahoo (and all), I found my password hidden in a obscure file cabinet under the "M" for Miscellaneous :)

The concert was awesome. I've had my fair share of concerts (Live, Robbie Williams, Coldplay, U2, Tina Turner, Genesis, Sting, etc.), but this one blew them all away (by far). It's the first time as well that I wouldn't mind visiting the same concert twice, and pay the full price again (€100 for a field ticket).

The concert itself was kinda split into two parts. The first part was mostly about displaying all the wrong doings in the world (cruelty to animals, hunger, aids and wars in Africa, Middle Eastern problems, position of women in the Islam). All these subjects were displayed on giant video screens, and supported by vocals, theatre etc. The combination of the music, and the multimedia on the giant displays was phenomenal. The second part was without a specific message (or the message would have been "Have Fun"), and lot's of great hits were played. The week before the concert, there were some protests about some Christian (extremist :) ) groups in the Netherlands. They wanted to "ban" the concert. During the concert, Madonna would appear nailed to a cross. The "event" took place during a revised version of "Live to Tell", which displayed all the horror taking place in the world, and those responsible for it (the Pope, our great friend George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Middle Eastern leaders, etc.). I don't think that anyone would protest against it (Madonna on the cross), if they would know the reason for doing it. I definitely didn't. The photos I made (20+) can be viewed on my Flickr page. Note that the quality is not that good, but that's what happends with a small digital camera (Canon Digital IXUS 400) with limited features for shooting in poor light, and an inferior flash (for large spaces). Anyway, I'll definitely visit her next tour if it comes along.

A while ago, the sales of Madonna tickets started for her concert in the Amsterdam Arena. Madonna is one of those artists which you need to see live at least once in my opinion. I tried to get myself a couple of tickets, but failed. The two concerts were sold out in less than an hour :(. Last Friday I received a call from my brother that a friend still had some tickets available, so my luck was changing :-). Thankfully the tickets are field-tickets, so the audio should also be pretty decent. The last concert I attended in the Arena was a concert of Robbie Williams, and back then, we had seats somewhere up in the Arena. This resulted in hearing the concert 3 times through the terrible echoing in the Arena :(. Anyway, I'll be bringing my Canon Digital IXUS along, so pictures will be available some time after the concert on my flickr page.

After years of developping my own website in Macromedia Adobe Coldfusion, it was time to leave those sort of things 'to those who do it best'. I tried to make my own blog, and, somewhere along the way, it worked (surprisingly). Although it was nice to use something you created yourself, it lacked some of the cool features the 'professional' blogs have. I just didn't have the time to keep developping those things. So, I downloaded 'Wordpress', and unfortunatelly it needed PHP as a scripting engine. The alternative would have been 'Movable Type', which uses Perl. I'm a n00b at both those languages, so I decided to take the most popular scripting engine... PHP. Thank god, that I can use both Coldfusion AND PHP on the same webserver, so I can still do a little development in Coldfusion. The nice thing about Wordpress is (and I'm sure Movable Type and all the others have similar features) that you can add plugins to the blog. I'm not yet familiar with them (hey, I got this one operational last night 8) ), but additional features, and some redesign, will be on their way in the next couple of weeks. I will also try to "port" (and translate :( ) my original post from the 'old' Redelijkheid.com website to Wordpress. So that the old info won't be destroyed. In the mean time, the "old" blog is available under http://www.redelijkheid.com/oldblog. For the time being both my public websites (redelijkheid.com and switched2mac.com) will be pointing to this blog. This means that you might even catch some of my adventures on the Apple platform. Actually, I'm writing this on my Mac Book Pro :-) So, stay tuned.