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.

Now, after more than one year without wearing a watch, I don't miss it at all. Not only because I have clocks in other places, but most of all as time is not that important. While wearing a watch I found myself checking the time several times a day, while actually I only have four moments on the day on which I really need to know the time: the moment I have to wake up (taken care of by the alarm clock), the moment I leave the office for my lunch break (I will notice as my colleagues will leave too), the moment I go back to my office after lunch (which is after the weather forecast on TV finished) and the moment to go home after work (once again, I only have to follow my colleagues). For none of these moments I need a watch.

The more I think about it, the more useless watches appear. In fact, nowadays they only serve as a fashion accessory or in case you are out without a mobile phone. The watch has become a relic from the past.

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. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim’s trick only works because his workload is very low. When you’re workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

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.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!

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. I installed Joomla!, chose one of the default themes, removed a whole bunch of clutter and wrote a few simple texts. And there it is, my new personal hub, where you can read all about me:

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. Some of those drafts only contain an URL, while other are more elaborated. In short, it became too difficult to find out quickly what was what.

So now I have changed my blogging workflow. I transferred all my ideas to Google Notebook, where they are nicely ordered per blog. On that page I can see all ideas with their actual content at a single page. One glance on my Notebook, and I can quickly decide what to write. Furthermore, with the Google Notebook Firefox extension I am able to select a text on a random web page and copy it together with the address of the page to my Notebook.

From now on, drafts in my blogging software are actually pieces I already have started to write, which usually are only a few. This set-up keeps things clear, and speeds up my blogging workflow.

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. The past years we brought some CDs with us, but CDs are bulky and we can only take a few of them.

For this year’s trip, I bought a Belkin TuneBase FM, allowing us to listen to all the music stored on MJ’s iPod.

The TuneBase converts the iPod into a radio station. It has four button to select pre-stored frequencies and up and down buttons for manually selecting frequencies. All we have to do is tune our car radio to the TuneBase frequency, and we can listen to all the music stored on the iPod.

We’re ready for the trip!

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. I am a long-time Movable Type user, and suspect that my database is full of legacy data of old settings and plugins.

After copying the files, I went to the new MT Dashboard, and found out that all images had been scrambled. I suspected that my FTP application accidentally had uploaded them in ASCII mode, so copied them again in binary mode, without result. I checked the files I had downloaded from Six Apart, and yes, they were scrambled as well. So I downloaded the tar.gz file instead of the zip, uploaded the images again, and the images came up correctly.

The second problem I encountered was more serious. The dashboard showed up OK, but whenever I tried to access one of the blogs, I got an error message:

invalid permissions for author 1 at lib/MT/Author.pm line 337

This one took a little bit more to solve, but at the end I found out that newly created users don’t have this problem. After comparing all settings in the database between my old users and the new user, I found the culprit: In the table ‘mt_permission’ I found duplicate record for my user ID with permision_blog_id = 0. After removing the duplicate records, the error did not appear any more.

Now I am able to get into my blogs, and as you see, write new items. However, as soon as I publish a new entry I get another error message: Fallback Is Required At Lib/mt/util.pm Line 1331. I haven’t solved this error yet, but found out that I can simply rebuild my site to make the entry appear.

As you can see, I also changed the design of the site. I was getting fed up with the previous design, and at the same time wanted to see what new template features came with MT4, so I reset the templates to the new minimalist theme. The coming days I will be studying and tweaking this design to my own tastes, so things might change a little bit.

One thing I noticed already is that the default templates do not use the widget manager, basically because the new sidebar template module offers filtering by template type, giving the possibility to show a different sidebar on different types of pages.

Other things they copied from WordPress are Pages and a file manager (with tagging!!!).

There are still some other things to be fixed, such as activating trackbacks. In the blog’s configuration I see that this has been deactivated on a system level, which is not the case. So far I like MT4 a lot. It is fast, pleasant looking and I am happy with new features such as the file manager, entry auto-save and interactive template errors.

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. Confused, the wife put on her robe, ran out to the driveway, and took the box into the house. She opened it, and found a brand new bathroom scale. Mark is not yet well enough to have visitors ...

Via Michael Sampson

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.

This allows me to batch-process the moderation queue, while still making sure that comments on active threads still show up immediately.

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.

Read all abot it on the official Towel Day Site.

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

While some people might find this more interesting than the usual text, I was not happy with it. I just updated Movable Type to the latest version, and now my sites are dead. As usual, when you think you can quickly update software, it usually takes way more time…

After several tries, I finally found the culprit: my new FTP software tries to be ‘smart’, and figures out whether a file should be overwritten or not. After dumbing down the FTP software, all is fine again.

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. The decrease in PageRank set me back to position 650. I can only wait until I steadily grow again, or until Google makes another readjustment of the PageRank.

We depend too much on Google…

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. I need a rest, and fortunately for me, Lleida celebrates its Festa Major this Friday, so my week is almost finished.

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. As a true GTD adept, I added this commitment to my list of responsibilities (20.000 feet), and started thinking about some projects to undertake to blow new life in this site.

In November I will celebrate the 10^th anniversary of my weblog, and will plan some extra activities here for all people who have followed me throughout the years. Stay tuned!