Just as four years ago I went to Hurghada in Egypt for my summer holiday. This time I went with Adri and we stayed in the Marlin Inn Beach Resort. We got an incredibly good deal at a last minute site. Once again it was the perfect holiday location. Everyday great weather, lots of excellent snorkel locations, nothing but friendly Egyptians and a whole week of having to do absolutely nothing.

Three days were spent laying on the beach. The rest of the days were filled with an excursion to Luxor, home of the Valley of the Kings and the Karnak temple complex, two boat trips and a snorkling trip to Sharm el Naga. I was especially impressed with the buildings at Karnak. Absolutely amazing that people could make such structures over 3000 years ago.

Update: I’ve just finished uploading the photo’s Adri and I made. We also shot some underwater pictures, but they will be added later. All photo’s are now online. Also made two panorama photo’s: Paradise beach & Marlin Inn beach.

Unfortunately no Rock Werchter this year. Together with Andrew & Sarah I went to Arrow Rock Festival for the second time. This year it was reduced to a one-day festival, but luckily there was a camping, where you could stay two nights.

Driving to Biddinghuize the weather was worse than terrible. Luckily, the moment we arrived it cleared up and we had just enough time to put up the tent before it started poring again. Amazingly enough, later in the evening it cleared up and stayed nice until we had to go back again.

Not all the bands appealed to me as much as I would have liked, but having Aerosmith as the finishing act made up for a lot. As always I made some pictures, and also some video’s: INXS, Riders on the Storm and Aerosmith with ‘I don’t want to miss a thing’.

First match in the new year started with a great tribute to Heurelho Gomes. From PSV.nl:

Before the PSV-Heerenveen game was kicked off, the home fans in the west stand showed their undoubted loyalty and devotion to in-form goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes. They were waving cards in the colours of the flag of Brazil: yellow, green and blue, while unfolding a huge banner saying ‘Gomes O Goleiro Grande’.

Gomes was visibly touched by his supporters’ initiative. It was a well-thought out campaign and the fans showed their commitment by singing songs and chanting the popular goalkeeper’s name for many minutes. PSV won the toss and in the first half Gomes was close to his supporters in the west stand.

See for yourself here and here… and in case you were wondering. Yes, of course we won!

Hope you have a great Christmas and I wish you all the best in the new year. Will it finally be the year I graduate from college, will I start to stop smoking again, and will I win the lottery jackpot… who knows. Stay tuned to Monsterfish.net in 2007 and find out.

Recently I’ve discovered the joy of Windows Movie Maker. I’ve been planning to make a nice video for some time now, but it just never happened. That is until last week. Before going to Andrew & Sarah’s I taped my camera to my bicycle in a very professional way… ahum. The idea was to tape the complete ride form start to end. Unfortunately the batteries decided to stop just before I got there. Luckily the most interesting parts had already been. I’m fairly happy with the result, it’s a bit dark and shaky, but for my first effort not too bad. In WMM I speeded it up a bit, added some fade in and out’s, added a cool ghosting effect and finished it off with a cool soundtrack by the American Analog Set.

To view it, head over to Bright Lights, Eindhoven By Night in the video section of the site. As a bonus I also turned a short video of one of my turtles into a scene of an old Hitchcock film: Turtle Attack.

It’s been a while, but here I am again. Yesterday I had an amazing time at the Champions League match of PSV against Bordeaux. They lost, which luckily didn’t matter since PSV was already placed for the next round. What made it so special was that I wasn’t sitting on my regular seat… but in the Avant-Garde restaurant (proud owner of a Michelin star).

Just before 7 o’clock, Jeroen called me saying that if I hurried I could join him and some coworkers. After an absolutely great meal, we headed outside to our 100% leather cinema chairs… truly the only way one should watch football . After the match we got to go to the ‘Bestuurskamer’, an exclusive room in the stadium where only the very top are aloud in. It was great standing so close to Guus Hiddink and overhearing Ronald Koeman telling someone that: “We zijn door naar de volgende ronde, en daar deden we het voor.”

It took me quite a bit longer than expected (a whole lot longer actually), but now I can finally introduce my slightly updated website. I have been wanting to add more of my video’s for some time. Thanks to the flash video format, I can now easily make all my video’s a reasonable internet size and most importantly, be sure that basically everybody can view them with no problem at all… Screw Quicktime and those dysfunctional media player frames.

Enjoy some of the recent shots I made: Illegal party, Bicycle Cafe, Depeche Mode, James Brown is Dead & Burn Baby Burn.

To see all the video’s currently online, head over to the Video Vault.

This years edition I’ll mostly remember as being very warm… no, make that VERY warm. It was four days of 30+ temperatures, great music , camping & BBQ`s. Driving by car meant that we could bring all kind of luxuries, including a cool box filled with frozen meat.

Highlights of the festival were: Kaizer Chiefs (stagedive), Matisyahu (a jewish rasta-rapper, yes they do exist apparently), Red Hot Chili Peppers (shame they didn’t play ‘Under the bridge’ though), Live (never really liked them, but live they’re really good, no pun intended), Vitalic & Tiga (my portion of dance music), The Who, Franz Ferdinand, Robert Plant (former Led Zeppelin frontman), Ben Harper, Hooverphonic (this one was a nice surprise) and of course Depeche Mode (started off disappointing, but ‘Enjoy the silence’ made up for it).

With my new 1 gig flash card I not only made lots of photo’s but also some video footage. They’re still too big to post but I’m sure will shortly arrive online.

Yesterday Ilona and I continued our yearly tradition of visiting the Fiesta Del Sol, a music festival in the centre of Eindhoven featuring various Latin and some Rhythm & Blues bands. The best part of the day was the Festa Do Samba. Even though it was miserable weather, it stayed dry most of the time luckily, Eindhoven was once again transformed into Rio De Janeiro. Didn’t make to many photo’s, but enough for a nice impression.

On a side note. The evening unfortunately sucked big time. Holland lost their World Cup™ match against Portugal thanks to poor play, a terrible referee, smart Portuguese and just sheer bad luck. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait 4 more years to become world champions, haha.

Wow, it’s been a while since I updated my site. I’ve been kind of busy with school the last few weeks… yes, it does happen. Thank goodness a lot of work was just reading, so I could sit outside in the sun and do some work, in stead of having to sit behind my computer. Thanks to the non existence of isolation, a big curtainless window facing southwest and the luxury of an attic room, the average temperature was somewhere between “unbearingly hot” and “off the flipping scale”. Of course there was also some programming to do, but as always I left it to the last minute, when the sun had once again taken leave behind the clouds.

I strongly doubt anyone will be interested in them, but here are some of the programs I had to make. Also added the source code for them, all in C++:

• AVL Tree (source)
• Red-Black Tree (source)
• Knapsack problem (source)
• Eight-Queen problem (source)