This fun, dragging magnetic letters around the screen while 10+ people are doing the same!

[Via VoWe]

10 While diving home from work, you have to pull over three times to jot it down and empty your mind. 9 You put your weekly review on a Someday/Maybe list. …NOT! 8 You go to McDonalds for lunch but, before ordering, you draw a mind map of what an ideal fast food meal would look and taste like. 7 You use your Brother P-Touch to label your kitchen drawers. 6 You actually know how to pronounce “Moleskine”. 5 You actually understand the workflow chart in GTD. 4 You know the difference between 40,000 and 30,000 feet perspectives. 3 You know that the “two-minute rule” has nothing to do with the conclusion of football games. 2 When you get together with friends, you say, “Show me your project list!” 1 After five minutes of foreplay, you pause and ask your partner, “What’s the next action?”

[Via the GTD forum]

I just received a cheque from Google. They pay whenever I pass $100, which in my case takes a while. But everytime the cheque arrives it is a happy moment.

The arrival of my cheque also triggered a chain of thoughts about advertising on my site. A little bit more than a year ago, I added the Google AdWords to this site. I simply took the existing pages, and looked where I could fit in the AdWords box. Since it was a test, I didn’t spent too much time tweaking my templates; I just wanted to know whether it worked. In the past year I have made some minor changes, mainly to try out the AdWords program.

As I said, I had some thoughts about this whole advertising thing. One of these thoughts is that I should rethink the design of my pages so that the advertisements blend in better. If I take advertising seriously, I should also give the ads a better position on my pages (above the fold) of course without taking too much away from the content.

I also want to try out Chitika, which I heard gives good results as well. I placed some Chitika adds on my site, like the one above, and will monitor it during the next weeks. As you see, Chitika’s eMiniMalls look far more sexy than Google’s AdWords. But are they also more effective?

During my last visit to the Netherlands I bought the latest CD from Hallo Venray for a very good price. I have been listening it for two weeks now, and wanted to share some songs with you:

• Big Catch;
• Kicking;
• Paris;
• Weirdo.

Business blog It’s a small place has a very interesting series of articles describing how BryteNet has been set up technically and commercially. At this moment the series contains the following texts:

• Why does one start a hosting company?
• A business plan
• Setting up the server
• Business Management
• Eating our own dogfood

The past 48 hours I have been diving around in our brand new Toyota Corolla Verso, and I feel the King of the road. That feeling mainly comes because this car makes a lot more noise than our previous, old, car, and because it is so much higher. I can look over the cars in front of me, and see much more when I am passing dangerous crossing. In short, I feel more in control, and that is worth a lot when driving in a chaotic Catalan city.

This weekend we’re going to make some more kilometres to try out the 6th gear and the cruise control.

I feel good!

We just came back from a week’s holiday in the Netherlands. The aim of our holiday was to relax, and we succeeded. Instead of running from one ‘obligatory’ visit to another, as we usually do when visiting my home country, this time we put the emphasis on what we want. This visit to the Netherlands has been touristic than any previous visit, and we loved every minute of it.

Of course the fantastic weather helped a lot; it was sunny every day so we could spend a lot of time outside in nature and on the terrace. We visited amongst others Amsterdam, Utrecht, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Zeist, Amelisweerd, Lelystad, and Enkhuizen.

Now that we’re back in ‘real’ life we are already looking forward to our next visit at Christmas time!

This week our new car arrived in Lleida. It is waiting for us at the car dealer and we can take it home as soon as all paperwork has been arranged. And I hate paperwork!

For some days we have been running around Lleida trying to get all necessary pieces of dead tree, but we won’t be able to meet our personal target, which was today. Why today? Well, since we leave tomorrow to spend a week in Harmelen, this means that we’ll only have our new car at the end of this month.

Anyway, let’s just first enjoy our holidays, and worry about the car later.

It’s a small place is a new blog I created today. You might be wondering why I am starting a new blog while I even haven’t got the time to update Brain tags regularly! The truth is that I am blogging just as much as always, but I spread my writings over several sites to prevent clutter.

If you are interested in my personal life and general writings about technology and travelling, Brain Tags is the place to be.

And if you are interested in news and my opinion about the Point of Sale market, I give you the POS Blog.

And now I have It’s a small place, giving you a view behind the curtains of a small part-time hosting company.

I have started writing about what I did to set it all up, with todays article telling on how I got the idea to start a hosting business. Of course, Brain Tags readers already know the answer, but I included it for completeness.

It’s a small place is also the first site I created in WordPress. For the moment the set-up is very basic (I only changed the default templates) but you can expect some more tinkering in the coming weeks. So far I have been impressed by WordPress: the installation was peanuts, and there is plenty of functionality. The user interface is not as sleek as the Movable Type interface, but I value function over looks anyway.

The last two weeks I have made two business trips; I visited London and the Netherlands. The last two weeks there have been no changes to this site. The obvious conclusion is that travelling and writing don’t go together. I have encountered some reasons for this incompatibility:

1. It is hard to find Internet connections. I spend most of my time in meeting rooms or in the car, without any computer in the neighbourhood. The rest of the time I am in restaurants or in hotels, where I can rarely find an Internet terminal and they have one it is ridiculously expensive.
2. I work a lot more. Since I don't have a home or friends to go to after work, I usually work the whole day. When I arrive in my hotel room, all I do is some zapping on the TV (does anybody know a hotel that does not offer that horrible CNN?) and go to bed.
3. There is nothing to tell. Since I don't do anything special and do not read my feeds, I have no inspiration.

Anyway, Im back home again, and will pick up my ‘normal’ life during the next days.

When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity.

Street theatre is nice, since it is small-scale and personal. The acts are small, and the audience is small. That’s why they got out of the theatre, and onto the street. That’s why it is called street theatre. A great way to get to know street theatre is to visit a theatre festival. Edinburgh has the most famous theatre festival in the world, and Tàrrega has the most famous Spanish festival. Tàrrega happens to be quite close to Lleida, so tonight we’ll be walking around in the streets of Tàrrega to see what is happening in the marvellous world of street theatre.

This year we found something curious. There was one show we really liked to see (Toni Alba), but this show is performed in a theatre. The curious thing is that we are going to look at a street theatre artist, those artists that are too small for a theatre, that is so popular that he’s playing in a theatre. The other curious thing about this show is that it starts at 1:00 o’clock at night.

The street where I live is just inside the ‘blue zone’, the zone where you have to pay to park on the streets. The payment machines are activated on working days from 9-14 and 16-20, the other hours you don’t have to pay.

I never pay, since these hours coincide more or less with my working hours, so I can park my car in front of our door for free. The only exception is the end of the morning: I work until 13:30, and usually arrive home 15 minutes later. So officially I have to pay 15 minutes, 15 eurocent, every day, which I never did until today.

When I come home I always pass the parking control, as they are talking to each other while waiting for the end of their shift. Every day I see them standing on the same corner, and I know that I can park the car in the blue zone without having to be afraid that they will fine me.

The controller on the photo might just have started this job and was simply doing his job, or she does not get along very well with her colleagues or maybe simply had a bad day and wanted to share this feeling ;-).

Anyway, the result was that I ended up paying for 5 minutes of parking to avoid problems.

Though we did receive a bid on eBay, the buyer yesterday told me that they decided not to buy the car. His ‘story’ was that he asked for some hours off at his office in order to travel to Lleida and pick up the car, when his boss offered him a lease car for only €90 per month.

So now our little Fiat Punto is back on eBay. As I stated before, the car is old, 11 years, but in excellent state, and I am sure it will serve some years more for somebody who takes care about the car. Place your bid, or contact me for more information.

We all know that almost all comment spam is coming from virus infected PC’s turned into zombies. For a while I suspected that these zombies work with a list of URIs to attack, since attacks always follow the same pattern: suddenly I receive a lot of comments from various IP addresses, but all using the same referrer and posting more or less the same message. Usually attacks take about two days before the comment spam slows down. Very few of all these comments make it through the Movable Type spam filters, and usually adding the URL to the blacklist takes care of them forever.

Since upgrading to version 3.2 I did not receive any single comment spam. The reason is that I forgot to rename the comment script. One of the first measures I took against comment spam was renaming this script, so bots using Google to find spammable sites would not find me. With the latest update, I forgot to do so. Now, the list with spammable URIs these spambots use, contain hundreds of links to a script that does not exist anymore. So they do not even reach my comment-spam filters!

Even better, they fall into another trap. I catch all request for ‘inapropiate’ files as system files and non-existing scripts (formmail.pl), and automatically put their IP address on a blacklist, which is cleaned up after two weeks. This blacklist has been growing like crazy the last week, due to all these MT-spammers requesting the old location.

Until they refresh their list, I can sit back and relax!

BryteNet is growing, but could grow faster. Therefore we decided to offer a sponsoring package, with the following conditions:

• The size and bandwidth of the sponsored site must be within the limits of the BryteNet Presence package. Any additional resources used will be invoiced;
• We require a link back to BryteNet on the homepage of the sponsored site;
• The sponsored site must be non-commercial;
• There must be a relation between the sponsored site and BryteNet or its owner.
• See the BryteNet site for more details and application instructions.

After I left Harmelen four years ago, I also stopped participating in youth activities. Of course I have done some work for Fimcap as their webmaster, but I never visited or participated in any activity.

Last weekend we went to Vall d’Aran to spend 24 hours in a Roundabout camp.

Roundabout is a Fimcap project in which two groups from different countries spend their summer camp together. This Roundabout was between three groups (Germany, Malta and Catalonia), and this was the third year of the project. Since we knew the Maltese animators and most of the German animators very well, we visited them to meet our old friends again.

Because the group had been together for already a week and the participants knew each other from former years, we decided to stay on the background to not disturb the group dynamics. That gave us many possibilities to analyse the activity, and compare it to our own experiences. People active within a youth organisation already know that there are huge differences between groups within a single organisation, let alone the differences between different organisations from different countries — this is one reason Fimcap is so interesting.

Anyway, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and everybody was enjoying the activity. And we? We were very happy to meet our old friends again, and get up-to-date with all the gossip.

I will be making some changes under the hood of this site. As a result, you might find that you cannot reach the server or that e-mail is bounced. Of course I will try to get everything back in order as soon as possible, in order not to dsiturb your reading pleasure.

Note: the maintenance only involves sites under the braintags.com and jeroensangers.com domains. No other sites hosted by BryteNet will be involved in the changes.

[Update 2005.08.31] As far as I know, everything went alright. I had some problems with a wrong DNS entry, but that should be sorted out by now. If you find anything strange, please contact me.

At this moment I am updating my MT sites to version 3.2. This is a huge update, and I am running into some issues. My dynamically published POS Blog is currently unavailable, because the core smarty libs are missing in the installation file. I receive the following error message when requesting a page:

main(/home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

My normal blog also gives me an error when rebuilding, stating that I used some tags in the wrong way:

Error in tag: You used an ‘MTEntryDate’ tag outside of the context of an entry; perhaps you mistakenly placed it outside of an ‘MTEntries’ container?

I hope to solve these issues, and other issues I find, as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Internet is a very good medium to get to know new artists. On the site of George I found The Subways, and of course I just had to put them in my jukebox: I Want to Hear What You Have Got To Say and Rock and Roll Queen are waiting to be downloaded.

Fiat Punto TD SX

Year: 1994 Exterior colour: White 290000 kilometres Diesel engine 5 doors ITV check until may 2006. Centralised closing, assisted steering, electrical windows.

For sale on eBay.

A bloke is in a queue at the supermarket when he notices that the rather dishy blonde behind him has just raised her hand and smiled hello to him.

He is rather taken aback that such a looker would be waving to him, and although familiar he can’t place where he might know her from, so he says “sorry do you know me?”

She replies “I may be mistaken, but I thought you might be the father of one of my children!”

His mind shoots back to the one and only time he has been unfaithful, “Christ!” he says “are you that stripogram on my stag night that I shagged on the snooker table in front of all my mates whilst your mate whipped me with some wet celery and stuck a cucumber up my arse?”

"

“No” she replies, “I’m your sons' English teacher.”

This week we bought a very expensive gadget: a new car!

After many visits to many car dealers we were very fed-up with searching. We are happy that we made a decission, mainly because that means that we can spend a Saturday at home, or just walking around. The car is expected to arrive at the end of September.

I just read ‘How to tip properly’ on lifehacker, and was very surprised to read about pre-tipping:

In busy clubs or at crowded bars, it is acceptable to “pre-tip” the bartender. This encourages him to respond promptly to your needs, and it keeps you from waiting at the bar. A pre-tip is always at least 5 dollars (and more often 10 or above, depending on how crowded or upscale the bar is). Despite the amount, it should not comprise the whole of your tipping. One dollar for every 2 drinks afterward is typically sufficient to maintain their interest.

What a huge bullshit!!! Why did we let it go this far?!

First of all, tipping is a way to express my thanks for the delivered services. If I decide to pay a little bit extra, I decide how much I will give. In many places I read tipping rules like “you should always give 10%”, but for me there is only one rule: how do I value the extra service delivered to me. I put emphasis on extra, since I always assume that normal service is already included in the price. I pay for a coffee, and you bring it. If I read in the quote above that I have to pre-tip in order to encourage the waiter to respond promptly to my needs, I’d rather go to another place, since this waiter is simply not doing his job! He should be paid less, not more!

Furthermore, why do we only tip in bars and restaurants? Don’t the hairdresser and the cashier of the supermarket work just as much or even more? And who ever gave a tip to the electric co.? OK, skip that last one, since they will never do something extra for me.

The point is, I see tipping as something general. If you do something extra for me, I pay you extra. If you deliver the basic service, e.g. you bring me my cup of coffee when I order one, I pay only the required amount. A tip is something you need to earn!

Today, I proudly present my latest work: BryteNet.

BryteNet is going to be the name under which I am going to manage my hosting activities. I am certainly not going to be the cheapest hosting provider, but my prices are far lower than the average European hosting company (XS4ALL still asks €23 for only 50Mb space) and I can support you in English, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan.

Furthermore, the only limits I put in my packages are disk space and bandwidth. I offer unlimited POP3 mail, mail forwarders, FTP accounts, mailing lists, mySQL databases, and subdomains; you decide how to use your space!

Go have a look at the site, and tell me what you think of it.