With Wall-E, Pixar once again proved that they’re leading the animation industry. All the other film studios make animation movies like “a head character goes on a quest with his so-called friends; they have a few laughs, they have a few fights, and at the end everything turns out fine (mawkishly sentimental life lesson included)”. Well, that’s not the case with Wall-E.

The first hour of the movie tries to describe how Wall-E lives, how he feels, and what he does. I think there were like 10 spoken sentences and that was it! The silence included humour, sentiment and compassion (what I believe is a very difficult thing to do for a garbage-cleaning robot).

In the second hour we see how Wall-E tries to get over the (mostly bad) feelings he has. He meets Eve who he falls in love with and he begins his (not so corny) quest. The rest of his objective I’ll leave for you to see.

If you were waiting for a movie that is full of fun, passion, adventure, beauty, … in short, all the ingredients for a good movie, then you should see Wall-E… like… immediately!

Once he was Fake Steve Jobs. Now he is Real Dan Lyons.

First of all, traffic. People in Germany are allowed to drive faster on several occasions. I completely understand why that’s not the case in Belgium: people are less friendly and less responsible. E.g. when we came back to Belgium, everybody was driving in the middle lane of the highway, while the right lane was completely empty. It’s something that happens too in Germany, but (much) less frequently.

Than there’s recycling. In Germany there’s a cashback for plastic bottles, which helps keeping the streets clean. You pay a bit more when you buy the bottle, but you get that extra amount of money back when returning it to the store.

In the small towns you still can enjoy the I-trust-you-feeling. E.g. I had to change my €500 note in notes of €50 and the bank clerk didn’t even check whether the note was legitimate or not!

To summarize: we had a really nice vacation (we even stayed there for a day longer than originally planned) and I’m not glad we’re back.

I’ll post some pictures that are worth sharing while we’re there.

For those who don’t know what Time Capsule is: it’s a wifi base station with an integrated hard drive (in our case 1 TB). It works flawlessly with Time Machine, a backup application that’s baked into Mac OS X, the operating system that comes on any Mac computer.

The concept is pretty simple. You set up Time Capsule as a wireless network and when that’s done you can access it from any Mac nearby. When connected you can transfer files wirelessly to and from Time Capsule.

The best part is that your Mac will then automatically ask if you want to use the wireless hard disk with Time Machine to backup all your files. If you then click “Yes”, you’re done! The first backup will take some time to transfer, but after that, Time Machine will automaticaly trace any changes that are made on your computer and mirror them every hour onto your “Air” disk.

File recovery couldn’t be easier than with Time Machine. You just open the folder where your lost file(s) used to be, you click on the Time Machine icon and you can literally go back in time to retrieve it/them. Also, when you lose the whole contents of your hard drive, you can use Time machine to restore it completely on a new one, so you can just continue where you had left.

And wait, there’s more! You can also hook up a printer or a second USB hard drive to Time Capsule to print or to share files from any computer within range.

I’m convinced it will be sparing us a whole lot of trouble in the future! More info on Time Capsule can be found on the Apple web site.

Christopher Nolan and his cast succeed in bringing the old Batman alive. E.g. the villains don’t necessarily die at the end of the movie. But at the same time they succeed in drifting away from the old Batman series concept. E.g. the villains really are villains, so they are taken serious by the audience. Also, the story line isn’t predictable at all, which makes this movie a must-see!

just to inform you that I decided to take the older posts offline. Maybe they will come back, maybe they won’t, but for now I will be blogging only from my iPhone.

If you have any questions or feedback, then I really like to hear from you in the comments.

Nice to be back!