November 16, 2018

Grand piano takes to the skies in Delft

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 3:34 pm

A Bechstein grand piano has been hoisted from the 16th floor of a flat building in Delft, using the highest crane available in Europe. The crane had to bridge a distance of 57 metres and a height of 54 metres.

The company doing the moving claimed that this was not something they do every day. They considered using a helicopter, but that was too complicated with the permits and all. How did the grand piano get up there in the first place? Maybe the lift was bigger a long time ago, the company speculated.

And since it’s good Dutch form to state the price of things, the move cost about 6,000 euro, with 5,000 paying for the crane rental.

The piano is being moved, as the person who owned it is deceased and the family has left it to the Dutch Musical Instrument Foundation in Amsterdam. It is a special piano the museum is very happy to have.

There’s even a video of the operation:

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of Bechstein Art Nouveau grand piano, 1902 by Count de money, some rights reserved)

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November 15, 2018

Kinderdijk is overrun by tourists and it’s getting worse

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 12:15 pm

Some years ago, my family was visiting from Québec and one of the places they insisted on visiting was the Kinderdijk, a Dutch UNESCO heritage listed place that attracts people from all around the world. At the time, we found it touristy, but not too busy or crowded. However, today if we believe the media, it’s now a lot busier to the point where the people who live there are ‘totally done with it’.

Mass tourism is getting a lot of press in Europe because it messes up local people’s living environment. In the Netherlands, places like Amsterdam and Volendam have issues with tourists, and the very small Kinderdijk is now on the list of places that are vocal about the problems it faces, as tourists don’t seem to realise people actually live there.

Only 60 people live there, and they have to deal with some 600,000 tourists a year, according to the Volkskrant newspaper. Tourists visit the windmills and learn about water drainage, and when they leave, they are given a picture of the windmills that says ‘Thanks for visiting’, which if you turn the card over says ‘600,000 visitors a year. Sixty residents. #overtourism’.

The stories range from residents being told to move out of the way, so that people can take a better picture (I’ve had that happen to me in Volendam while I was on a sailboat that was docked, and the tone of the man who told me to move didn’t make me move) to waking up to tourists eating at their picnic table and being yelled at by a photographer because the windmill wasn’t turning.

In 2010 the plan was to cap tourism at 400,000 according to a regional business plan, but now it’s 600,000 visitors and plans to grow to 850,000, which means the Kinderdijk could lose its current character.

I guess I’m glad I visited it when I did.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of Kinderdijk by Travelinho, some rights reserved)

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November 12, 2018

PostNL delivers in bins and gardens

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:14 pm

Receiving packages from PostNL, the Dutch postal service, can either be a breeze or a tragedy. Sadly, it can also be a lot of shades of frustration in between, and now there’s a Facebook group entitled ‘We hebben u gemist’ (roughly, ‘Since you weren’t home’) that collects notes left in mailboxes by delivery personnel, and a lot of them are hilarious.

“Package left in the orange bin”: yes, they leave stuff in actual bins. In this case, there was a brown bin and a grey bin, but no orange bin. Another one says ‘PAKITINTAON’ (In Dutch, it should be written as ‘Pakket in tuin’, which means ‘package in garden’, but someone just wrote it phonetically.

One of the reasons they leave a lot of notes is because people are not home during business hours (duh) or because the delivery folks want to ‘drop’ that package as fast as possible, as they are more often than not paid per delivery. For example, since my office is at home, I tend to sign for other people’s packages. You could also be a shit neighbour and steal stuff, which happens, but PostNL just wants to drop those packages wherever they can, including unguarded bins and gardens.

There’s a lot of hilarity to enjoy, especially if you can read Dutch, but I’ll share a note left by someone that sums up PostNL’s passive-aggressive work ethic: “Don’t order if you’re not going to be home. Your neighbours are also fed up of it. So are we.” PostNL pays not much and attracts people who don’t have too many options. As well, many people do this job on the side, such as students, pensioners, and so on, to give you a bit of context.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo: wehebbenugemist)

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November 4, 2018

Indian party mistakenly uses pics of Dutch bridge

Filed under: Architecture,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:22 pm

Yesterday evening, the official Twitter account of the Aam Aadmi Party, an Indian political party and currently the ruling party of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, posted a tweet saying, “Delhi! Here is your pride The Signature Bridge”, with a couple of pictures, one of which was of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam – the one on the left shown here.

India Today fact checked the photos and corrected the situation quickly by posting a YouTube video, entitled “Illumination of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam”, featuring the exact frame the AAP tweeted, at 0:27.

I’m wondering how nobody from the AAP noticed that they had a photo that didn’t match their own skyline or they just thought ‘the common man’, which is what the name of the party means apparently, wouldn’t notice. The bridge is said to be inaugurated on 5 November.

Tip: never underestimate your audience.

(Link: indiatoday.in)

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November 2, 2018

Bitcoins wrongly seized, owner loses big

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:15 pm

bitcoin-key-fob-btc_keychain

Last week, Dutch news site nu.nl wrote about a case from 2014 where the Public Prosecutor had confiscated 712 bitcoins as a result of a man having stolen electricity to mine said Bitcoins. The problem was that the judge could not determine whether the Bitcoins were mined using the stolen electricity or not.

The authorities first found 127 Bitcoins and later uncovered 585 more, for a total of 712 bitcoins. The 585 bitcoins were seized then sold, as it would have taken more effort to keep them then to sell them, a perfectly legal action according to Dutch lawyer and blogger Arnoud Engelfriet. Then again, this point is being discussed at length: why not keep the Bitcoin wallet containing the information and keys to be able to maintain the wallet?

The condition for selling seized things is that ‘their value can be determined easily’, which is not the case with Bitcoins. Selling the 127 was fine, but not the 585 found later because it could not be proven that they were mined using stolen electricity. The value of the 585 Bitcoins had to be paid to the owner, but today they would have been worth about 3.3 million euro, meaning the man is being ‘cheated’ out of a hell of a lot of money. The fact that he is a petty thief doesn’t seem to outweigh the feeling that a lot of money was lost by wrongly selling the Bitcoins.

According to jurisprudence, the value must be determined at the moment of confiscation, February 2014. The Bitcoins to be returned were then valued at the rate one week after their confiscation, €268,46 per Bitcoin, for an amount of €157.179,55.

Should we not care simply because the man was a thief in the first place? Should we be worried that in the future, courts will be slow to determine the value of Bitcoins in cases and have this sort of problem occur again? Shouldn’t we be even more worried about how dangerous it is to steal electricity?

Possibly the weirdest thing we have wrote about Bitcoins the last couple of years is the Dutchman who had a Bitcoin wallet injected into his hand, and a few other things as well.

(Links: blog.iusmentis.com, waarmaarraar.nl, nu.nl, Photo by BTC Keychain, some rights reserved)

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October 30, 2018

Dutch championship escape room scheduled for 2019

Filed under: Dutch first,Event,Gaming,General by Orangemaster @ 1:56 pm

On 7 January 2019, the first ever national championship escape room will take place in Erp, North Brabant and will involve ‘an escaped psychopath from Germany’. The goal is to find out what he’s planning, find his bombs, and thwart his plans.

According to organiser Joris van den Bergh from Erp, they’ll be three preliminary rounds before having a shot at being the winning team. In other words, it won’t be a walk in the park. There is room for 22 teams (sign up here until this Thursday), each of which should consist of four or five people. Sign-up costs 200 euro per team.

Since more than 1000 people will be participating, some 32 escape rooms will be used. The best 75 teams will go for the final in an actual castle, the location of which is still under wraps.

One of the last times we mentioned an escape room, it was one based on Anne Frank’s life, which raised a lot of eyebrows.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Photo by Aapo Haapanen, some rights reserved)

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October 19, 2018

Dutch issue first ever gender neutral passport

Filed under: Dutch first,General,History by Orangemaster @ 3:25 pm

Today, the first ever gender neutral passport has been issued to the 57-year-old Leonne Zeegers of Breda, Noord-Brabant. Instead of having a ‘v’ (‘vrouw’ = woman) or ‘m’ (‘man’, same as in English) in their passport, they have an ‘x’, making them the first Dutch person to have such a passport.

The issuing of this passport comes after a court decision earlier this year in Roermond, Limburg, claiming that gender was a question of gender identity and not of sex characteristics. When Leonne was born, the doctors were not able to determine with any certainty if they were a boy or a girl, and as such was an intergender person back when the term was not used as it is today. Back in the day, the parents had to pick a gender, so they went with male ‘because it was easier’. Later in life, Leonne realised they didn’t feel like a man, and switched their gender to female, but that didn’t help because they really felt like neither, a choice that didn’t exist back then.

Hopefully the move will also encourage many other Dutch instances to scrap registering gender for no actual reason than force of habit. According to Dutch interest groups, some 4 percent of the Dutch feel like Leonne does.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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October 14, 2018

Musical street in Zaandam sounds ‘too gay’ for some

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 3:07 pm

The city of Zaandam, North Holland has a street that is getting a name change, from Piccolo to Hobo (Oboe), both of which are musical instruments. The Zaandam neighbourhood in question already has a street called Hobo and is now going to extend it. It also has streets called Cello, and then gets into musical-related terms such as Aubade, Prelude and Mazurka, to name a few.

The people who live on Piccolo street don’t want their street to become Hobo street. In Dutch, Hobo rhymes with ‘homo’, which is used as a derogatory word for homosexual, an issue brought up back in 2016 when the area was created. And I know what some of you are thinking, ‘Hobo’ doesn’t sounds great for anybody whose first language is North American English, as that refers to a vagrant, but that’s besides the point.

There are other Hobo streets throughout the country and apparently, that’s not a problem. I’d like to think that going from Piccolo to Oboe musically is a bit of an upgrade, because – and I held back on this – in that tooty-fluity neighbourhood, there’s also a street called Fagot, the Dutch name for a bassoon, which nobody seems to complain about.

In the Netherlands, you can always live on Fart Street, but then you could also live in on a street named after Lord of The Rings characters.

(Link: noordhollandsdagblad.nl)

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October 11, 2018

Google Home Minis understand some Dutch, but not enough

Filed under: General,Technology by Orangemaster @ 1:12 pm

According to someone who works for Bright.nl, yesterday all of a sudden their Google Home Minis, a type of wireless speaker and voice command device with an integrated AI-based virtual assistant started to understand his commands in Dutch. Before then, his entire family had to ask for everything in their best American English.

After choosing Dutch as a default language, all devices stopped working except the Hue lamps, a line of colour changing LED lamps with wireless control, and the Honeywell thermostat. Sending images from the front door to the television with the Dutch command ‘Hey Google, show me the front door on TV40’ produced a YouTube video about front doors on the telly.

A day later, Hue dropped out, with an error that the lighting was no longer available. Bright hopes that Dutch language support will be working properly on 24 October when Google Home speakers will officially be available in Dutch shops. I’d hate to be working in a shop that is going to get a wave of complaints with no fix in site or be told to use it in English or German. And I wonder if it will understand those of us who speak Dutch with accents.

For the advanced class, here’s the discussion about Dutch accents within the country, such as is it Leiden, Leide or Leye? It depends where you’re from, but that’s still not good enough.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo: consumentenbond.nl)

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October 9, 2018

Sending Dutch troops to Norway without winter clothes

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:16 pm

It’s actually front page news that the Dutch military does not have to buy their own artic winter clothes for military exercises in Norway this month. A few days ago, the news was that the Dutch Ministry of Defense did not order winter clothes on time for them, with no explanation as to why they messed up, which probably means someone plain forgot or worse.

The military were asked to buy their own special winter clothes to the tune of 1000 euro per person, which was fronted by Defense. Defense claims it had to ‘possibly’ break its own rules on calls for tender to get the winter clothes on time to the more than 1000 military off to Norway later this month to carry out exercises. However, due to the time crunch, some military already bought their own gear.

What the hell was Defense thinking? Or were they thinking at all? Even Dutch Parliament was “very critical” of the idea of sending military who were given 1,000 euro to buy their own winter clothing. It may be 14 degrees in Oslo today, which is in the South of Norway, but it will be close to -20 soon enough in the North, and forgetting to equip your military is unsafe, dangerous and embarrassingly stupid.

The Dutch military have also had complaints about the quality of combat uniforms and even female military personnel have been forced to travel during work hours just to buy military approved bras.

(Link: nu.nl)

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