Elena is a Russian who made a motorcycle trip through the Chernobyl "dead zone". Her pictures are haunting - shades of things to come?

Her story is here.

"Most people had to leave everything, from photos of their grandparents to cars. Their clothes, cash and documents has been changed by state authorities. This is incredible, people lived, had homes, country houses, garages, motorcyles, cars, money, friends and relatives, people had their life, each in own niche and then in a matter of hours this world fall in pieces and everything goes to dogs and after few hours trip with some army vehicle one stands under some shower, washing away radiation and then step in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with very doubtful future."

There could be another "Chernobyl" anywhere there is a nuclear power plant!

Listening to Nevada Drive is like watching a David Lynch movie. At first you’re seduced by a smooth sleekness. Soft alluring vocals, easy grooves, images of elegant young things reclining on designer couches. Next moment you’re swept off to a vast desert where siren-like creatures tempt and entice you. Then a soothing voice is whispering in your ear, bringing you back home. Where you are stranded with unanswered questions that linger in your mind for days.
[from Nevada Drive web site]

A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio while driving. ID-T Radio was playing this really dreamy music. Something made me relate to it. I memorized some of the lyrics so I could look it up later.

I did find what the music was later looking on google with some of the lyrics. It turned out to be a small Amsterdam group called Nevada Drive which consists of Rene Ahoud and Christien Oele.

You can listen to their music in low-bitrate Realplayer format on their website. My favorites are Not Here and Fragile Woman.

You can order their (home-burned) CD Fernweh on the site for 10 euros+postage. It is well worth it if you like their music.

I hope that this will be the model for music distribution by small groups in the future. I am glad to buy CDs directly from the actual artists. Or even to pay to download high-quality MP3s. I don't buy many CDs any more. I feel that most of the money goes to the record companies, the store and distribution. Through the repressive contracts record companies impose on their artists, the artists are almost completely dependent on the company's good will. The Internet has the potential to democratize and liberalize the music market. At least as long as the RIAA doesn't succeed in getting a throttlehold on the Internet as well as traditional music distribution.

On Saturday, 20 March, I went to the demonstration against the occupation of Iraq held in Amsterdam. The Dutch Socialist Party supported the demonstration and I went with some fellow members. The SP believes that authority should be handed over to a democratically elected Iraqi government, and foreign troops should be under UN flag.

It was wet and rainy and the turn-out wasn't very good - about 4000 to 5000. Still it was fun trudging around Amsterdam waving our banners, flags and placards.


  
Click to see more photos.

In what I think represents a milestone in the music industry adapting to the Internet, singer George Michael has announced that in future he will offer he is going to offer his music on the Internet for anyone to download for free.

BBC News - George Michael shuns music industry

This is my first blog post. I've spent my spare hours during the last week getting the software installed and working on my server.

I chose to use the b2evolution package. Mainly because it uses PHP. Moveable Type was also a possibility, but as C/C++ veteran I'm much more at home with PHP than the (for me) strange syntax of Perl.

Everything installed fairly easily. Although, as is usual on Unix/Linux boxes I had to tweak various files and permissions to get it working. The b2evolution modules are quite flexible and the source code is fairly easy to understand. I've tweaked some of the files. (I might regret this later when upgrading to a newer version).

What has taken me the most time, however, is giving the blog page a look that I like. I did not like any of the skins provided. And the whole skin switching idea is something that the programmers are probably proud of but probably doesn't really appeal to many blog authors. The way my blog looks also says something about me. The Guadeloupe skin is simply atrocious.

So I've been fiddling with my blog's main PHP file and the related CSS style sheet. It takes a lot of fiddling! Partly because I need to ftp each changed file to my server ("Do you want to overwrite file...") and then reload the page to see the difference. I realize I could put up a local server with PHP, but that was something I didn't really want to get into right now.