KLEIN KROMHOF

Apparently Starbucks and AT&T struck a deal, Starbucks will ditch T-Mobile (yay!) and AT&T will move in and provide wifi access at 7,000 Starbucks stores. Given the number of problems we’ve had with T-Mobile in Bedford I sure hope we’ll be among the 7,000 stores to get AT&T, especially since it will be free for anyone with a Starbucks card. Just hope there’s not any catches on this one.

No word yet on when all of this will happen, so don’t bring your laptop in just yet…

Link to article on ArsTechnica

As seen at Burger King in Bedford.

 Visit XKCD for more geeky comics

Why not to use online translators… You might insult the Dutch Prime Minister (and his mother)

Link to article

So, I’m listening to my iPod the other day and White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane comes on. Yeah, it has drug references, that’s not why I listen to it though. It’s just a pretty cool song and it’s weird so I like it. Only while listening to it, for the hundred thousandth time, do I finally realize it’s about Alice in Wonderland. I’m a little slow sometimes…stick with me here. Soooo, I hear the following lines sung by Grace Slick, and while grading papers I’m also thinking about LOST (I know you never figured a blonde could think that much at one time, I’m amazed too!). Here are the lines…

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

And I thought to myself…I don’t remember a chessboard in Alice in Wonderland, but I remember the one Locke (LOST) was playing on when he was at Mikhail’s house (the one that blows up the house when he figures out how to win). SO, I turn around to my trusty Google connection and do some quick research and I was right! There isn’t a chessboard in Alice in Wonderland…it’s in Alice Through the Looking Glass (ATtLG). So I’ve got that in the back of my head and I’m thinking about LOST too, when I read the synopsis on ATtLG. Basically, Alice gets to another dimension by going through a mirror.

So for LOST, what does this mean? Well, initially I remembered the last show in season three was called “Through the Looking Glass”. Directly, it’s a reference to Charlie at the end looking through the glass and telling Desmond that it’s not Penny’s boat. BUT…most of the rest of the episode is about Jack. I thought of it as a flash forward where Jack is looking at the future of his life. Somehow after getting off of the island, Jack is a drunk and addicted to some drug I can’t remember (remember how I said Jefferson Airplane’s song makes references to drugs?) and he keeps taking Oceanic flights to find his way back to the island. On one of those flights, he finds an obituary about someone (and Kate later shows up and she knew him too, so I think it’s someone we haven’t seen yet but Kate is adamant about not going to the funeral). At one point Jack is standing on a bridge, so upset with his life, and he’s about to jump over when he says “forgive me” and a car crashes behind him, which we find out later is his fault, and Jack saves the people in the car. So my question is, to link all this together, was Jack seeing a glimpse of another dimension, another life possibility? Or is the one he is living now the one that is “Through the Looking Glass”?
And what’s up with all the white rabbits in LOST? There is a white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and a ton of them in LOST. The keys to the VW van have a white rabbit foot on them, on Christmas day Charlie is wearing a pair of white bunny slippers, Ben shakes the white rabbit “to death” in front of Sawyer but later shows him it was only sedated, one scene shows Alex skinning one for Karl, Ben uses a white bunny to test the pylons current. Not to mention that there is also an episode called “White Rabbit”, the one in first season where Jack sees the hallucination of his father.

So, what do you think? Is the recurring white bunny theme a message that they are in another dimension? Or is it all coincidence?

Some people are either very brave, very confident or very dumb. If you’ve ever wanted to see natural selection at work, here you go…

So, we are currently in the process of re-watching season 3 of Lost and we noticed something just slightly strange the other night. In “Flashes Before Your Eyes” the Hatch has just imploded and we follow Desmond as he finds himself back home with his beloved Penny, and it’s like he travelled back in time because we see how the picture of him and Penny gets taken and all that good stuff. Right before that picture gets taken we see Desmond trying to buy Penny an engagement ring from a not-so-sweet old lady who tells him that he’s not supposed to buy the ring and he is in fact not going to propose to Penny. Desmond ofcourse disagrees and is adamant about changing his life’s course, but sure enough after the picture is taken he breaks up with her and tosses the ring into the river.

Flash forward (no pun intended) to a later episode, “Catch 22″ where Desmond tries to become a monk (“see you in another life, brother”) but fails miserably and eventually meets Penny while he’s loading crates of wine into her car (they only sold 108 crates of wine that year by the way, according to Brother Campbell). Desmond only met Penny because Brother Campbell suggested he “do some heavy lifting” while he waits for another Brother to give him a ride into town. This Brother Campbell has a picture on his desk, a picture of him and a sweet old lady, very crudely photoshopped so it’s got to be important right?

To once and for all show my total geekness (if that was still needed), I have set up my “old” cell phone, a Sony Ericsson K700i as a remote control for our Mediacenter. Our Mediacenter is a PC, running Ubuntu Linux with MythTV as a frontend, hooked up to our TV (that should be geeky enough by itself). What this allows us to do (in a nutshell) is watch videos and my European DVDs, when we get if we had cable this would also act as our ‘TiVo’. The only problem with our Mediacenter was that in order to pause, rewind and slow-mo (required for watching Lost) we had to jump up and run to the keyboard or mouse which of course will not do in this day and age…

So now, thanks to the magic of Bluetooth we have a remote control that also shows the local time in Holland, for what it’s worth…

For future reference and for anyone interested, keep reading to see the steps involved in getting this to work, I’m afraid it does require a Sony Ericsson phone, it might work with other phones, I know for a fact that it does not work with our severely gimped Verizon phones (LG VX8300). Also note that not all PCs have bluetooth capabilities, there are USB ‘bluetooth dongles’ available which will fix this though.
Continue Reading »

This is the first post on our new blog: www.kleinkromhof.com. The idea is to share pictures and stories with those who know us, both in America and back in “the Old Country” (I’m talking to you Dutch people!)

If you just stumbled upon this page and have no clue who we are, no worries, you’re more than welcome… Let us know you visited by leaving a comment, we really appreciate it!