Jeroen Sangers

There is new music available in the jukebox: Allermooiste Fout from Poels & Giessen. You have 96 hours to download it. Enjoy it!

Yet another meme. It came here via Realization, Big Pink Cookie and Jay Allen. I have highlighted the items that apply to me.

N.B.: Why am I the first to make this an Ordered List?

• Bought everyone in the pub a drink
• Swam with wild dolphins
• Climbed a mountain
• Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
• Been inside the Great Pyramid
• Held a tarantula.
• Taken a candlelit bath with someone
• Said ‘I love you’ and meant it
• Hugged a tree
• Done a striptease
• Bungee jumped
• Visited Paris
• Watched a lightning storm at sea
• Stayed up all night long, and watch the sun rise
• Seen the Northern Lights
• Gone to a huge sports game
• Walked the stairs to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa
• Grown and eaten your own vegetables
• Touched an iceberg
• Slept under the stars
• Changed a baby’s diaper
• Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
• Watched a meteor shower
• Gotten drunk on champagne
• Given more than you can afford to charity
• Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
• Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
• Had a food fight
• Bet on a winning horse
• Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
• Asked out a stranger
• Had a snowball fight
• Photocopied your bottom on the office photocopier
• Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
• Held a lamb
• Enacted a favorite fantasy
• Taken a midnight skinny dip
• Taken an ice cold bath
• Had a meaningful conversation with a beggar
• Seen a total eclipse
• Ridden a roller coaster
• Hit a home run
• Fit three weeks miraculously into three days
• Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
• Adopted an accent for an entire day
• Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
• Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
• Had two hard drives for your computer
• Visited all 50 states
• Loved your job for all accounts
• Taken care of someone who was shit faced
• Had enough money to be truly satisfied (money != satisfaction)
• Had amazing friends
• Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
• Watched wild whales
• Stolen a sign
• Backpacked in Europe
• Taken a road-trip
• Rock climbing
• Lied to foreign government’s official in that country to avoid notice
• Midnight walk on the beach
• Sky diving
• Visited Ireland
• Been heartbroken longer then you were actually in love
• In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
• Visited Japan
• Benchpressed your own weight
• Milked a cow
• Alphabetized your records
• Pretended to be a superhero
• Sung karaoke
• Lounged around in bed all day
• Posed nude in front of strangers
• Scuba diving
• Got it on to “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye
• Kissed in the rain
• Played in the mud
• Played in the rain
• Gone to a drive-in theater
• Done something you should regret, but don’t regret it
• Visited the Great Wall of China
• Discovered that someone who’s not supposed to have known about your blog has discovered your blog
• Dropped Windows in favor of something better
• Started a business
• Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
• Toured ancient sites
• Taken a martial arts class
• Swordfought for the honor of a woman
• Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
• Gotten married
• Been in a movie
• Crashed a party
• Loved someone you shouldn’t have
• Kissed someone so passionately it made them dizzy
• Gotten divorced
• Had sex at the office
• Gone without food for 5 days
• Made cookies from scratch
• Won first prize in a costume contest
• Ridden a gondola in Venice
• Gotten a tattoo
• Found that the texture of some materials can turn you on
• Rafted the Snake River
• Been on television news programs as an “expert”
• Got flowers for no reason
• Masturbated in a public place
• Got so drunk you don’t remember anything
• Been addicted to some form of illegal drug
• Performed on stage
• Been to Las Vegas
• Recorded music
• Eaten shark
• Had a one-night stand
• Gone to Thailand
• Seen Siouxsie live
• Bought a house
• Been in a combat zone
• Buried one/both of your parents
• Shaved or waxed your pubic hair off
• Been on a cruise ship
• Spoken more than one language fluently
• Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone
• Bounced a check
• Performed in Rocky Horror
• Read – and understood – your credit report
• Raised children
• Recently bought and played with a favorite childhood toy
• Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
• Created and named your own constellation of stars
• Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
• Found out something significant that your ancestors did
• Called or written your Congress person
• Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
• …more than once? - More than thrice?
• Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
• Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
• Had an abortion or your female partner did
• Had plastic surgery
• Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
• Wrote articles for a large publication
• Lost over 100 pounds
• Held someone while they were having a flashback
• Piloted an airplane
• Petted a stingray
• Broken someone’s heart
• Helped an animal give birth
• Been fired or laid off from a job
• Won money on a T.V. game show
• Broken a bone
• Killed a human being
• Gone on an African photo safari
• Ridden a motorcycle
• Driven any land vehicle at a speed of greater than 100 mph
• Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced
• Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
• Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
• Ridden a horse
• Had major surgery
• Had sex on a moving train
• Had a snake as a pet
• Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
• Slept through an entire flight: takeoff, flight, and landing
• Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
• Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
• Visited all 7 continents
• Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
• Eaten kangaroo meat
• Fallen in love at an ancient Mayan burial ground
• Been a sperm or egg donor
• Eaten sushi
• Had your picture in the newspaper
• Had 2 (or more) healthy romantic relationships for over a year in your lifetime
• Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
• Gotten someone fired for their actions
• Gone back to school
• Parasailed
• Changed your name
• Petted a cockroach
• Eaten fried green tomatoes
• Read The Iliad
• Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
• Dined in a restaurant and stolen silverware, plates, cups because your apartment needed them.
• …and gotten 86–ed from the restaurant because you did it so many times, they figured out it was you
• Taught yourself an art from scratch
• Killed and prepared an animal for eating
• Apologized to someone years after inflicting the hurt
• Skipped all your school reunions
• Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
• Been elected to public office
• Written your own computer language
• Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
• Had to put someone you love into hospice care
• Built your own PC from parts
• Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
• Had a booth at a street fair
• Dyed your hair
• Been a DJ
• Found out someone was going to dump you via LiveJournal
• Written your own role playing game
• Been arrested

The link dump of this site is kaputt. So no new links until I have repaired it. I do not know yet what went wrong, but after removing a test blog I am also missing part of the Links blog.

[2004.10.04]: We’re back to normal again.

I have put some ska in the Jukebox. Smooth swinging horns, velvet vocals, rhythms…

Each morning before I leave home to go to the office, I take some time to see what is happening in the world. A few years ago, I used newspapers, radio or television for that, but nowadays we have internet. While eating a sandwich and drinking my coffee, I check my e-mail and scan the headlines of about 200 web sites. If I see something interesting, I read it or bookmark it to be read later.

This whole process takes me 20 minutes, thanks to my newsreader which fetches all information from those 200 sites and presents it to me in an easy digestible way.

However, this list of sites I want to keep up with is growing steadily; each week I discover new interesting sites, and add them to my list. When I finished browsing to my list today, I had to run to the office. I guess I’ll have to adjust my alarm with 10 minutes to give me the time to read my news.

Just before starting to write all this down, I read that Robert Scoble has exactly the same problem, but worse. He currently checks 915 feeds, and in his entry Dealing with the information flow he wonders how scalable feed are, as more and more resources use them. What happens if the number of feeds grows up to 10.000?

I guess what is going to happen is the same as happened to the web. Ten years ago I scanned the NCSA What is new? list. First I looked at this list every week, but soon new sites appeared by thousands, and I left this method to keep up with new sites. Nowadays I use search engines. They are not the same, and don’t give met the same feeling, but they scale better. With feeds the same thing is happening: at this moment I follow everything published on some sites, but soon I will have to fall back on PubSub to find what I want. I propose they will build some randomness in their queries, so I can still discover some unknown sites, and don’t have the feeling that I am reading the same as everybody else.

When I read about the Jukebox that Lijn created, I got this feeling inside…

I copied the two files to my server, made some changes to the configuration, and there it is: the Brain Tags Jukebox!!!

It needs a little bit of decoration, but the functionality is there. All songs will stay available for 96 hours, after which they will automagically disappear.

At this moment you can find You Learn About It from The Gathering, and of course the wildly popular new song from the Pixies Ain’t That Pretty At All.

Happy downloading!

[Update 2004.09.24] I added some echo statements to the PHP code, and the results looks a lot better. It is also valid XHTML now. [Update 2006.11.9] More than two years later, the jukebox became obsolete and has been removed from this site.

Besides collecting spam, I can also use my GMail account to invite others to use this service. If anybody still doesn’t have a GMail account and wished to have one, leave your full name and current e-mail address —which won’t be shown— in a comment.

Many people starting to implement the Getting Things Done methodology start processing their inboxes full of energy. The first result is usually obtained within a few days: an empty inbox! Everything has been evaluated, using the well know flow chart, and stored in reference files, someday/maybe actions, next actions… Small tasks (2–minute rule!) have been finished immediately, and a lot of junk has been thrown away. Great!

Once the big mess is out of the way, you only need to maintain it. Process arriving items as soon as possible, and start working your way through the Next Action list. You even do your first weekly review, to see whether there are any open loops left. You feel that you are getting grip on your workflow.

But usually after two or three weeks, the doubts come up. The processing goes all right, but you have the feeling that actions come in faster than you can finish them. Your N/A list is growing and growing, and looking at your N/A list gives you the same feeling you had before when you opened your inbox. You don’t know where to start or how you can set your priorities. You’ve lost control.

At this point many people throw GTD out of the window, reasoning that if they spend less time organizing their time, they will have more time for actually doing things. This might be true for some people, but in many cases you simply need to adjust your system to fix the problem. If I have a question about GTD, I always first go to the source. The problem I described here appears on David Allen’s site in the FAQ section. David’s answer is: If it’s ’too long’ either you need to get used to a big list of still-undone things […] or you need to make fewer commitments.

Of course this is very true if you implemented the system correctly. But in many cases, the problem is not the amount of commitments, but rather the way these commitments have been entered into the system. Before starting to use GTD, most people work with some kind of to-do list. New GTD users treat their N/A list in exactly the same way as their old list, only now they specify the context of the action. This is wrong, since a task is not the same as a Next Action. Anne Gennett explained it in an excellent way in The power of the real next action. In her example, the client needs new glasses. So he creates a N/A ‘Get new glasses’. But getting new glasses is not an action! Getting glasses is something you can’t do. The real N/A is to email someone for the name of an optometrist, so this is what he should have put in his list.

If you look at a long list that contains items like ‘Get new glasses’, you get the feeling that you will never be able to finish the list. But if you put real next actions, your list contains easy to perform steps, and you will see that you can process your next actions more efficiently. The next action is the very first thing you need to do to move on that item.

Even the best drivers sometime get into situations in which they cannot prevent damage. I am not one of the best drivers, so I might get into this kind of situations a little bit more.

This morning when I was driving to the office, I noticed a dog crossing the road. The car coming from the opposite direction stopped, and the dog reached the other side of the road without problems. I was still far away from that point, but I noticed another dog standing next to my side of the road. I imagined that this dog would want to follow his friend, so I slowed down. About ten seconds after spotting the dog, I passed the dog, driving carefully. And exactly at that moment the dog decided to cross the road. I hit the brakes, but could not prevent hitting the poor fellow. Of course I immediately pulled down the car next to the road, and went to look for the dog. However, he was gone — I assume he ran away into the orchards next to the road. When I inspected the car, I noticed one bump and a broken spotlight. Tomorrow I will have it repaired.

I would like to use this opportunity to tell the owner of the dog that I am very sorry, but that I could not have prevented it. Sorry…

On my individual entry pages, I show two dates: the date on which I created the entry, and the date on which I modified the entry. Today, after making some changes to an entry, I noticed that the modification date was not updated.

I found some information about this problem in earlier versions of Movable Type on the Tweezer’s Edge, but they state that this error has been fixed in the 3.x versions. I guessed that the same solution should work on my version (MT3.11 at the moment), I only needed to find out the right line in the scripts to fix. I tried some options, and found that the following fixes the problem:

Edit /lib/MT.pm, and add the text shown on line 598: 596 $ctx->stash(’entry’, $entry); 597 $ctx->{current_timestamp} = $entry->created_on; 598 $ctx->{modification_timestamp} = $entry->modified_on; 599 $cond{EntryIfAllowComments} = $entry->allow_comments;