News
I finished the new theme for our website. After extensive testing, the v7.0 theme is now online.
With this theme update, I will also be implementing new gallery software: Gallery2. This image gallery will perfectly integrate with our current WordPress blog software. I have started migrating the photos, starting with the lasted albums. As long as the migration has not been completed, photos remain available through gallery.victorie.com (our old gallery).
Find our new gallery here.
I woke up to a dark and gloomy sky. I checked The Weather Channel and the outlook for New York and New Jersey wasn’t pretty: rain and scattered thunderstorms. And sure enough: it started to rain in the afternoon. All my plans for the afternoon down the drain! No sense in goin’ to the Jersey shore for a tour of some of the places that are important in Springsteen’s music career and in his personal life in this kinda weather.
By the time I had to leave for my very 1st Springsteen Show in Ney Jersey, there was a real downpour. That didn’t make me too happy, as I still had to pick up my ticket from the will call window at the PNC Bank ArtsCenter. Also, the ArtsCenter is an half-open amphitheater: the seats and stage are under a roof, but you can also watch shows from the lawn behind the seats.
Right before the show, they played Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head over the P.A. which is not part of Springsteen’s usual walk-in music. And sure enough: it stopped raining! Could this be the beginning of an awesome show? It surely was! Never before have I seen Springsteen play with such fierceness and such eagerness. And never before have I seen an audience respond to an artist as this New Jersey audience did. At times it felt as if everybody was “Brooooocing”. Even the folks up on the lawn made one hell of a noise. Springsteen responded with “You’re gonna wake up the kids!” and he seemed to like that.
To top it all off, I got 3 songs I hadn’t heard before on this tour. One thing’s for sure: I’ve seen the best marching band in the world tonight. And I was part of the best crowd an artist can have.
I flew in to Newark Liberty International Airport yesterday for a concert trip. I Got to my hotel late in the evening after having to wait in line at immigration and at the Hertz counter to get my rental car.
After a good nights rest and lunch at the local Panera Bread Cafe, I made my way to New York City. Walked around the city for a bit and paid a little visit to the new Hard Rock Cafe on Times Square.
And then on to the Garden—Madison Square Garden that is—for a concert: Soul II Soul with Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. I’ve been a fan of Faith’s music for a few years now. And this was an excellent opportunity to see her live.
She and her hubby Tim are huge in the US. In Europe, Faith Hill has had a couple of hits. She’s probably best know for her single There You’ll Be, the title song for the movie Pearl Harbor. But hardly anybody in Belgium knows Tim McGraw.
And it was a pretty nice show. Faith and Tim opened the show with a duet. Next, Faith took the stage for a full hour with songs from her latest album Fireflies and the best songs for her other albums. To close Faith’s set, she sang 3 more duets with Tim. He stayed on to finish the rest of the show. In total, 2 and a half hours of pure entertainment on an awesome stage. Loved it!
Tomorrow will be the high light of this trip: Bruce Springsteen with the Seeger Session Band in Holmdel, NJ.
Came across an interesting Springsteen related website: springsteentracker.com. You can build a list of all Springsteen shows you have attended on this site. Your list is linked to Google Maps, so you can see where you’ve been for a Springsteen show.
See the list of shows that I have attended here. There is one show missing in my list: Springsteen’s performance in Paris as part of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.
We drove way up north to Leeuwarden for the open days of the Dutch Air Force. But the 3 hour drive was worth the while, ‘cause the Blue Angels were there. It was their only European performance for 2006. They hardly ever get to Europe for a show. In fact, it had been over 10 years since their last visit to Europe.
These pictures have been almost 10 years in the making. I got my first glimpse at an air show by the Blue Angels when I visited Florida with friends. When I found out that the Blue Angels were practicing every Tuesday morning at Pensacola NAS, I changed our plans and made get everybody out of bed very early in the morning to go see the Blue Angels. When we got to the base, it was too cloudy for the Blue Angels to fly. So I never got to see them until now.
Every year in October, DIFO, the photo club I belong too has an exhibition with the best work of their members. All the photos automatically enter a club competition. Every June, we select the best 3 black/white photos, the best 3 color photos and the best 3 slides.
I joined DIFO last September, so I’ll be showing off my work for the first time this year. 8 of my photos will be at the exhibition. And I also entered the club competition for the first time ever. Not having high hopes,
I won 3rd prize in the category Color Photo with this photo from models Dasha and Natascha. The photo was made during a model shoot at the Anco building.
I was totally surprised. Honestly, this is not one of these “I didn’t expect this†Oscar speeches. I consider myself to be a rookie in photography. I’ve got only a few years of experience. And to see that my work can compete with the work of my fellow photographers in the club makes me really proud.
Geocaching season for us started this afternoon. We went looking for the Prinsenpark geocache (GCKJQ7). It was a rather easy pick up. And since the park is a nice little nature preserve, we used the rest of the afternoon for a little walk and to shoot some photos. We can across a pond with a couple of dragonflies and we just had to give it a go. Shots didn’t come out as we wanted it though.
I’m doing some design work for new website templates. I suddenly realized that this year is the 10th anniversary of our website.
When we first got an Internet connection, about 10 years ago, we were connecting to the internet with a 14K modem. I remember the hassle it was to set up a connection back then: lousy modem drivers, winsocks stuff, slow browsers and the phone always busy. And it took forever to load a page.
Almost as soon as we got the internet connection, I started experimenting with my own website. And pretty soon, I was hosting the website of the Belgian Bruce Springsteen fanclub. But that site is no more as the fanclub is no more.
At first, our site was a simple HTML based site, hosted with our internet provider. See snapshots of our site on the wayback server. Later, in 1999, we got our own domain name. All that time, the site has become more and more complex, as you can see from the wayback server.