“Everybody has problems. Some people can deal with them, some can’t.”
Don Draper (Mad Men – Season 7, Episode 10)
Author Archives: Jan Van Haver
Adventures in unsubscribing
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Whenever I decide to dig into some or other subject matter, I end up being subscribed to several email newsletters, as you often cannot download a piece of content that appears to be interesting (but half of the time turns out not to be – let’s call that the movie-trailer-phenomenon) without submitting your email address. Obviously I could set up Continue reading
Quote of the day #69
“A woman can buy for herself as if she were her own lover.“
Anna Blaman (Dutch novelist)
Song of the day: Sondre Lerche – Dead Passengers
Not sure what it exactly is about this song from the Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche that touches me so strongly. The violins? The angelic background vocals? The build up of the song itself? I honestly have no idea. But it does.
I bet a carpool karaoke video of me humming along he parts without lyrics would get a lot of shares on social media.
I gladly give up privacy for convenience
What is it with all these concerns about privacy? As I am spending quite a bit of my time in Germany, and even more because I am working for a German company operating in the IT security space, I am confronted with privacy related issues on a regular basis. But still I fail to see what the problem is.
Picture by Isengardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/isengardt/
Have all these people so much to hide that they need to be concerned about whatever they are hiding getting exposed to the party they want to hide it from? (Most likely I imagine that to be either the tax administration or the cheated wife – in the first case: please stop using the public roads that I, but not you, have been paying for; don’t call the fire brigade if your house is on fire, but try putting out the fire yourself; and when you unfortunately have to spend some time in the hospital, pay the full bill yourself). Continue reading
Quote of the day #68
“The German language ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.“
Mark Twain
Quote of the day #67
“It seems to me that there are about 1,000 people on the planet to whom ad blocking is problem and about 7 billion to whom it’s a solution.”
Bob Hoffman
Song of the day: Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – I Need Never Get Old
A couple of months ago there was an announcement on the radio that Paul McCartney was going to perform in Belgium. A handful of seconds and mouseclicks later, a digital ticket was in my mailbox. The guy is 74 now – “will there be another chance after this?” is therefore a very valid question, certainly justifying the quick response time (also given the speed with which concerts sometimes get sold out these days).
The McCartney gig was at Rock Werchter, undisputedly the n°1 festival in Belgium in terms of alignment with my taste in music. So I was pretty confident that the day at the festival would bring me (as has been the case on previous occasions) some pleasant surprises. And it did: the live performance of Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats was amazing. I knew some of the songs as they had received some air time on radio, but the live set caused me to make the following mental note: “Tell my wife never to allow me to spend a summer without at least spending 1 day at a music festival”. Which fits it quite nicely with the song title here: ‘I Need Never Get Old”.
Quote of the day #66
“Thirty years from now it will be illegal to drive a car.”
Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase)
(when asked to give his view on the future of driverless cars)
How I enjoy creating yet another online profile
Yes, that title is meant ironically. More or less anything you want to do online these days, any service you want to use, any network you want to join, comes with the requirement to create a personal profile. This is particularly true if whatever you want to get hold of is free (actually meaning: “you can have this without having to pay for it, if we can have your personal data” – as I discussed in a previous post), or can access your personal data or your money.
In the latter case, I obviously agree that it is a good idea to have some barriers Continue reading
THE SECOND HALF 