Recently in Div Category

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.

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...)

pac-chart
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?
Two years ago, reflections were cool and something new. Reflactions gave your web site or your application a crisp look. Nowadays, even the big operating systems and television stations have reflections and thus reflections as a design element are outdated. I am surprised, even irritated, by the big number of startups still using reflections in their logo or their screendumps only to look 'cool'.

Get over it. Reflections are soooo 2005.

Coverflow

I could simply write here that I am too busy to write on Brain Tags, but I guess it is more interesting for you to read what I am doing currently. So this is a short list of my most interesting current projects:

New web site for Fimcap
This is a project on which I have been working for a long time (not always as active as now) and which should have been finished a long time ago. I am now finishing off the new design, after which we can finally show the world the work we have been doing. Working on a graphical design is quite an adventure for a technical person like me. I can easily tell whether I like a design or not, but to make one yourself is a whole different thing.

Renewed site for Brytenet
Hopping along with the Fimcap redesign, I am also reworking the site where I station my side-business. Both sites are built on eZ Publish, so I use the experiences on ons site to advance on another. I am also working to leverage some of the karma I got with blogging to new profitable projects under the Brytenet umbrella. You will read more about that when these plans have crystallized a little bit more. Anyway, currently the Brytenet site is off-line while I restructure the content, but before next week I hope to be open for business again.

A home project

There is still one room in our house where we didn't do anything since we moved in, the room where our visitors sleep. Those who have visited us can confirm that the beds in that room have had their time. So we are going to use our holiday in November to get rid of the current furniture and paint the room. In the mean time we are already looking for two new beds and a wardrobe to provide our guests with better rest and ourselves with more storage room.

Teaching sells
And finally I started an on-line course about making on-line courses (?) called Teaching Sells, which will probably help me getting all that information I have been absorbing over the past years out of my head and into my wallet. I am sure some very interesting new projects will arise from that course.

Blogging
The blogs are still there, and will stay, though I am considering stopping to write on the Wizard of POS.

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