Xbox 360

Xbox 360 Xbox 360 Originally uploaded by Kaeru.

Last thursday I got to try out the new Xbox 360 before it launched in the Netherlands. The wireless controller was nice, the graphics of both games I tried were as good as was to be expected. But sadly – no innovations in gameplay. I would’ve loved to see some massive online games in action. That had to wait to after the launch of course. Some more shots over at Flickr.

56,7 km of snowy hell

56,7 km of snowy hell 56,7 km of snowy hell Originally uploaded by Kaeru.

Last night I had to get from Den Bosch to Utrecht. Public transport decided to break down, we had a crazy snow storm, and the longest traffic jam total in Dutch history (over 800 km at it’s height). My only option: take a taxi. Together with a south korean business man, who’d already missed his flight four times, I was in traffic for over three hours over a trip that’s less than 60 kms long. Crazy, crazy stuff! Here’s some shots of a snowy A2.

Dan

Please people. Lay off the Dan Brown. I can’t commute without seeing at least one person reading a book of his. If you’re interested in crackpot theories about templars, Jesus and Sangreal – just pick up Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Brown stole borrowed all his Da Vinci Code ‘revelations’ from that book anyway). If you’re really interested in what conspiracy theories can do to a person, read Foucalt’s Pendulum – a much, much better way to spend your time reading.

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BBC social software goodness

Lots of nice things appearing out of the Beeb’s offices these days. Two recent projects that appeared on my radar:

  • Annotatable Audio is a project Tom Coates was involved with. It’s about wiki-style annotation of online audio with some extremely impressive Flash goodness (such as live audio scrubbing) thrown in for good measure.
  • The BBC archive will be opened up to the public using an IMDB-style website. Both Ben Hammersley and Matt Biddulph wrote about this. They’ve got amazing high quality metadata to work with – allowing all kinds of cross referencing. It’s built with Ruby on Rails, allowing for plenty of AJAX niceness.

(Update: I admit the last one isn’t social software; but it’s still cool.)

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