Hi! I just got back from another great holiday in Spain. This time me and my girlfriend visited Salamanca and the ‘Green Spain’ (Galicia & Asturias).

To my opinion this is the most beautiful part of Spain, with some nice little villages, green mountains and a great coast. We went by car from Madrid to Salamanca, A Coruña, Luarca and Cudillero. And back to Madrid.

For me, the extremely warm weather (30-35 degrees) in Madrid was too much, so it was a good thing to go to the north. In Galicia and Asturias it was between 20-25 degrees, which is ‘agradable’. The beaches and coasts were amazing. Especially the Playa de las Catedrales and the Playa del Silencio.

Feel free to check out the pictures.

This weekend I went to our tropical dutch island ‘Texel’ for a tandem skydive. It was really an amazing experience. Going up in a small plane to a height of about 3km, where you could enjoy a great view of the island and the top part of Holland (and we really do have a small country).

I was the last one to get in, which also ment, I was the first one to get out. With the instructor behind me I was hanging out of the plane for a couple of seconds and then falling down. With a speed of appr. 200km/h we were going down for about 30 seconds and then a couple of minutes with the opened parachute.

I made some pictures which can be viewed here

From the Berner Zeiting (newspaper):

We got back from our Switzerland adventure yesterday night. It was worth every mile of driving. The city of Bern was completely filled with people in orange. I would guess about 90%, the rest was in blue (France) or from another country. Really amazing!

There were 3 big squares with huge televisions to see the matches. The weather was great and I didn’t see any fights or whatever. It was like queensday in Amsterdam. The people from Bern didn’t know what happened to them and their city. One big party. And even they were supporting the dutch mannschaft.

Ofcourse the match was great and we were lucky to be there with such an important match, which was also very attractive to watch. The following day we did some site-seeing and discovered that the city is actually really nice without all the dutch supporters.

Enjoy the pictures!

Today I’m going for a quick visit to Bern (Switzerland) for 2 days, with two of my friends. The reason? To support the Dutch football team at the European Championship. We don’t have tickets for the match, but we will head to the Orange square in the center.

They expect 50.000 people there, so I guess it will be a little crowded. After our 3-0 victory against the current world champion hopes are really high. We are going to see the match Netherlands-France. I’ll keep you posted.

Bienvenido!
Things are going quite well, except that my girlfriend is back in Spain again. But we had a couple of really nice days. Kicking off with queensnight in The Hague, always a nice atmosphere with happy people and music everywhere. We spend most of queensday in Amsterdam, which is always crowded but fun, because of all the funny looking crazy people.

We also went to the Keukenhof (kitchen garden), which is a big and beautiful flower park. I was partially being forced to go there by my girlfriend (girls and flowers…). But it was definitely worth it. Afterwards we drove to the top of my province, Den Helder, where we visited the new restaurant of my friend Dave. It’s called Spijz and I can really recommend it. It is a unique restaurant with different themed sections. The food is excellent and has a fair price. (no, this is not an advertisement ).

Next to that we had a nice walk in the dunes near my hometown and a bowling night with my friends. Here we heard big news of our friends Peter and Marieke getting married! From the whole LikeMike.net team: congratulations!! (All the readers of this site will be invited to the party …all three… )

Well, I’m off enjoying the weather we’re having now! Hasta la pasta!

For those of you who have a company car, or just if you’re lazy and you want to listen to your own mp3 songs in your car, here is the solution, the FM transmitter.

I recently bought the Linex FM Car transmitter, to use it with my Meizu mp3 player. It works pretty straightforward, one end in the player, the other end in the cigarette lighter and choose a frequency. You can choose between 7 frequencies in the lower fm regions (from 88.0).

Make sure you choose a frequency which is free to achieve the best results. You have to put the volume of the mp3 player quite loud, so make sure you have any equalizer settings turned off to minimize the distortion.

I used it in different parts of Holland, all with good results. The sound quality balances between radio and cd quality.

So if you are looking for an affordable way to listen to your own music, I can recommend this item. I got it from www.got2have.nl

Meet my new mp3 player! The Meizu M6. It looks like a cheap Chinese iPod clone and maybe that’s what it is. But to my opinion it’s a good working player with a lot of options. I have the 8GB version, but they are also available in 2 or 4 GB. But the more, the better.

It’s quite a small player, even a bit smaller then my credit card. It has a universal mini usb connection to upload your data and it doesn’t require any additional software. You will only need the video converter software from the included cd to convert your videos.

Because I bought the Dane-Elec version of this player, I updated the firmware with the original Meizu firmware. This enabled the use of the radio tuner! (I know, it’s weird…)
Some of the other features include a photo album, voice recorder, video player (avi files), some games and even a calculator.

But the most important is the sound quality, which is very impressive. It sounds very clear and even has a good bass. The equalizer has some predefined settings, but it’s also possible to set them to your own taste.

There are some thing that could be improved. In my opinion (as a interaction designer) the user interface could be better. The main menu has too much options and in general the menus are not really consistent. However, you can change this (a little) in the settings. And the second thing is, that after charging, it updates the complete music library. Even when no new songs are added. This can take up to 1 or 2 minutes. So that can be annoying. I hope these things will be fixed in a new firmware upgrade soon.

So before buying a new iPod, consider this Meizu miniplayer, it’s a lot cheaper and of great quality.

As most of you can see, I finally made a new design for my website. My old website was about 4 or 5 years old and really outdated, so I decided to make something new. Not only a new design, but a whole new backend as well.

I choose the popular open source Wordpress blog. It has a lot of options and the new version has some nice new features as well. For the ones who are wondering what I used to change the header images, take a look at the JW image rotator, it works quite well. For the gallery I used Nextgen (combined with the Lightbox plugin) , which currently is one of the best out there, if you don’t use Flickr or something similar. It has some disadvantages, but I expect some updates soon. It is still under development.

I also switched from provider, so I have some more space to put my pictures. You might have noticed there are some pictures from 2003 and before which weren’t available anymore on the old website.

Have fun browsing around and let me know what you think.