In a perfect world
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 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 10th anniversary of my weblog, and will plan some extra activities here for all people who have followed me throughout the years. Stay tuned!
From the Twitter Support page:
Delete: use delete to remove a person from your friends list, like so: delete jade.
Remove: this command will delete a person from your friends list: remove jade.
So if I want to delete a person I have to use the Remove command, and if I want to remove a person I have to use Delete?????
[Via Jason Womack]
I just signed up at Twitter, mainly to see what all the buzz is about. As with many new tools, I will simply try it our for a few days, and then decide whether it brings me enough value to keep on using it.
Of course, with social products as Twitter, the main factor is the number of links/contacts/friends/whatever I can connect to. At this moment I am very lonely, so I would like to invite readers with a twitter account to link to me.
I am ready for it! Within a few hours I will leave for Germany to participate in the CeBIT.
That also means that the coming two weeks this weblog will be even more quiet than it already is, as I will have very limited time.
If you happen to be in Hannover as well, feel free to drop by in hall 1, stand G33/1.
See you later!
My good friend Berry started a new weblog called the Harmelense Nieuws Pagina to compensate for the lack of news about this village in the main stream media.
Clickety-click, and added to Google Reader so I stay up-to-date about what is happening in my old home town.
By far the easiest way to make a Catalan angry is calling him/her Spanish. Berry knows this very well, and used this for his practical joke with the flags.
Google finally opened up GMail for users in Canada and the USA, where this service was still invite only. The popular mail service remains in beta though.
This will probably also end one of the largest comment threads on Brain Tags (138 comments up to now), where visitors could request a GMail invite.
The release op Yahoo! Pipes is definitely the news of the day:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Of course I have tried out Pipes, and used it to create a consolidated feed of all my writings.
Until now, I have two remarks about this service:
Update: Two minutes more clicking, and my Brain Network pipe ended up halfway on the second page, in front of some way more interesting feeds. Help me get to the front page by running my Pipe!
I just tried out IMified, and felt like I stepped into a time machine bringing me back to the 80's. Web 2.0 finally got text menu's:
*** Main Menu ****
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - My Account
type 'M' at any time to return to this menu
Forum: http://forum.imified.com | Blog: http://blog.imified.com
Jeroen: 3
IMified (ColdFusion): *** IMified Todos ***
1 - Add
2 - View
3 - Completed
type 'M' for the main menu
Hire me. My rate would be onehundredandtwentyfive an hour. Plus VAT and expenses. Four hours minimum. Dollars for small problems, Euros for big problems. British Pounds for management problems.
If you buy a brand new PC with Windows Vista, you might find a big surprise when Vista does not look the same as the Vista in the showroom. After installing Vista, the so-called Windows Experience Index is calculated for your PC. Depending of the results of this test, certain features of Vista are enabled or disabled to give you the optimal performance.
This is great from a technical point of view, but makes it difficult to know exactly what you are buying. Only at home you will find your Experience index and see what has been disabled. And until now I haven’t seen any hardware manufacturer publish the Windows Experience Index for the PC’s they sell.
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY! If there's a problem, fix it. If your job can't be fixed, quit. How dare you waste your life in exchange for a paycheck. You have high speed internet access, bub, you've got no excuse. You don't live a hovel in Ghana. Go do it!! Pick up the phone and call someone.
Seth Godin in SVN fireside chat
I am on the road again. Today I am traveling from Barcelona to Cyprus, spending over ten hours in airplanes and airports. No distractions, just me, so I could get a lot of job done. I carry a laptop computer, and already wrote some documents, I checked my e-mail and read all interesting news in Google Reader. I am in the ‘flow’, but will soon have to stop working. My laptop is running out of batteries, and I still have about half the trip to go. I searched in every corner of the airport, but haven’t found a single power outlet!
Many travellers nowadays carry laptop computers and other electronic devices, and most of those devices need electricity. Batteries only serve for some hours, so power outlets in airports would be useful to many travellers. I can’t imagine the number of productive hours lost each year in Milano alone! Please airports, give us power outlets.
A little bit more than one month ago, I started a new weblog called ‘El Canasto’ in which I write about Getting Things Done and personal productivity.
Until now I have written 28 posts meaning that I have been able to keep up with my initial schedule of at least one post every two days. I found it easy to find new material, and usually have about 10 posts in he pipeline.
The people have received the new blog very well. I have received 30 comments/trackbacks. Quite some bloggers have found my blog and have reposted or linked to my articles. The most popular post is my translation of David Seah’s compact calendar for 2007 with 2850 unique views. At this moment I am receiving about 200-400 visitors per day.
So far it has been a very positive experience for me. Even though it costs me a little bit more time to write in Spanish, I enjoy using this language and already learned some more. Of course I tell my visitors that I am not a native speaker, and hope they are willing to forgive my errors.
Little by little, this former humble little weblog is getting bigger and bigger. I hardly have the time to answer all the fanmail I receive, and have difficulties going out on the street. Bit some fans really go far in their adoration:
[Thanks ImageChef]
I just found out that I had completely forgotten the 9th birthday of this weblog. On November 9, 1997 I announces, in Dutch, the launch of my news page, as the word weblog had not been invented yet.
Wow, nine years! Time flies when you’re having fun. Let’s see if I can do something special for next year’s anniversary. Of course I put the date in my agenda, so I won’t forget it!
I just wanted to look up some information, and I remembered having read about it in a webfeed in Google Reader. Without thinking I opened up Google Reader, ready to type in my query, but there was no search box!
How is it possible that the world’s biggest search company releases a product suited for search without adding a search function??? Google, you are missing a huge opportunity here.
Today I published the first entry on a new weblog: El Canasto.
El Canasto is my first blog in Spanish and has been created for two reasons. The first reason is that I have found very little material in Spanish about lifehacks and Getting Things Done, one of the topics I like to read about. There is clearly something missing in the Spanish weblog spectrum. The second reason is that I really want to improve my Spanish language skills, but don’t have the discipline to sit down and study. However, writing about stuff I like might give me the drive to learn more.
To set up El Canasto I used WordPress and the minimalistic Cutline theme. I spent some days making sure every word in the template has been translated correctly into Spanish, and have many plans more for optimizing the look & feel of this new site. But for the moment, it is more important to get rolling, so I published a first little entry. My plan is to maintain a higher posting frequency than on this blog or the Wizard of POS as I have much material and a lot of ideas for this blog.
For now I would like all my readers to have a look at El Canasto.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Source: Wikipedia
The Pareto principle was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population, but the same principle can be found in many other situations.
In most businesses, 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales. And technical departments know that 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the clients. This is very interesting information for managers, who can use these numbers to steer their sales and support departments.
But how can we correlate the Pareto numbers for these two departments? Are the 20% that purchase the most the same customers that use most of your organization’s resources? Well, experience tells us that this is not the case: there usually are customers buying for huge amounts without ever needing the support department. The two Pareto principle are not correlated, so if we only look at the small group of customers responsible for 80% of the sales, you will find once again that 20% of that group is using 80% of the resources.
As there is no correlation, I can easily divide my customers into four distinct groups:
I put those four groups in a specific order. The first group is worth the most, as they bring in a lot of money at low costs and the fourth group is the most difficult group.
So should you just drop the customers in the fourth group? Of course not, as we are talking about a principle and not a fixed categorization. If you drop group four, and look again at the numbers, you will see that once again 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales and 80% of the resources are used by only 20% of the clients. Customers who were in to top 20% before, not rank lower simple because you have less customers. If I have 100 clients, there are 20 clients in the top 20%, but if I drop 50 of them, the top 20% will be formed by only 10 customers. Of course, if you have to drop customers, because you haven’t got enough resources, make sure you drop clients from the fourth group, as the clients in the other three groups are worth more.
Dear spelling checker,
Please do not consider the internet as something holy. The internet is simply a technology for delivering information, just as the postal service or the cable television. There is nothing that makes the internet of a higher level than other things and ideas on this planet.
So please stop telling me that I should write internet with a capital i. It is internet and not Internet, did you get this?
Kind regards,
Jeroen Sangers Frustrated writer.