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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. The excel days 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.

As of version 3.31, Movable Type natively supports tags. Tags are keywords or descriptive terms associated with an item as means of classification. Unlike categories, an item can have many tags to describe the item in several ways. Tags are well known from other (web) applications such as Flickr for tagging photos and del.icio.us for tagging links. The well known weblog search service Technorati introduced tags to weblog entries, and allows for browsing and searching texts on weblogs by tag.

One of the biggest problems in scripting and programming is escaping quotes. Quotes have a special meaning, they are usually used for specifying the start and end of a string, such as in <abbr title="eXtensible Markup Language">. But what happens when the string between the quotes also contains quotes? …Errors! There are several ways to prevent this situation. The two most common solutions are escaping the quotes by placing a special symbol in front of it such as " and replacing the quote by its character entity reference &quote;.

Only a week after I closed down Brain Links, Brain Links is back, albeit in a more simpler form. Before, each link had its own page, with a description and the possibility to comment on the link (which was rarely used). The new Brain Links is only visible as a linkroll on the sidebar of the main page of Brain Tags. To power Brain Links, I no longer use Movable Type, but created a new widget that fetches the last ten links from my del.

After reading the lifehacker desktop blog editor comparison I decided to give performancing for Firefox a try. I am a happy user of Ecto (number three in the comparison), but the performancing editor has WYSIWYG functionality, as well as Technorati and del.icio.us integration. So I installed the plugin, and am now writing the first post in my new editor. So far I like it. It is easy to use, and it has more than enough functionality.

When its latest stand-alone browser ships in Q4, Microsoft plans to use its patch-distribution mechanism as its primary delivery vehicle. But businesses will be able to control distribution via a Microsoft-provided blocking tool. Though a new version of the most popular web browser is definitely needed (the rendering engine is more than 6 years old, and there are many security problems) I wonder whether it is a good iedea to push it through the throat of so many people.

After the succesful redesign of The Wizard of POS, I had gathered some momentum, and continued with the redesign of Brain Tags. First of all, I reverted back to the basic Movable Type templates, as I had hacked the old templates to a level that made it very difficult to maintain and update. Actually, the latest update to version 3.31 broke my site at several parts. When all templates were more or lass back to basic, I used the fantastic StyleCatcher plugin to change the look and feel.

Since June 2004 I have posted 953 links to interesting, new and funny sites in the Brain Links section of this site. Today I have decided that I will stop adding more links. I noticed the last months that little by little I am adding less links, and I started to wonder why. I started collecting the Brain Links as a reference site for myself; a place where I could look up those handy sites I saw a month ago.

After the latest release of Movable Type, I wanted to have a look at the new Widget functionality. The result: a redesigned version of The Wizard Of POS:

A few days above 30° and Holland grinds to a halt. I wonder what would happen if they would also have two months of really hot weather…

It has been very quiet on this site, and that usually means that I am working on something. And indeed, I am working on the new site for Fimcap. Besides that, the temperature in Lleida, almost reaching 40 °, makes that I don’t want to spend too much time behind the PC, but rather stay in the water of the swimming pool. As you might be worried what is going on here, I deceided to write a little bit about the new fimcap site.

Our old APS camera has become useless now that we have a brand-new digital camera. It has been lying in a drawer for some weeks now, and I know that I will never use it again. So I decided to sell it before it becomes completely unvaluable. If you are interested in this camera, you can bid on it on eBay.

After reading the lifehacker How I work series, I thought that it might be interesting to write down my own way of working for the readers of Brain Tags. What desktop software do you use every day? As most people I have two sites from where I work: in the office I sell and support the products of ICG software, and at home I run BryteNet, do some web development, blog and keep in contact with me friends all over the world.

FC Barcelona is champion of the ‘Liga’. If you know me only a little bit, you know that I couldn’t care less, right? I only like sports the moment I practice it myself, but do not care about what others are doing. I like playing soccer with friends, though I am a terrible player, but get really bored when looking soccer on the television, to the point that I usually fall asleep.

The steward seriously missed his calling. The man was a stand-up comedian, and a dang fine one at that. I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. That whole safety thing you have to suffer through every time? He turned it into a comedy routine: “Please pretend to pay attention while we explain the safety features of this Boeing 737. I know, I can’t believe it either, but there’s a safety card in the seat pocket in front of you.

When we were close to Andorra this weekend, we hopped over the border to do some shopping. We were looking for a new digital camera, and finally bought the Pentax A10. Of all cameras that matched our requirements, small form factor, minimal 3x optical zoom, quality optics system, the Pentax was the only one offering a usefull additional feature: stabilisation. The problem with small cameras is that it is very difficult to hold it steady, especially when using the zoom function.

Found this piece on OpenBC. If they actually hired this man, they did the right thing. This is an actual job application that a 75 year old senior citizen submitted to Wal-Mart in Arkansas. They hired him because he was so funny. NAME: George Martin SEX: Not lately, but I am looking for the right woman (or at least, one who’ll cooperate) DESIRED POSITION: Company’s President or Vice President. But seriously, whatever’s available.

After having our own stand on the CeBIT for two years, we have decided not to go this year. The reasons are the high cost of stand space, the length of the show and the decreasing number of business visitors. Though I always liked going to the CeBIT, this decision saves me a lot of time, as I don’t have to prepare the stand, and will stay at the office during the two weeks that I normally need for the CeBIT.

Edgeio is a new service to create classifieds directly from your weblog. It automatically organizes entries tagged with listing on the Edgeio site, and allows visitors to search and comment on listings. The concept sounds very interesting to me, so I decided to try it out. The only thing I have for sale at the moment are web server accounts, so I created three posts on the BryteNet blog describing the three web hosting packages BryteNet currently offers.

I have been playing a little bit more with eZ Publish for the BryteNet site. One little disappointment was that I could not generate friendly URIs like http://brytenet.com/forum/, but I have to work with URIs as http://brytenet.com/index.php?/forum/. According to the eZ people this is because BryteNet has set up PHP as a CGI process and not through Apache’s mod_php, which understands the accept_path_info function. The Brytenet servers implemented PHP as a CGI process for security reasons, and there is no way to change this in an easy way.

The last weeks I have been very busy with the new BryteNet site. The old site had been created in a couple of minutes ‘just to have something’, and never changed afterwards. It was really time for a complete site overhaul. When planning the datacenter move, I decided not to restore the old site, but to put a simple page with the main properties of the hosting packages and contact information instead.

I have to identify myself in order to get Internet access?! How on earth do they think to stop terrorism by asking for identification for terminal access, while I can have a wireless connection without identifying myself?

It has been some time ago since I last posted, so I thought I needed to spend some minutes to explain what is happening. As usually when a site does not get updated anymore, I was simply too busy. First of all, I have been traveling. And in my case, travelling usually means working many hours (yes, I considder a diner with my client ‘working’) and a lack of Internet connections.

As most of you know, I hate paperwork. So when after a lot of effort I received my residence permit in 2002, and it appeared to be only valid for 4 months, I quickly decided that it was not worth the effort. Fortunately, coming from another EU country I have the privilege to not really need it in daily life, so there was no problem. I can use my Dutch documentation for identify myself.

Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do. [From Guy Kawasaki]