I have uploaded a few photos in the past few weeks. You can view them all below.

Today we celebrate the fact that Seth is 6 months old! He has changed a lot in six months. I see him every day. And that makes it hard to notice him changing. But today I was looking at some ‘old’ pictures of Seth, and he has changed quite a bit.

October 2007

November 2007

December 2007

January 2008

February 2008

March 2008

April 2008

Los Angeles is a place that means a lot to me, for several reasons. So I made a Los Angeles vector scene. I like it, I hope you do too.

In 2006, I asked my friend Josh whether or not he had a blog of his own. Then he told me he did not have a blog. But he did have a Facebook. Facebook was then quite new to me. In The Netherlands, no one knew Facebook back then. No, in The Netherlands, you had two options: MySpace and Hyves.

I have a MySpace, and I don’t like it. So I don’t use it anymore. I have tried using it for a month or two. Most people on there are just looking for attention. They take pictures of themselves in weird positions, then upload them and say: “don’t comment on this!”, when in fact they do want you to comment (nicely) on it. I also get kinda frustrated with the new ‘talent’ on MySpace trying to gather new fans. So yes, bands and the like will add you and ask for you to check out their music. That’s fine, but I don’t have the time to do that nor am I interested. Also, compared to some other networking sites, MySpace doesn’t have anything fun to do.

Then there’s Hyves. Hyves is a Dutch networking website. And people have been inviting me from the very beginning. And I have been ignoring those invites since the beginning. I do not like Hyves. Hyves soon turned into a complete hype. I avoid websites like that where everyone just signs up ‘because everyone else has one’. Also, as far as I’ve seen it (yes I have seen a profile page from a friend), you can’t do a whole lot on there. It’s like a Dutch MySpace. So now you have two crappy Dutch networking sites. Because MySpace recently added a Dutch site as well. I will never register a Hyves for myself. So anyone trying to invite me, please stop. I won’t be using it anyway, so why sign up.

Another Dutch website is MeetYourMessenger, which I discovered purely because of stupid invites in my inbox. I run SNW. And people on there -in general- do not know me. Yet they are trying to add me on profile sites. What’s up with that? And everytime someone invites me, I get new mail from *all* the people that are still waiting for me to sign up.

You must know IMVU? Well, people seem to enjoy it to invite people for that as well. I hardly have time to play Sims or Simcity. Then how am I supposed to play an online (chat) game thingy with ‘friends’.

Please just stop inviting me over there, on any networking website. If I’ve said no, it means no!

So, back to Facebook then. I have been using Facebook for two years now. And since January, I haven’t really done anything on it. It has a lot of fun things to do. And I even got my friends to join in as well. Mainly because I had photos of Seth on there. But we could do trivia, pet (fluff)friends, give gifts, maintain an aquarium or a small planet, do quizes, upload a many photos as you like. There isn’t much you can’t do on there. And that’s what made it so much fun.

The (fluff)friends thing was a lot of fun. You could get a pet and invite others on Facebook to get one as well. It was like a Tamagotchi, but on Facebook. Pet him, feed him, get friends for him. By petting others (fluff)friends, you would receive ‘munny’. With that munny, you can buy food, decorations, habitats and more.

The thing is, it got very tricky for some people if they wanted to make more munny. You could do surveys and then you would receive munny for that survey. However, the surveys are usually only for US/Canada/UK people. If you do not live there, you can either get 100 munny a week (if you collect it of course, not automatically). Or you can’t get anything at all in some cases.

If you pet your friends daily. And let’s say 20 of your friends have (fluff)friends, you will receive 5 munny per (fluff)friend. You will make 100 munny a day. That’s nice. You can get nice things for your (fluff)friends that way.

Since January or so, they’ve introduced ‘gold’. You need gold in order to buy certain (usually the pretty, fun) decorations and habitats. The only way to obtain gold is to grab your credit card or your PayPal account. For $1 you will get 10 gold. I actually liked (fluff)friends, until they introduced this. They have been adding loads of new things, but most of them require gold in stead of munny. To me, the fun I had with (fluff)friends is gone. I am not going to spend money on something I could make myself! Of course, I can make things myself, but there’s no option to use your own habitats in any way.

There are also some other reasons why I won’t be using Facebook a lot anymore. I have some friends on Facebook. But I also have people on there, that just follow my every move, because they want to know what I’ve done, what I’m doing and what I’m going to do. They do not keep track of me for themselves. No, they do this to inform other people. People that have lost contact with me and obviously still need to know what’s happening in *my* life. Because of that, uploading photos now isn’t an option anymore. I now only allow a handful of people to view the photos I still have there. And I might delete all the photos soon. I know I can block and remove certain people. But that might give it away about me knowing, about them. And I don’t want that.

I hate the fact that I can’t unsubscribe from e-mails sent from certain of the networking sites. Either there is no way to unsubscribe because they don’t have that option. Or you just can’t unsubscribe because the system doesn’t work properly.

My point of this whole blog post baically is, that I am tired of all the social networking sites at this very moment. I even don’t like using Facebook anymore. I might be using it in the future again. I don’t know yet. I won’t delete my account. But I am moving important things to my personal websites. Some things will be available for the public, some things won’t.

My birthday was last week. I’ve been in need of a new HDD for months already. With all the projects I have and maintain, I really need more space. I have four other HDD’s (400GB, 200GB, 120GB and 40GB) right now. This new one will be my fifth and will replace the 40GB HDD. That one then will be used for backups and stuff. The delivery will take place this week. And I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m so happyyyyy!

I love blogging. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it is because I am a busy body and sometimes I can’t find time to chat with my friends. It’s so much easier to just blog everything that happens in my life, because all my friends can read that just at once. People can reply on my blog posts. This often results in some kind of online conversation between friends. The fun part about that is, that these ‘logs’ won’t get lost.

Although…

I’ve been a blogger ever since I’ve been making websites. And I’ve been making websites since 2001. Well I have made some websites before 2001, but I do not feel the desire to share these with any of you :p They’re also gone. The problem with me is that I have too many websites. Some of these have grown too big and therefore I had to get my own server in 2003. I shared this server with someone else. And this sometimes caused problems, like crackers (people who call themselves hackers but are not worth it). And crackers just love to destroy websites from amateurs like myself back on those days. It’s because of these crackers that I’ve lost so many blog posts in the past. Which is a shame really, because looking back, I do miss certain parts of my ‘blogging life’. And I can’t retrieve them. At least not all of them.

I found a few blog posts back today. I honestly doubt I will ever find any other old blog posts back. But never say never, right? The blog posts that I could retrieve, are from June, July and August 2005.

Right now, archives won’t show up. I can’t figure out why. I have a test blog on my pc where I run the same theme, and that one does show archives. Maybe it has something to do with the new Wordpress? I don’t know. But it’s quite frustrating.

Yes, I’ve joined Twitter. Don’t ask me why. I’m busy enough already. But Alex asked me whether I had a Twitter account a while ago. And if I find something appealing enough, I tend to join anyway, even if it is just to try it out. So now I did. Have a Twitter? Add me here (You will need to be logged in on Twitter to do that though)

You know you’re becoming a design geek when…

• You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
• You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
• You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
• Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
• You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
• You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
• You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
• You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
• The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”
• You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.
• Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash – and you’re running OSX.
• You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
• You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.
• You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
• Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
• And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
• You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
• Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
• You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
• You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.
• You actually understand this post and pass it on to your friends.

Source

You may or may not believe this, but the majority of the above has happened to me or does apply to me. With a slight difference that I didn’t dream about a paint program. As a teenager, I dreamed about DOS. I myself don’t use a Mac quite often. I have a PC instead (I’d love a Mac, but I just can’t afford one). When I break something, I often think “CTRL+Z, CTRL+Z!!”. Of course, this doesn’t work When watching television, I often remark a font when I recognize it. And I recognize fonts often :p My family and friends just laugh about it. I sometimes (well okay, almost always) stay up late (or leave my bed) when I get a great idea to work on Just a few examples, but there is a certain resemblance between the “design geek” described and me :p

I think I’ve got some serious problems here…