Douwe Osinga's Blog: 2008

Monday, December 15, 2008

Meet the Meat!

When you walk around Sydney one thing that draws your attention are the signs outside pubs advertising for Steaks for 12, 10 or even 7 dolla...

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Picasa Webalbums Face Recognition Rocks

Picasa's Webalbums has this newish feature to recognize faces and it is pretty awesome. You make it run over your photo's and then ...

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Broken Window Theory

When the movers came and brought our stuff to Sydney, they also brought my bicycle. Sydney isn’t the bike friendliest of places, but it isn’...

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Death and Taxes. Correlated.

90% of creativity is misunderstanding, I sometimes think. Some the best ideas come when you hear something and think, wow, that's brilli...

Thursday, November 6, 2008

In defense of colonialism

We’re just back from a quick trip to Hong Kong for a wedding. Hong Kong is an impressive city in many ways. Here you have this most unmercif...

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The Great Bank Robbery. In Reverse.

From reading the news you might believe that the financial crisis that we’re in is one of the banks. Banks might have caused some of the pro...

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Taking from the poor, giving to the rich

Desperate times call for desperate measures and in the 700 Billion dollars to bail out Wall Street certainly falls in that category. The que...

Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Swissest of all cuts

First to get you all up to date: two days ago we moved out of Switzerland. We’re off to India now, where we’ll stay for 5 weeks or so, befor...

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Google Share and Chinese Radicals

I am slowly rebuilding my projects one by one, porting them from Zope to AppEngine. I restored Chinese Radicals just now. This is a progra...

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Project Updates

Now that douweosinga.com is running on App Engine, I am slowly converting my old projects to the new infrastructure. Moreover I am trying to...

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Back from the dead part II

Those who check my blog over a feedreader might have concluded I stopped posting for a bit (which is also true). Those who check back on htt...

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Nice work if you can get it

India has a billion people and it shows. They are everywhere. The masses of people you find in the street here, one would only find in Zuric...

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Truth in advertising

Advertising tells you a lot about a country. Not maybe so much about what is the case, but about what people dream about. Or at least what t...

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Laundry Service

Some people don’t like the fact that you can have almost anything done by somebody in India because of the low cost of labor; they feel it i...

Friday, April 25, 2008

An Old Friend for Questioning

My good friend Hans Peter came visit from the Netherlands. Against all reason he decided he wanted to visit of all places the Andaman Island...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Back in Switzerland

So various people have wondered if I still blog. I do, but more often than not when I don't have access to the Internet and these posts ...

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Good help is hard to find

Employing people is a fact of live in India for people with a certain income, obviously much more so than for example in Switzerland. Cheap ...

Monday, March 10, 2008

Capturing the presidency for the next 12 years

Meanwhile at the other side of the planet the Americans are going through the long process of deciding who will be the most powerful person ...

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Priceless India

India is by all means a lot cheaper than Switzerland. Sure, things in Switzerland are more reliable, cleaner and generally of higher quality...

Monday, March 3, 2008

Something does beat Cow

Saying the Indian traffic is like advanced rock-paper-scissors like I did in my last post, sounds interesting, but isn’t quite accurate. In ...

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Getting Around

One thing that is definitely harder to do in Hyderabad than in Zurich is getting around. It is not just the difference in size (Hyderabad ha...

Monday, February 4, 2008

15 minutes of fame. Daily

One of the weirdest thing of visiting tourist attractions of India must be the fact that people come up to you all the time to take your pic...

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The End of the World

When I was growing up in the Netherlands, shops would close during weekdays as 6PM, with the sole exception of Thursday night, which was fit...

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Life is a beach

The first time I was in Goa is now more than 15 years ago. Back then the only Indians you'd see on the beach would be the skinny fisherm...

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Dirty Country

If cleanliness is next to godliness, then India firmly is on the side of godliness; there are temples, churches and mosques everywhere, but ...

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

There's always a guy

India is a guy country. I don’t necessarily mean the fact that it is very much male oriented. It is, though then again in surprising ways it...

Monday, January 21, 2008

India goes where the EU stumbles

A couple of years ago, the European commission set out to solve the electricity problem in Europe. No, not the generation, transport or asso...

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Flying in India

I went to Bangalore on Wednesday to check out the office there and to chat to a bunch of people. India has a thriving low cost airline indus...

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Non public transport

Every time I arrive in a new city by plane , I wish one of those drivers holding up those signs would be waiting for me. Not that it really ...

Monday, January 14, 2008

On my way

My latest trip to India started out just like first trip to the sub-continent: by pulling an all-nighter cleaning the apartment. Back then I...

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

New Year, New Blog, New Plans

My posting frequency has recently almost flat lined; In 2003 I think I had a few weeks where I had a post everyday; Q4 of 2007 saw one post....