A couple of years ago I signed up for an account on PhotoSig, a great community for photography enthousiasts. On PhotoSig I got in touch with mister Steve Chong, an enormously talented artist from Malaysia. I'm an great admirer of Steve's work. It's of exceptional artistic quality and Steve routinely explores the boundaries of what's possible with both digital and analog photography. Not only did I get to see a lot of Steve's work on PhotoSig but I also loved his often elaborated descriptions of what he did to accomplish that one perfect shot. Steve's photo's often require the help of the children in his local community and... an insane amount of patience. Quite often Steve spends a whole weekend just to realize ONE new photo. I guess one just has to be from the Far East to possess this amount of patience! If ther's such a thing as a 'Zen of photography' I'm quite sure Steve has mastered it.

Passion of Bacchus

Besides being a true master of surrealist and landscape photography, Steve is also an all around great guy. For a long time I've been wanting to show his amazing work to the world on my humble weblog and do an interview with him. Last week I finally got around writing my questions to Steve. The result is the illustrated interview you're about to read!

Important note: All images used in this article are copyrighted work by Steve Chong. These images were used with Mr. Chong's explicit permission and do NOT fall under the Creative Commons license. This means you have NO permission to use them for anything except for your personal viewing pleasure.

You can click on each image to view it's corresponding page with a description on Steve's website.

A lot of things are going on again in the Netherlands. Like many times in the past, the trouble is related to our immigration policy. A while ago I mentioned Taïda Pasic wasn't going to be allowed to finish her highschool in the Netherlands because she lied in some occasions in the process of obtaining her visum. Later on she was kicked out of the country because of our immigration minister's holy motto 'rules are rules'.

Right now the problems are a whole lot more complicated because we're dealing with a prominent figure. A politician: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Ayaan Hirsi Magan as we should call her now, because that's her real name. If her name doesn't ring a bell I'm sure it will by mentioning the fact that it was she who created the movie 'Submission' together with one of my favorite Dutch filmmakers, Theo van Gogh. A movie van Gogh had to pay for with his life later on. His dead body was used as a 'vehicle' for a message adressed to... Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Now that we've looked at the context, let's take a look at how the Netherlands are looking like a retarded country, again...

I've been doing some design work in my spare time recently. Two of them went live recently which is why I thought it would be nice to present them here! You can click on the screenshots to check out the websites.

ZoeTown

ZoeTown is a great project in which young video amateurs compete against eachother by submitting their own videos. The design and it's implementation in XHTML/CSS was done by me. The backend is Plone which was implemented by the fine people at my former employer Pareto.

Waterkant.Net

Waterkant.Net is the premier portal for people from Suriname, both living in Holland as well as in Suriname. Creating a design for this portal was quite a challenge because the frontpage is packed with an enormous amount of content. I implemented the news section with WordPress with the help of some custom plugins that I wrote. The frontpage is a custom PHP program with some smart caching in order to take some of the load off the WordPress install.

A while ago I saw this photoshopped image which I thought looked rather cool. I had no idea about the movie "They Live by John Carpenter that inspired the person who created the image. Of course it triggered me to check out the movie and watch it.

Unless you're suffering from impaired vision you'll probably notice some changes on this website. I figured right now would be the best time to do what I've always wanted to do to this website: actually finish it! I'll be relocating to Sweden in two months and after that I don't think I'll have much time to work on this site's design because a truckload of more important and more exciting things are coming up. Therefore I decided to perform what I call a 'warm reboot' this very weekend, while I still have time.

The design you're currently looking at has received quite a lot of praise since I launched it. People have even tried to steal it or copy it. While I'm still very happy with the general look I felt some parts were a bit rough on the edges. The main page design with the pseudo-transparency and the tabbed navigation on the right are the key assets that make this site look cool. Obviously I didn't touch any of those! Let's have a look at what I did change, and why.

It's finally happening. PHP fanatic Marco van Hylckama Vlieg is learning Rails. First of all because my brand new employer is 100% Rails based but also because I'm growing extremely tired of writing so called 'plumbing code' over and over again. While nice PHP frameworks exist here and there I don't think there's one that can match Rails in terms of richness of the framework. Rails is going full steam ahead and I decided it's time to jump on the train.

I've been a sceptic for a very long time but after I finally allowed myself to read Agile Web Development with Rails I guess I'm sufficiently convinced that Rails is going to bring back the fun in web development. The fun I've been missing for quite a while already.

HOWEVER........

I've already mentioned the fact that me and my girlfriend are going to relocate to Stockholm, Sweden in two months but I didn't get around doing a little writeup on what's going on exactly. In addition to this writeup I'll post some pictures to show you my future office and my beautiful soon-to-be hometown: Stockholm. It all started with this little post on Robert Nyman's weblog. The job sounded cool. Added to that we already had a pretty strong desire to leave Holland and work abroad. So I went ahead and fired off an email with my resume and some relevant links. I figured it was worth a shot!

A couple of days later Tim Heighes from Adocca mailed me back to let me know my application looked interesting. After a long phonecall with Tim in the weekend we swiftly booked a little trip to Stockholm in order to meet the Adocca crew. The phonecall already made me excited as hell. If this would all be as cool as it sounded on the phone I'd be into some serious luck if I'd get hired!

So you want a free 60GB iPod Video eh? Getting one was never easier. Your shiny new iPod Video could be just one phonecall away! Did I grab your attention? Then keep reading!

A while ago I was a judge in the TextPattern template competition. Winning an iPod Video in that contest required some serious hard work. In this case it won't. All you need to do is find me and my girlfriend an affordable apartment in the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Here are the requirements^*:

• max. 20 minutes away from Södermälarstrand by public transport or by foot
• preferrably two rooms, or one really big one
• Available for at least 12 months
• Affordable: rent preferrably not above 7000 SEK / month
• Available starting from juli 2006

Got something available for rent? Do you know someone who does? Do you know someone who knows someone who does? Get me in touch with this person! I'll arrange one of my new collegues in Stockholm to go and have a look and... if it results in a signed contract I'll send you a brand NEW 60GB iPod Video. No strings attached. Black or white, the choice is yours!

^* Got something that doesn't exactly meet these requirements but you feel it might still be of interest to a couple moving to Stockholm? Please do drop me a line. You never know!