May 2007 Archives

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 5 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.