I ate some Ben & Jerry’s icecream yesterday and was appalled by how poor it tastes these days. I used to love ‘Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough’ when The brand was first introduced in The Netherlands, but it had been a while since I had gotten around to one of those little buckets.

In 2000, Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever. I happen to know someone who used to work in the Dutch Unilever frozen foods department, and he told me how for every product they have there’s a timeline. Upon introduction (or in this case: company takeover) the product is made with top notch ingredients, and over the next year or so the components are gradually downgraded to make the product cheaper to make, whilst still somewhat resembling the original. Kind of.
(more…)

A couple of years ago I bought DV video camera. I was looking forward to capturing and editing Ruby’s first steps and bought a good one, albeit not a very compact one. Big mistake. My daughter almost four years old now and I’ve less then one DV tape to show for it (besides 3000+ photographs). Because it’s in it’s own bag and rather bulky, it’s just never around when fun stuff happens. On top of that I hate being the party pooper with the camera.
(more…)

Most baby items aren’t really ‘gadgety’. Most are highly functional, but lack the combination of elegant design and technical wizardry that comprise a gadget. But when I first came across this little stroller I fell in love on the spot. The problem was that my daughter was a little old to invest in another stroller at that time. Now, with the birth of her little sister, I’ve finally given in.
(more…)

A while ago, my wife Verina and I had a ‘digital photo scare’. It looked like some of our most precious photos had been lost duing the latest cleanup of Verina’s computer. I spent an entire morning searching her system for any and all JPEG images and was ultimately able to find all of them in folders with names like ‘backup old computer’ and ‘digital photos old’. Oops.

There were a couple of things wrong with the way we were handling our photographs.

1. No backups - harddrive failure would have meant disaster.
2. No photo management - using different PCs to load the photos off the camera, not erasing the camera’s card, sharing them through obscure folders and moving them from one Windows install to the next had really taken its toll. I found 10,000 files which turned out to be only 2,900 unique photographs.

(more…)