The original blog commenters
[Via Signal vs. Noise]
[Via Signal vs. Noise]
Great advertisement from 1934 promoting Kelp-O-Malt to put five pounds on your bones in just one week!
Things are definitely different nowadays.
[Via Modern Mechanics]
Though my spamfilters, SpamLookup in combination with Akismet, catch really a lot of comment- and trackback spam on this blog, there is still too much spam slipping through. Since I don’t have the time to check my site to see whether comment spam has been published, I have changed my configuration to automatically moderate comments and trackbacks on entries older than twee weeks on which no comment has been posted in the previous week.
This allows me to batch-process the moderation queue, while still making sure that comments on active threads still show up immediately.
Today is Towel Day!
Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after his death on May 11, and since then has been extended to an annual event. On this day, fans carry a towel with them throughout the day. The towel is a reference to Adams's popular science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read all abot it on the official Towel Day Site.
During the last hour instead of the usual non-interesting stuff I write you saw:
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While some people might find this more interesting than the usual text, I was not happy with it. I just updated Movable Type to the latest version, and now my sites are dead. As usual, when you think you can quickly update software, it usually takes way more time…
After several tries, I finally found the culprit: my new FTP software tries to be ‘smart’, and figures out whether a file should be overwritten or not. After dumbing down the FTP software, all is fine again.
My latest weblog El Canasto is a big success, with more and more readers every day.
Every week a few other weblogs link to articles from El Canasto and therefore I expected my PageRank to increase, but to my big surprise Google decided to lower the PageRank for El Canasto last week. It went from five down to four, and I have no idea why.
Normally I wouldn’t care about it, but in this case El Canasto was about to enter in the Top 500 of Spanish weblogs, and I expected an increase of visitors when arriving to that point, but the PageRank is one of the factors used to calculate popularity. The decrease in PageRank set me back to position 650. I can only wait until I steadily grow again, or until Google makes another readjustment of the PageRank.
We depend too much on Google…
After six days of giving training in German, I am not able to speak normally any more.
What really killed me was not speaking German, but the little things I did in the breaks: talking with my colleagues (Spanish), ordering in the restaurant (Catalan), answering some e-mails (English & Dutch), reading documentation (Italian)…
To much switching languages combined with a little bit of tiredness and I start mixing up everything! This lunchtime I told the waiter that I wanted a table for drei persons. I need a rest, and fortunately for me, Lleida celebrates its Festa Major this Friday, so my week is almost finished.
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.