Yeah! I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my PC. As you might know I used to have Vista running on my PC (for more then 1 year without any troubles) but with the Windows 7 being released I just had to give it a try! I already had heard a lot of good things about Windows 7 so you can imagine that I was very curious.

After backing up the important files and folders I formatted my HD and started to install Windows 7 x64 bits. I don’t know why but I had never installed a x64bits OS on my PC before so with Windows 7 I thought… Why not give x64bit a try? I mean I do have the hardware parts for it! So the installation started and I must say that the installation only took about 30 minutes which is really fast!

Once the setup was done and Windows 7 was loaded I noticed that all of the drivers of my CPU chipset, video drivers etc was already installed! I mean I was able to work with Windows 7 Ultimate almost immediately. Here below a screenshot of Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

With Windows 7 some small things have changes.. One of the good changes is that you can re-arrange every system try icons. Just drag and drop them into the order you like! This is definitely one of the things which I’ve missed in the past Windows versions…

My first impression of Windows 7 is that it’s a great improvement compared to Vista. So far everything is working just fine. It has also improved performance, speed and feels much more stable then Vista.  I also like the improved taskbar and some other features!

As  you might know each file in Windows has an extension in its filename, for example .doc is for Microsoft Word. So in this case when you double click on a file which has the .doc extension Windows tries to identify the program in order to open the file. Now in most cases you don’t need to change and/or set these file type associations however in some cases that can be very handy!

While I had Windows XP installed on my pc, I was able to change/set the file type associations under Folder Options.. However ever since Vista, Microsoft has decided to move it to somewhere else! If you would like to set/change the file type associations in Vista and don’t know where to look then follow these steps below:

• Go to Start
• Open Control Panel
• Click on Default Programs followed with Set Associations
• Select a file type in the list and click Change Program.
• In the new screen you’ll see a list of Programs along with a description and the current default program.
• Now click on the Change program to set or change the current defaults.

Easy right?

This video was brought to my attention by my cousin Parna. At first I thought this was just a joke but when watching the video I realized that this is for real!

Recently we’ve bought a new car, next to our first car: Peugeot 106! This time we’ve bought a beautiful bigger car; a Ford Fusion 1.6I from 2003, see the pictures below!
We’ve bought this car last Monday and we’ve driving in it a lot and I have to say that I love this car! It’s so comfortable and it’s a bit higher (and faster ) then what I used to!! We will keep the Peugeot 106 as Jannie needs her own ride..

What do you do when you just got married? Yeah, going on honeymoon! And that’s we did too! We chose to go back to Kos (Greece) once again as we loved it the first time we went there!

We had actually booked at the first hotel as the last time however we ended up in another hotel, which was even 10 times better! Why? Well, at the first hotel (The Loca Blue Lagon) they mixed up our hotel room and gave us a shitty room. A room which was 10 minutes a way from the main pool, bar, restaurant etc.. That’s not the worst part.. They offered us a room with 2 single beds! Yeah.. exactly on our honeymoon!  After complaining we were transfered (almost immediately) to the Palazzo Del Mare hotel which is even more luxurious then the first one! From then on we could enjoy our honeymoon perfectly!

Click here to go to the gallery and view the pictures or click on the picture above!!

As you might remember some time ago I got a new contract at work 6 months ago. As my contract almost expired at Joico, it was time for a new contract!
So again they extended my contract… But this time the contract is extended with 1 year! Wait… That’s not all! I’m going to follow an education and the company is willing to pay the costs of it! Isn’t that awesome!

With this new contract everything will remain the same, except the part that I’m going to do the MIL (Medewerker Inkoop & Logistiek which actually comes down to Purchase Management). I’m really existed about this as this is a very good opportunity to expand my knowledge.

I’m really looking forward to start with the education (which starts on the 12th of November) and also to continue my work at Joico! I signed the contract yesterday so my weekend started pretty awesome as you can imagine!

In case you didn’t knew, Jannie and me got married on the 4th of September.. Yeah, newly weds! Our wedding was just a perfect day and it was actually exactly how we hoped it would be! We really enjoyed “our day” from the start till the end. It’s actually a day which we will never forget.

It was really a beautiful day and fortunately we’ve a lot of pictures (1100+!) of our wedding just to remember the day! I have made a selection and you can view them in the gallery by clicking here or clicking on the picture here below!

Enjoy watching them!

Yeah, BioTecK.net is back online again!
A lot of people e-mailed me that BioTecK.net was unreachable for them. When I wanted to check I was surprised to see the following message:

Website unreachable.
This website is temporarily unreachable for the general audience. Are you the owner or webmaster of this website? Please contact the customer service.

So that’s what I did and told them that I get a “strange message” and asked them what’s going on. After a several hours I got a reply back and they told me that they needed to shut down BioTecK.net because it was overloading the server!
In order to get the site back online they asked me to follow some (security) steps and update Wordpress and every plugin I was using. Perhaps that this was the fault of one of (outdated) Wordpress plugins.. 

So in the last 3 days that BioTecK.net was offline I checked every plugin just to see if it was causing the problem and I couldn’t find any! I also went through every template page in order to see if there are unused html/php codes which could cause the problems, but I still haven’t found the problem!
Ok, I have to say that the website is faster again and therefore I can only assume that the problem is solved. Have you experienced something like this before of have any suggestions, please don’t hesitate and let me know!

For a long time I was looking for a way to display Miniposts. Miniposts (or asides) are actually small blog posts that live outside of the usual hierarchy of postings. Miniposts are posts with let’s say 1 or 2 sentences in length, so that’s why the call it Miniposts!

In the past I had tried some plugins but they didn’t do the job as I would like to. While surfing on the net today, I found the solution to my “problem”. The solution is actually a plugin called: Miniposts. Kinda obvious! So from today on you’ll see my 5 newest miniposts in the tabbed sidebar which can be found to your right!

So why display miniposts?
Well, minipost can be very handy in case you like to share a link, video or anything else to your readers and you just don’t have the time to write an post about it.  You can also use miniposts to let your visitors know that there’s a new post on one of your other blogs etc. With other words, you can use it for almost anything!

In case you would like to have miniposts on your blog too, just head over to the plugin’s page and follow the instructions there!

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve updated the sidebar a bit again: the Entrecard widget has been removed from the sidebar.

After a long time using and having the Entrecard widget in my sidebar, I’ve decided to remove the widget from today on. The reason? Lately I just couldn’t see any real benefits of it and the traffic that stays for a couple of seconds just to click and move to the next site. Beside that, I don’t have any time for dropping.

It was pretty fun at first as I was very new to the blogging world and through Entrecard I’ve found a lot of cool blogs (which I immediately subscribed too) and a lot of cool bloggers too.. Entrecard also brought me a lot of visitors who have been turned into valuable readers/subscribers.

So thanks and no hard feelings Entrecard, it’s just that I don’t see why I should display the widget anymore!
What about you? Do you still have the widget running on your blog?

Some weeks ago, 11th of July to be exactly (yeah, I know.. I should have posted about this much earlier but couldn’t do it because a lack of time!), Jannie and me decided to do something fun and went to Movie Park Germany.
Movie Park Germany which is located in Bottrop-Kirchhellen, in Germany off course , is just 1 hour and 20 minutes drive from us, so it’s not that far!

Movie Park Germany was very easy to find and once we arrived it wasn’t that crowded, lucky us! Off course this changed a bit during the day. As we arrived pretty early we started to explore the park and watched the Shrek 4D which was nice but definitely not great!

Unfortunately the weather turned around during the day, at first the sun was shining but then it started to rain, but that didn’t spoil the fun for us and we did have a nice time!
You can see the picture by clicking this little link here!

Time for a new post.. Yeah, this are very busy times for me as I’m getting married on the 4th of September! We still have 3 weeks to go and we still have to arrange some little stuff so that’s why this blog doesn’t get updated that much!
You can visit our wedding blog at: BJ-Alborz.com for more information and updates on our wedding!

Anyway, in the meanwhile I had some time to update the gallery page! A lot of people and friends didn’t liked the way the gallery worked and asked me if I could change it… I actually hadn’t thought well about this so I had to look into it. The problem was that I used the build-in gallery option in Wordpress and linked/opened the picture in the attachment page. By doing the whole site needed to be reloaded over and over again which is actually pretty annoying and slow, right? So I had to look for another option.

A picture of Jannie and me on our holiday in El Gouna (Egypt).

After giving it some thoughts and playing around with a dozen of plugins, I actually found the perfect solution: Slimbox!
Slimbox is a visual clone of the popular Lightbox 2 script and to be honest.. this wasn’t actually what I was thinking about when I started but I really like this plugin! It works really simple (download, install and you’re good to go!) and it’s really fast.

Now you are able to view and navigate between the pictures in the gallery very quickly! Give it a try and let me know what you think!

I just came across a very funny video staring a parrot! The parrot is able to make all kind of sounds so make sure you have your speakers on!

As you might know I’ve recently bought a new phone: HTC Touch PRO2 which runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, a great phone by the way! Anyway, ever since I got this phone I was looking for a nice Twitter client which I could use to tweet on my HTC Touch PRO2. (You can follow me on Twitter too, just click here! )
After having some applications installed on my HTC TP2 I noticed that none of those applications is actually what I was looking for; One was too slow to start-up, the other hadn’t had that many options as I wanted and with one of the application I wasn’t able to tweet at all!

So a couple of days ago I stumbled on a tweet of Darren Wilson saying he used “Twikini” to tweet from his Windows Mobile Phone. After checking the pictures, reading about Twikini I decided to give it a try and installed the application on my HTC TP2.

The download size of the trial is just 110 KB which is very small and after the installation I was actually pretty amazed. Twikini It offers you a lot of features (which I missed in a lot of other applications!) and it’s still very fast! With Twikini you’re able to use your phone’s camera, GPS, Media, touch screen, keyboard, graphich and storage capabilities of your device. Great isn’t it? Some of other features are:

• You can choose from some theme. All of them are simple and uncluttered and customizable user interface.
• Post your tweets using a full screen editor (another thing which I missed on other applications..)
• Optionally you can decide to set your location(manually, using GPS coordinated or geocoding) along with your status updates.
• Send and receive Direct Messages.
• View your “@” replies and much more!

Do you own a Windows Mobile phone and are you looking for a good Twitter client for your phone? Then you’ve to try Twikini! Believe me when I say that it wouldn’t let you down!

Imagine the following situation: You have 500+ photos which you want to resize to a maximum height of 480px, save the picture in PSD format, save the picture for web, use the same image to resize it to 50px, canvas the image to 29px, save it again for web and close the picture without saving. Well, do you find your self repeating those steps again and again? Well, to be honest… I don’t!

As I’m working on the new webshop of JoicoEurope I needed to resize 500+ pictures twice, as mentioned above… One to get a larger picture which should have a maximum height of 480 px and the other one, 50×29 px, was meant to be used as a thumbnail.

So this is when the Action part in Photoshop comes in…. Actions can save you a lot of time and can increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks, yeah exactly like resizing images.   Action can also be used for reproducing techniques and creating special effects.  The only thing you have to do is “record” an action and “play” it the next time if you want to get the same results as the first time.

Want to know who you can record your own Actions in Photoshop, watch the video!

Nope, I’m not dead! I’m still alive and back with a brand new post!
Forgive me for not updating the site for a while now but these are very busy times for us..

During the last couple of weeks, which were very busy weeks for us obviously,  we have managed to do a lot of stuff for our wedding and enjoyed life..
See below a small round up of what I was up to when I wasn’t blogging!

• I turned 27 on Friday the 26th.
  Jannie surprised me with some lovely presents; such as a Sony digital video recorder with 60GB harddisk and it’s accessories (yet another toy which I can play with! ), some perfume, a nice card, a nice diner and in the end a small party.
  Ow, I forgot to mention that I also got a Guitar Hero Metallica as a present! I haven’t had that many time to try it, but I already played it for a couple of minutes and I have to say… IT’S GREAT!

• I managed to buy my wedding suit!
  While shopping with Jannie we saw this lovely black suit and when I tried it on, it just fited perfectly!
• We went to “Zwarte markt” (blackmarket) in Beverwijk (somewhere near Amsterdam) with some friends.
  Every week, tens of thousands of visitors come to check out the stalls, lively cafés and countless bargains. Live music, interesting finds and the many restaurants and cafés all help to make this cosy and convivial picture complete. The atmosphere here is full of good fun and good fortune!
  After visiting the “Zwarte Markt” we drove to Scheveningen, yep our favourite place beside Eindhoven, to enjoy the sun.
  We ended the day by having an Iranian meal at some Iranian Restaurant.

• Working in the garden…
  Yep, it’s summer again and therefor it’s necessary to have the garden nice & clean as we love to BBQ and sit outside!
• Some birthday parties of our friends / family and had a great time..
• We went to Roermond for a day trip, which was really fun to do! The weather was just great!
• Ow, I forgot to mention.. The pictures above are taken with my new digital camera, yeah the old one has “passed” away. My new camera is a Canon IXUS 95 IS which is a very nice camera with 10 megapixels and a lot of cool features.

So as you can see a lot happened during the last couple of weeks.. So you may understand why I haven’t updated the blog that much!

After having a HTC P4350 for two year, which is a very good & nice phone, it was time for some new gadget/toy to play with.
Obviously there are a lot of cool phones which you can get these days but after a recommendation of a good friend (and my man of honor) I decided to stick with HTC and go Pro with the new HTC Touch Pro2!

As you might know HTC is actually a very large player on the Pocket PC ground and therefore it runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 PRO. I like having Windows Mobile installed on mobile phones as you can quickly have it working with your Windows PC/synchronizing it  and like a Windows PC you can install third party software on it and off course.. You can tweak it!

Anyway, the specs of HTC Touch Pro 2 are actually awesome, check them here below!

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and HSDPA 7.2Mbps
• 3.6″ 65K-color touchscreen WVGA display (480×800 px)
• Five row full QWERTY side-sliding keyboard of brilliant ergonomics which is really handy!
• Revamped TouchFLO 3D Home screen and gesture controls
• Wi-Fi and built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS. Yep, navigation is possible with TomTom!
• Qualcomm MSM7200A 528 Mhz CPU and 288 MB DDR SDRAM (yeah, reminds me of one of my computers which I used to have in the 90’s!)
• Dedicated graphics chip (64MB RAM reserved for graphics)
• 3.15 MP auto focus camera
• Active stylus
• Touch-sensitive zoom bar (which works with pictures and even with Opera browser!)
• microSD memory expansion (I guess it could go up to 16GB, but I’ve used my old microSD card of 1 GB for time being)
• TV out
• Teeter game aboard (a very nice game which you can play by tilting the phone up, down, left and right!)
• Cool YouTube client
• Excellent video playback
• MS Office Mobile document editor
• Opera 9.5 web browser (Yes, it has Internet Explorer on it, but believe me I’m NOT going to use that!)

I just have the phone for a day and I’m having a lot of fun with it and I don’t think I’m done “playing” with it!

While surfing on the net I just came across a very funny commercial from a phone service company in Norway called 1881.
What this commercial is about ? Well..”Be sure you know the spelling before getting a tattoo or better yet, make sure your tattoo artist knows the spelling”

I just installed a very cool FireFox add-on which you might want to give it a try! This FireFox add-on is called “Locationbar²” and it basically allows you to formats and linkifies URL segments in your location bar.

At first I didn’t know what to expect but after spending 30 seconds on playing with the options, I have to say that this is a great add-on! It makes browsing even more easier, I mean take a look at the screenshot here below!

As you can see you can also add breadcrumbs to the URL segment and as I already mentioned; This is very handy to use and to navigate websites with! Give it a try, I know you’ll like it!
PS: See here below a screenshot of my preferences of Locationbar2..

Requires: FireFox
Publisher: Dao Gottwald
OS: Windows 95,98,98SE,NT,2000,XP,Vista, Mac OS X, Linux etc.
Current Version: 1.0.3
Language: English
License: Freeware
Download: Click…

It was last year when I saw Metallica live on PinkPop, yeah they did give a nice performance, and now it’s time for you to step on the stage as Metallica!
Yesterday I saw a Guitar Hero Metallica ad in “Bart Smit” paper.. Guitar Hero Metallica has been released in Europe just a couple of days ago and is now offered with the Game (duh! ), Wireless guitar and a Metallica t-shirt.

I obviously haven’t played the game (yet), but as a Metallica fan I think I would like to give it a try.. However.. me and “making” music?
Anyway, while surfing the net I saw this very funny Guitar Hero Metallica commercial which you have to see! As mentioned it’s hillarious: “means you gonna have to put on some pants, pops”! Watch it your self here below!