May 2003 Archives

The calendar shows it is weekend... Time to arrange our house and enjoy the weather. We urgently need a sun tan before leaving to Holland next Thursday. Can you immagine that we will be the whitest persons on the wedding of Berry and Manon? Nobody will believe we are living in the south of Europe.

Therefore we will be going to the beach tomorrow. Usually we go to Vilafortuny, which is a quiet place between Salau and Cambrils, about 70 km from Lleida. Surely we will leave early in the morning, as we expect whole Lleida to head to the water, and stay there untill the early afternoon. The afternoon we will probably spent walking through the city, sitting on a terras or enjoying our life in another way.

Many companies pay a lot of many to have somebody design their web site. This person has to decide on the colours, structure, fonts and page layout used. It takes a lot of experience to get this right.

But now there is a new method, which is way cheaper: StrangeBanana: Computer-generated webpage design. Just let Strange Banana create some random designs for you, and pick the one you like. Simple as that...

And, do you like the new look of the site? Drop a comment and let me know what you think of it.

I planned to do everything in the most logical order: first decide what has to be shown on each page, and then create the looks of the site. But playing with colours and images is more fun than programming templates, so in between I worked little by little on this new look.

I still have some more ideas in my mind, concerning both content as style, so don't be surprised if things change (a little bit) again....

The lesson of this weekend is: always study the program carefully. Of course I looked at the program of the Aplec del Caragol, but I quickly came to the conclusion that we would only join the meals on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and of course the parties on Saturday night. We decided to skip the parade on Sunday morning, simply because we didn't want to wake up at 8 o'clock after a 'heavy' night. If I would have read the program better, I would have known that I could just as well have joined the parade, since they were passing our house anyway. The parade is a quite curious thing, and there is no way to continue sleeping when they pass your house. You have to imagine that the world famous Kwakbollen Brass Band is passing your window 20 times in half an hour, with in between hundreds of people who continued partying the whole night without sleeping. Noise enough...

A funny habit is to throw water on the persons passing your window (ours was just too far from the street to do this), so all participants will be 'fresh' again for another day on the Aplec.

When we were cleaning the space of our colla after the applec, bad news arrived. The parents of Maria José had an accident with their car and had to go to the hospital for some research. While her brother and sister went to the hospital, Maria José and I went to their house to take care about the grandmother and the dog. Last night Maria José slept in the hospital in the room of her parents, and I stayed in Alpicat. Both of them are reasonable OK, with a lot of brouses and glass cuts in their faces. The mother of Maria José has a broken shoulder and will probably be operated this week.

Eating and drinking...
I guess that will be the central theme for today and the coming days. This lunchtime I went to restaurant 'La Tapa' with 23 colleagues to say goodbye to a colleague. For me this was a great opportunity to see my other colleagues again, since I work only with a few people in the commercial department, and all the others are in another building. It also was nice to see the new faces and connect them to the voices I have heard over the telephone.
Tonight we are going to have a supper at the house of the parents of Maria José, to celebrate the birthday of her grandmother. We will be bringing some coca de recapte, and together with some tortilla's and a little bit of Cava (Catalan Champagne) my first culinary day will be complete.
But after that the party will begin. This weekend is the weekend of the Aplec del Caragol, the snail party. The motto of the weekend says it all: 12.000 participants, 100 clubs, 200.000 visitors, 12 tons of snails. To get a better impression, change the word club in something like 'group of friends with their family who has their own place to eat, drink, meet, listen to (live) music...'. There is no way to describe the Aplec, it is something you have to experience, and preferably in a colla (group). As any year, we will be with the whole family in the colla called 'Picarol'.

Today I finally received it: my new passport!!!!!
On March 22 my jacket with my passport got stolen, and now, more than a month later I finally have a new one. Now I can renew my residence permit and buy a new cellphone. For the moment I have decided not to buy a new Palm yet, although the new Zire looks great.

Anyway, Berry, now I can surely come to your wedding!!!!

Before I used to have a link on this page to the photo gallery. The photo gallery is not gone yet, and as soon as the site redesign has progressed further, a permanent link to the photo section will appear again. For now, you can use this message to find out where my Photo Gallery is.

03.06.2003: I have decided to replace the old gallery, so I removed the link.

I wrote the last entry on this site exactly four hours before the start of the 'Festa Major' en Lleida. This morning I have been working again, so it is exactly four hours after festa major.
We had a great weekend! I think that we have seen all the highlights of the weekend, and in between we took the time to enjoy our free time. We have spent quite some time shopping for clothes. Maybe it was because our wardrobe looked empty after removing the winter clothes and clothes we never ware anymore.

Yesterday we went to a big factory outlet in a small town called Roca de Vallès. For those who don't know: in a factory outlet you can buy the clothes the factory does not want to sell in the normal shops because of small errors or because the model is outdated or experimental. You have to look carefully, but you can find good quality for a very sharp price. Unfortunately, the women's fashion is so horrible at the moment that we couldn't find anything for Maria José. And all we were looking for was a normal pair of jeans (unbleached), a white collar-shirt and a jeans jacket.
Later on that day, the deception of the morning was balanced by the wonderfull show of the Moros i Cristians. First we saw the parade through the city and in the evening they presented in a spectacular way how the Moros conquered Lleida from the Christians.

On Saturday we didn't see much of the party. We went shopping in town. and relaxed at home. In the evening we had some friends for supper. After supper (which was around 1 o'clock) we went to the 'regional houses'. Just outside Lleida on the fair grounds you could eat and drink specialities from different regions of Spain. It reminded me of the typical evening at Euroforums, where each country presents their typical culinary specialities. Only here tens of thousands people were trying to get the best. We usually hang around the bar of Galicia. The difficult thing is to find your friend in this huge audience. Besides food and drinks there were also some concerts, of which I only remember that they were horrible. They told me that one of the artists has represented Spain on the Eurovision song contest... The surprise of that evening was when I noticed someone who looked very familiar to me, only I couldn't remember why. He came to us and when he started talking I knew it. Pietro had participated in a few Euroforums and is the nephew of the former Italian representative Marco. He told us that he is living in Barcelona since a few months, and he came to Lleida to party. Yes, Fimcap is like a small family....

Only four hours left to work, and then it's party time!!!
This weekend Lleida is celebrating its Festa Major, with a lot of activities. We haven't decided yet on which activities to visit, but I think you will find us tonight with the fireworks, tomorrow at the regional houses, on Sunday at the castle builders and Monday at the show of the Moors and the Christians.

Anyway, I will keep you all informed.... four hours to go!

Being a user of Movable type and a player of Blogshares, I have been looking to combine those things: it would be awesome to see Blogshares information on my site.

After looking around a little bit, I found MTBlogShares from David Raynes. His plugin lets me publish all kinds of information from blogshares on my site, but the one thing I have been looking for has not been implemented yet.

So David, if you read this, could you implement this in your plugin for me, since my programming knowlegde is by far not as good as yours:

Using your plugin it is possible to obtain the URL of each stock's blogshares page. The only thing that I want is a possibility to remove the string http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=, so that I have the URL of the site in question. This allows me to create a list with links to sites I own shares of. As soon as the blogshares spider visits my site and picks up those links, the total value of the blogs I have shares in will increase, making my shares worth more.

Well, what do you think about this idea? I think a lot of people will use your plugin if you have implemented this option.

As I continue defining the information shown on the main page, I find the list of archives by date way too long. I have been thinking about how to solve this problem. The nicest way would be to group all dates by year and make a dynamical menu showing the months when clicking on the year. This would requiere some advanced JavaScript, and visitors without JavaScript would still see the whole list.

I went to look for other solutions, and came across Brad Choate: Year Archives in MT. Brad describes a way of creating a page showing a year calendar. I guess I'm going to implement this the coming days...

This weekend we had wonderfull weather, so we headed to the beach to get a tan and relax a little bit. Since I didn't have a lot of opportunities to see the sun until now, I am walking around with a sun-burned nose.