Jeroen Sangers

The street where I live is just inside the ‘blue zone’, the zone where you have to pay to park on the streets. The payment machines are activated on working days from 9-14 and 16-20, the other hours you don’t have to pay.

I never pay, since these hours coincide more or less with my working hours, so I can park my car in front of our door for free. The only exception is the end of the morning: I work until 13:30, and usually arrive home 15 minutes later. So officially I have to pay 15 minutes, 15 eurocent, every day, which I never did until today.

When I come home I always pass the parking control, as they are talking to each other while waiting for the end of their shift. Every day I see them standing on the same corner, and I know that I can park the car in the blue zone without having to be afraid that they will fine me.

The controller on the photo might just have started this job and was simply doing his job, or she does not get along very well with her colleagues or maybe simply had a bad day and wanted to share this feeling ;-).

Anyway, the result was that I ended up paying for 5 minutes of parking to avoid problems.

Though we did receive a bid on eBay, the buyer yesterday told me that they decided not to buy the car. His ‘story’ was that he asked for some hours off at his office in order to travel to Lleida and pick up the car, when his boss offered him a lease car for only €90 per month.

So now our little Fiat Punto is back on eBay. As I stated before, the car is old, 11 years, but in excellent state, and I am sure it will serve some years more for somebody who takes care about the car. Place your bid, or contact me for more information.

We all know that almost all comment spam is coming from virus infected PC’s turned into zombies. For a while I suspected that these zombies work with a list of URIs to attack, since attacks always follow the same pattern: suddenly I receive a lot of comments from various IP addresses, but all using the same referrer and posting more or less the same message. Usually attacks take about two days before the comment spam slows down. Very few of all these comments make it through the Movable Type spam filters, and usually adding the URL to the blacklist takes care of them forever.

Since upgrading to version 3.2 I did not receive any single comment spam. The reason is that I forgot to rename the comment script. One of the first measures I took against comment spam was renaming this script, so bots using Google to find spammable sites would not find me. With the latest update, I forgot to do so. Now, the list with spammable URIs these spambots use, contain hundreds of links to a script that does not exist anymore. So they do not even reach my comment-spam filters!

Even better, they fall into another trap. I catch all request for ‘inapropiate’ files as system files and non-existing scripts (formmail.pl), and automatically put their IP address on a blacklist, which is cleaned up after two weeks. This blacklist has been growing like crazy the last week, due to all these MT-spammers requesting the old location.

Until they refresh their list, I can sit back and relax!

BryteNet is growing, but could grow faster. Therefore we decided to offer a sponsoring package, with the following conditions:

• The size and bandwidth of the sponsored site must be within the limits of the BryteNet Presence package. Any additional resources used will be invoiced;
• We require a link back to BryteNet on the homepage of the sponsored site;
• The sponsored site must be non-commercial;
• There must be a relation between the sponsored site and BryteNet or its owner.
• See the BryteNet site for more details and application instructions.

After I left Harmelen four years ago, I also stopped participating in youth activities. Of course I have done some work for Fimcap as their webmaster, but I never visited or participated in any activity.

Last weekend we went to Vall d’Aran to spend 24 hours in a Roundabout camp.

Roundabout is a Fimcap project in which two groups from different countries spend their summer camp together. This Roundabout was between three groups (Germany, Malta and Catalonia), and this was the third year of the project. Since we knew the Maltese animators and most of the German animators very well, we visited them to meet our old friends again.

Because the group had been together for already a week and the participants knew each other from former years, we decided to stay on the background to not disturb the group dynamics. That gave us many possibilities to analyse the activity, and compare it to our own experiences. People active within a youth organisation already know that there are huge differences between groups within a single organisation, let alone the differences between different organisations from different countries — this is one reason Fimcap is so interesting.

Anyway, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and everybody was enjoying the activity. And we? We were very happy to meet our old friends again, and get up-to-date with all the gossip.

I will be making some changes under the hood of this site. As a result, you might find that you cannot reach the server or that e-mail is bounced. Of course I will try to get everything back in order as soon as possible, in order not to dsiturb your reading pleasure.

Note: the maintenance only involves sites under the braintags.com and jeroensangers.com domains. No other sites hosted by BryteNet will be involved in the changes.

[Update 2005.08.31] As far as I know, everything went alright. I had some problems with a wrong DNS entry, but that should be sorted out by now. If you find anything strange, please contact me.

At this moment I am updating my MT sites to version 3.2. This is a huge update, and I am running into some issues. My dynamically published POS Blog is currently unavailable, because the core smarty libs are missing in the installation file. I receive the following error message when requesting a page:

main(/home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

My normal blog also gives me an error when rebuilding, stating that I used some tags in the wrong way:

Error in tag: You used an ‘MTEntryDate’ tag outside of the context of an entry; perhaps you mistakenly placed it outside of an ‘MTEntries’ container?

I hope to solve these issues, and other issues I find, as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Internet is a very good medium to get to know new artists. On the site of George I found The Subways, and of course I just had to put them in my jukebox: I Want to Hear What You Have Got To Say and Rock and Roll Queen are waiting to be downloaded.

Fiat Punto TD SX

Year: 1994 Exterior colour: White 290000 kilometres Diesel engine 5 doors ITV check until may 2006. Centralised closing, assisted steering, electrical windows.

For sale on eBay.

A bloke is in a queue at the supermarket when he notices that the rather dishy blonde behind him has just raised her hand and smiled hello to him.

He is rather taken aback that such a looker would be waving to him, and although familiar he can’t place where he might know her from, so he says “sorry do you know me?”

She replies “I may be mistaken, but I thought you might be the father of one of my children!”

His mind shoots back to the one and only time he has been unfaithful, “Christ!” he says “are you that stripogram on my stag night that I shagged on the snooker table in front of all my mates whilst your mate whipped me with some wet celery and stuck a cucumber up my arse?”

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“No” she replies, “I’m your sons’ English teacher.”