Before I used to have a link on this page to the photo gallery. The photo gallery is not gone yet, and as soon as the site redesign has progressed further, a permanent link to the photo section will appear again.
For now, you can use this message to find out where my Photo Gallery is.
03.06.2003: I have decided to replace the old gallery, so I removed the link.
I wrote the last entry on this site exactly four hours before the start of the ‘Festa Major’ en Lleida. This morning I have been working again, so it is exactly four hours after festa major.
We had a great weekend! I think that we have seen all the highlights of the weekend, and in between we took the time to enjoy our free time. We have spent quite some time shopping for clothes. Maybe it was because our wardrobe looked empty after removing the winter clothes and clothes we never ware anymore.
Yesterday we went to a big factory outlet in a small town called Roca de Vallès. For those who don’t know: in a factory outlet you can buy the clothes the factory does not want to sell in the normal shops because of small errors or because the model is outdated or experimental. You have to look carefully, but you can find good quality for a very sharp price.
Unfortunately, the women’s fashion is so horrible at the moment that we couldn’t find anything for Maria José. And all we were looking for was a normal pair of jeans (unbleached), a white collar-shirt and a jeans jacket.
Later on that day, the deception of the morning was balanced by the wonderful show of the Moros i Cristians. First we saw the parade through the city and in the evening they presented in a spectacular way how the Moros conquered Lleida from the Christians.
On Saturday we didn’t see much of the party. We went shopping in town and relaxed at home. In the evening we had some friends for supper. After supper (which was around 1 o’clock) we went to the ‘regional houses’. Just outside Lleida on the fair grounds you could eat and drink specialities from different regions of Spain. It reminded me of the typical evening at Euroforums, where each country presents their typical culinary specialities. Only here tens of thousands people were trying to get the best. We usually hang around the bar of Galicia. The difficult thing is to find your friend in this huge audience.
Besides food and drinks there were also some concerts, of which I only remember that they were horrible. They told me that one of the artists has represented Spain on the Eurovision song contest…
The surprise of that evening was when I noticed someone who looked very familiar to me, only I couldn’t remember why. He came to us and when he started talking I knew it.
Pietro had participated in a few Euroforums and is the nephew of the former Italian representative Marco. He told us that he is living in Barcelona since a few months, and he came to Lleida to party.
Yes, Fimcap is like a small family…
Only four hours left to work, and then it’s party time!!!
This weekend Lleida is celebrating its Festa Major, with a lot of activities. We haven’t decided yet on which activities to visit, but I think you will find us tonight with the fireworks, tomorrow at the regional houses, on Sunday at the castle builders and Monday at the show of the Moors and the Christians.
Anyway, I will keep you all informed… four hours to go!
Being a user of Movable type and a player of BlogShares, I have been looking to combine those things: it would be awesome to see Blogshares information on my site.
After looking around a little bit, I found MTBlogShares from David Raynes. His plugin lets me publish all kinds of information from BlogShares on my site, but the one thing I have been looking for has not been implemented yet.
So David, if you read this, could you implement this in your plugin for me, since my programming knowledge is by far not as good as yours:
Using your plugin it is possible to obtain the URL of each stock’s BlogShares page. The only thing that I want is a possibility to remove the string http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=, so that I have the URL of the site in question.
This allows me to create a list with links to sites I own shares of. As soon as the BlogShares spider visits my site and picks up those links, the total value of the blogs I have shares in will increase, making my shares worth more.
Well, what do you think about this idea? I think a lot of people will use your plugin if you have implemented this option.
As I continue defining the information shown on the main page, I find the list of archives by date way too long.
I have been thinking about how to solve this problem. The nicest way would be to group all dates by year and make a dynamical menu showing the months when clicking on the year. This would requiere some advanced JavaScript, and visitors without JavaScript would still see the whole list.
I went to look for other solutions, and came across Brad Choate: Year Archives in MT. Brad describes a way of creating a page showing a year calendar. I guess I’m going to implement this the coming days…
This weekend we had wonderful weather, so we headed to the beach to get a tan and relax a little bit. Since I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to see the sun until now, I am walking around with a sun-burned nose.
I just added a lot of old news.
Using the Internet Archive I was able to see my old site again. I copied all the news I had written on this site, and imported them into my new site.
In case you are curious to read them, they are dated from November 9, 1997 until March 4, 2001. Most of these messages are written in Dutch.
Whenever I am talking to somebody in Holland, one of the first questions asked to me is: “How is the weather?”.
The truth is, the weather here is not so interesting as it is in Holland. Over there you never know what to expect, it my rain, it might be sunny, it might be cloudy… everyday something else. Over here it usually is warmer than in Holland, and usually we have a sunny or partially cloudy day. Nothing special.
If you’re still interested in the situation here, please read the weather report on Internet. It appears that there are two amateur radio stations in Lleida publishing weather reports, so you will always be able to have updated data.
Lleida is a good place to live. People who regularly follow my messages on this site already know that, but now an independent source has confirmed this.
The Spanish magazine Actualidad Económica has done a research for the quality of life in the 52 capitals of the Spanish provinces, and Lleida ended on the 2nd place!!!
The have looked at the price of living, mobility, services, educational possibilities, the character of the inhabitants and the political situation. All those factors seem to be alright here in Lleida.
The most remarkable conclusion from this research is the top position of the Catalan cities, with Girona and Lleida on the first two places and Barcelona on the fifth place.
Yes, it’s definitely great to live here!
Q: How long does it take me to put my signature on a paper? A: Over 5 hours!!!
To get my new passport, I had to fill in a lot of papers. I did all I could at home and send the whole bunch (request form, photo’s, police report,…) to the consulate.
Last week they phoned me and told that they had sent the whole packet to Holland, but that I still had to come to Barcelona to put my signature on a paper. And this could not be done by post, but had to be done in person at their office.
So this morning I left home at 8 o’clock to enjoy the traffic jams of Barcelona. After three hours I parked my car, I went into the office, put my signature and within 10 minutes I was standing on the street again. Two hours more in the car, and the morning was finished and I was home again.
Still I am very lucky, because since I live so far away from Barcelona, they are going to send my new passport to me by mail. People living in Barcelona are also ‘obliged’ to come and get their passport at the consulate, but for me they are willing to do this favour. The girl at the desk even told me that I don’t have the pay the cost of sending it!!!!!
This must be my lucky day…
Until some months ago, this web site had the possibility to subscribe to the news published on this page. Each time I wrote something new, the subscribers would receive the text by e-mail. Unfortunately, my hosting provider does not allow me anymore to send e-mail.
Today I have added a new solution, hosted by Bloglet. By filling in your e-mail address on the form on the main page, you will receive a daily message with all news of that day (usually not a lot…).
This website is now available for trading on the BlogShares fantasy blog shares market.
At this moment, 4000 stocks are available at $0,20 each.
I am convinced that this is a very good investment, since the site is still under development, so quality (and thus incoming links) will surely increase.
Now that I have a wonderful new CMS able to produce RSS feeds, I have been looking for a way to use it. My idea is to create a page showing the latest headlines from some news sources (see the list in the side bar), so that I don’t have to visit each site.
I have found some applications (so called news aggregators) which do this, but until now I haven’t found a good web service offering the same service.
I don’t want to install an application, since I want to access this information both from home as from my work as well as when I am on holiday. My idea is that I don’t have the same bookmarks on all those locations, and by offering a web page the information is always available.
NewsApp is the closest to my ideal I could find, but it lacks configurability and has the layout of an early alpha release.
Today is Sant Jordi, the day that all Catalan boys give a rose to their girlfriend and receive a book in return.
Already this morning I could see some people selling roses at the traffic lights, so for sure I won’t have any problems getting a rose.
Maria José does not know this yet, but I also bought a book for her. To me it is not so fair that the boys are ready for €4, while the girls have to spend at least four times that amount.
I read on the Gencat site that Sant Jordi has been celebrated since the year 1456!
Easter in Spain is something special. On ‘Semana Santa’ everybody takes a small holiday and leaves town to spend a few days in the mountains or at the beach. You can not imagine how silent and empty a city can get until you have visited a city at Easter.
Maria José and I also planned to go away for some days (but not to Holland), but finally decided that after working so many weekend to make our home perfect and comfortable, we should take the opportunity to enjoy it.
Of course, four days at home is a little bit too much, so to start our short holiday we headed to Andorra to do some shoppings. The typical items people buy in Andorra are gasoline (we made sure that our tank was empty when arriving—the difference in price was €0,10 per litre), sugar (we bought enough), perfumes, cigarettes (unfortunately we don’t smoke), clothes (it appeared that most shops have the same owner, must be a rich guy!!!) and electronics (at the moment we don’t need anything).
We took our swimming clothes with us to visit Caldea again, but after a day shopping we preferred to go home instead.
You might have noticed the BlogShares logo on my web site. This is because last week I started trading on their fantasy blog share market. The principle is very simple:
Instead of buying shares for companies you virtually buy shares for weblog sites.
The value of a site depends on the incoming links. This very sites has no incoming links from other weblogs, so that leaves my website worthless. However, my outgoing sites are worth a little bit, so by linking to other sites, I add value to these sites.
The rest functions just like the normal stock market. Everybody starts with $500 and can buy virtual shares. At this moment my assets are worth $745, which I think isn’t bad, but compared to some big players this amount is insignificant.
People who haven’t visited my website might think that it has changed a lot. But after the big step last week things look quite the same. That is because I am going to make the site in three stages:
Anyway, plenty of work left for the next weeks.
Yesterday I started installing Windows 98 on my computer WITHOUT A LICENCE!!!
I know that it is illegal, but I have some reasons for doing it. First of all I think that I will only use Windows 98 temporary, and will be able to switch to Linux or FreeBSD soon.
Secondly, Windows 98 is a product that is not supported anymore by Microsoft, and I doubt if I still can buy a licence. But even if I could, I wouldn’t buy it.
So today I entered the world of serialz, my god how I hate this! Especially since I was doing it on my old laptop which was slowing down with each pop-up showing.
Now that I almost finished installing the operating system, it is time to start thinking about the applications I need. I have made this small list:
The worst part of the site redesign is done.
I just changed the CMS application form the old NewsPro (which is not supported anymore, the creator is now working on Coranto) to Movable Type. Until now I am very positive about MT, I even was able to import all my old NewsPro posts!
The site now shows the default Movable Type layout and design, which is not ugly at all.
The coming weeks I am going to study the Movable Type templates and little by little create my own style.
Alright, the legs of the table in our working room are there. My old computer is unpacked, the boxes are thrown away.
After some problems I got the computer to work. I decided not to install the scanner, since is is quite big, and I never use it anyway. If I really need to scan something, I can always connect it temporary…
Now I have to reinstall all the software. I could clean up the current installation and copy my files from my laptop, but I have been playing with this machine for years, and I think it is best to start from zero. I am sure I don’t need any file or application, since I didn’t use this computer for the last 17 months.
First I was thinking about installing only Linux, but to get working quickly I think it is best to start with a small Windows 98 installation.
After Linux is fully operational, I only have to change the boot loader. And it is always handy to have a copy of Windows available, isn’t it?
As I have stated before, this site has been created in a very short time, expecting that soon it would be transferred to a better place with better possibilities.
As this has not happened yet, I decided to redesign my site. I will do it in the Zeldman way, so I will strip the whole site to its bare bones and after that start trying out the new design. So expect the site to change once in a while…
Since I created my first web page back in 1994 I always have had at least a section in which I tell about my personal life.
At this moment this section is the most important part of the site, and more and more people have such a section. If you also link to other sites in your articles, this is called ‘blogging’, and blogging is very popular.
Although my site is not (yet) so advanced as some other bloggers, I do realise that I am a blogger.
And ‘real’ bloggers publish their Blogger code on their site. Of course I also have created my own code:
B9 d++ t+ k s+ u- f i o++ x– e+ l- c–
In fact, the blogger code is nothing but a lame copy of the good old Geek Code.
It has been a while ago since I last updated my page. The stats show that it doesn’t matter since people are visiting my site anyway, but I feel a little bit guilty about it. It is not that I haven’t got anything to tell. There are things happening in my life, but mostly I am waiting.
Waiting for the arrival of the legs of our desk, so I can remove my computer from the boxes and check if it still works after spending 17 months stuffed away in a little corner.
Waiting to see if my computer works, so I can finally buy a Wifi PCI card to connect to the neighbours ADSL line. Why pay a lot of money if you can share, isn’t it?
Waiting for the Dutch consulate to tell me when my new passport will arrive. I just sent them the request form, and I know that it takes at least three weeks to have the new passport, but I want to be sure that I can go to the Netherlands for a small party in the beginning of June.
Waiting for Easter, when I will have some days off to relax a little bit. We have been thinking about going away for some days to the Basque Country, but finally we decided to stay at home and relax a little bit. Of course we will go to the beach one day, and for sure we are going to do some nice things the other days as well.
Waiting for inspiration to write something more interesting on my site…
The police has found my driver’s licence!
This morning I went to the police station to pick it up. It was still in the wallet I keep it in, but the other things like my passport and my Aino business card have disappeared from the wallet.
Anyway, this saves me some trouble requesting a new licence.
After we had some visitors from Barcelona last weekend, this weekend we had visit from Switzerland. Karin and her boyfriend are having a holiday in Catalunya, and decided to visit us last weekend.
I know Karin since my first Euroforum and have met her and her friends several times in different countries in Europe. Two years long I went to Switzerland in summer, to help them with their summer camp, and every time I crossed Switzerland I tried to make some time for a stop in Luzern. The last years however I didn’t have a lot of contact with her, so it was a pleasure to see her again.
They arrived on Friday evening, while I was still at work, so they had to wait a little bit at home. They didn’t mind after walking two days through Barcelona.
After my work we went for a beer in O’Sullivans, after which we would meet Maria José and go to a restaurant.
However, when we wanted to leave the place, I noticed that my jacket was gone. I knew 100% sure that I had put it on the chair right behind us (and we were almost in the corner!), but it just wasn’t there anymore. After searching around a little bit, we knew for sure that the jacket had been stolen.
I informed a waitress, who told me that the day before had happened the same thing. Without jacket (including cellphone, Palm III agenda, passport and drivers licence) we walked to the restaurant, where Maria José tried to phone to my phone. It was still ringing, but nobody answered (as expected).
We enjoyed a nice mail at Pastificio (pasta of course), brought our guests home for a beer and went to the police.
On Saturday I showed our guests around in Lleida. We visited the usual things like the Seu Vella, Carrer Major, Seu Nova, … We also taught them wat a ‘siesta’ is.
On Sunday, after enjoying our breakfast, we prepared some sandwiches and drove to Ulldemolins. There, we took a drink and started walking into the mountains.
After almost two hours we were up on the mountain, almost 500 meters higher than where we started. We ate our sandwiches, and said goodbye to our guests. They were going to walk some hours more until they arrive in Montsant on the other side of the mountain, where they would have to find a place to stay. We walked back to our car and drive back home. Notice that this is not the normal way we leave our guests!!!