Yesterday I have installed Mozilla Thunderbird on my computer.

Until now I was using Microsoft Outlook Express to handle my mail, but I was far from satisfied with it. I never have been a great fan of OE, but since my computer is very old (1997) with limited resources (Cyrix P150+, 48Mb RAM), I am very careful not installing too much heavy software on it. Therefore I stick with the default Windows applications as much as possible, unless they are completely unworkable.

A while ago I already switched from IE6 (which was almost as old as my computer) to Mozilla Firebird for obvious reasons, and I never looked back to Internet Explorer anymore.

Outlook Express was also close to unworkable for me. Its limited filtering, habit of creating bloated e-mail and top posting were bugging me all the time.

Time for a change, and my Mozilla experience lead me to Thunderbird. The only problem is that the Thunderbird project is still in a alpha stage, and therefore surely still contains some bugs. I decided to install it anyway, and until now I haven’t found a single bug!

It feels a little bit slower than OE, but it certainly makes life a lot easier. I was able to import my Outlook Express address book and mail without problems, and was able to set up a (Bayesian) Spam filter in no time.

I still have to do some additional configuring like specifying the signatures and adding my certificates, but my experience so-far is more than positive!!!

I am receiving a lot of Spam, way too much…

The last years the amount of Spam I receive has been steadily growing, and now I receive about 50 messages per day. But I am not going to sit down and accept it; no, I am fighting Spam. I am fighting Spam because Spam takes away the pleasure and the functionality of a system I like and use a lot. Spam is about to destroy e-mail. I fight Spam in several ways, here is how…

I am very careful with my e-mail address

The most important thing is to make sure that spammers don’t get your e-mail address.

I always try to avoid to fill in an e-mail address in guest books, forums and when requesting online information. If I do have to give my e-mail address, I always make sure I can track down the source.

I can do that, since I have my own domain. If I have to leave my address at example.com, I will use example.com@jeroensangers.com. The moment I start receiving Spam on this address, I can easily block it.

If you don’t have your own domain, this is not possible, but make always sure that you only put your address on-line if you really have to. And never munge your address by adding something like NOSPAM!!!!!

I never let spammers white list my e-mail address

Spammers look for addresses on the Internet, but a lot of them are not used anymore. Therefore they try to verify that somebody is reading the mail; a verified address is worth more to the spammer.

There are two common ways to whitelist an e-mail address. The most common is the ‘Remove me from this list’ message at the bottom of much Spam.

But instead of removing you from their Spam list, the spammer will put you on the verified addresses list, and you will surely receive more Spam. Therefore I never use these links to remove me from a Spam list.

The second method of white listing uses images. The spammer links to an image with a code in the filename, and when you open the message this image is loaded from the spammer’s server. After that the spammer can check the code in the image name and your e-mail address is verified!

I usually use Mozilla mail, which let you select whether you want to view messages in HTML (including images) or as plain text. Although a lot of people send messages in HTML by default, few messages have content that NEED this, so I usually read my messages in plain text. (I also send my messages in plain text, but that is a different story). People using Outlook will have to disable their preview pane to prevent images from being loaded automatically.

I separate Spam from my normal mail

No matter how hard you try to prevent Spam, at a certain moment you will receive some, and it will never stop. In 99% of the cases you can easily recognise Spam from the sender and the subject, which are unknown, strange, in a foreign language and coded (texts like: jbkdk,bjhskda).

I always make sure to directly put Spam messages in a separate folder, so I can continue reading my regular mail, and deal with the Spam later. If you don’t receive many messages, you can do this by hand, but lazy people like me like this to be automated.

The latest technology is based on Bayesian Filtering, and luckily Mozilla has this technique integrated.

I report Spam to the provider of the Spammer

Depending on my time (usually not a lot), I send a complaint to the provider of the Spammer. I open up my Spam folder, analyse all messages and send a message to the provider of the originating mail server and sites mentioned in the text.

It is very difficult to find out who is the responsible, but fortunately this can be partly automated as well. I use the SpamCop notification service, to report Spam. SpamCop analyses the email, works out the likely true sender of the email, looks in the body to find any advertised email addresses or web sites, and then emails the administrators of all the systems involved to let them know about the problem.

SpamCop tells me whom the notification will be sent to, so I can remove any incorrectly targeted reports from the list.

I don't buy

This last one is quite obvious, but essential. Spammers send you messages to sell something. Sending millions of e-mail is cheaper than sending leaflets by snail mail, but still costs money. If I don’t buy anything, they will have the costs but no profit. If we all just stop buying, Spam will stop automatically!!!!

The holidays are definitely over; I have spent my first day at the office again. Of course my colleagues wanted to know everything about my trip and of course I recommended them to visit Croatia as well.

Black polo shirts with the company logo arrived during my absence, and everybody except me was wearing those shirts in the office. Wearing the polo is more or less obliged, unless you have a reason to dress more formally. I don’t mind wearing this uniform, since it is a nice shirt and saves me from making some wrong choices in that very difficult first hour of the day.

As expected, the work I left on my desk before leaving was still there, so today I continued working on the English version of the corporate site. I still need to translate some documents and have to create some screenshots of the software, but I hope to finish it this week.

The site is already live but gives 404 errors for the pages that I still have to translate. In my opinion a bad decision, but since my move to the international department I have no influence on the design and technical side of the site anymore. The only way to get rid of these 404’s is to work hard this week!!!

Short, but absolutely worthwhile…

That is how I would describe our short holiday to Croatia. We absolutely have the feeling that we should have stayed longer, since the country is sooooo beautiful.

We have seen a lot of nice things, but we missed visiting Split, Dubrovnik, Zagreb and Plitvice national park.

We did visit Rovinj, Pula, Zadar and the Paklenica national park. I could write a lot more about it, but I don’t have the time for it.

Anyway, now that I am back, you can read about my life again.

The car has been thoroughly checked, my colleague has been informed of ongoing issues at my job,… I guess I am almost ready for holidays. There are only three things left to arrange before I will disappear for two weeks.

First at home. Tomorrow I will clean our house and do some shoppings (we only have yoghurt and beer in the fridge!). I also have to ask our neighbours to take care about our plants; they are very thirsty with this weather.

Then I have Fimcap. I need to finish the on-line edition of the Link magazine June edition. Besides that I need to activate a page I already created on which you can read live news from the World Camp, a Fimcap activity for youth animators in the Philippines. During the world camp, participants will write their stories on this page. Photos will be added later by the webmasters (of which I am one), since editing pictures, uploading them and creating the right HTML code is too difficult. I could have used some advanced blogging tool, but decided that for the moment NewsPro will do the job.

And finally I have to prepare the trip. We decided to go by car to Croatia, with a stop in Milano to visit Roberto. And that is about all we decided and have prepared so far. We don’t know which road to take, what we can visit and where to stay in Croatia. I hope that MJ was able to buy a copy of the Lonely Planet guide, because then I will have good faith in our trip.

Anyway, I am almost ready. The next two weeks it will be very quiet on this web site!

28.00789% - Total Geek

Today is Sant Joan, a free day in Catalonia. The night before Sant Joan is celebrated with big fires, fireworks and eating coca, and that’s exactly what we did.

Today we celebrate Sant Joan on our own way, in our favourite quiet swimming pool in Alpicat. Tonight we will meet our friends and have a drink on a terras. That is our way of celebrating the start of the summer!

The good thing of buying a cellphone pack is that everything comes pre-configured. I have chosen the Movistar Activa pack with a Sony Ericsson T200 phone.

One small box containing the phone, a power adaptor, a manual for the phone, the Movistar Activa SIM card and the accompanying manual. In the shop they placed the SIM card in the phone, activated it and selected the right rate. I could use it immediately, everything was configured.

Everything? Well, no. I couldn’t use WAP. Not that I really need WAP, but I prefer that everything works when I buy something. I intent to use WAP for only two tasks: check my bank balance if I want to purchase something expensive and to do some emergency browsing in case www.fimcap.org is having problems.

Both manuals I received are user-level manuals (how do I send a SMS message) and hardly contain any technical details. So I changed the language from Spanish to English (somehow technical terms are easier to understand in English) and started browsing through the settings.

After trying out some options I found it: the phone was configured to use WAP over GPRS, while the prepaid Movistar Activa I use does not support GPRS by default.

This is really stupid, they deliver a phone and a SIM card bundled with WAP settings that don’t function in this configuration!!!! It would be more logical to configure the phone by default to use WAP over GSM, and let the few people who do contract for GPRS configure their phones later!!!

Relax, relax, relax… I really needed to relax, and that is exactly what I have done.

Friday after work we met with some friends at the Tapas Gallery. First I had to convince them to sit outside in the comfortable terras, while they preferred the air conditioning inside. Even though we were eating some Patatas Bravas, Maria José and I were still hungry, so we headed to Telepizza for a pizza. What a horrible dirty place is that!!!! Next time we will phone them from home or go to the Burger King.

On Saturday morning I was supposed to clean our house, but instead of that I walked into town to buy me a new cellphone. I already figured out that I wanted a Telefonica Movistar prepaid number, since I am not using the phone that much and mostly to phone Maria José who also has Movistar. For the phone I only knew that I wanted one of the major brands, except for Motorola. After looking at the options in the shop, I chose the Sony Ericsson T200, a beautiful small device.

At lunch time, the temperature had risen to 38–40°C. With these temperatures, there are only two things you can do: stay at home (if you have air conditioning) or go to the swimming pool. We chose the last option as we don’t have air conditioning. We headed to the amazing pool of Alpicat and bought a season ticket.

To my shock I received a reduction because of my age, I am definitely getting old!!!! For only €15 I can swim the whole summer.

When around 7 o’clock the temperature was a little bit more bearable, we took a shower and headed to Carrer Major for some shopping. Maria José was in a buying mood, and as usual that meant that she could not find anything while I easily bought some new clothes.

The Sunday started late. I went downstairs to Lo Panet to buy some croissants for breakfast and bought a newspaper, while Maria José made the coffee. After this slow start we cleaned the house and headed to Alpicat to help my in-laws preparing the lunch.

The rest of the day… swimming pool!!!

I always thought that the Internet would not be suited to learn a language, because it is better to learn from a real teacher who can explain things to you.

Once again Mark Pilgrim is two steps ahead of everybody. First, he started a Spanish site, to practice his Spanish a little bit (I know, I should also write in Spanish on this site), and I suspect also to have a good excuse to design a new site.

After announcing this new site, a second message for the Spanish speaking readers appeared, asking for Spanish curse words, dirty words and insults. I guess he just wants to built a filter for the comments on his new site.

Anyway, the amount of reactions and the contents of these reactions is impressive! I learned some wonderful new expressions (the best/worst until now: “Estás tan buena que te comería la regla a cucharadas”), and surely will keep on watching the new comments on this post!!!

[Update 2004.01.21]: Removed broken links to Mark’s site.

The temperature is around 35°C for over a week now, during the day you hear a lot of complains about the heat, in the evening people live on the cool streets.

Everybody runs to the beach in the weekend, Lleida is getting empty. And not only here, Russell Beattie made the same observations in his entry Small Spanish Towns.

The holiday season is approaching, so we are thinking about what to do. We have two short periods to get away: the first two weeks of July and the first two weeks of September.

We were planning to visit the Netherlands in July together with my in-laws (they never went abroad), but we are not sure if they recovered enough from their car accident.

If not, we will try to go in September. The other short holiday we plan to take our car and drive to Croatia, with a short stop in Milano to visit our friends Roberto and Francesca.

Maybe we will also stop in Venetia. Besides travelling we also want to have some days to stay at home and relax, since lately we hardly have time to be at home.

Then there are also some people visiting us. The most important ones are my parents, who will be here on August 12–19. My mother has not seen our finished house yet; the last time she was here was in July 2002, when we just started the reconstruction of our house. My father has visited us two times more, mainly to work in our house.

The truth is that we haven’t made a lot of progress since he last visited us. Therefore we plan to finish some more small things, so my father doesn’t get the impression that we don’t do anything (keeping up appearances)…

Yesterday Roberto phoned us from Italy to tell that he and Francesca are going to spend some time in the beginning of August in Catalonia, and surely will visit us. Yes, we are definitely looking forward to the summer!

Yesterday a new webblog was born in Lleida. That is something quite special, since until now I haven’t found many people writing about Lleida. So I decided to make a short overview:

• Albert Alcaine i Peralta After some persistant clicking you will find an outdated but beautifully designed blog
• Braintags I guess I don't have to explain anything about my site.
• Connexions Internes Xavier is another Linux user, who started his own web log recently.
• Ecografia The milk bottles blog of Sinfry (in Spanish).
• El Manicomi About overclocking, watercooling, networks, internet and Lleida
• Aleix Portell Llobetó Unfortunately he hasn't updated his site since February.
• Postals des del frenopatic The new weblog created yesterday. Spookie writes in Catalan about her life in Lleida.
• Quien Pone La Polla Fellow geeks!
• stee Stee is surely the most active blogger in Lleida. Although she is Catalan, she writes in Spanish to reach more people. I found her site after she wrote about The Cramps.
• Underlog GeoURL tels me that the owner of this blog lives 3 miles west of me.

Do you know any other bloggers is Lleida? Just let me know, and I will add you to my list.

[Update 2003.07.22]: Added Albert Alcaine i Peralta [Update 2003.08.13]: Added Connexions Internes [Update 2003.09.05]: Added Underlog

I love technology. I just love it. And I love computers, cellphones, PDA’s, digital camera’s and other geek toys. The only thing is… I don’t have them!!! I used to have some fine toys, but they have been stolen some months ago.

I do have some computers, three in total. It is not the quality of them but the amount that make them geek toys. My desktop computer is the most advanced of the three, with a Cyrix P-133+ processor and 48Mb of memory. Yes, I know it is not that impressive. But after I reinstalled everything lately it runs faster that the mega computer I use at work. I did keep some room on the harddisk to install Linux to have even more pleasure. But… no Linux at the moment!

You might think that I must be a sad geek without any toys, but that is certainly not the case. I don’t have any toys, because I am looking around to decide what toys I am going to buy. Alright, I could go into a shop and buy the latest and the greates phone, PDA and computer, but that is gonna cost me an awful lot of money.

First of all I decided that I don’t need a fancy cellphone. If I have time I will buy a prepaid number this weekend, and I will probably start using a second hand phone. For the moment that will be enough, since I don’t phone a lot and neither plan to use any other functions.

I will also keep on using my old computer. It is fast enough, and with a little bit of extra memory, a wireless connection to the ADSL router and Linux installed I sure will have lots of pleasure of it.

That leaves me without PDA. Palm recently released a new model, the Zire 71, which kicks ass! It has a built-in camera, so it gives me two toys for the price of one. The only problem is the price, which is around €300. I will have to think it over a few more times, but I am afraid that I am going to buy it…

Lately a lot of talk has been going on around Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer (IE). This is my contribution.

First I want to go back in history. The first graphical browser NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was available in 1993 (I was one of its happy users). After a little bit of hesitation Microsoft jumped on the internet train with their Internet Explorer. Between that moment and the year 2000 Microsoft came with 6 versions of their IE browser.

At that moment they had a huge monopoly in the browser market because of their monopoly in the OS market, and they sat back and relaxed.

Now, three years later (30% of the time since the creation of the World Wide Web!!!), we are still stuck with the same version, and it looks like we will have to deal with it for two more years, since Microsoft announced that they will only deliver their browsers together with Windows, and the next version of Windows (Longhorn) is scheduled for 2005.

I think they are making a mistake. It is true that they have the monopoly, but more and more people are switching to other browsers. Furthermore, technology is advancing.

More and more sites appear that make use of features that IE doesn’t support, giving users a less than perfect browsing experience. At this moment the majority of the sites still uses code specially tweaked for IE, but little by little site designers start using standards compliant code. And everybody knows that conforming to standards is not Microsofts strongest point. Their philosophy is ‘what the monopolist uses is the standard’.

That is why IE6 does not fully support CSS2, a standard created two(!) years before they created IE6.

But this is not why they are loosing users. After all, users don’t care about these things, the web designers have to make sure their pages are coded well. But IE6 is also behind on the user interface side.

Mozilla has nice features as a pop-up killer, an image manager to block unwanted images and a site navigation toolbar which lets me navigate through this site using the arrow keys on my browser.

Everybody is free to choose their browser, but I prefer a more modern browser than IE, which misses one third of the development of the Internet. At home I have installed Mozilla Firebird which has an install file of only 6 MB. Although is is still beta software, it runs perfectly on my old computer and gives me a lot more browsing pleasure than the browser installed by default.

It has been a while since I changed the backend of my site from NewsPro to Movable Type.

A side effect of this change was that all pages changed URL, which I considered a minor problem since most people enter the site through the home page (which did not change).

Normally I try to keep URL’s the same, but the old system used horrible filenames like 1025286960,58049,.html and stored all files in a single directory.

Like I said, most visitors enter the site through the front page, but there are some people looking for specific information with search engines. Until today these visitors were presented a ‘404 Page not found’ error page of my provider directly followed by the homepage of my provider. In other words, these visitors end up at a completely useless page, and won’t ever visit my site anymore!!!!

Something had to change. First, I wanted to change the error message from 404 (Not Found) to 410 (Gone), since the latter message is more precise. All visitors looking for never-existing files will still get the old 404 message. I read about this code a while ago on dive into mark, and I kept it in mind for using it on m own site.

Secondly, I want to show them another page, which at least links to my site. For the moment I chose to present them the search page, so at least they can search my site for the information they are looking for.

I am planning to create a separate error page explaining what has happened in more detail, but until now I will just show the search page.

So how did I set this all up?

The Apache server has the ability to specify configuration options in a file called .htaccess. The settings in this file are valid for the current and all underlying directories, and thus can be overruled by another file.

I created this file in the root directory of my site and added the following information:

ErrorDocument 410 /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/cgi-bin/newspro RewriteRule cgi-bin/newspro/(.*) - [G,L]

In ‘normal’ language, these lines say the following:

The first line says that the page at /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi (which is my search page) has to be shown in case a request has status ‘410: Gone’.

The second and third lines activate and configure a module for the Apache webserver calles mod_rewrite, which allows me to process the next two lines.

The fourth line defines the condition to me used for the rewrite. It says: if the requested URL starts with /cgi-bin/newspro.

The last line specifies what has to happen if the condition above is met: rewrite cgi-bin/newspro/. with nothing (-). Besides the rewrite (which does nothing) two options have been specified: G and L. The first changes the status to Gone (410), and the L tells that this is the last rule to process.

In short: if the URL contains /cgi-bin/newspro, the status will be changed to Gone, and when error 410 (Gone) occurs, the search page will be shown.

With fancy e-mail I mean HTML mail.

Most mail applications are able to send (and receive) messages in two formats: text only or HTML, and most applications use HTML by default, which is a BAD THING.

People like to use HTML e-mail, because it looks nicer with all those colors, fonts, pictures,… and therefore most software companies like it.

But for writing a simple “Hello, how is life in Lleida?” message you don’t need bold words nor blue titles. Plain text is probably better readable than that piece of art some people create.

There are of course always cases in which HTML mail is better, but usually that has to do with Viagra marketing, and those messages are deleted immediately.

You might think that even if you don’t use fancy effects, HTML mail could not harm anybody, could it? Wrong! There are a number of reasons why I (and many other people) consider HTML mail harmful:

• HTML mail wastes bandwidth HTML code adds usually 200% to the size of the message. I know, for your short message this is only a very little bit, but if I have been away for the weekend and find tens of HTML messages I urgently want to read, I get nervous when I am waiting 5 minutes (yes, I am using a slow modem) while it could have been finished within 2 minutes!
• HTML mail is more vulnerable for viruses This is a really important one. By using HTML mail, one of the main security principles are broken: separate code from content. HTML mail (content) can contain scripts (code) that virus writers exploit. Many of the famous Trojan Worms would never have been spread around if people would have used plain text messages by default.
• HTML mail can connect to the internet This is something used a lot in spam. They include an image which is stored on their server and insert it into the message with some kind of parameter. The moment you read the message, the image is fetched from their server, passing the parameter to the sender of the message. The result is that your e-mail address will be listed as ‘verified’ and therefore will receive more spam.
• HTML incompatibilities Most people who create websites know how difficult it is to create a page that looks alright on all mayor browsers. Guess what? E-mail clients have the same problems! The message that looks perfect in your Outlook Express can look completely different on the computer of your sister, who uses Eudora to read her mail. And there are still people around with mail applications that don't support HTML at all!
• HTML mail is slow Plain text messages only have to be shown on screen, but ‘rich’ messages need preprocessing. Especially on old computers the difference is very clear. Wait, hasn't your neighbour still got that old-timer Pentium II? Better send him plain text next time, I am sure he will appreciate it! This does not only go for old computers, but more and more people start reading their mail using PDA's or cellphones.

In short: unless you have very good reasons to use HTML mail, I would ask you to send plain text messages. If the appearance of the message is so important, you’re probably better off by sending it as a PDF attachment or publishing it on a web page; those media are suited better for this task.

Go ahead, configure your mail client to send plain ASCII text.

The reason we went to Harmelen last weekend was of course the wedding of Berry and Manon. Besides that, we took the opportunity to rest a little bit after the last busy weeks.

As a result, we have spent most of our time (except for Friday) on the terras in the garden of the house of my parents.

But Friday was different, since that was the big day; the day we came for.

After getting up late, taking a North-European breakfast, and waking up under the shower we realised that most of the morning already has passed, so we started to run to get ready in time.

Thursday we had a lot of time to wrap our presents in paper and prepare our contribution to the book with personal notes from the guests, but as usual I waited with these things until the very last moment.

With a little bit of running we arrived exactly on time at the house of Manon’s parents.

Together with the family of Berry and Manon and some of their best friends we drunk a cup of coffee with some cake. We talked a little bit with Ton and Mirjam, who had brought their two children, of which I haven’t seen the youngest (Daphne) yet. As you can imagine there were lots of things to talk about. After a while Berry and Manon arrived from their photo tour, and they looked gorgeous! Of course they were really happy to see us, and we had a small opportunity to talk a little bit.

Because the weather was great, we were able to walk to the centre of Harmelen, were the old ‘monastery farm’ (now a restaurant) provided a beautiful ambiance for the official ceremony.

There were barely enough chairs to fit all the people present, and the ceremony was not too oficial with regular jokes about Berry’s talent for playing darts, friends through thick and thin, and of course the hassle with the ‘stoofje’ under Manon’s feet.

Since we were in such a romantic place, Berry and Manon had chosen to use some time for some pictures together with the family, witnesses and friends in different combinations.

After sending Loek to the supermarket to get us some water, we walked to the church.

The mass was also really nice, although a little bit long. I participated as a witness, but was surprised to see that my role was only that: witness the rituals. I did not have to sign any document! Maybe if I would have been on the oposite site, I could have had an additional function by trying to catch Berry when he accidentally almost fell from the altar.

Anyway, after hearing them say “yes” and seeing them exchange rings for the second time, we were absolutely sure that they were married, so it was time to party.

Besides that we were very thirsty, and as a result we arrived first in ‘De Putcop’, where the reception would take place. Since it was already late, we quickly sung the welcome song prepared by the family, cut the pie, congratulated the couple and sat down to (finally) have a drink.

While we were relaxing and talking at our table, more and more people entered. Both Berry and Manon are very active Harmelen, Berry in Jong Nederland, SCH, the Pirates, de Kwakbollen, and Manon in EHBO.

After filling our stomachs we were ready again for the final party, with even more people than appeared on the reception. I tried to speak at least some minutes with all my old friends, but one evening is by far too short for this. At least I (and Maria José as well) had a lot of fun.

Sunday before leaving home again we visited Berry and Manon at home. We watched (parts of) the video made and talked a lot about the day…

Wednesday they will leave to Florida, where they will visit Disney World (they are huge fans of Disney) and have a cruise through the Caribbean.

I wish them a good time, and hope to see them soon again.

[Update 2004.01.21]: Changed link to JNH

A while ago I wrote about my old Image gallery, and gave a link to the gallery since I didn’t create the navigation tabs yet.

The gallery was created using a script called ‘Image Arcadia’ which is not supported on a public site anymore. Although it worked alright, it still needed a lot of customisation to fit into the rest of the site.

Recently I run across PhotoBlog from Quixotic Pixels. This is a set of Movable Type templates, allowing me to manage my images the same way I manage my texts, without having to install extra scripts.

I uploaded some photo’s from my old Photo Gallery and used the default blue style, and it looks alright.

The next time I will add all other photo’s and I will adjust the look of the pages little by little until it fits with the rest of the site. There is still a lot to be done…

Two more days working and we will go for a short trip to Holland!!!

The reason is of course the wedding of Berry and Manon on Friday. We will leave Thursday early in the morning, giving us one day to travel, shop, talk with my parents and of course to prepare us (physically and mentally) for the big day.

Berry and Manon will get married ‘for the law’ in Restaurant de Kloosterhoeve, which I consider a good choice, since it has a lot more atmosphere than the town hall in Woerden and is situated in the centre of Harmelen.

The religious part of the day will take place in the St. Bavo church, and the party will be in Restaurant De Putkop.

I am really looking forward to this day, firstly because it is an important day for some of my best friends and secondly because I will meet a lot of people to whom I haven’t spoken for some time. And finally, I always like to go back to Harmelen.

The calendar shows it is weekend…

Time to arrange our house and enjoy the weather. We urgently need a sun tan before leaving to Holland next Thursday. Can you imagine that we will be the whitest persons on the wedding of Berry and Manon? Nobody will believe we are living in the south of Europe.

Therefore we will be going to the beach tomorrow. Usually we go to Vilafortuny, which is a quiet place between Salou and Cambrils, about 70 km from Lleida. Surely we will leave early in the morning, as we expect whole Lleida to head to the water, and stay there until the early afternoon. The afternoon we will probably spent walking through the village, sitting on a terras or enjoying our life in another way.

Many companies pay a lot of many to have somebody design their web site. This person has to decide on the colours, structure, fonts and page layout used. It takes a lot of experience to get this right.

But now there is a new method, which is way cheaper: StrangeBanana: Computer-generated webpage design. Just let Strange Banana create some random designs for you, and pick the one you like. Simple as that…

And, do you like the new look of the site? Drop a comment and let me know what you think of it.

I planned to do everything in the most logical order: first decide what has to be shown on each page, and then create the looks of the site. But playing with colours and images is more fun than programming templates, so in between I worked little by little on this new look.

I still have some more ideas in my mind, concerning both content as style, so don’t be surprised if things change (a little bit) again…

The lesson of this weekend is: always study the program carefully.

Of course I looked at the program of the Aplec del Caragol, but I quickly came to the conclusion that we would only join the meals on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and of course the parties on Saturday night.

We decided to skip the parade on Sunday morning, simply because we didn’t want to wake up at 8 o’clock after a ‘heavy’ night. If I would have read the program better, I would have known that I could just as well have joined the parade, since they were passing our house anyway.

The parade is a quite curious thing, and there is no way to continue sleeping when they pass your house. You have to imagine that the world famous Kwakbollen Brass Band is passing your window 20 times in half an hour, with in between hundreds of people who continued partying the whole night without sleeping. Noise enough…

A funny habit is to throw water on the persons passing your window (ours was just too far from the street to do this), so all participants will be ‘fresh’ again for another day on the Aplec.

When we were cleaning the space of our colla after the Aplec, bad news arrived. The parents of Maria José had an accident with their car and had to go to the hospital for some research. While her brother and sister went to the hospital, Maria José and I went to their house to take care about the grandmother and the dog.

Last night Maria José slept in the hospital in the room of her parents, and I stayed in Alpicat. Both of them are reasonable OK, with a lot of browses and glass cuts in their faces. The mother of Maria José has a broken shoulder and will probably be operated this week.

Eating and drinking…

I guess that will be the central theme for today and the coming days.

This lunchtime I went to restaurant ‘La Tapa’ with 23 colleagues to say goodbye to a colleague. For me this was a great opportunity to see my other colleagues again, since I work only with a few people in the commercial department, and all the others are in another building. It also was nice to see the new faces and connect them to the voices I have heard over the telephone.

Tonight we are going to have a supper at the house of the parents of Maria José, to celebrate the birthday of her grandmother. We will be bringing some coca de recapte, and together with some tortilla’s and a little bit of Cava (Catalan Champagne) my first culinary day will be complete.

But after that the party will begin. This weekend is the weekend of the Aplec del Caragol, the snail party. The motto of the weekend says it all: 12.000 participants, 100 clubs, 200.000 visitors, 12 tons of snails.

To get a better impression, change the word club in something like ‘group of friends with their family who has their own place to eat, drink, meet, listen to (live) music…’. There is no way to describe the Aplec, it is something you have to experience, and preferably in a colla (group). As any year, we will be with the whole family in the colla called ‘Picarol’.

Today I finally received it: my new passport!!!!!

On March 22 my jacket with my passport got stolen, and now, more than a month later I finally have a new one. Now I can renew my residence permit and buy a new cellphone.

For the moment I have decided not to buy a new Palm yet, although the new Zire looks great.

Anyway, Berry, now I can surely come to your wedding!!!!