Jeroen Sangers

DiceLaRed —TheNetSays— has a nice tool: the Technology Barometer. They monitor several sites, mostly weblogs, and automatically create a graph of the subjects these sites talk about. Really neat. This is the current graph:

About a year ago I made a list of webloggers from Lleida. It was time to have a look at it again, so I consulted my friend Google, to find some additional weblogs:

El Bloc Catxipanda A Catalan site, made with an Italian CMS :-D. I like the use of the word “tristpartit” for the Catalan government.

Lizzie Another Lleidatan writing in English!!!

Bitacola d’en Chufo A new blog, counting only three posts at the moment. Let’s wait and see…

I have a confession to make: I use Microsoft Outlook.

Not at home, but in the office. I know many people are stuck with Microsoft Outlook because their company uses an Exchange server, but that is not the case with me; I am free to choose. I use Microsoft Outlook because it allows me to do some things I can't accomplish with other tools, even though there are many things I don't like about Outlook.

The main feature that has become indispensable for my is the fact that I can adjust any view to my needs. I have a huge list of contacts, which I have grouped in two levels (country and company). That way I can quickly find contact information. Unfortunately, when I select a contact from a new message window, all I have is a huge flat list of contacts. Another feature I use frequently us the ability to add fields to items. All my task fields have an additional field called 'project', where I put the name of the project this task belongs to. If I group my tasks by project I have a good overview off all pending items per project.

The features mentioned above are essential for my functioning in the office. Some other features are simply handy to have. For example, conditional formatting allows me to change the view of an item, so that I can see quickly which items have to be processed today or in the coming week, and which items are in progress.

As bloated as Outlook may be (partly fixed by some add-ons), I haven't found a better PIM.

Bloglines has redesigned!

The new user interface looks more beautiful, and they also added some new functions. You can now blog about the items you read, directly in Bloglines!

Six months ago I set some targets for myself for this year. Now that I am halfway the year, it is time to evaluate my progress:

Learn to speak Spanish

My Spanish is definitely better, simply because I have been using it some months more. I planned to study more structurally, but so far I haven’t spent a single minute doing this. There’s still work to do on this one.

Say "ja"

I am on schedule on this one; I expect to finish this task in 36 days.

Call old friends

I have more contact with my old friends in Holland than I had last year. However, for my feeling it can be even better.

Finish work in the house

The plans have been made, now all we have to do is say to eachother to start. I still have hope.

Be less afraid of risks

This is the most vague item on the list, and I don’t know how I can ‘measure’ the result. My feeling tells me that it hasn’t changed much.

Think about the future

My plans for the near future, 2–3 years, are ready. But what do I want with the rest of my life?????

Spend more time in the nature

For several reasons, we haven’t made as many excursions as we would like. Now that summer has come, the only nature we can visit is the Mediteranian Sea. This item has been postponed to autumn.

Learn to program in python.

Not started yet… All in all I have the feeling that at 50% of the year I haven’t reached 50% of my aims.

I have been using the services of Mobical for some time now, mainly to back up my cell phone’s contact list, and have been very satisfied. Once in a while I press the button on my phone, and I know that all my phone numbers are stored safely on a server in Sweden. They also supply a web interface to your data, so you can enter your contacts with more than nine buttons, but I never used that.

Today I visited them again, and noticed that they have created version two of their service. Version two is not backwards compatible, so I had to create a new account. After setting up my account, I uploaded the data from my phone, and looked around at the site. It all looks very professional, and I can imagine that some people use this as their main agenda contact list. It has a nice overview window with the upcoming meetings and tasks, and you can browse your contacts in an intuitive way. Notes have been implemented as post-it notes glued to each page, with the option to drag them with your mouse. Really neat… if you only have one note. I tend to store many small pieces of useful information as notes on my phone (I definitely have to buy me a Palm) and the pot-its became very annoying. I tried to close the ‘windows’, but a pop-up warned me that I was about to delete the note.

For the moment I continue to use Mobical as always: to back-up my data.

This is a message for every person in the world creating a form with a drop-down list to choose the country from: the country where I was born is called The Netherlands, and I expect it to appear in the list right between Nepal and Netherlands Antilles. I am not going to look at the H, since Holland is only a part of The Netherlands, and neither do I expect it at the T, if dictionaries would do the same, most entries would be found under the T!

Thanks!

💬

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. — Albert Einstein

Summer in Lleida has a bad name. Being in the inlands without any lake and usually without even a small breeze makes Lleida a very hot place. The hottest months yet have to come and the temperature is already at 38°C. With this kind of temperatures you have only two options to spend your free time: inside the water (a swimming pool or the sea) or in the mountains. In both cases it is advisable to leave early in the morning, as driving a car can be unbearable during the day.

This weekend we chose the swimming pool option, since we didn’t feel like driving very far. As a result, our activities were limited to those you can do in a swimming pool, which is basically limited to reading. Fortunately I still had to read the latest Linux Journal, but for next weekend I will have to buy some books.

The night of San Joan, two o’clock in the morning. We are sitting side by side on a balcony on the fifth floor of a house in Balafia. The view is stunning; we can oversee the whole city with the Seu Vella high above it. There are fireworks and bonfires everywhere, and I count 5 empty bottles of Cava. The radio plays “The house of the rising sun”, so there is no need to say anything…