Lately, on weekday mornings, I have been waking up at about 5:45, give or take 10 minutes. My alarm is set for 6:00. This has been going on for a few months now and it’s a bit disconcerting. It doesn’t matter when I go to bed; my internal clock somehow still beats the electric one. With such an early wake-up time, I have been able to arrive at work at around 7:20, which means I can leave at 4, which is great. Well, it would be great if there was a bus to catch at 4:10. But the first bus is scheduled for 4:27 and more often arrives after 4:30. More »

I recently sat down with Encarta Instant Answers, a new Artificial Intelligence robot from Microsoft that works through MSN Messenger. I asked it about what it’s like to answer millions of questions of thousands of strangers. More »

One of the biggest hypes on the Internet this year has been Google Maps. The ability for web designers to use the Google Maps API free of charge and use the real-time satellite and map imagery software is just brilliant. Thousands of sites are using it, and I’m amazed that Google’s servers can cope with all the traffic. It’s dead-easy too — I had a play and set up this map of our travels fairly quickly. But what’s with the lack of map details outside the US, Canada, Japan and the U.K.? Not even capitals (like Paris, Rome or Sydney) are marked. More »

It’s well over two months after Talk Like A Pirate Day, but pirates are a hot topic at the moment. While Disney has been working all week to keep spoilers of their two Pirate sequels off the web, the set of Pirates of the Carribean (see the brand-new Dead Man’s Chest trailer!) has been visited by real pirates. The production has come to a halt after four robberies in which $20,000 worth of cash and equipment were taken from the set, and two cast members were “forced to flee for their lives”. More »

My brother, film-maker Patrick de Wolf, has won a bronze medal and the special award of film-maker with a promising future for his 12-minute short Tarot at the Netherlands NOVA National Film Festival 2005 for amateurs this weekend. More »

The east of the Netherlands is getting 3 cm of snow every hour causing chaos on the roads during this busiest-ever rush hour. Right now there are over 600 km 800 km of traffic jams on the Dutch highways. The Dutch KNMI weather service’s new color-coded weather system has gone to orange for most of the country, indicating heavy snow. It is advising people to stay off the roads. More »

George Lucas talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the end of DVD’s and the future of pay-per-view.

Earlier this year I learned that Ewan McGregor would be in a West End revival of Guys and Dolls. Being a fan of both the Scottish actor and popular musicals, I decided we had to see a performance. So in May we booked the major components of a long weekend trip: the easyJet flight; the easyHotel room and the theatre tickets. More »

Did you know that the Pilgrims lived in Leiden, the Netherlands, for 11 years before boarding the Mayflower in 1620? They lived around the Pieterskerk, where today the annual Thanksgiving Day Service is held at 11:00am. More »

Leiden is a great place to live for a lot of reasons. It is picturesque, with cute small streets and old shop fronts, a moat-like canal around the center and several waterways passing through the middle, plus city gates, a castle fortification, and windmills. More »