Terra Taco

Clearing the site

Barely back on my feet again after the flu, I started cutting down trees today. The site has to be cleared before the digging machines arrive next week.

March 31st, 2006

Mia & Ami

I’ve been sick, so there’s been a lack of updates. Luckily, Cecilie made some nice pictures of the twins.

Mia

Ami

Mia

Ami

1 comment March 31st, 2006

Announcing Kykuit.net

We’re about to start building a new house. We’ve bought a piece of land (the part with the trees on the picture above) and naturally, I bought a domain name to go with it. We decided the house will be named ‘Kykuit’ which is Dutch for ‘view’ (‘utsikt’ på Norsk) and also happens to be name of the Rockefeller Estate in New York.

Hence, Kykuit.net.

The idea is to document the building process on that website, which I hope will be operational in a few weeks from now. I will let you know when it’s up and running.

March 24th, 2006

New car

We’ve bought a new car. With three kids we needed more space. And space we got. The car has nine seats, so there is room for further family expansion.

More pictures here.

1 comment March 19th, 2006

Recycling

This might sound weird to both the people out here, and to my faithful readers from Holland, but I still think it’s kind of cool to be able to walk down to the shore (200 meters) and dispose of all your junk mail, cardboard wrappings, milk cartons and the like.

Amsterdam is very far away here. A good thing.

March 16th, 2006

Stillness before the storm

2 comments March 15th, 2006

Airplane

Snow is one thing, airplanes another.

March 13th, 2006

Passport Photo

My passport is about to expire, so I needed a new passport photo. Being Dutch and all, I figured: why spent a 100+ Krones on something I can do myself for 2 Krones? The problem is that I don’t have any lighting equipment, just the build-in flash. The result is obvious if you look at the picture on the left: shadows and a dirty background. So here comes a very quick Photoshop tutorial on how to clean it up.

1. Select the Magic Wand Tool with a Tolerance of 30. Make sure Anti-alias and Contiguous are checked.
2. Click on the background.
3. Decrease tolerance to 10, select ‘Add to selection’, blow up the picture and fine tune by clicking on the areas you want to add (or visa versa by selecting ‘Subtract from selection’) until you’ve selected the whole background.
4. Click Select>Feather… and use a Feather Radius of 3 pixels. Click OK.
5. Click Image>Adjustments>Levels… and move the black slider at the bottom of the dialog box (under Output Levels) all the way to the right. Click OK.
6. Click Select>Deselect.
7. Done!

Now I just need some Tips on how to make that guy look better.

2 comments March 6th, 2006

HOME SWEET HOME!!

3 comments March 3rd, 2006

Carnaval

March 3rd, 2006