Terror alert level
See you later!
Almost two years ago, Antipixel published a set of minimal buttons to replace the ugly buttons used by most people at that time.
They were modern, tight, fashion... so a lot of people started using them on their sites and many people designed buttons in the same style. I also preferred them over the traditional buttons, but I never placed them on my sites. Why? Because the Antipixel style did not mix with the style of my site. Just as it does not mix with the style of 80% of all sites. Still people use them. I guess because there is nothing better. Of course everybody is free to create their sites as they like, but I won't put Antipixel buttons on my site. They are soooo 2003…
There is nothing to celebrate yet, but the presents are already rolling in... In Holland people don't want to arrive to a party with empty hands; the people from here feel better when they know that we have already received our present when they arrive.
Anyway, our gadget collection has increased a lot last week. After buying the Palm Zire 31, we received a Sony DCR-HC40E video camera.
I haven't had the time yet to try out all its features, but we are going to take it with us on our holidays in August. That means that I have two weeks left to read the huge user manual and make a list of all features I would like to try out.
I was always thought that the Netherlands have two languages: Dutch and Frisian. Besides these two languages, many dialects exist. Spain in contrary, has 5 languages: Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Aragonese.
Today I found out these numbers are wrong. Or not? The languages I mentioned above are the languages that have an official status in those countries, based on history and culture. The real number of languages (linguistically seen) is higher: there are 15 languages in the Netherlands, and 11 languages in Spain. So Spain, which has twelve times the size of the Netherlands has less languages —and less water, but that is another subject— than the Netherlands.
For the curious readers: in the Netherlands, people speak Achterhoeks, Drents, Dutch, (Western) Frisian, Gronings, Romani (Sinte), Romani (Vlax), Sallands, Stellingwerfs, Twents, Veenkoloniaals, Veluws (East), Veluws (North), Vlaams and Westerwolds. In Spain, the following languages exist: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Caló, Catalan-Valencian-Balear, Extremaduran, Fala, Galician, Gascon (Aranese), Quinqui and Spanish.
Ik ben dus nummer 22 en doe bij deze de splitsing die door Lijn en David gemaakt was weer ongedaan!
Misverstanden alom! Ik dacht nummer 22 te wezen, maar die was al vergeven op Davids's site.
Daarom gaan we maar voor nummertje 25, leuk nummer overigens… Voor de geïnteresseerden, Mieke was nummer 24.
Voor verdere uitleg, zie Punkey.
Already for some months I wanted to bey me a palmOne PDA. Last week I finally found what I wanted: the Zire 31 was offered on eBay for a very good price. And now I have it!!!! :-D
I still have to research all the available options, study Graffity 2 and enter data, but I am already convinced about my purchase.
An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trashcan.
The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!”
The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that! We must train all the audience members to recognise XML, and then start a committee to investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement semantics!”
Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:
<h1><span style=“color: red;">FIRE!</span></h1>
which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display, saving the lives of everyone in the theater.
(Found on Molly.com)
The billboard shown above is part of a recruiting campaing of Google. I am far from smart enough to solve this problem, and it this moment I haven’t got any plans to move to the United States. But I am interested in the solution, so for the moment I wait until somebody has solved this problem, and publishes it on internet. After that, I will be able to find it throught Google.
[Update 2004.07.14]: Google already gives some answers. The best discussion about the answer, 7427466391.com, is found at the FogCreek forum.
The Classic IQ Test Watch out, they want your data!
Congratulations, Jeroen! Your IQ score is 136 This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the Classic IQ Test relative to others. Your Intellectual Type is Visionary Philosopher. This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways. Like Plato, your exceptional math and verbal skills make you very adept at explaining things to others — and at anticipating and predicting patterns. And that's just some of what we know about you from your IQ results.
I wonder how they are able to tell something about my verbal skills based on an on-line test. What’s Your IQ?
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:
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.
I am on schedule on this one; I expect to finish this task in 36 days.
I have more contact with my old friends in Holland than I had last year. However, for my feeling it can be even better.
The plans have been made, now all we have to do is say to eachother to start. I still have hope.
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.
My plans for the near future, 2–3 years, are ready. But what do I want with the rest of my life?????
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.
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…
Just like many people, sometimes my head bursts of all things I have to remember and to do. In fact, my short—term memory is terrible; I am able to tell you to do something and completely forget about it within 10 minutes. The reason for this is that I can be completely focussed on the action I am doing at the moment. I am aware of this problem, and have tried out many strategies to overcome this. How can I process the enormous amount of information I receive by e-mail, hear from colleagues and clients and read on the internet without getting drowned in it, so that I can actually get things done?
The answer for me lies in the last three words: for the last year I have been applying David Allen’s methodology called Getting Things Done. This method looks a lot like the things I have been trying out before; only it is worked out a lot better. The basis is to process your inbox (which can be mail, paper, phone…) and fill your calendar and next action system. Combined with a weekly review, this system ensures that no action will slip out of your system, and you actually get things done.
Of course the whole thing is explained in more detail in the book by David Allen, but this scheme explains a lot.
These days I am trying to see whether the Mambo Open Source CMS system could fit my idea’s for the new Fimcap site. The software is very complete, and I still have to explore all available third-party Components and Modules before I can make my final judgement. I am using this post as my scrapbook, so I can access my notes from any computer.
More and more people are buying digital cameras; I even read that the digital camera sales outnumber the traditional film cameras nowadays. I am very happy with my Canon film camera, but after I have been playing with my parents' new Sony digital camera last week I wondered whether a digital camera would be something for me. Of course as a gadget it would most certainly be welcome, but as a replacement for my current film camera it will need to add much additional benefits. So I made a little comparison:
In short, digital cameras give you ease of use and electronic access to your photographs, while film cameras give you quality and are cheaper. The choice is up to you. For me it is not so important having a digital photograph — though I would like to publish more photo’s on this site. On a cold Sunday in winter, I like to grab a photo album and browse through the images on my sofa. I don’t think I can have that same feeling sitting behind my computer. For the moment I still prefer film cameras to digital cameras, but maybe I might buy a very cheap digital camera for those moments I want to send a photo by e-mail or publish it on this site.
Firefox 0.9 has been released today. Of course I immediately downloaded and installed it. As the version number shows, this is still a technology preview, so there still are some things not working quite as they should.
The most important missing feature is a good installation procedure. To upgrade from version 0.8 to 0.9, I had to remove the old version, install the new one and after that I had to reinstall all my extensions — Bookmarks synchronizer, Bloglines notifier, Links toolbar. All together 10 minutes work to upgrade a simple application.
But alas, this was the last time I had to go through this, since the next version will hopefully be 1.0 and will include the upgrade functionality.
A red Buick Electra Convertible 1959. Really nice car…