Teasing the Catalan
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.
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.
A while ago I tried out the new Google Reader, and haven’t looked back at my old RSSBandit ever after. It ran very smoothly since the start, and I just love the ‘River of News’ view.
But lately the experience has decreased. The last few days Google News feels slow, taking about 2-3 seconds to go from one article to the next one when I press the J key, which was also noticed by Robert Scoble.
I also noticed that sometimes it doesn’t load all my unread items as it did before; after reading about fifty articles, I reach the bottom, while there are still many unread items waiting for me to be read. This is not a big issue, as I can simply press the R to refresh. The last days I noticed another glitch: zombie articles:
Google Reader tells me ‘Your reading list has no unread items’, while at the same time it shows that I have two unread articles from tech.memeorandum. For me, this is the most irritating glitch, as I have to leave my River of News to open the specific feed, change my setting to show all articles and go down the list to find the zombie.
Google Reader still is my preferred reader, and I hope they will solve these glitches soon.
More and more bloggers unite in so-called blogging networks. Robert Scoble published a good overview of the most important networks in Competitors of PodTech that I love, er, going to the Content Mall. A content mall is the same as a blogging network.
As I am interested in blogging in general, I have been following various blogging networks for some time. I can clearly see the benefits of blogging networks for the bloggers involved, but have been wondering for a long time what the benefit is for the visitors of a site part of a blogging network. So I posted the following comment:
It is clear that 'content malls' bring in huge benefits for the sites within a mall. They can work together and link to each other to boost PR.
But what benefit is there for the visitors? Shopping malls bring benefit by sharing a physical space with various stores. After going shopping for clothes I can buy some electronics without having to drive to another place. Very comfortable.
But when visiting a fashion weblog part of a content mall I can go to the technology weblog of that mall just as fast as I can go to any other techblog. I won't visit the technology weblog because it belongs to a certain group, but rather because I like it in spite of being part of that group.
Answered promptly by Robert self:
By joining a network a blogger/podcaster/videoblogger will probably be able to get paid much more than if he/she tries to do it on his/her own.
That money might let them quit their jobs (that's what happened to GeekBrief.TV, for instance) which will enable that person to produce even more content for you. Or, maybe, afford better equipment. Or, maybe be able to afford a trip to more industry conferences where they'll be able to bring you more news and information.
Robert completely hits the nail on its head here. What is good for the blogger is good for his/her reader.
Sometime, thing that have been in place for many years get in the way. In such cases, it is better to get rid of them.
Today, I said goodbye to the music jukebox the place where for the past two years you could find tasty music. In this age of streaming music and video, there is no need any more to share MP3 files. Sites like last.fm and pandora are of greater help for discovering new music you like.
I also removed the jeroensangers.com site. Until now, that page showed an ugly photo of me (is it even possible to have a pretty photo at all?) and some links to my various sites. I am going to rethink the purpose of that site, which will probably contain more dynamic content. Until then, the site is in stealth mode.
Now, that feels a lot better!
[Via Volker Weber]
Just like most other weblogs, this site has its ups and downs, and you might have noticed that it has been down lately. I am quite busy at the moment, working parallel at several projects.
The company I work for is preparing for the SIMO trade show in Madrid, where we will present the new versions of our products. Though I won’t be present at the show (my responsibilities lie outside Spain) I do have a lot of extra work concerning translating and testing the new software.
Then I am working on the new Fimcap web site. This weekend we are going to finish the forum functionality and start working on the design. We already did some brainstorming and I am happy that we are all more or less on the same line. Once the design is finished we will start using the first parts of the new site, and gradually transfer more functionality.
Once in a while I also work a little bit on BryteNet hosting. Little by little the customers are coming in, but as everything is running smoothly and automated, I don’t have much work on it.
And finally there is the blogging thing. I am planning on taking it more seriously, using Brain Tags for playing around, and doing the real blogging at The Wizard of POS. I am rethinking my work flow to crank up the posting frequency –now once a week– and have a more diverse range of articles. Furthermore I am working on a new weblog in Spanish about GTD.
You see, I have plenty of work, so I better stop writing and get something done!
The campaign for the upcoming Catalan parliament elections officially started last Sunday. Main opposition party CIU started in a very American way by including a one hour DVD called ConfidencialCAT criticizing the current government with any Catalan newspaper.
I was shocked.
Not because of the movie, which I haven't seen yet, as in the past three years CIU has done nothing else than criticizing and whining. No, I was shocked because all newspapers co-operated. Every single newspaper in this country got blinded by flash of sensationalism and opted to distribute plain propaganda. Last Sunday, the newspapers of Catalonia lost their independence and transformed themselves into propaganda vehicles.
Everybody who knows me a little bit will admit it: I am a lazy person. Because I am so lazy I work in the IT industry, dreaming about automating all those boring tasks. Of course, automating tasks is hard work, but I don’t want to think about that.
One of the problems I wanted to automate for a very long time is making backups of my PC. I know that it is very important to backup my files, and usually after tweaking my backup system I backup every X days. But after a while I loose interest, and days become weeks, and weeks become months,…
Media choice is another problem with backups, as the amount of data I have is growing exponentially. Back in the MS-DOS days, all important data fitted on e few floppy disks. As I started my studies and got involved in Jong Nederland I produced more documents and changed to ZIP disks for my backup. When I started ripping MP3 files, I was forced to change to CD’s and DVD’s. And now that I am creating my own video’s I need even more than that. I thought about buying a USB hard disk, but the thought of spending a lot of money for a medium that will be outdated within two years kept me from going to the store.
And then I found Carbonite Online Backup. Carbonite is a little application that will automatically backup my files to a server on the internet, without any user interaction. The best part of Carbonite is its price: $5 per month for unlimited storage!!! So for only $5 per month I can sit back and relax, knowing that my files are safe, and I won’t have to worry about running out of space in the future.
I quickly downloaded and installed the demo version (15 days free), which promptly began to upload data. Now there was a little problem, as our broadband connection is ADSL, and the A stands for Asynchronous meaning that you can download at high speeds, but have less bandwidth available for uploading. It took me two days to get all my files to the Carbonite server.
When checking what files were present on the Carbonite server, I noticed that there was a lot of crap. In the installation procedure, I had selected that I wanted to backup My Documents and the Desktop, which Carbonite had interpreted as being the whole Documents and settings folder, including cached files, etc. I tweaked the settings a little bit, and was able to reduce the backed up volume by one third. I also added some other files such as my ActiveWords database and my Trillian preferences (both installed under Program Files).
I’ve got the whole system up and running for some weeks now, and am very happy with it. My backups are always up-to-date and I don’t have to think about copying files anymore.
The only problem I have found is my mailbox. As I typically have e-mail open during the whole day, the inbox file changes continuously. Besides that, the file is rather big, taking a while to upload. The result is that this particular file is hardly ever backed up. I am still looking for a solution, possibly using another tool to create a local copy and adding this copy to Carbonite.
In short: Carbonite is a very good product giving great value for its money.
Cal Paller is a lovely little cottage (Casa Rural) in the mountains near La Seu d’Urgell. We had the pleasure to spend three days in one of the six available rooms, and have enjoyed it a lot. Cal Paller is the perfect starting point for mountain walks, mushroom ‘hunting’, horseback riding or skiing (winter only of course).
We found Cal paller a very special place. The location is fantastic and the 18th century mansion has been restored with great care of detail. There are many little corners where you can sit down and relax. Eva and Pep, the owners of the place, are very caring and the food Eva prepared us for supper was absolutely fabulous.
I have uploaded some photo’s we made during the weekend, so everybody can see what a fantastic place Cal Paller is.
N.B. If you also have a Flickr account, let me know, so I can give you access to even more photo’s.