TV when I was young pt 1.

Okay, I'm back from the summer school so now there's time to get started on the TV shows that I used to watch when I was in England (1990-1993). Warning: I was between the age of 5 and 9, so this contains a lot of awful stuff. First off: (Game)shows.

• Perhaps the weirdest gameshow that I can remember was Channel 4's crystal maze. A bunch of contestants would run around a large set and complete quests/puzzles in rooms created on set in order to win crystals. For each crystal collected time was earned in the crystal dome, a transparent chamber with high wind speeds that kept a bunch of banknotes flying around. Any money that was caught could be kept. Random compilation clip here.
• A more traditional gameshow was ITV's Blockbusters, in which the object is to build a bridge (as far as I can remember) across a field of hexagons by answering a question correctly for each hexagon. The intro is up on youtube here.
• Though I can't find a clip of it to show how bad it was, I did occasionally watch Bob's your uncle, which is a gameshow in which newly weds would compete against each other. Probably it was popular because of Bob Monkhouse. Some info about the format is here.
• I also watched the Generation Game (which restarted in 1990 and ran until 2002, though started in 1971-1982) with the at that time popular Bruce Forsyth. Apparently the concept is Dutch, or so Wikipedia says here. The idea is that someone shows something (usually requiring training) and then unprepared contestants try to do the same. Also had some shows in between, such as this example here.
• And then there's Noel's houseparty, which showed al kinds of things, but will be remembered most for the creation of Mr. Blobby. Example from the show here. They even managed to get a Christmas No.1 hit with this terrible thing here.
  

Hoax of the week: Reverse PIN code

There's a (Dutch) e-mail going around that states that when you are forced by someone to withdraw cash from your account you should enter your pincode in reverse order. This supposedly alerts the police whilst still giving you your cash to avoid nastiness. NOT TRUE, it's a hoax. When even the NVB (Dutch banking association) denies it (here), you can be certain that it isn't so.

UPDATE Jan 2009: If wikipedia is to be believed, this could be based on a proposed system that hasn't been implemented. More info at wikipedia's ATM Safety PIN Software article.

Random links...

In the first link list in ages:

• One brilliant prank here.
• One YouTube account (stupid game show answers) here.
• One of those annoying 'did you know...' films here, and the excellent parody here.
• Boring geek stuff... laptops with the Intel PM965 express chipset are listed with 2GB and 4GB max RAM. Which one is it? The chipset supports 4GB, windows 32 Bit supports 4GB (here), no wait, it doesn't it kind of supports 4GB, but only 3GB really, though hardware can use the rest, kind off (here). Erm... Now there's room for misleading advertising...

Soon to come: what I used to watch on TV as a 5-8 year old (as it differs from the list by H., who e-mailed the Dutch version some time ago.

Amsterdam-Dakar, €500

The latter being the maximum price to be paid for the car that should be used. The challenge is to then spend only €150 on repairs and then drive the thing to Dakar to sell it off for charity. Always wondered about the people who do that. I met one of them today, and I think the things that shone through were enthusiasm, optimism and the drive to get things done. Anyway, good luck to them! Details about the challenge and the charities at www.amsterdamdakar.com, details about the team the person I spoke to belongs to here.

Blogger feed widget not updating..

Or it least it seemed that way, only hitting ctrl-F5 displayed the newer posts for the other blogs in the sidebar. That's why I've set this page to not be cached, though I haven't tested whether this works. The implementation I use is the tag 'meta equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"/' in the html header (between the 'head' tags) (single quotation marks used in the text in stead of brackets as I'm too lazy to format this post correctly). Complaints via the comments below...

UPDATE: it seems to work, for now...

The Quick Summary...

Starting off in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) (forests, hills, cake)...

...with some cities for good measure...

...and ending up in the mountains (and the rain later set in).

A small dose of... Limburgian history

One of the more noticeable features of the province of Limburg is the small & narrow section linking the area around Maastricht to the rest of the province. This apparently has its roots in the formation of the province of Limburg from former Prussian lands (Some forms of Limburgian refer to Germany and Germans as Prussia and Prussians) in the convention of Vienna in 1815. At this convention land was allocated to the Netherlands in order to keep the French surrounded by strong nations [yeah..., right]. At the time, Belgium was still part of the Netherlands (until the rebellion in 1830, in which Limburg tried to become Belgian, but ultimately failed). This explains why the Dutch border has such a shape, but the thin part already existed before the belgian rebellion. Though the area has always been kind of a mess (interactive map in the left frame here), there is no logical reason for this. The reason that is mentioned, however, is that the width of the province was determined by the width of a canon shot. How this fits into everything I have yet to find out.

The other thing is the German region of Selfkant, which is now the most western german municipality. Some people may know it as the (former) Dutch municipality of Tudderen, which it was for a limited amount of time. After the second world war the Dutch wanted compensation for damages from the Germans. The way this was organised was by transferral of German land to the Netherlands, Selfkant being one such area. This happened in 1949 and stayed that way until 1963 when Germany paid 280 million DM to get the area back. In the meantime, however, the Netherlands had built a main road linking Roermond and Heerlen through the area. This road wasn't handed back until 2002. As the road had no level crossings with German roads, the road could be used without the necessity of carrying a passport. In fact, if you look at the satellite images in google maps (here) there are now still only two level crossings in the stretch of 'Niederländische Durchgangstrasse'.

Progress...

...with cleaning up the site. Though I've lost my list of blogs. So if you feel you should be mentioned , let me know. I've removed some of the non-active blogs (the teaparty and nican nicuica), yet these will be replaced with the newer blogs of the respective authors as soon as I find out where they can be found. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't been able to add the recently closed blog of Olivier (...wo man sein Herz verliert...), but here's a mention anyway.

For the technical details: the site template was updated to be compatible with the new blogger templates and then rebuilt. I.e. the java scripts and corresponding CSS that were in the old template were added back in and I've used the widgets to rebuild the sidebar. Of course, the widgets aren't formatted the way I want them out of the box, so the CSS part of the site was modified along with some of the widget code that resides in the template. The dead links have also been removed from the sidebar. I'm leaving the old posts alone, though the re-addition of the scripts mean that they will function normally with the exception of the imageshack images, of which a number have randomly been lost over at imageshack.

Site maintenance scheduled...

For the lone (or so) visitor who sometimes strays onto this near-abandoned site:
Site maintenance and overhaul is planned for this month. Content maybe to resume thereafter.