One of my pet peeves is geographical restrictions. With the internet connecting the entire world, it just doesn't make sense to me to restrict access to content based on someone's location. Suppose I heard about this band, and I want to check their music out. So I go to YouTube and search for them. Oh, look, that's nice, an official video. So I click play, and all I get is a message saying that this video isn't available in your country. That's like saying, Oh, hi there! So you want to check out this video we made? That's awesome. Oh, but wait: haha! You can't! You're in The Netherlands, we're in the U.S.A., suck it! Well, no. What'll happen is this: I go somewhere else, you suck it.

Enter Paul Mutant. When I first saw his This Painting is Not Available in Your Country I was all, like, OMGWTFBBQawesomesauce. Do want. Unfortunately, that painting isn't available.

But prints are:

This painting is not available in your country.

(If this doesn't look right, use a real browser, like Firefox, Opera or Chrome.)

You see, there's no such thing as the "Contract for the Foundation of the European Community." Google isn't helping much, as searching for this cryptic disclaimer only leads to other people wondering what the hell it means. There are two prime candidates: the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community or the European Convention on Human Rights. In the former, articles 9 and 10 are about the free movement of goods within the union. Since this package came from the US, it shouldn't apply. In the European Convention on Human Rights these articles cover the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and to freedom of expression respectively. Which seems a better fit, but it's still weird.

Anyway, given the actual content of the package, it's an approriate warning. Because, and may the blubbering and gibeous Elder Gods have mercy on us insignificant mortals, one should bloody well hope that this kind of arcane knowledge remains forbidden and forgotten.

(Baby's First Mythos by C.J. Henderson, illustrated by Erica Henderson)

I love that song to bits.

Last year, I found out that it was going to be sung by Maaike Vos on X Factor, one of those countless "talent shows" on television. So I went to YouTube and watched it. Before the song was halfway done, it was clear to me that it was a completely inoffensive, forgettable and superfluous cover, so I shut it down and forgot all about it.

Apparently, it was released as a singe, and did reasonably well on the Dutch charts. A few weeks ago this was brought to my attention, when I heard the song twice on one night. The first time I thought I heard something odd, which made me pay more attention the second time. And indeed, my suspicion was confirmed: Maaike was singing the wrong words.

You see, neither the original LP nor the reissued CD version of Nightout contain any lyrics. And unless you happen to find the right page on my website, it's slim pickings for Ellen Foley lyrics on the internet. Most lyrics sites just have the words to "We Belong to the Night" and "What's a Matter Baby", while occasionally you'll find the lyrics for Another Breath, which is quite incidentally the only album where the lyrics were included.

It seems to me that those lyrics sites copy each other's content, without checking if it is correct. And since whomever did the first transcription of "We Belong to the Night" got a couple of lines wrong, it isn't all that surprising that those faulty lines are all over the place. While the first verse is mostly correct, the second verse is a complete trainwreck: The music that we hear in our hea[r]ts gives us something to dream of / 'Cause when that lonely soul that calls, it's those dreams that we'll need / To keep us strong, to take us far / Far away from the pain of the days / 'Cause that's a cruel mental start / But baby, we, we belong to the night.

That does not make sense on any level. I could go along with needing dreams if a lonely soul calls out for you, but what, in the name of all things bright and shiny, is a "cruel mental start"? And how does a cruel mental start relate to the dreams we need to keep us strong and to take us far away from the pain of the days? When I first started working on my Nightout page, I used the widely available lyrics as a starting point, but I knew that they couldn't be correct, because, well, it does not make sense.

According to the latest version of my transcription, the lyrics should be:

Dancin' on the street in the heat of the neon
The quiet and the cool night air makes it easy to breathe
The music that we hear in our hearts
Gives us something to dream ofon
'Cause when that lonely sunlight comes
It's those dreams that we'll need

To keep us strong, to take us far
Far away from the pain of the days
'Cause like the moon and the stars

Oh baby, we, we belong to the night
Yes, baby we, we belong to the night
By day we just survive but after dark, we come alive
'Cause baby we, we belong to the night....

Now, doesn't that make a lot more sense? The song is about a boy and a girl lost in the big city, but at night, when they dance, everything seems alright. For in the morning, when the sun comes up, they hear the music in their hearts, that lets them dream and that gets them through the day. Those dreams keep them strong and take them far away, far from the pain of the day, because—like the moon and the stars—they belong to the night. That, or it's a song about vampires.

While someone singing the wrong words to a song I love is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it annoys me to no end. Also, it pisses me off that none of the people involved seemed to care what the song they were recording was supposed to be about. Apparently, it's totally acceptable to just sing whatever is on the lyric sheet. Why should you care what you sing, as long as you can hit the right notes at the right time? For me, this explains why this cover does absolutely nothing for me: it was made just to have a song for a talent contest, and the singer has no involvement with song, emotionally or artistically, whatsoever. As we would say on the twitters, #epicfail.

Disclaimer: I should, for the record, state that I'm not implying that every word of my transcription is correct. English isn't my native tongue, and I'm doing the best I can. I'm pretty sure that the (almost) complete lyric archive is littered with errors. It's just that this song is so epicly wrong that I don't think it's funny anymore.

update 2011-03-01 I've adjusted my transcription once again, based on a YouTube-comment by Fred Goodman, who co-wrote "We Belong to the Night" with Ellen. That'll teach me to disable YouTube's comments. Although: 99% of the comments on YouTube are utterly useless.

Just go to the official website, ikzoekdekking.nl, and witness the horror in the footer.

It's a fucking disgrace that the Dutch government pays tax-money for anything that uses comic fucking sans. It's not as if the Dutch government is three years old and this campaign is the equivalent of an invitation to a birthday party. (Hint: unless the invitation is actually made by a three-year-old who doesn't know better, there isn't any good excuse to use comic fucking sans.)

The website, however, does get bonus points for using web-fonts, but I'll have to deduct several points for not caring how these look—bump the font-size for the navigation two pixels up and it looks a lot better—and for not checking if the site breaks if you use an ad-blocker—hint: don't wrap images in an element with the classname "ad_block". They might not show up.

As a bonus, I hacked together a GreaseMonkey User Script that not only plays the Comic Sans game, but also swaps it with a more palatable monospace-font:

comic_saaaaaaaaaannnnns.user.js

Update Version 1.1 of the script now comes with a slightly less obtrusive alert.

CTRL + SHIFT + NUMLOCK

In a word, compared to 2009, it was crazy: over nineteen-thousand vistors payed more than thirty thousand visits to the site, and with an average of 2.13 pages per visit they generated well over sixty-five-thousand pageviews. That's nearly two gigabytes of data.

March last year, I was quite pleased with the increase of visitors to the site in the run-up to the release of mr. Loaf's new album, Hang Cool Teddy Bear. As I expected, once the album was released, the traffic increased. April 20 was the busiest so far, with 153 visits.

From early May to late August, traffic slowly went down. Then I did two things: I added a page for a promotional single for the Belgian production of Tanz der Vampire, and I played around a bit with Google's webmaster tools. The results were quite absurd:

1. The traffic went through the roof. For about three months, from the release of the promo single, through the start of Dans der Vampieren in Antwerp and the subsequent release of the cast album until a couple of weeks after it closed, there hasn't been a day that there were less than a hundred visitors. On the busiest day there were 243 visitors.
2. The bounce rate shot down. As far as I understand it, bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors that come to your site, and leave after seeing just one page. A bounce rate of 40% is supposed to be quite normal, and anything under 20% is very hard to reach. For most of the year, the bounce rate was just above 60%. Then it went down to less than a single percent, and it stayed there. Franky, I still don't believe it's possible, but statistics don't lie, do they?

In case you wondered what I did with the webmaster tools—not much. I didn't do much more than generating and uploading a sitemap. And while that should benefit the indexing of the site, I don't see how that explains the dramatic surge in visitors and abnormal drop in the bounce rate.

Some other figures:

• Average time on site: 3 minutes and 3 seconds.
• Most popular pages: the Dans der Vampieren promotional single (6,301 pageviews), both parts of the Tanz der Vampire libretto (roughly 3,000 pageviews each), both versions of the Los Angeloser page (3,478 pageviews), the Dans der Vampieren cast album (2,801), and Hang Cool Teddy Bear (2,587).
• 79.10% of the visitors came in through a search engine. 95% of those vistors used Google.
• 10.29% of the visitors came in through one of 228 referring sites. Facebook is with 27% the largest in this area, followed by three forums related to the subject of the site. (Disclosure: I visit those forums, and I am not above shameless plugging.)
• The remaining 10.60% came in directly.
• Geographical distribution: There were vistors from 118 countries. Belgium leads the top 5—dankuwel—with nearly a quarter of all visitors, followed by Germany (18.03%), the United States (13.36%), the United Kingdom (11.73%), and The Netherlands (7.47%).
• Browserswars: Internet Explorer (42.13%), Firefox (35.92%), Safari (10.06%), Chrome (7.37%) and Opera (3.93%)
• The stats for Internet Explorer can be divided into IE8 72.41%, IE7 21.12%, IE6 6.01%, IE9 0.43%. Two visits were made with IE5.5 and one even with IE5.01. I refuse to understand those last people.
• Less then 2% of all visitors use a mobile device to view the site. Still, I should see if I can optimize the site for those fine visitors.

I'd like to thank all of last years' vistors for stopping by. Please stop by again, and I'll keep tinkering with the site whenever I feel like it.

Last year there were 4,064 visits from 2,407 unique visitors to this website. With an average of 1.53 pageviews per visit, a grand total of 6,199 pages were viewed. Average time on site was 49 seconds. That's all a bit down from last year. Which doesn't surprise me much, as I didn't write as much as last year.

Last year I had visitors from 68 countries. That's nine down from 2009, and the top 5 hasn't changed a bit:

1. The Netherlands
2. United States
3. Belgium
4. United Kingdom
5. Canada

Traffic then. Just over a third of the visitors come here directly, nearly a third uses a search engine, a quarter clicks on a like on some other site, and the rest come in via Twitter and the like. Among the search engines, and quite unsurprisingly, Google is the most popular by far with an eighty percent share. From the others only Bing (10%) and Yahoo (8%) are worth mentioning. Among the 535 different keywords recorded, "book title generator" is still the most popular. People looking for an evil nickname (or me, I never know), screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place, 'were all just kinda winging it' and Dans der Vampieren also generate a bunch of traffic. Several other search phrases that made me chuckle were "dat is me fiets" (which is a personal pet peeve, people butchering the Dutch language like that), "christelijke paasquiz" (I guess it is an popquiz about easter popquiz, but if it's christian enough, I dunno), "100 things that make my heart beat" (aaaahhhhh), "philip pullman is a massive douche" (if you're so certain, why do you need reaffirmation?) and "w00t²" (which is, like, w00t! squared. awesomesauce.)

Last year I wrote 114 entries. The most popular of those were:

1. A bootleg of Meat Loaf in Slagharen was good for 226 pageviews
2. My Hang Cool Teddy Bear review (153)
3. PostSecret: We're all just kinda winging it (103)
4. My write up of Dans der Vampieren (59)
5. And I'm still looking for more info on Fat Out Of Hell (49)

The most popular page apart from the front page is still my random book title generator.

Finally, the browser stats. Internet Eplorer is down 5% from last year. And while Firefox loses some of it's market share, overall, decent browsers are up.

1. Internet Explorer (54.31% — IE8 83.91%, IE7 11.19%, IE6 4.67%, IE9 0.18%, IE5.01 0.05%)
2. Firefox (29.72%)
3. Chrome (7.38%)
4. Safari (5.61%)
5. Opera (0.94%)

This year, I might do some infrequent updates from the trenches of the browser wars, as it seems like IE is losing ground. If you just look at the last three months, it's down to just 43%. And that's more like it.

As always, thanks for stopping by. I'll try to make this site more interesting this year.

sudo umount /dev/dvdrw1
readom dev=/dev/dvdrw1 f=/path/to/file.iso

Where /dev/dvdrw1 is the path to your dvd-drive. Burning the ISO-image is as easy as a right click on the file and selecting 'Write to disc…'

But when [Tess] was in her office with her computer booted up, she only stared at the Apple welcome screen for the first five minutes …

but a little while later, she

… exited YouTube, Binged Richard Widmark, and found what she expected …

Yes, you read that right. She Binged Richard Widmark. But all right, I am willing to accept that in the fictional universe of the story Bing.com is a search engine that people, even those using a Mac, actually use.

And then Tess needs to find some details on another person. So:

She googled Ramona Norville, got forty-four thousand hits, added Chicopee, and got a more managable twelve hundred (although even most of those, she knew, would be coincidental dreck).

And I was all like, Stephen Edwin King, take me to your dealer, cause I wanna know what kinda crack you are on. I mean, seriously. Having a character use Bing.com is stretching it, but when you have her switching search engines, you clearly haven't been using the internets enough.

Right up to this point I was in the zone, and totally down with what happened. This just yanked me right out of there. Disbelief can only be suspended this much, you know?