Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Internet Entrepreneur

Archive for December, 2006

300 DVDs…


My Complete DVD Collection.
(all 302 DVDs! Click to view in detail)
Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

The first DVD player I bought was a hacked Pionier player. I bought it online for more than a thousands pounds from a dodgy hacker who was able to remove the region limit. To change the region I had to press a combination of keys and then restart and then press another set of keys. The instructions for this routine were xeroxed many times and hardly readable and I lost the instructions after only a few months.

The first DVDs I ordered at Amazon.com were Reservoir Dogs, Heat, Blade Runner - The Director’s Cut, Payback and Starship Troopers. I just looked it up. According to Amazon that order was shipped on january 19, 1999.

Last week someone gave me a box with 10 DVDs which brings me to a total of 302 DVDs. That sounds like an awful lot but it has been 2916 days since I bought my first DVD. That means that on average I bought a new DVD every 9,65563 days. Less than one a week. Sometimes none for a few months and then 10 at once on Amazon.

Sometimes a DVD costs me $20 and sometimes $4 and sometimes I get them for free. But I think that we can assume that on average I paid $7 for each DVD. That means that I paid over $2114 for my whole collection.

This is DVD number 300: Underground

There used to be more DVDs in my collection but I kept losing them to friends who wanted to borrow a few and than forgot about it. I don’t blame them at all. I’m sure I have a few DVDs in my collection that I borrowed and forgot to return. But these days I use the excellent Delicious Library tool from Delicious Monster. You can just type in the title of a movie and the software gets all the information, including the cover, from Amazon. When you lend someone a movie you just select their name from your addressbook and a date from your calendar for when you exect it back. I currently have about 20 DVDs out with friends which are all weeks or even months overdue. But I don’t mind that at all because at least I know where they are and I’m sure I will get them back one day.

Oh, and Delicious Library also lists your books. I have a lot more books than DVDs but I only list the 139 books I bought in the last 3 years in my library. The first book I bought was “The first 20 million is always the hardest” by Po Bronson…

Just stumbled upon this photo of the Amazon.co.uk warehouse:

Amazon warehouse

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Blue Bally Briefcase

On my way to the office I found a beautiful blue Bally briefcase. It was empty but my guess is someone stole it and then disgarded it.

The code for the lock is 221 061 so I think the owner was born on Oktober 10, 1961.

Any idea who the owner could be? Then contact me….

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New Tailor - New Suit


New Tailor.
Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

Today I met with Roel Wolbrink. He is the founder of New Tailor which is an old fashioned but forward thinking tailor in Amsterdam. He has been making suits for me for years.

I order some of the more bizarre suits and every year I model them all for his photo material. I haven’t ordered many suits last year (not even one?) because I have been too busy with Fleck and other projects.

So Roel called me a few weeks ago and we agreed to have lunch and decide on a new suit.

Go to Flickr if you want to see how it will look. Now I will just have to wait for 6 weeks until it is ready…

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Magic Pen Drawings

Drawing of Boris by AninaAnina was a guest at my Informal Diner Party with Marc Canter last week. She is into gadgets and brought a Nokia digital pen thingy. She used it to draw this image (of me!) in a special book and then it appeared on her phone, just like that! See all the images at her blog.
LIFEBLOG.anina.net: magic pen drawings

And did you know that Anina is one of the top 10 hottest Web2.0 girls?

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Moving, or not?

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Wikipedia-based Search Engine: The Next Google?

Techcrunch reports on a new project by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Read it if you are interested in the future of search:

Techcrunch: Wikipedia-based Search Engine

UPDATE: Jimmy Wales left a comment that the article on Techcrunch isn’t correct and the screenshot has nothing to do with what they are working on. More information on the search.wikia.com page: http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

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