NevOn

Pray the name isn't Kone

If you ever get stuck in a lift, hope that it's not a lift where the emergency help system is managed by Kone.

I had a surreal experience last night, New Year's Eve, involving a Kone lift, three gorgeous women and a bottle of champagne.

We'd been celebrating the New Year Amsterdam-neighbourhood style, where you gather on the street corner just before midnight to toast in the New Year with your neighbours. Plenty of champagne and other beverages flowing freely to accompany the sound and light spectacle of fireworks going off everywhere. Very loud fireworks, especially the strings of Chinese firecrackers that were going off on just about every neighbourhood street corner (example pics on my moblog).

So at about half past midnight, we all traipsed back to Janine's place, next door to ours. Janine is the hostess with the mostest and we fully intended to continue our New Year celebration with more champagne, mince pies, etc.

Like ours, Janine's place is on the top floor. Unlike most apartment buildings in Amsterdam, though, we have lifts. No mountain-climbing steep flights of stairs in our neighbourhood!

Our lifts are quite compact so we took it in shifts: half of our group took the lift then sent it back down for the rest of us.

And so it was that Janine, Micky, Karen and I squeezed into the lift for our flight to the top floor. Except we didn't go up, we went down. About two feet, to the basement buffer. And stopped.

Uh oh. Door wouldn't open. None of the floor buttons would work. We were stuck.

Video presentation on PR and the blogosphere

In mid October, I participated in a session at the Emerce eDay conference in Amsterdam entitled Public Relations in the Blogosphere.

The session comprised two presentations followed by a panel discussion. The two presentations were made by Scott Rafer and I, and were video recorded.

That video is now online and you can view it via Google Video. In total, it's just over 35 minutes and you can watch Scott and I separately presenting on this topic. We both talked about different subject matter but all to do with the primary theme - PR in the blogosphere:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7497036260870920356&q=winkeldermaat

The conference organizers have made a PDF version of my presentation PowerPoint available so you can download it if you want to follow the slides along with the video.

Speaking at E-Day Amsterdam

Heading off to the Emerce E-Day conference taking place today in Amsterdam.

I'm participating in a panel discussion broadly titled Public Relations in The Blogosphere. My fellow panelists are Scott Rafer, Frank Janssen, Paul Molenaar and Hans Mestrum.

We hope to have a stimulating and dynamic multi-lingual discussion (Dutch and English) on issues and strategies for PR.

There is a conference blog which features live blogging (in Dutch) during the day so you can follow events. Sessions including mine are being videoed and organizers VNU plan to make those recordings available  after the event. There will be info about streaming video on the event website.

More later.

Technorati: emerce eday

Customer service from UPC? Fat chance!

Is waiting a week for your cable TV service to be fixed a reasonable time? Is it right to expect that the cable guy who's coming to fix your service at an appointed time actually shows up? And is it reasonable to expect that, when you call customer service for the third time and they tell you they'll call you back, that they actually do and reasonably quickly?

As a customer of UPC Nederland, I think these are reasonable expectations. But clearly UPC don't think so.

Our cable TV service conked out last Tuesday. Switched the TV on at lunchtime to catch the news, and no signal on any channel. A check of things showed that everything was connected up correctly and the VCR and DVD player worked fine, just no TV signal via the cable.

So we called UPC customer service on their 10 Eurocents a minute support line. Amazing response from that department - they said first thing to do is to go around the neighbourhood asking the neighbours if they have cable TV service or not. If yes, then connect another TV to make sure it's not a fault with the first TV. Well, maybe our demographic isn't the right one for UPC, but we have only the one TV.

To cut a long story short after that nonsense, we made an appointment for the cable guy to come. The earliest time was yesterday between 8 and 1.

He didn't show up.

Another conversation with customer support yesterday afternoon revealed that while our appointment was "in the system," the news of that appointment hadn't reached the cable guy. The helpful customer service representative said he'd investigate and call me back.

He didn't call.

Net chaos in Amsterdam

Since about midday yesterday, Wednesday, I've been without net access along with several hundred other people in the part of Amsterdam where I am. Still no service this morning.

No dial-up any more: none of my PCs has the capability to connect to the net via a normal phone line (how we progress!). So I'm writing this post from an internet cafe downtown.

From what KPN, the Dutch telecom company, and XS4ALL, my ISP, told me in my frequent calls to them during Wednesday, there was a complete outage of DSL service in Amsterdam affecting hundreds of subscribers. No one could say what the problem was nor when it would be fixed. All KPN would say was that they were working on fixing it, whatever it was.

In one of my conversations with KPN yesterday, the otherwise-helpful support person suggested I check the ISP's website for info. Duh! Hello?!

At 11.00am this morning, there was still no net service. Speaking to KPN early this morning, they told me that the problem had now been fixed although still unable to say what the problem was. If I still had no connection, then full service restoration was in the hands of my ISP, they said. They also said that other parts of The Netherlands were without DSL service.

Simply a gorgeous day

Today's one of those city days when the weather is just perfect. Wall-to-wall sunshine, 25 degrees C (about 77 F), about 50 percent humidity. For this part of western Europe, it doesn't get much more pleasant than this in a city.

Here in Amsterdam, it's been pretty dismal during the past few weeks. A couple of pleasant-ish days but mostly cloud and usually rain. Today, though, made up for all that.

I took the photo above at about 3pm this afternoon, a view from my home office balcony looking south towards the World Trade Center. Contrast this with the scenes of heavy snow I shot from this same position back in March.

Incredibly, the weather's even looking good for at least three days in succession during the coming week according to Forecastfox, my Firefox weather widget. Blimey!

Incidentally, it's not only the English who always talk about the weather - the Dutch do as well (probably because the weather here and in the eastern part of England is, generally, quite similar). I add another dimension to that - an Englishman living in The Netherlands. So I can talk about it in English and Dutch ;)

Amsterdam's giant street party

On 30 April each year, The Netherlands celebrates Queen's Day, or Koninginnedag to give it its formal Dutch label.

Queen's Day is ostensibly about celebrating the birthday of Queen Beatrix. Indeed, the monarch spends the day visiting towns throughout the country as part of the celebrations. This year, 2005, is a special one as it marks the 25th year of Queen Beatrix' accession to the Dutch throne as head of the House of Orange-Nassau.

These days, Queen's Day is more about having a lot of fun, especially in Amsterdam. There are street parties everywhere, with thousands of people setting out stalls in every neighbourhood to sell literally anything. It's just an enormous flea market as throughout the city, shops are closed as the pavements are filled with display after display of... whatever!

Bars do a roaring trade, as you'd expect, especially in the city center as does anyone connected with the hospitality industry. This year, there are reports that almost every hotel room in Amsterdam was fully booked in anticipation of the celebrations and parties.

So this afternoon, my wife and I took a stroll from our neighbourhood in the Oud-Zuid district of the city, up to the Museumplein and back again.

Along the way, I took about 70 photos all of which I've uploaded to Flickr. I've also recorded a brief 3-minute audio commentary (MP3, 1.5Mb) to accompany those photos.

Enjoy!

Talk and images about Blognomics

Yesterday's Blognomics conference at the RAI conference center in Amsterdam was a terrific event. With about 85 participants, there were so many great people to meet.

I commented about it in yesterday's edition of the Hobson & Holtz Report podcast, so I won't repeat all that here in a post.

If you'd like to listen to my 10-minute commentary, download the show (MP3, 27Mb); the Blognomics commentary starts at about 24 minutes 19 seconds into the show.

Already, there are plenty of other blog posts about the event, mostly in Dutch - check them at this Technorati link. Also, some media will report on the event. For instance, I was interviewed by NRC Handelsblad, one of the leading Dutch dailies, so I expect there will be some event coverage there. In fact, there was a strong media showing at Blognomics so I expect there will be more coverage in other Dutch media.

I've just uploaded 20 photos to Flickr. I saw that Guido van Nispen and Krijn Schuurman have taken some great photos, all up on Flickr as well. You can see all the photos there with the blognomics tag.

In all, I think Blognomics will have done a great job in raising more awareness in the Dutch business and political community.

Update Edit: I must also mention that Frank Meuuwsen was live video casting during the whole event - laptop, webcam and wi-fi meant he could do that.

All Frank's videocasts are in Dutch, but go take a look anyway at the 10 'casts he did. Terrific example of what you can do, anywhere, any time, with a bit of imagination,  the right kit and a connection to the net.

The colours of Keukenhof

One of the things The Netherlands is well known for is flowers, tulips in particular. And there's one place in particular where you can see tulips of every single type imaginable. Not only tulips, but also other flowers including rare orchids.

That place is Keukenhof outside the town of Lisse, about a 20-minute drive from Amsterdam towards The Hague.

Keukenhof is the place where, each year from late March to late May, nearly 100 Dutch bulb-growing companies exhibit the best and most beautiful flowers in The Netherlands. Keukenhof has become one of the best-known attractions in the country and one of the most photographed sights in the world, with some 700,000 visitors each year.

The Keukenhof estate is a big place, covering some 30+ hectares (74 acres). The grounds are filled with flowers of every type. At this time of year, not many are yet in bloom - May is the best time to go for seeing a kaleidoscope of colour wherever you look.

But we took a family trip to Keukenhof today. The various exhibition halls, being under cover and with controlled environments, have all the flowers you could want to see in full and spectacular bloom.

One point in going is to capture what you see on disk (no, not film any more). So I took quite a few photos and I've just uploaded them to Flickr.

Feast your eyes on the colours of Keukenhof!

A stroll through the neighbourhood

Today is the first really spring-like day of the year in Amsterdam. A hazy but sunny day, temperature about 19 Celsius (about 66 F), so it felt nice for my wife and I to take a stroll for an hour or so around our neighbourhood with my camera this afternoon.

I snapped quite a few pics, real amateur snapshot stuff. Some crocuses in bloom here, some daffodils there, plus quite a few of the buildings and architecture of the World Trade Center and surroundings.

I've uploaded those photos to Flickr where you can view them as a slideshow. Contrast these views with the winter snow scene from just a few weeks ago.

One thing you'll notice from the photos is that the area where we are in Amsterdam - the Oud-Zuid district - isn't the typical Amsterdam scene that might spring to mind. Most of the residential buildings in this area were build between 1900 and 1935, so relatively modern constructions. So it's not an area of pretty 17th-century canal-side houses - for pictures of those, see my TypePad photo album of last year's Gay Pride Parade in August, with photos taken along the Prinsengracht downtown.

The other thing is that this is the first time I've really used Picasa to any extent. This really is an excellent photo management and manipulation application, and its free. What I especially like is that I just insert my camera's memory card into the PC; Picasa opens and loads all the pics, I fill in some details in the dialog box and that's it. It then deletes the photos from the card which then goes back into the camera ready for next time.

The collage pic you see here was automatically created by Picasa from the ones I took today. Neat! A much bigger (1600x1200) original image than the one I have here (I used Paint Shop Pro 7 to make this smaller-size copy).

How easy it all is.

Edit: Oops. Yes, it is all easy as well easy to not pay attention. That collage pic was just too big (400 pixels width), so I've replaced it with one at 300 pixels width.