Hands world
I am multi-lingual: born Dutch, living in Spain and speaking English for most part of the working day. In the past it was easy to choose the language to use: Dutch, unless the other person doesn't speak Dutch, in which case I spoke English. I also choose English as my preferred language for everything related with IT, as more software and documentation is available in English, and because of the horrible translations in the first Dutch operating systems.

When I moved to Spain, I only knew a little bit of Spanish, so I decided to dive into it, and convert my whole life to Spanish. I wrote my own personal notes in Spanish, my PCs had the Spanish version of Windows, my to-do lists and calendar were in Spanish, and little by little my Spanish improved.

Now that I have lived here for a little bit more than six years, doing everything in Spanish started to feel a little bit forced. A few months back I changed the language of my mobile phone to English, and suddenly I realized that it is indeed possible to fit the texts on the tiny screen. My phone instantly became easier to use.

Then I got a new laptop. Though initially and by habit installed in Spanish, I felt more at home when I changed it into English (fortunately, in Mac OS X the operating system language is a user preference, so I didn't need to reinstall). And since the tools I worked with are in English, I also enter the data (to-do items, appointments, etc.) in English.

For each aspect of my life, I choose whether it is best to do in Dutch, English or Spanish. For example, whenever I am writing on El Canasto, I prefer that everything is in Spanish in order not to lose any time translating. Therefore, my brainstorming, saved text fragments and Movable Type are in Spanish. I also found that even though I am fully trilingual, you can't beat 37 years of experience in a language. Deeper thinking and difficult tasks are thus easier to do in Dutch.

You see: each language has its place.
I just realized that I have been ignoring my good ol' blog for a long time. Of course, I am still actively blogging at El Canasto, and you can find some signs of life at Twitter, but over here it has been awfully quiet.

Next action: plan some posts for Brain Tags.

Just came across this on YouTube. How I wish more presenters would think about how they use PowerPoint.
Get back to basics and remember you need

  • Significance
  • Structure
  • Simplicity
  • Rehearsal

First there where blogs, then came the e-books and now there are Interactive Learning Environments (ILE). Building an ILE is a novel way of sharing your knowledge. For the last two months I have been following the Teaching Sells course, and I am very enthusiastic about it.

Teaching Sells Free Report

The course is divided into five parts: Instructional design, marketing, creating multi-media content, business models and building membership sites. The more technical parts are not that interesting for me (just some links to the software used is enough for me), but the other three courses are well worth the money. Furthermore, the forums already brought some very good contacts, and I might be setting up some joint-ventures to start building membership sites.

My first ILE project will probably be a Spanish productivity course (what else?), on which I will start working in a few months (of course I am already doing some brainstorming now...)

[Via Volker Weber]

Let's continue our trip through the history of Brain Tags at 1998, my second year of blogging.

I celebrated my birthday party in De Jeugdhof, and after cleaning the floor we forgot to close the fire hose. The next morning when we came back to finish cleaning we encountered a swimming pool instead of our cleaned floor. Oops...

I also went to Africa and visited the very interesting country of Lesotho. Of course, still being a rookie blogger I only slightly mentioned this instead of writing a post with high Google juice. Missed change indeed.

I also had the worst skin problems I remember and had to stay home for several days because my face was severely infected. I still don't know what caused it (allergy?, stress?), but fortunately it didn't return  after 1998.

Then there were of course some stories about Jong Nederland, such as kaderschouw, the Night of 16+, planning the EuroContact and the famous volleyball tournament of the Utrecht district.

You might also be interested in Looking back at 1997.

pac-chart
email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things
Via Adventures in Home Working
LinkedIn It is good habit to add a personal note when inviting someone to connect through LinkedIn to explain how you know the other person and why you want to connect. However, lately I noticed a small inconvenience with this approach: I invited a few people with a personalized note and instead of the acceptation of the invitation I received a reply to my note.

It is no big problem, as I simply reply back and ask them to accept my invitation. Maybe LinkedIn could think of a 'Reply & Accept' button?

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