Today was Koninginnedag (the queen's birthday) in the Netherlands. Although the 30th is celebrated as the queen's birthday, it is not her real birthday, it is actually the queen's mother's birthday. (The Queens Beatrix's mother, Juliana, passed away a few weeks ago.)

In any case, in Amsterdam the day is big street festival, a bit like carnival in other countries. The celebrations have little to do with the royalty, except that people dress up in orange, which is the colour of the House of Orange. It is more a day of national celebration.

People sell things (mostly old junk) on the street, children play music or sell home-made cookies. There are music bands and street theater (especially for children). It is just one big party. And a day when Amsterdammers feel closer to each other than on other days.

This year we went again to the Bredewegfestival in Watergraafsmeer in East Amsterdam. There is always a lot for children to do there, and the crowds are mostly locals, without any of the aggressive groups of young men which have become a problem in the city center.

Toos street orchestra played well and put on an entertaining show. The band Jazz Alert also kept things swinging.

I have posted a gallery here.

    

At the Scripting News Dinner on Monday evening, Ed Alkema told a story about how his company invested in WAP only to find that it was not a viable proposition for a small enterprise to develop applications, because operators had developed their own browsers, and had different interpretations of what was supposed to be a standard.

Adam Curry has pointed out that there is a risk of the same thing happening to the RSS world. Dave Winer agrees.

I am not that technically literate on RSS and Atom, but I do have experience in software development. Looking at a comparison of RSS and Atom, it is probably true that it might be possible to support both RSS and Atom right now. The problem is that they will inevitably start to diverge. RSS is probably not perfect, but it is well-supported, and it works, which is the main thing.

The really bad thing is that Google (through their subsidiary blogger.com) is trying to force Atom on the blog community by not supporting RSS on the more than a million blogs they host.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having rival technologies. In the end the marketplace and (sometimes) the better technology wins. Given the huge installed base and wide support for RSS, Atom probably wouldn't have much chance. I think that is possibly why Google is trying to force the issue.

Google might be a small company, but it has a huge influence on the Internet. Companies literally spend tens of thousands of dollars to improve their ranking on Google searches. That's how important Google is perceived as being. If your site does not get listed on Google because it supports RSS and Google wants Atom, you have a big problem.

I'm getting anxious that Google might be beginning to emulate Microsoft's methods. It's hard to have faith in the neutrality of a search engine company when it is obviously partisan. I think Adam's concerns are justified.

Tonight I went to the Scipting News Dinner in Amsterdam, which was held at De Waag on the Nieuwmarkt.

I have read Dave Winer's Scripting News for several years. It is one newsletter that I always skim every day, and I almost always find some link that I am interested in.

Dave Winer (of course) and Adam Curry were there. It was interesting to see how varied the people were who turned up. There was Jon, a Canadian from Vancouver, a Dutch photographer who had interesting stories about his assignment in the North of Iraq, Ed whose company does lotteries via SMS, Peter, Jort, Andrew from Harvard, and Daniel, a Parisian living in Amsterdam.

It was interesting to talk. We really neeeded more time but I did meet some interesting people. I hope we can get together again some time.

Thanks for paying for the dinner Adam.

De Wallenwinkel is a store in Amsterdam's Red Light District which provides information about prostitution (for prostitutes and clients) and sells books, souvenirs and other itesm related to the Red Light District.

Sybille and I went to the official opening on Friday. A ceremony performed by "Miss Red Light District '94" assisted by "Mr. Cock van der Ring".

The Wallenwinkel is owned by a friend, Mariska Majoor. She was once a prostitute but later founded the Prostitution Information Center. I have a great deal of respect for her. She has had to overcome many problems in her life (which I won't go into), but she is always optimistic. Whenever I ask how things are going, she never fails to smile and say "we're doing well."

She is also one of the most enterprising people I know. One of her most interesting projects was an experiment in which male prostitutes (for women) sat behind Amsterdam's (in)famous red-lit windows. Although the project had to closed down because of the commotion it caused, the guys did get a lot of customers in a very short time.

Mariska has done a great job redecorating the store. If you are ever in the Red Light District, make sure you pay it a visit.

In addition to the store, Mariska does a lot of social work among prostitutes and is a vocal advocate of prostitutes' rights.

Her husband, Willem Haurissa, is originally from the Molluccas. In 2000, he sat for three weeks in front of the Dutch parliament to draw attention to the situation in the Molluccas, which the Dutch government essentially sold out to Indonesia in 1950.

The opening was great fun, with lively Cuban music on the street and three "waitresses" who enjoyed showing off tremendously. It was a memorable afternoon, and one that could only have happened in Amsterdam.

I have posted a gallery here.

    

I tried to fix the washing machine yesterday. It's (or it was) an AEG Öko Lavamat 6450, about 9 years old.

It stopped working last week. Instead of turning it would just make a whirring noise. I got around to opening it up two days ago and it turned out that all that was wrong was that the belt between the motor and drum had frayed and come off.

So a simple repair, I thought. Just get a new belt from the electical parts store.

I paid through the nose for one: 18 euros. The parts store (or the manufacturer, or both) charge ridiculous prices. Their price point seems to be determined by how much they think you're prepared to pay. In any case, I duly replaced the belt. It all looked fine. I did a small test wash and all was okay. So now to catch up with the washing...

The washing went fine. I looked every now and again. All okay.
All was fine until it was spinning. Well even the spinning seemed to be fine...

All of a sudden the power in the whole house went off.
I took a look at the washing machine - it was smoking!

Smoke was seeping out of every crack and opening. And there was a terrible electrical fire sort of stench. It kept on coming too. More and more of it.

I opened up the back and the motor was smoldering. Luckily it seemed be slowly getting less.

So that's the end of an AEG washer.

I'll never buy an AEG washing machine again. We've had no end of problems with it. And two families we know also had so many problems that they have also vowed never to buy another. Maybe that's coincidence - AEG is supposed to have a good name - but it's too much coincidence for me.

Their #$%# washer could even have burned the house down. And that burnt stench is still there to remind me, grrr...

I think this is an interesting new concept: Until now the web may have been world-wide, but mainly in the virtual rather than the physical sense. There was no link from websites to their geographic locations. It doesn't always make sense to tie a website to a geographic location, of course. But even if it doesn't make sense, it can be fun anyway. And for many sites such as blogs, organizations and business it does make sense.

You might have noticed the small GeoURL button on this page. The button displays a list of websites that are geographically near to me.

The GeoURL database is simply a list of websites and their corresponding longitudes/latitudes. [Okay, so someone could use this to target an ICBM at you, but why would they?]

To add your site to their database you have to add a few meta tags to the header of your index page. You can find information about how to do that on the GeoURL main page.

I found it harder than I thought to find out my coordinates. There are a list of sites that can do this for you on GeoURL, but I found multimap.com to be the easiest to use.



Click to show the map in MultiMap.