People are individualists; we prefer to do things alone and don’t care about the others. Fortunately, we are also ‘intelligent’ and realise that we need other people in certain situations. But if this is not strictly necessary, we are selfish. This is a big pity, since we can do so much more when we co-operate!

I was realising this when I was waiting at the luggage belt of the airport. As usual, everybody was bending over the belt to see whether his or her luggage was coming and thereby blocking the view of the people behind him or her, who in their turn had to bend even more over the belt to see something. In this struggle, only the first person is able to see the luggage coming, and is able to get the luggage without problems. All others have two problems: they cannot see their luggage coming, and when they finally see their property, they are not able to get it because of all the people blocking the way. The solution is very simple: if everybody keeps 2 meters distance from the belt, everybody is able to see their luggage coming, and everybody is able to get to the belt to pick up their suitcase. If it is that simple, why won’t people do this? Well, mainly because there is no incentive for the first person that has the view and the space no matter the distance to the belt. And when the first person chooses to stay close to the belt, all the others have only one solution: get even closer to the belt!

In my work I encounter the same problem. Whenever I have contact with a possible dealer in a new country, the word exclusivity falls within the first two conversations. They have seen our product and think it is good and have the idea that they can conquer the whole market because they have a better product. They are so wrong. Dominating a market is extremely difficult and usually does not depend much on the quality of the product (Microsoft?). If you want to sell a lot of our product, all you need is demand, which is difficult to create. The best way to do it is to have many, many dealers. If many dealers are offering this product, it will become visible. And when it is visible, clients start asking for it. This is how we work in the Spanish market. There are 400+ dealers of our product, and in some branches our product has become the ‘de facto’ standard. Local dealers sell a lot more because there are many other dealers offering the same products; they would never have reached those sales using an exclusive product. If only our foreign contacts could have this insight and allow for more competition in their markets. I am 100% sure that they would sell a lot more!

If people would be less individualistic, we could do bigger things!

The main reason we went to the Netherlands last weekend was to visit our family. Finn is about a month old, so it was about time to meet him!

And babies are such a great subject for photos, so I uploaded some to Brain Pics.

It’s a TV, it plays DVDs, and it’s a beer fridge, all-in-one! What else could you possibly want?

[Via Gizmodo]

Tomorrow morning I will travel to Harmelen again. It will be a short visit to see Finn, the newborn son of Esther and Terry, and of course to visit the party of the ‘Vrienden van JN Harmelen’.

Until next week!

Some weeks ago, we decided to change mobile provider. We have a contract with Telefonica Movistar, but most people we phone with are at Amena. We did some calculation and came to the conclusion that we could save on our bill by changing to Amena as well.

This weekend we finally found the time to head to the Amena office, and we explained out plans. The nice lady in the shop asked us some questions on our phone behaviour, who, when and how much, and she explained us about all the possibilities of the different packages. We made some quick estimations and selected the ‘right’ package.

Then the more important question came. Carriers earn so much money with all their inflated rates, that they can give away expensive toys. We could choose a new phone! MJ had prepared herself, and knew what her demands were: she wanted the cheapest phone that could flip open. Until now she always had candy-bar phones, but now she wanted clamshell. All other functions did not matter, since she only use the device for phoning and sending SMS messages. Her choice was the NEC e242.

Of course, as a reader of mobile expert Russell Beattie, I know that there is more. Russ has the most incredible applications and uses for his mobiles, and it seems that he uses his mobile for everything I still use a PC for. But his phones are, even after the carrier discount, so incredibly expensive that it would take me years to earn that back with the cheaper rate of Amena. I guess Russ lives in another realm, but most people here choose between the five cheapest models. So I set my mind together, and thought logically. I don't phone a lot, I use SMS even less, and once in a while I use WAP to spend some dead time. Basically, any phone would be enough. But hey, I am a gadget freak, so I should have something additional to wish for, right? Maybe I need a camera on my phone, to update my photo page more often. That's it! I looked around, and saw a nice and cheap Samsung phone that according to the specs had a camera. I asked if I could see it, and fell in love with the device. Cool design, very light weight (they show the phones without batteries), but… without camera. I asked the friendly lady if she could show me the camera, but no, they'd made an error in the specs. So I took the cheapest camera phone they had: the NEC e242.

Now we have to find a way to keep our new phones separated!

Will all these WordPress users now switch back to Movable Type?

Zie De Volkskrant:

STAP merkt op dat de drinkschuren zich ontwikkelen tot geduchte concurrenten van de plaatselijke horeca. Hoewel alcoholverkoop zonder vergunning illegaal is, wordt er veelal niet tegen opgetreden door de controleurs van de Drank- en Horecawet. De Koninklijke Horeca Nederland (KHN) dringt dan ook aan op sluiting van de drinkschuren. Volgens een woordvoerder van de KHN werken de schuren alcoholmisbruik in de hand.

Jongeren gaan op zoek naar alternatieven vanwege de slechte kwaliteit (en prijs!) die de reguliere horeca biedt. Zolang er geen betere alternatieven zijn, lost verbieden niets op.

Overigens, hoe staat het met de Sjet?

Before:

Now:

After: ??????

The redesign of Brain Tags has officially started!

One of the songs I always play when I need to get rid of some excess energy: Million Dollar Love by Dub War.

Have a look at the following screen:

This is the screen Firefox shows me when a site requires me to log in. Note that there is no information about the URL of the site or the realm requesting me to log in. You can imagine the problem this gives when I open many tabs at the same time: I have no idea of which site is going to receive my details.

This problem only occurs in the Spanish version of Firefox; I also installed the English version, which showed me the necessary information.

It is Easter holiday for me, which means that I have a weekend of four days! I am very happy about it, though most of my friends here have two weeks of holidays.

Anyway, we take the opportunity to leave town for some days. Tonight we will drive to la Seu d’Urgell, which is about 150km from here, and which will be our home for these days. Tomorrow we will visit Andorra to do some tax-free shopping and to enjoy the mountains. We will also take a bath in Caldea to relieve our tired feet after all those shopping kilometres. On Saturday we will drive to Barcelona, since we have tickets for the theatre.

Surely I won’t be connected to internet, so no updates are to be expected. But you are already used to that, right? :-)

Today is a very quiet day, so I have some time to upload some photo’s and write a short post. You can see the photo’s in my CeBIT set.

Just like last year, the last two days of the CeBIT are very boring. The days are long since I spend most of it waiting or visitors. Even though, I have a positive feeling about this year’s show. We have made some very interesting contacts, which might turn out successful. As usual, we only know the real results after a few months.

This view is very uncommon because of the geographic position of Lleida, shielded by mountains and a lot of land.

Two songs! Omaha from the Counting Crows and Believe from K’s Choice.

I just uploaded some photos from the Euroshop trade show. You can see the booth and the house I stayed in.

Six days with almost no internet connection gave me a backlag. I just waded through all e-mail and some RSS-feeds, and hope to process all that information today. As of today I will focus completely on the CeBIT show, show posting will probably stay on a low level for some more time.

The EuroShop was in my opinion a moderate success. We made some good propaganda, but I would have liked to have more contacts. As with any trade show, the real result is only known after some months, when we know how interested the visitors of our booth were in our products.

The EuroShop trade fair starts Saturday, so you can imagine what is on my mind at this moment. I just finished packing my suitcase, and will take the airplane tomorrow morning at 8:00. Ai, that means I have to leave home at 4!

As I wrote before, I will be in hall 6, stand G30, the stand of the company Wirth. Besides ICG Software, the hardware companies Star and AQSonic will be on the stand. It is the first time we are present on the EuroShop, so I have no idea what to expect. I imagine that most visitors are shop owners, but seen the size of the fair it could very well be that I will be able to catch some potential distributors as well.

Being on a trade show usually leaves not a lot of time for other things, and certainly not for surfing the internet. So I will leave the management of this site to the spammers for some days ;-)

Instead of publishing, I have spend some time thinking about my site. The trigger was the article Stinky links by Matt Haughey. At that moment I had just created my FeedBurner feed combining my posts with my Flickr photo's and my linkdump, and I knew that I had done something wrong. Readers following me because of my Movable Type writings are probably not interested in my holiday photo's, and people who want to know about my life abroad don't want to be bothered by my link dump. This site has a lack of focus, and I only made it worse.

The feed readers have the biggest problem, since they don't see the context of each entry. On the home page, my ‘normal’ entries take up the bulk of the space, the links are shown in the sidebar, and the latest photo is shown in the sidebar as well. People who read my feed, don't see the context; the three content types appear in exactly the same way. To solve this, I am going to offer three more feeds: one for my weblog, one for the links and one for the photos. They will be added to the current everything-in-one feed, to give my readers more choice.

Once the biggest problem has been solved, I want to restructure the links section. My main problem is the category structure, since I find it increasingly difficult to correctly place the items. I have to review the existing categories and their items, and will probably start using a tree structure with sub-categories.

Next, I want to split the weblog part in two parts: a web–tech site and a personal site.

First I will have to find out how to move certain categories from one weblog to another, but a little bit of SQL-fu should do, right? To link everything together I would like to change my homepage to a gateway to the different parts of the Brain tags empire. I guess this would also be the right moment for a new stylesheet, as I am getting fed up with light blue as well.

Once all that work has been done I want to start a new site, focused on a subject I work on every day, but which does not show up often on weblogs: point of sale software and hardware. I still have to work out my ideas on this subject, and I want to talk it over with some people, since it comes awfully close to a business weblog, but I think it would add something to the current blogosphere.

These are my ideas on the near future of Brain Tags. What is your opinion? Am I right, or should I go in another direction? I would like to hear and read your opinions.

[Update 2005.02.17]: The first step has been taken. I added a new feed for the photo's: http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainpics.

Mmm! Flogging Molly! Tobacco Island

It’s trade show time! The coming weeks I will present our products in two trade shows in Germany. Note to self: start practising German.

The first show is the EuroShop in Düsseldorf. Though this show is aimed at end-users, I will go to support our German distributor. We will share the stand with some hardware companies. At the moment I am working vary hard to make leaflets for fashion shops, shoe shops, perfume shops, supermarkets,… Besides that I am double checking the quality of our German software and arranging a thousand of small things.

I will be in hall 6, stand G30. If you’re in the neighbourhood, just drop by and I will show you our products in person.

The CeBIT is a show from which we expect a lot. There are many potential dealers walking around, who might know us from last year. As this is the second year we have a stand on the CeBIT, we are better prepared than last time. I can assure that the posters won’t fall from the wall every 15 minutes this year :-D

After my return from the EuroShop I will start working full time for the CeBIT. Our stand at the CeBIT is located in hall 1, stand 6i14.

While reading the great joke Google Maps find Weapons of Mass Destruction, I noticed something strange: all searches performed without specifying a state give results in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Not exactly the states where I expect many things to happen. I did some more tests, and each time the results were found in the centre of the country.

I guess Google simply found too many results to display, and instead of showing the most significant results for the terms, it used some geographical parameters to decide what results to display…

Google is generous today! I have 50 invites for a Gmail account to give away. Mail, IM, phone me or leave a comment if your interested.

It took a while, but I finally uploaded the photo's from our holidays in Thailand in August last year. I created a set, Thailand, to hold all of them, but since I have a limit of only three sets I probably will remove it in the future. You can always find these foto's by the tag thailand, or simply look at the pictures from August 2005.

I love the many ways of organizing photo's that Flickr offers!

[Update 2005.02.09]: I became a paid member of Flickr, so I don't have any set limits anymore.

Maintaining a site like this takes a lot of effort. After successfully having outsourced pinging external sites to the Ping-o-Matic, and using Flickr to host my photo's, I decided to start using the FeedBurner service for making sure that all aggregators get up-to-date information.

Just as with the pings and photo's, the reason is that FeedBurner offers additional advantages (statistics, feed optimization, Flickr integration, ...) that I am currently unable to supply myself.

I will redirect request for my old feeds to the new location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/braintags.

[Update 2005.02.02]: Besides moving my feeds to FeedBurner, I also combined all my feeds to a single feed.

This week a vulnerability has been discovered in Movable Type. Until today, I did not have the time to upgrade my MT installation, and I hoped that my site had not yet been attacked.

After upgrading I found an e-mail message from my hosting provider, stating that they had patched all MT installations on their servers!!!! Even though they don’t support any software installed by their clients, they already patched my system to prevent damage. Each month I am getting happier with TotalChoice Hosting.