September 2005 Archives
The last two weeks I have made two business trips; I visited London and the Netherlands. The last two weeks there have been no changes to this site. The obvious conclusion is that travelling and writing don't go together. I have encountered some reasons for this incompatibility:
- It is hard to find Internet connections. I spend most of my time in meeting rooms or in the car, without any computer in the neighbourhood. The rest of the time I am in restaurants or in hotels, where I can rarely find an Internet terminal and they have one it is ridiculously expensive.
- I work a lot more. Since I don't have a home or friends to go to after work, I usually work the whole day. When I arrive in my hotel room, all I do is some zapping on the TV ---does anybody know a hotel that does not offer that horrible CNN?--- and go to bed.
- There is nothing to tell. Since I don't do anything special and do not read my feeds, I have no inspiration.
When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity.
Street theatre is nice, since it is small-scale and personal. The acts are small, and the audience is small. That's why they got out of the theatre, and onto the street. That's why it is called street theatre. A great way to get to know street theatre is to visit a theatre festival. Edinburgh has the most famous theatre festival in the world, and Tàrrega has the most famous Spanish festival. Tàrrega happens to be quite close to Lleida, so tonight we'll be walking around in the streets of Tàrrega to see what is happening in the marvelous world of street theatre.
This year we found something curious. There was one show we really liked to see (Toni Alba), but this show is performed in a theatre. The curious thing is that we are going to look at a street theatre artist ---those artists that are too small for a theatre--- that is so popular that he's playing in a theatre. The other curious thing about this show is that it starts at 1:00 o'clock at night.
The street where I live is just inside the 'blue zone', the zone where you have to pay to park on the streets. The payment machines are activated on working days from 9-14 and 16-20, the other hours you don't have to pay.
I never pay, since these hours coincide more or less with my working hours, so I can park my car in front of our door for free. The only exception is the end of the morning: I work until 13:30, and usually arrive home 15 minutes later. So officially I have to pay 15 minutes ---15 eurocent--- every day, which I never did until today.
When I come home I always pass the parking control, as they are talking to each other while waiting for the end of their shift. Every day I see them standing on the same corner, and I know that I can park the car in the blue zone without having to be afraid that they will fine me.
The controller on the photo might just have started this job and was simply doing his job, or she does not get along very well with her colleagues or maybe simply had a bad day and wanted to share this feeling ;-).
Anyway, the result was that I ended up paying for 5 minutes of parking to avoid problems.
Though we did receive a bid on eBay, the buyer yesterday told me that they decided not to buy the car. Their 'story' was that he asked for some hours off at his office in order to travel to Lleida and pick up the car, when his boss offered him a lease car for only €90 per month.
So now our little Fiat Punto is back on eBay. As I stated before, the car is old ---11 years--- but in excellent state, and I am sure it will serve some years more for somebody who takes care about the car. Place your bid, or contact me for more information.
We all know that almost all comments spam is coming from virus infected PC's turned into zombies. For a while I suspected that these zombies work with a list of URIs to attack, since attacks always follow the same pattern: suddenly I receive a lot of commenst from various IP addresses, but all using the same referrer and posting more or less the same message. Usually attacks take about two days before the comment spam slows down. Very few of all these comments make it through the Movable Type spam filters, and usually adding the URL to the blacklist takes care of them forever.
Since upgrading to version 3.2 I did not receive any single comment spam. The reason is that I forgot to rename the comment script. One of the first measures I took against comment spam was renaming this script, so bots using Google to find spammable sites would not find me. With the latest update, I forgot to do so. Now, the list with spammable URIs these spambots use, contain hundreds of links to a script that does not exist anymore. So they do not even reach my cooment-spam filters!
Even better, they fall into another trap. I catch all request for 'inapropiate' files as system files and non-existing scripts (formmail.pl), and automatically put their IP address on a blacklist, which is cleaned up after two weeks. This blacklist has been growing like crazy the last week, due to all these MT-spammers requesting the old location.
Until they refresh their list, I can sit back and relax!
BryteNet is growing, but could grow faster. Therefore we decided to offer a sponsoring package, with the following conditions:
- The size and bandwidth of the sponsored site must be within the limits of the BryteNet Presence package. Any additional resources used will be invoiced;
- We require a link back to BryteNet on the homepage of the sponsored site;
- The sponsored site must be non-commercial;
- There must be a relation between the sponsored site and BryteNet or its owner.
After I left Harmelen four years ago, I also stopped participating in youth activities. Of course I have done some work for Fimcap as their webmaster, but I never visited or participated in any activity.
Last weekend we went to Vall d'Aran to spend 24 hours in a Roundabout camp. Roundabout is a Fimcap project in which two groups from different countries spend their summer camp together. This Roundabout was between three groups (Germany, Malta and Catalonia), and this was the third year of the project. Since we knew the Maltese animators and most of the German animators very well, we visited them to meet our old friends again.
Because the group had been together for already a week and the participants knew each other from former years, we decided to stay on the background to not disturb the group dynamics. That gave us many possibilities to analyse the activity, and compare it to our own experiences. People active within a youth organisation already know that there are huge differences between groups within a single organisation, let alone the differences between different organisations from different countries ---this is one reason Fimcap is so interesting.
Anyway, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and everybody was enjoying the activity. And we? We were very happy to meet our old friends again, and get up--to--date with all the gossip.
