Jeroen Sangers

My good ol’ club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source (MOS) CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change.

It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning. Of course the horrible “Designed for Internet Explorer” disclaimer has to go!!!

Further tips to make the site better:

• Knowing the amount of events Jong Nederland has, it would be better to present an event list instead of a calendar;
• Mambo has a nice option to create friendly URL's, which only needs some changes to the .htaccess file;
• The section pages should be more descriptive and at least contain links to the sub-sections to make browsing easier. I had to look twice before I noticed the extra options in the menu;
• Jong Nederland has a huge collection of drawings and logo's, but these are not used at all in the articles. I want Kleppie and Molly Mol!!!

As a regular contributor to the old guestbook, I need to browse my old JN stuff to find my membership number, so I can access the new forum.

The year of the rooster has officially begun. I wish everybody all the best and a lot of love in this year. May all your wishes come through!!!

For obvious reasons: Tsunami from the Manic Street Preachers.

The year 2004 is almost over, which means that it is time for reviews. All important media have a review, so Brain Tags as wel!

Personal

Lets start with the most important day of this year: August 7. For us the greatest thing of that day was to see all our friends and all our family together. Even though they could not understand each other, it was great to see how they tried to help.

Another personal highlight of 2004 was of course our holidays in Thailand. I still have to upload the pictures, but promise that I will do it.

Technology

2004 has also been the year of new technology. It started with a a new computer after cursing on the old one for over two years. I chose a cheap but decent white label box, and expect that it will last seven years as well.

After that came a new cellphone since my ‘old’ one landed under a car. I am still very happy with my Siemens M55.

And to bring back some structure in my life, I searched eBay for a PalmOne Zire 31 PDA. It is used daily, and can’t image how I got things done without.

Work

Also my professional life became more interesting, with our participation at the CeBIT, and trips to Cyprus, the Netherlands and Germany.

Brain Tags

And finally, this site. Since it is my hobby, I spend a lot of time tweaking it. This year, I have upgraded the CMS to version 3, added a Link Dump section to store links to interesting sites and texts, changed hosting provider since my old provider is going out of business and added a Music Jukebox to offer MP3 files.

Quite a good year, don’t you think?

Once in a while I put a song in the Jukebox. Some songs are popular, others won’t be downloaded at all. That’s your choice. Today I put a file in the box of which I was sure that it would be popular. Why? Because the famous Boing Boing links to it.

And while I have enough bandwidth left for this month, I had no idea what to expect. 10 downloads? 100 downloads? 1000 downloads? More? In such a case, it is wise to monitor the traffic.

At this moment the file has been downloaded 170 times and has generated 835 Mb traffic on a little bit more than two hours:

If the downloads stay at this level, I can easily keep on sharing the file; but you never know what to expect when America gets active the next hours. I will keep on monitoring…

[Update 2004.12.30]: The biggest peak is over, everything is quite now. The file only consumed 1,5 Gb bandwidth:

This is our new entrance, with some chistmas decoration. The nativity scene is made from clay, with lead hands (clay fingers tend to break) and real textile clothes. The mark in the upper left corner contains dried mushrooms, hand-picked by my inlaws.

Found on Boing Boing: a Beatles Mash-up Medley.

Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!

A little bit of copy and paste work, and my Flickr page is up and running. At the moment it contains the same images in the same low resolution (400x300) as the original Brain Pics contained, but I will add more and higher quality photos soon.

I will remove the Brain Pics section from this site, and link to the Flickr site instead. For a DIY guy like me this is a big step, but Flickr offers so many advantages and features, that I decided to outsource this feature to them.

Since my parents are here to celebrate Christmas with us, we took them to a living nativity scene in Sudanell on the 25^th of December. Each year they show some on the television, but I never actually visited one, so it was interesting for me as well. After buying the entrance tickets, I browsed through the leaflet, and found out that it was not exactly what I expected. I had imagined a place where the main figures would walk around with some animals, but in reality it was a lot more. There were 60 scenes in total with over 250 figures. Furthermore, the figures did not walk around, but stood still as statues. Each scene had been elaborated to the smallest details; everything looked right.

From the clothes to the tools they used! It took us an hour to see all scenes and reach the nativity scene. Besides biblical scenes from the christmas story, there were many scenes showing the life in that era: how to make baskets and soap, the work on the field, etc. We were very impressed. It was a pity that we were not allowed to make photo’s, the flash would disturb the figures, but my parents bought a video tape showing all scenes. It is difficult to explain it to others, but we really felt like we were walking around in another era. Next year we surely try to visit another living nativity scene.