Little by little, this former humble little weblog is getting bigger and bigger. I hardly have the time to answer all the fanmail I receive, and have difficulties going out on the street. Bit some fans really go far in their adoration:
[Thanks ImageChef]
I just found out that I had completely forgotten the 9th birthday of this weblog. On November 9, 1997 I announces, in Dutch, the launch of my news page, as the word weblog had not been invented yet.
Wow, nine years! Time flies when you’re having fun. Let’s see if I can do something special for next year’s anniversary. Of course I put the date in my agenda, so I won’t forget it!
I just wanted to look up some information, and I remembered having read about it in a webfeed in Google Reader. Without thinking I opened up Google Reader, ready to type in my query, but there was no search box!
How is it possible that the world’s biggest search company releases a product suited for search without adding a search function??? Google, you are missing a huge opportunity here.
Today I published the first entry on a new weblog: El Canasto.
El Canasto is my first blog in Spanish and has been created for two reasons. The first reason is that I have found very little material in Spanish about lifehacks and Getting Things Done, one of the topics I like to read about. There is clearly something missing in the Spanish weblog spectrum. The second reason is that I really want to improve my Spanish language skills, but don’t have the discipline to sit down and study. However, writing about stuff I like might give me the drive to learn more.
To set up El Canasto I used WordPress and the minimalistic Cutline theme. I spent some days making sure every word in the template has been translated correctly into Spanish, and have many plans more for optimizing the look & feel of this new site. But for the moment, it is more important to get rolling, so I published a first little entry. My plan is to maintain a higher posting frequency than on this blog or the Wizard of POS as I have much material and a lot of ideas for this blog.
For now I would like all my readers to have a look at El Canasto.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Source: Wikipedia
The Pareto principle was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population, but the same principle can be found in many other situations.
In most businesses, 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales. And technical departments know that 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the clients. This is very interesting information for managers, who can use these numbers to steer their sales and support departments.
But how can we correlate the Pareto numbers for these two departments? Are the 20% that purchase the most the same customers that use most of your organization’s resources? Well, experience tells us that this is not the case: there usually are customers buying for huge amounts without ever needing the support department. The two Pareto principle are not correlated, so if we only look at the small group of customers responsible for 80% of the sales, you will find once again that 20% of that group is using 80% of the resources.
As there is no correlation, I can easily divide my customers into four distinct groups:
I put those four groups in a specific order. The first group is worth the most, as they bring in a lot of money at low costs and the fourth group is the most difficult group.
So should you just drop the customers in the fourth group? Of course not, as we are talking about a principle and not a fixed categorization. If you drop group four, and look again at the numbers, you will see that once again 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales and 80% of the resources are used by only 20% of the clients. Customers who were in to top 20% before, not rank lower simple because you have less customers. If I have 100 clients, there are 20 clients in the top 20%, but if I drop 50 of them, the top 20% will be formed by only 10 customers. Of course, if you have to drop customers, because you haven’t got enough resources, make sure you drop clients from the fourth group, as the clients in the other three groups are worth more.
Dear spelling checker,
Please do not consider the internet as something holy. The internet is simply a technology for delivering information, just as the postal service or the cable television. There is nothing that makes the internet of a higher level than other things and ideas on this planet.
So please stop telling me that I should write internet with a capital i. It is internet and not Internet, did you get this?
Kind regards,
Jeroen Sangers Frustrated writer.
A while ago I tried out the new Google Reader, and haven’t looked back at my old RSSBandit ever after. It ran very smoothly since the start, and I just love the ‘River of News’ view.
But lately the experience has decreased. The last few days Google News feels slow, taking about 2-3 seconds to go from one article to the next one when I press the J key, which was also noticed by Robert Scoble.
I also noticed that sometimes it doesn’t load all my unread items as it did before; after reading about fifty articles, I reach the bottom, while there are still many unread items waiting for me to be read. This is not a big issue, as I can simply press the R to refresh. The last days I noticed another glitch: zombie articles:
Google Reader tells me ‘Your reading list has no unread items’, while at the same time it shows that I have two unread articles from tech.memeorandum. For me, this is the most irritating glitch, as I have to leave my River of News to open the specific feed, change my setting to show all articles and go down the list to find the zombie.
Google Reader still is my preferred reader, and I hope they will solve these glitches soon.
More and more bloggers unite in so-called blogging networks. Robert Scoble published a good overview of the most important networks in Competitors of PodTech that I love, er, going to the Content Mall. A content mall is the same as a blogging network.
As I am interested in blogging in general, I have been following various blogging networks for some time. I can clearly see the benefits of blogging networks for the bloggers involved, but have been wondering for a long time what the benefit is for the visitors of a site part of a blogging network. So I posted the following comment:
It is clear that 'content malls' bring in huge benefits for the sites within a mall. They can work together and link to each other to boost PR.
But what benefit is there for the visitors? Shopping malls bring benefit by sharing a physical space with various stores. After going shopping for clothes I can buy some electronics without having to drive to another place. Very comfortable.
But when visiting a fashion weblog part of a content mall I can go to the technology weblog of that mall just as fast as I can go to any other techblog. I won't visit the technology weblog because it belongs to a certain group, but rather because I like it in spite of being part of that group.
Answered promptly by Robert self:
By joining a network a blogger/podcaster/videoblogger will probably be able to get paid much more than if he/she tries to do it on his/her own.
That money might let them quit their jobs (that's what happened to GeekBrief.TV, for instance) which will enable that person to produce even more content for you. Or, maybe, afford better equipment. Or, maybe be able to afford a trip to more industry conferences where they'll be able to bring you more news and information.
Robert completely hits the nail on its head here. What is good for the blogger is good for his/her reader.
Sometime, thing that have been in place for many years get in the way. In such cases, it is better to get rid of them.
Today, I said goodbye to the music jukebox the place where for the past two years you could find tasty music. In this age of streaming music and video, there is no need any more to share MP3 files. Sites like last.fm and pandora are of greater help for discovering new music you like.
I also removed the jeroensangers.com site. Until now, that page showed an ugly photo of me (is it even possible to have a pretty photo at all?) and some links to my various sites. I am going to rethink the purpose of that site, which will probably contain more dynamic content. Until then, the site is in stealth mode.
Now, that feels a lot better!
[Via Volker Weber]
Just like most other weblogs, this site has its ups and downs, and you might have noticed that it has been down lately. I am quite busy at the moment, working parallel at several projects.
The company I work for is preparing for the SIMO trade show in Madrid, where we will present the new versions of our products. Though I won’t be present at the show (my responsibilities lie outside Spain) I do have a lot of extra work concerning translating and testing the new software.
Then I am working on the new Fimcap web site. This weekend we are going to finish the forum functionality and start working on the design. We already did some brainstorming and I am happy that we are all more or less on the same line. Once the design is finished we will start using the first parts of the new site, and gradually transfer more functionality.
Once in a while I also work a little bit on BryteNet hosting. Little by little the customers are coming in, but as everything is running smoothly and automated, I don’t have much work on it.
And finally there is the blogging thing. I am planning on taking it more seriously, using Brain Tags for playing around, and doing the real blogging at The Wizard of POS. I am rethinking my work flow to crank up the posting frequency –now once a week– and have a more diverse range of articles. Furthermore I am working on a new weblog in Spanish about GTD.
You see, I have plenty of work, so I better stop writing and get something done!
The campaign for the upcoming Catalan parliament elections officially started last Sunday. Main opposition party CIU started in a very American way by including a one hour DVD called ConfidencialCAT criticizing the current government with any Catalan newspaper.
I was shocked.
Not because of the movie, which I haven't seen yet, as in the past three years CIU has done nothing else than criticizing and whining. No, I was shocked because all newspapers co-operated. Every single newspaper in this country got blinded by flash of sensationalism and opted to distribute plain propaganda. Last Sunday, the newspapers of Catalonia lost their independence and transformed themselves into propaganda vehicles.
Everybody who knows me a little bit will admit it: I am a lazy person. Because I am so lazy I work in the IT industry, dreaming about automating all those boring tasks. Of course, automating tasks is hard work, but I don’t want to think about that.
One of the problems I wanted to automate for a very long time is making backups of my PC. I know that it is very important to backup my files, and usually after tweaking my backup system I backup every X days. But after a while I loose interest, and days become weeks, and weeks become months,…
Media choice is another problem with backups, as the amount of data I have is growing exponentially. Back in the MS-DOS days, all important data fitted on e few floppy disks. As I started my studies and got involved in Jong Nederland I produced more documents and changed to ZIP disks for my backup. When I started ripping MP3 files, I was forced to change to CD’s and DVD’s. And now that I am creating my own video’s I need even more than that. I thought about buying a USB hard disk, but the thought of spending a lot of money for a medium that will be outdated within two years kept me from going to the store.
And then I found Carbonite Online Backup. Carbonite is a little application that will automatically backup my files to a server on the internet, without any user interaction. The best part of Carbonite is its price: $5 per month for unlimited storage!!! So for only $5 per month I can sit back and relax, knowing that my files are safe, and I won’t have to worry about running out of space in the future.
I quickly downloaded and installed the demo version (15 days free), which promptly began to upload data. Now there was a little problem, as our broadband connection is ADSL, and the A stands for Asynchronous meaning that you can download at high speeds, but have less bandwidth available for uploading. It took me two days to get all my files to the Carbonite server.
When checking what files were present on the Carbonite server, I noticed that there was a lot of crap. In the installation procedure, I had selected that I wanted to backup My Documents and the Desktop, which Carbonite had interpreted as being the whole Documents and settings folder, including cached files, etc. I tweaked the settings a little bit, and was able to reduce the backed up volume by one third. I also added some other files such as my ActiveWords database and my Trillian preferences (both installed under Program Files).
I’ve got the whole system up and running for some weeks now, and am very happy with it. My backups are always up-to-date and I don’t have to think about copying files anymore.
The only problem I have found is my mailbox. As I typically have e-mail open during the whole day, the inbox file changes continuously. Besides that, the file is rather big, taking a while to upload. The result is that this particular file is hardly ever backed up. I am still looking for a solution, possibly using another tool to create a local copy and adding this copy to Carbonite.
In short: Carbonite is a very good product giving great value for its money.
Cal Paller is a lovely little cottage (Casa Rural) in the mountains near La Seu d’Urgell. We had the pleasure to spend three days in one of the six available rooms, and have enjoyed it a lot. Cal Paller is the perfect starting point for mountain walks, mushroom ‘hunting’, horseback riding or skiing (winter only of course).
We found Cal paller a very special place. The location is fantastic and the 18th century mansion has been restored with great care of detail. There are many little corners where you can sit down and relax. Eva and Pep, the owners of the place, are very caring and the food Eva prepared us for supper was absolutely fabulous.
I have uploaded some photo’s we made during the weekend, so everybody can see what a fantastic place Cal Paller is.
N.B. If you also have a Flickr account, let me know, so I can give you access to even more photo’s.
I was very surprised when I received the magazine promoting the biggest cultural event in Lleida with a huge photo of me on the cover.
In case you are interested: we are preparing the clasical Caracols a la llauna. The snails are prepared on a big plate and for the best results they will have to be placed upside-down. My job is to throw salt to prevent the snails from turning around.
For me the holiday period is not only a period for relaxing, but also a period of reflection. I never make any January 1st changes to my habits, but usually do so in August or September.
For a while I have been thinking about doing more sports, as most days my physical exercise is limited to the daily walk to the garage to pick up the car. We do occasionally walk in the mountains, but that’s not enough. I have been thinking about it for a long time but never found the activity that suited me. My working hours make it difficult to commit to team sports and I don’t like the gym as I prefer something in the open air.
This summer it finally occurred me: inline skating could me my thing. I’ve always enjoyed ice skating in the Netherlands, and like the freedom of making little tours around my hometown. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Right after coming home I bought myself some Rollerblades, the Geo II model, and downloaded some braking instructions as I knew that I’d had to learn different breaking techniques that I used on ice.
This week I went out skating two times on an empty parking lot. The coming weeks I will go back there to practice my breaking skills before I hit the streets. And you know what the best thing is? I already feel good about myself!
This weblog will remain quiet for some weeks as I will be on holidays. If you have any question, remark or news, just drop me an e-mail. I will occasionally read my mail, but probably won’t respond until the end of this month. I assume that you won’t miss me, as most other bloggers already have returned from their holidays.
See you later!
Though weblogs are the perfect example of periodical publications, in many countries they are not liable for ISSN codes. After the Spanish standards organisation denied an ISSN request, a group of bloggers created the IBSN, the Internet Blog Serial Number.
In a short time an IBSN wiki was created and of course there is an IBSN weblog. And finally a handy PHP scripter created a tool to manage all IBSN numbers.
Since I support their cause and because you can never have enough buttons and banners on your weblog, I requested an ‘official’ IBSN code for Brain Tags:
It has been a long time ago since I last posted a little bit of listening pleasure. To make up for the long waiting time, I have uploaded two great punk covers from Me First & The Gimme Gimmies: Summertime and Favorite Things. Enjoy it!
Amazon.com launched a new affiliate tool this week called aStore. This tool allows you to create your own themed Amazon store and embed the store on your web site. The tool is very easy to use and allows you to create a site complete with product reviews and full product descriptions. They have even added some widgets that automatically display lists and similar items. There have always been ways to display lots of Amazon content on your web site, but this is a much more robust and easy to implement option.
Of course I could not resist playing around with it, so I created my own little store and filled it with products related to David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity methodology: books, labelers, moleskine notebooks, PDA's…
I am planning to embed the aStore in my new GTD related weblog, but until that I will only publish an ungly Amazon aStore link to my Getting Things Done on-line shop.
One more week to go until the start of our holidays. Yes, we go when everybody else already forgot about their holidays.
Our plans are simple: we are going to spend one week in the Netherlands, and two weeks in Andalusia. We’ve tried to visit my family before, but the flights were simply too expensive in the high season. So we decided to use part of our holidays to visit my family and our friends. As we have plenty of time, we will go up by car, saving a few bucks along the way.
After that we plan to spend some days at home to pick up our tent, and drive further down to Andalusia. In the almost five years that I live here, I haven’t seen a lot of Spain besides Catalonia. Of course there is plenty to see over here, but I feel a little bit ashamed of my lack of knowledge about the other parts of this country. The two weeks we will be spend in the south will be a little start in getting to know more of Spain.
I joined the Google Adsense program before I started using GMail. As a result of this, I have to logins for Google’s services: the old e-mail for AdSense and my Gmail account for using all other Google service.
I was fed-up with this situation, so I decided to look at the AdSense help pages for instruction on how to combine my two accounts. I found the following:
Right now, it isn't possible for AdSense publishers to update their email address directly from within their account. If you require an update of the email address associated with your AdSense account, please follow the instructions below to help us assist you.
- Draft a new email. If possible, please use the email address currently associated with your AdSense account
- Write 'Login change request' as the subject of your message
- Please include all of the following in the body of your message:
- The email address currently associated with your account
- The email address you'd like to use as your new account email address
- The date of the first day your account registered AdSense impressions
- The number of page impressions registered on your first day of impressions
- Send this email to adsense-support@google.com
I collected all the necessary information, and requested a change to my Gmail account. This was their reply:
Unfortunately, I'm not able to update your AdSense login to a Google Account or a Gmail address because our system doesn't support this type of change at the moment. I sincerely apologize for the trouble this causes you, and I thank you for bearing with us as we work hard to extend this option to AdSense publishers in the future.
I can, however, update your AdSense login to a non-Gmail address if you prefer. You can simply reply to this email, providing the desired email address in the body of your response, and I’ll take care of your request as soon as I’m able.
WTF?! Google does not have the possibility to merge accounts???? If I sign up with Yahoo! I can use that e-mail account for AdWords, but I can’t use a GMail account? Great way to send customers to the competition! They’ve got some work to do then, since all those acquisitions they make will only bring more people like me with double accounts. It cannot be that hard, right?
Yes, the 43 Folders podcast is my favourite podcast. There are a few reasons why I consider it my favourite. Besides the obvious reasons such as “Merlin Mann is a geek like me”, and “I am obsessed with productivity tools” there is another difference between the 43 Folders podcast and 99% of all the other podcasts out there.
Most people listen to podcasts during their daily commute. Modern society forces people to spend a ridiculous amount of time travelling, and there are very few things you can do while driving a car. Most commuters listen to music or the radio, but that is a very unproductive activity. If you want to spend your car-time productively, you only have two options: audio-based learning and listening to podcasts. Long commutes are the perfect place for listening podcast, and most podcasters target their show to this group. The result is that most podcasts are either 30 minutes long or 60 minutes long, so listeners have handy building blocks to fill their car time. 30 minutes also gives the podcasters the possibility to add decoration such as jingles and music to their show, making podcasting more entertaining, but less productive.
My commute usually takes less than 10 minutes, so it makes no sense for me to listen to podcasts in the car. I listen to podcasts during my breakfast instead. I only take a sandwich and a coffee for breakfast, so the maximum podcast length is about 15 minutes. I searched around (why do none of the podcast directories have an advanced search feature where I can filter for podcast length?) and found only very few short podcasts. And out of this very few podcasts that fit my needs, 43 folders is my favourite.
I am happy to say that I rarely receive spam. But today a message slipped though my defence lines using a tactic I did not see before: they sent me a simple, innocent message with a Word file attached.
In my curiosity I opened the invoice.doc attachment, and was greeted with “Back2School Software”:
Apparently the current generation of spam filters has gotten to the level where the only spam getting through are unreadable V1^Gr^ messages, and they are desperately looking for new ways to get their message across. Though probably many people that otherwise would read the e-mail won’t open the Word document, the possibilities to create a readable message makes this a viable spam method. As far as I know, few spam filters look at the contents of attachments, but that is about to change.
At the moment the spammers are once again one step beyond the filters…
[Update 2006.08.14]: More and more bloggers report the same problem, and several experts discuss on how to scan Office attachments for spammy messages.
Personal finance is the application of the principles of finance to the monetary decisions of an individual or family unit.
I have a love/hate relationship with personal finance. Ever since I have a computer I have been trying to get a grip on finances, with changing results.
My first attempt used the example Excel sheet created by the Nibud that came with Microsoft Excel. It was a nice and clever Excel sheet, but still living with my parents I only used part of it. After a while I stopped entering my receipts, and out went the Excel sheet.
A little bit later I started playing with Microsoft Access. Access also comes with a financial example file, and I modified and tweaked it to fit my needs. But after all the hacking, all left to be done was entering receipts and numbers, which is a boring job. I guess I still didn’t need personal finance, as I left the database alone after some months.
Some time later, a new phenomenon showed up: internet banking. My bank sent me some diskettes with an application that was able to import bank statements. Now that was easy! At first I tried to manage cash money with that application as well, but soon left that again. Internet banking was a success, as I have managed my bank accounts through that application until I could access my accounts through web pages. When later I started buying and selling stocks and stock options I could do that from the same application. That little application gave an overview of my bank accounts, but I still haven’t been able to see where the money was going…
The situation complicated when I started living together. I was not dealing with my money anymore, it was our money. After some months the question came up: “Where does our money go?” We talked about it, and decided to implement a low-tech financial planning solution: pen & paper. This worked great for some months, until we had more or less a picture of our expenses. Exit pen & paper.
Last year we were planning some big expenses, and I wanted to know whether these were justified, and how much time we would need to recover the invested money. Right about that time I read about an easy budgeting template in Excel, Pear Budget. I downloaded it, sat down half an hour to fix the categories and the budgets, and have used it ever after. It is easy and fast to maintain, gives a good overview of our spendings. However, lately I had the feeling that I wanted more. Pear Budget shows me where the money is coming from and where it is going, but does not show what we have, and what we are expecting to have in the future. Besides that I wanted to make some changes in the categories I had set up last year, and that would mess up all past numbers.
So I started to look around for a more complete solution, that could offer me budgeting, but also import bank statements, manage investments, work in several currencies, schedule payments, …
I thought a moment about searching for a Web 2.0 solution, but quickly let go that idea as I wouldn’t trust such a personal information to anybody. I looked at Microsoft Money Premium, but that seems a very US centred product, and is overly complex; I do not need my personal finance application to do tax statements.
After a little but more of searching, I found AceMoney, a cheap but very complete solution that seems to fit my current needs. The user interface is not as shiny as MS Money, but it certainly does the job. Furthermore, AceMoney has been translated into many languages and even loads the local list of banks and categories.
