[Via Volker Weber]

Let’s continue our trip through the history of Brain Tags at 1998, my second year of blogging. I celebrated my birthday party in De Jeugdhof, and after cleaning the floor we forgot to close the fire hose. The next morning when we came back to finish cleaning we encountered a swimming pool instead of our cleaned floor. Oops… I also went to Africa and visited the very interesting country of Lesotho.

[Via Volker Weber]

Email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things Via Adventures in Home Working

It is good habit to add a personal note when inviting someone to connect through LinkedIn to explain how you know the other person and why you want to connect. However, lately I noticed a small inconvenience with this approach: I invited a few people with a personalised note and instead of the acceptation of the invitation I received a reply to my note. It is no big problem, as I simply reply back and ask them to accept my invitation.

As I have been blogging for 10 years now, I thought it would be a nice idea to look back at almost 1000 posts on my sites. Today an overview of the year it all started: 1997. Though I already had a personal web page for some years, I didn’t spend a lot of time on it. My main interests these days were Jong Nederland and Fimcap. In November I had a great weekend with all JN volunteers on a national level, and in December I joined a Fimcap meeting in Rome.

On November 9, 1997 I added a new section to my personal web site: a news page. The word weblog did not exist yet, but my news page (though updated manually in FrontPage) did have some aspects of modern day weblogs; it showed the entries in reverse chronological order, but did not allow for comments. The first entries are written in Dutch, but as I got more foreign friends I changed my personal site to English.

Two years ago, reflections were cool and something new. Reflections gave your web site or your application a crisp look. Nowadays, even the big operating systems and television stations have reflections and thus reflections as a design element are outdated. I am surprised, even irritated, by the big number of startups still using reflections in their logo or their screendumps only to look ‘cool’. Get over it. Reflections are soooo 2005.

I could simply write here that I am too busy to write on Brain Tags, but I guess it is more interesting for you to read what I am doing currently. So this is a short list of my most interesting current projects: New web site for Fimcap This is a project on which I have been working for a long time (not always as active as now) and which should have been finished a long time ago.

Note: This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining thousands of other bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year’s topic is the environment. Camping is my favourite holiday activity. In our tent I feel free and I feel at home as I use my own stuff and sleep in my own sack. Furthermore, it is very easy for a shy person like me to have contact with others on a camping.

Op 6 oktober ontving ik een mailtje van een andere Nederlander in Lleida. Helaas ben ik door mijn gebrekkige IT kennis dat mailtje kwijt geraakt, en heb dus je e-mail address niet meer. Kun je me a.u.b. nogmaals een mailtje sturen of meeven bellen? Sorry voor het ongemak!

Lately I haven’t written much personal things any more, so let’s change that… This weekend Berry, Manon & Bas visited us in Lleida, and we really enjoyed it. The visit coincided with the autumn festivities in Lleida, so there was plenty to do. However, most of the weekend we spend chatting and playing at home. Other highlights include the castellers on Sunday, who were building such an impressive human castles that they needed extra people to form the base.

When I take my breakfast in the mornings, I usually sit in front of a window looking out to the entrance of a school. Some days ago I looked at some teenagers and noticed that all of them were listening to a MP3 player, but none of them had an iPod. As the iPod is certainly the hippest and easiest to use MP3 player on the market, I assumed that at least some teenagers would have one, while others would settle for a cheaper model.

When I started using the default templates coming with Movable Type 4, I missed the Recent Comments widget. Below I explain how you can add create this widget and ass it to your sidebar in true MT4 style. In the Movable Type administrative interface, go to Design > Templates > Template Modules and open either the ‘Sidebar - 2 Column Layout’ or the ‘Sidebar - 3 Column Layout’ template module, depending on which one you are using.

You can’t do knowledge management until you accept that you can’t manage knowledge. — Luke Naismith

Widgets are the fastest and easiest way to configure your sidebar. Just open up the widget administrator and drag and drop widgets on the sidebar. A great feature for novice bloggers, who don’t have the technical knowledge to tweak sidebar templates. Unfortunately, the default Movable Type templates don’t use widgets, which means that to enable widgets on your site you will have to tweak the sidebar template… ouch! I know, the default sidebar template offers a far more advanced features than the widget engine can offer, with variables and MTIf constructions.

Spain is a country of bureaucracy and civil servants. Many people I speak to have only one dream: becoming a civil servant. Unlike most other modern countries, in Spain civil servants earn way more that people working in companies. Add to that some very good secondary labour conditions and a contract for life without performance objectives, and you can understand why most people working for companies envy those others.

As of today, Brain Tags is not a stand alone blog anymore, but uses my central Movable Type installation at Ai-No. Hopefully you haven’t noticed anything of the changes, as I have been able to limit the downtime to only two minutes (the time necessary to delete an account from the web server and configure an add-on domain. As Ai-No has its own blog which I will use for meta-blogging, there will obviously be less meta-blogging going on over here.

The past days two posts have been published on other blogs, based on my experience and knowledge available on El Canasto. Last Saturday, I wrote an entry on What’s The Next Action called On-line GTD with Nozbe and Google Calendar, in which I explain how two on-line services can be used together as a complete productivity tool. And yesterday my second guest post (which I wrote some weeks ago) was published on GTD Experiences.

Behind the screens, various big changes are happening on my blogging environment. As you see in the sidebar, I currently maintain have four weblogs. The oldest of the four is Brain Tags, running since ages on Movable Type. Then I have a weblog called The Wizard of POS, until today running on the same MT installation as Brain Tags and available at ‘pos.braintags.com’. There is also an old blog about my web hosting adventures, which I haven’t updated in ages, called Brytenet weblog and just as the rest of the Brytenet site managed with eZ Publish.

For everyone who has spent more than a holiday in Spain and for whom some of the following are true… You think adding lemonade, fanta or even coke to red wine is perfectly acceptable. Especially at lunch time. You can’t get over how early bars & clubs shut back home —surely they’re shutting just as you should be going out? You aren’t just surprised that the plumber/decorator has turned up on time, you’re surprised he turned up at all.

Lately, especially since I use Twitter, I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs? On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z.

Now that Movable Type 4 has been released and leaped ahead of WordPress, the old discussion of static publishing versus dynamic publishing shows up again. Movable Type by default uses static publishing (it generates static HTML files with are served to the visitor) while WordPress uses dynamic publishing (all content is served directly from the database). What method is better? As usual, the answer is: it depends… Static publishing requires less server resources per visit, but it takes longer before updates (entries, comments and template changes) are visible.

I just remembered that a little more than a year ago I took off my watch. The main reason was that my skin was irritated by the leather in the hot weather. And I knew that I didn’t really need a watch, as I spend most of my days behind the PC with a little clock in the corner, and usually wear both my mobile phone and my Palm with me.

Most of you know that I also write in Spanish on my other weblog El Canasto, and you might even have visited it to see what it looks like. I just remembered that two months ago I published an entry in both Spanish and English, participating in a meme about my ‘killer’ GTD set-up. Basically I describe how I work and what productivity tools I use. If you’re interested, just head over to My Killer GTD Setup, which might also help you learn a little bit of Spanish as the translation is right next to it.

In the coming years I would like to see politicians wear maintenance uniforms instead of business suits, because when they wear business suits they represent business. When they wear maintenance uniforms they are the servants that they are supposed to be. — Danny Hoch

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters. I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn’t tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received.

30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work…

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don’t know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you’re like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you’ve commented on.

For quite some time, my old domain jeroensangers.com had been in monkey mode. That is to say, there was nothing interesting at all, except for a photo of me in my younger days. For a long time I wanted to put up something more useful, but never started. And you know how it goes: the moment you start, you can’t finish anymore, and within a small period of time my new site was finished.

Whenever I had an idea for a blog post, I used to create a new entry on that particular blog, jot down my idea, and save the post as a draft. As soon as I had more time, I checked the list with draft posts, chose a draft, and finished the post. What had worked perfectly for a long time, lately became a burden. The problem is that over the time I have collected a great number of interesting themes to write about, resulting in a big amount of drafts.

Very neat. At TravBuddy you can check the countries you have visited, and they will produce a good-looking map for you.

Holiday is over, the hard life is back! After a bad start, our holiday was great! We spend one week in St-George’s-de-Didonne (tasting oysters and great wines at the beach) and one week in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port (hiking in the mountains and eating some of the best tapas). One of the first things I did after coming back was fixing this site by upgrading Movable Type to the latest beta release. Of course I know that I shouldn’t have upgrated the software just before leaving for vacation, but I took the bet and lost…

Next week we’ll be going camping in France. That means amongst others that we will be making quite some kilometres, and if you know me a little bit you know that I am not that fond of travelling large hours. One way to make the trip more pleasant is music. The traditional source of music was the radio, but when travelling long distances in several countries, you’ll loose your station every two hours.

Every once in a while when I log into Movable Type, I am happily greeted by the following message: If I press the ‘Begin update’ button, Firefox will crash. So I open good ol’ Internet Explorer, and update the database. After that I switch back to Firefox and go to phpMyAdmin to fix the mt_permissions table. I love beta software!

when the message “Please wait while we install product X. This may take several minutes” stays on screen for almost two hours.

Last week Six Apart released the beta for Movable Type version 4. Until last weekend I didn’t have the time to have a look at it, but Sunday I downloaded the files and copied them to my server. Of course things went wrong, as was to be expected with a beta release. I know that you never should install beta releases on a production environment, but I took the risk anyway as this weblog is partly a playing ground.

Mark, a loving husband, was in trouble. He forgot his wedding anniversary and his wife was really ticked off with him. She told him, “tomorrow morning I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in under 6 seconds, AND IT BETTER BE THERE.” The next morning, Mark got up really early before work. When his wife woke up a couple of hours later, she looked out the window, and sure enough, there was a small gift-wrapped box sitting in the middle of the driveway.

youtu.be/FdTOFkhap…

[Via Signal vs. Noise]

Great advertisement from 1934 promoting Kelp-O-Malt to put five pounds on your bones in just one week! Things are definitely different nowadays. [Via Modern Mechanics]

Though my spamfilters, SpamLookup in combination with Akismet, catch really a lot of comment- and trackback spam on this blog, there is still too much spam slipping through. Since I don’t have the time to check my site to see whether comment spam has been published, I have changed my configuration to automatically moderate comments and trackbacks on entries older than twee weeks on which no comment has been posted in the previous week.

Today is Towel Day! Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after his death on May 11, and since then has been extended to an annual event. On this day, fans carry a towel with them throughout the day. The towel is a reference to Adams’s popular science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

During the last hour instead of the usual non-interesting stuff I write you saw: tr = preg_replace("/[_$i]/", $params[$i-1], $str); } } return $str; } ?> return $this->error(“Tag does not exist.”); } function load_modifier($name) { $params = array(‘plugins’ => array(array(‘modifier’, $name, null, null, false))); smarty_core_load_plugins($params, $this); return true; } } ?> } ?> Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/mt.php:682) in /home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/mt.php on line 554

My latest weblog El Canasto is a big success, with more and more readers every day. Every week a few other weblogs link to articles from El Canasto and therefore I expected my PageRank to increase, but to my big surprise Google decided to lower the PageRank for El Canasto last week. It went from five down to four, and I have no idea why. Normally I wouldn’t care about it, but in this case El Canasto was about to enter in the Top 500 of Spanish weblogs, and I expected an increase of visitors when arriving to that point, but the PageRank is one of the factors used to calculate popularity.

After six days of giving training in German, I am not able to speak normally any more. What really killed me was not speaking German, but the little things I did in the breaks: talking with my colleagues (Spanish), ordering in the restaurant (Catalan), answering some e-mails (English & Dutch), reading documentation (Italian)… To much switching languages combined with a little bit of tiredness and I start mixing up everything! This lunchtime I told the waiter that I wanted a table for drei persons.

In a perfect world spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship. [Via Volker Weber]

In order for a weblog to be successful, an author needs to write with personality. A weblog needs its own voice. And I have to be honest and admit that Brain Tags was missing a voice lately. I did post regulary, but most of the content was picked elsewhere and republished here. But the voice is back! Of course I will still occasionally post a nice video, but will also start writing again about technology, travelling and my life in general.

From the Twitter Support page: Delete: use delete to remove a person from your friends list, like so: delete jade. Remove: this command will delete a person from your friends list: remove jade. So if I want to delete a person I have to use the Remove command, and if I want to remove a person I have to use Delete?????

[Via Jason Womack]

I just signed up at Twitter, mainly to see what all the buzz is about. As with many new tools, I will simply try it our for a few days, and then decide whether it brings me enough value to keep on using it. Of course, with social products as Twitter, the main factor is the number of links/contacts/friends/whatever I can connect to. At this moment I am very lonely, so I would like to invite readers with a twitter account to link to me.

I am ready for it! Within a few hours I will leave for Germany to participate in the CeBIT. That also means that the coming two weeks this weblog will be even more quiet than it already is, as I will have very limited time. If you happen to be in Hannover as well, feel free to drop by in hall 1, stand G33/1. See you later!

My good friend Berry started a new weblog called the Harmelense Nieuws Pagina to compensate for the lack of news about this village in the main stream media. Clickety-click, and added to Google Reader so I stay up-to-date about what is happening in my old home town.

By far the easiest way to make a Catalan angry is calling him/her Spanish. Berry knows this very well, and used this for his practical joke with the flags.

Google finally opened up GMail for users in Canada and the USA, where this service was still invite only. The popular mail service remains in beta though. This will probably also end one of the largest comment threads on Brain Tags (138 comments up to now), where visitors could request a GMail invite.

The release op Yahoo! Pipes is definitely the news of the day: Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Of course I have tried out Pipes, and used it to create a consolidated feed of all my writings.

I just tried out IMified, and felt like I stepped into a time machine bringing me back to the 80’s. Web 2.0 finally got text menu’s: *** Main Menu **** 1 - IMified Notes 2 - IMified Reminders 3 - IMified Todos 4 - My Account type ‘M’ at any time to return to this menu Forum: http://forum.imified.com | Blog: http://blog.imified.com Jeroen: 3 IMified (ColdFusion): *** IMified Todos ***

Hire me. My rate would be onehundredandtwentyfive an hour. Plus VAT and expenses. Four hours minimum. Dollars for small problems, Euros for big problems. British Pounds for management problems. [Volker Weber]

If you buy a brand new PC with Windows Vista, you might find a big surprise when Vista does not look the same as the Vista in the showroom. After installing Vista, the so-called Windows Experience Index is calculated for your PC. Depending of the results of this test, certain features of Vista are enabled or disabled to give you the optimal performance. This is great from a technical point of view, but makes it difficult to know exactly what you are buying.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY! If there’s a problem, fix it. If your job can’t be fixed, quit. How dare you waste your life in exchange for a paycheck. You have high speed internet access, bub, you’ve got no excuse. You don’t live a hovel in Ghana. Go do it!! Pick up the phone and call someone. Seth Godin in SVN fireside chat

I am on the road again. Today I am traveling from Barcelona to Cyprus, spending over ten hours in airplanes and airports. No distractions, just me, so I could get a lot of job done. I carry a laptop computer, and already wrote some documents, I checked my e-mail and read all interesting news in Google Reader. I am in the ‘flow’, but will soon have to stop working. My laptop is running out of batteries, and I still have about half the trip to go.

A little bit more than one month ago, I started a new weblog called ‘El Canasto’ in which I write about Getting Things Done and personal productivity. Until now I have written 28 posts meaning that I have been able to keep up with my initial schedule of at least one post every two days. I found it easy to find new material, and usually have about 10 posts in he pipeline.