I’m a huge fan of windmills and wind turbines. They beautify the skyline like nothing else. Windmills of this size must be breathtaking and I most definitely would visit them as if it were the Eiffel Tower (what’s the Eiffel Tower next to something this beautiful, right?).

These stunning images were created by On Office, an architecture collective who have clearly found an appealing way to communicate their work and ideas. Pitching projects to people who want to see results immediately can be a frustrating process. Before facing a technical implementation team who will want to know how your masterpiece idea can become reality, you’ll probably have to face an enthusiastic board of directors who only think of the end product and how their immediate peer group will associate their names with wow, that’s awesome the things you guys are doing over at …. That’s why in a first phase you really have to be able to trigger the emotional layer and get your audience jumping up and down because they are going to be owners of something fantastic. What better way to do this than present images like these which get the imagination flowing.

And also, did I mention wind turbines are awesome?!

Minority Report seems to be getting closer. Several devices are being released (or at least I’ve just heard of them for the first time) with (semi)transparent screens thanks to the OLED technology. My only question is if people can see the content on your screen from the other side (I wouldn’t necessarily appreciate co-workers staring at every word I type). I’m wondering how far we are from technology that can produce screens which don’t need a surface to project an image. A video ‘screen’ in the sense of a laser sword would be awesome. The only thing you’d need would be a small bar which emits the screen.

In the mean while 3D-TV made our national news today. Apparently Sony will be releasing TV’s and other devices which can handle 3D. Already they released a 3D-TV end 2008 but you still needed the special glasses to get the effect. This time we’re talking 3D-TV without the need for any kind of glasses, something called autostereoscopic screens. I don’t know if watching people die on the news is something I’d prefer to be immersed in but ESPN‘s promise to show sports games shot in 3D should quite the experience.

Now all we need is TV’s with smell. But not for sports, please.

Or you could watch this documentary which aired on Fox channel in 2001, also initiated by Bill Kaysing, in which the video footage of NASA is scrutinized for inconsistencies. Rippling flags by non-existent wind on the moon, light where there should be shadow, different shadow lengths, etc.

Kaysing died in 2005 but sparked the interest of Bart Sibrel who took it on to continue the mission of uncovering the truth about the moon landings and directed a documentary called “A funny thing happened on the way to the moon“.

Who hasn’t heard of 72-year-old second-man-on-the-moon Buzz Aldrin punching Sibrel when the latter calls him a liar and some other non-flattering names?

After that you could read NASA’s official rebuttal of all of the above in their special press release in 2001. You could also look into the allegation that Stanley Kubrick, hot off “2001: A Space Odyssey“, was hired by the US government to shoot al the moon landing scenes. And if after this you still have time, find a good overview of everything on this topic at Wikipedia.

Or you could just sit back and watch the new digitally enhanced version of this legendary moment where mankind unveiled some of the mystery surrounding the universe.

The software is just slow, very slow. Rebooting my BB is necessary almost every 2 days, which means taking out the battery and waiting 10 minutes for it to startup again. Answering a call is a pain seeing the green ‘answer call’ button on the screen rotates with the screen position thanks to the automatic vertical/panorama screen rotation. The number of missed calls because of this is above 75% for sure. Another loss for the BB Storm is the much criticized lack of WiFi on this ought-to-be hypermodern phone (although the BB Storm 2.0 is said to have given in to consumers complaints). Surfing only happens through the 3G-network (which is luckily rather good thanks to Belgacom/Proximus  in Belgium) and thus doesn’t allow for the speed of your own Internet connection.

Coming back to the slow software of the BB Storm, it just isn’t made for fancy stuff. Get your e-mails, answer phone calls (if you can overcome the struggle with the rotating screen) and write text messages with the ‘full-size’ keyboard. But don’t try iPhone stuff, it’s just not made for it. My BB has finally pulled me out of denial; I’m a boring manager.

I switched to Mac in November 2008 and have given it some time to see what change it brings. Surrounded by Mac fanatics means hearing no objective statements whatsoever. Mac is heaven and everybody should know. For five years I’ve sported a Sony Vaio laptop single processor which has worked remarkably well. It got a bit slow but until the end it could compete with most pc’s I came across. I was always amazed by how slow most pc’s are and how well mine was holding up. Anyways, the screen gave away and the hard-drive just died one day. I’ve given Mac a spin the past months and I must say I’m very pleased with it. Its intuitive and slick design gives you the impression just working on it is already an artistic expression.

I must say I expected it to be way more powerful than what I was used to but I think my expectations were a little too high. Multitasking is going well but it is nowhere near the perfection most Mac’onites claim it is. It does get stuck once every while, the little colored circle nothing near to completely absent, the heating system has a mind of its own with sudden stretches of intense ventilating, some keyboard shortcuts have rather weird effects sometimes, etc. My SuperDrive broke three months after I bought it and takes all inserted DVD’s for a crazy clicking rattling spin which requests a complete hard stop (yes, pulling out the battery). I’m waiting for some larger design projects to be done so I can bring it back to the store (one year guarantee, right?).

I still wouldn’t go back to a pc … ever. There’s plenty of things I love and didn’t know were on it. ‘Inspect element’ in Safari browser is one of the greatest inventions ever (does it exist in other browsers, too?). And the lack of need for security measures is refreshing as well. Although I’ve just installed some free antivirus thingy it doesn’t bother me with popups every second. ‘Finder’ is a good experience with the column view. It does make file searching a lot handier, especially together with the very fast real-time search option which seems to be rather slow in Vista. And I’ve had fun with the speech commands telling my Mac to ‘tell me a joke’.

Enough of that nerd talk. It just works, this Mac thing. But it ain’t heaven. Maybe a little cloudy, but not heaven.