Stet » The nether lands

Delving A’dam, espying Eve

Ria — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:46:52 +0000

After a series of workshops at the University of Amsterdam, we retired to Café Van Zuylen for beer and soup, waiting out the Friday evening traffic before heading south on a three-hour drive done in 2 hrs 10″, thanks to my driver’s belief that speed radars don’t work at night.

Mobile photo, edited in-camera

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End of the Non-aligned Movement

Ria — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:24:36 +0000

First HDR photo using a tripod, which means no more caffeine-induced wobbly hands and blurred photo merging.

What do you think?

This was posted on Google+…

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A very Dutch death

Ria — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:38:48 +0000

The new year had barely begun when I learned of the death of a colleague who worked in the office opposite mine. A very Dutch death, he was out cycling on New Year’s Eve, probably going home to celebrate with his wife and four kids, when he had a heart attack and ended up in

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Once more unto the intocht, dear friends

Ria — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:41:56 +0000

All of the Netherlands turned out yesterday to welcome the return of a pensionado (retiree) from Spain — Sinterklaas! And his merry band of pranksters, the Zwaartepieten (Black Peters), whose political incorrectness is tempered by the addition of fantasy Piets, such as the Elvis Piet.

Related posts: Thanks a lot, Voltaire Old habits The winter evening settles down

Content still counts

Ria — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:44:35 +0000

The law of diminishing content

First off, a disclaimer: I love discovering and using new Web 2.0 technology and tricks. However, it sometimes seems that the people I would most like to share with are the least likely to use the technology; worse still, the people who tend to dominate new media are the

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The limits of tolerance

Ria — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:08:02 +0000

The Dutch like to think of themselves as an exceptionally, even uniquely, tolerant people. The precedent is often cited as Amsterdam’s reception of refugees fleeing religious persecution in the 17th century, although London too hosted Huguenots and Jews, in perhaps greater numbers than Amsterdam. And to the outsider today, the Netherlands is not obviously more

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A little light relief

Ria — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:35:52 +0000

We are just entering a two-week period of exams and already my desk is beginning to overflow with papers to grade and regrade. While invigilating one exam this morning, filled with familiar faces of students taking the same exam for the nth time, I was inspired (actually the opposite) to make a little satire of

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Thanks a lot, Voltaire

Ria — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:48:08 +0000

News just in: seven out of ten Dutch people have participated in a poll about Geert Wilders.

Whatever issue Wilders addresses becomes the discussion of the day, and in such a way that Wilders himself becomes the issue once again. I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I read somewhere that someone’s brother-in-law overheard

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Hiatus interruptus

Ria — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:43:31 +0000

Since the start of classes in September, I’ve had very little time to blog. In addition to teaching and its concomitant demands, I’ve been getting busy with developing a learning management system (LMS) for the modern languages department. It’s based on Moodle, one of the most popular LMSs around, and offers almost infinite possibilities of

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DIY slum

Ria — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:41:45 +0000

It might come as a shocking fact to learn that in the Netherlands hundreds of children, some as young as five years old, are living in the most primitive conditions, sheltering from the rain in makeshift huts made from disused wooden pallets and scraps of cloth they managed to scavenge from the piles of trash

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