Author Archives: ajebe

Even more easy money?

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Easy Money!In the recent past I was approached and asked if I would consider placing a link with an add on my website. At first I declined the offer but when they made me a better offer and explained the terms I got interested. Now, somewhere on my website there is a little line of text containing a little add and a link to the advertisers website. To find the add you will need to search a lot on my site.

I figured I had gotten lucky and the money I received I transferred to the account of little Pek, thus cleaning my conscience. That was it, I thought.

The next offer followed surprisingly fast. Another company also wanted to place an add on my website and politely asked my what were my tariffs for the various options. They were interested in these possibilities:

  • Text link from the index page
  • Text link on every page of my website
  • A sponsored post

The problem is that after my previous experience I did some research and found out that in Holland it is more or less illegal to advertise any gambling related thing. Of course living in Spain probably make these rules not apply to me.

The article from the law for games of chance:

Article 1
Subject to this Act it is prohibited::

a.
give opportunity to win prizes or premiums, if the winning takes place by chance determining which participants win and with participants generally having no influence, unless authorized under this Act;
b.
give opportunity, promotion or have such documents intended for publication or distribution to stock for participation to items referred to under a;

Just stimulating gambling is illegal, and placing a simple link maybe falls under this scope.

I’ll just see what happens.

Countdown, only 3 more weeks!

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Three!I have started the countdown. This is Ana’s last month being pregnant and it is going to be the first month in our lives as parents. Still only 21 more days. If everything goes to plan I will leave in a little less then three weeks to Madrid to join with Ana just one day before giving birth. The next day we plan to go to the hospital together.

Ana is already in Madrid, taking it easy and trying to relax. I could not join her because I want to save my holidays (I don’t have so many) for when Pek is born.

What I am doing in Las Palmas, without my wife? Well, she left me a big list with chores, but still I find time to read, go our running, watch some movies, listen to music and relax a little. Might as well enjoy myself now, because my life is about to change.

My Dutch tax return has been finalized. This week I planned to figure out how to validate my Dutch diploma for use here in Spain. Still I need to make an album with the photos of our wedding and I want to make a little album with photos of Pek because by now we have gathered a huge number of echo-photos. Enough to make an album.

Finally, if I can find the time, I would like to finalize the project for the red cross and maybe publish our own ‘project‘.

Posted in Pek

Easier dreaming

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More dreams!I’m not sure why, but I think my sleeping pattern has changed because of some change I expect in my life in my near future. The result is that I dream much more and have a much easier time in remembering my dreams. Of course it helps that I have an old-fashioned notebook and a pen lying right next to my bed on my nightstand.

My dreams are pretty strange. These are a few of them.

  • A dream about a soft inflatable toy bear.
  • A dream where I’m a swimming champion. I need to swim a match against an evil rival. I win the match.
  • A strange dream where I’m living with two spines. A dig part of one of my spines I remove with brute force. The rest is removed in an operation. None of this even bothered me.

Visit by the Ammers

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Visit Rogier, Barbara and Lucas 2011
Some nice chatting, swimming, remembering, playing villain and police, got semi lost, ate apple syrup, pissed against a Canarian tree and much more highlights. We enjoyed it a lot! See you in October.

The social network

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The social network!It keeps amazing me. The enormous power the social networks have in Spain. Earlier this year I had already experienced that the social network can take more than a year of your next scheduled doctors appointment.

The social network also seems to have very direct financial benefits. Like the price of medicines, a very important product for the public health. Instead of paying the normal price for our medicines we no just pay 66% for all products you can get in the pharmacy. Where I used to pay around 21 euros for a pot of multivitamins I now pay just 14 euro.

For us this is a nice discount and we would be fools not to make use of it. Still, it is annoying that the price of health in Spain for someone without connections or for a tourist is a lot higher.

Pek’s last echo

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Once again we were offered a look into our future. In one month Pek will be born and he will stop being called Pek, because at that time he deserves his new final name.

Ana will leave for Madrid next week where in a month, the 24th of August, the birth of Pek will take place. He will be born during a vasectomy in the Alcala hospital. The same city as where we got married.

Pek is kicking quite a lot every now and then. Also he gets very happy and excited after Ana has something to eat. This time we had a test where they made a graph of Pek’s movements and his heartbeat. Everything started out really relaxed, but when Ana was given a lollypop the action started.

Pek - Statistics!
The top line in the graph are the heartbeat or the movement of Pek. The vertical stripes are an indication of movement. Ana had a little button which she needed to press when she noted movement. Every press on the button resulted in a little vertical stripe. The bottom line is movement by Ana. This bottom line indicated that Ana had two mini contractions during the test.

The little one weighs 2046 grams and it is a small baby, but that was to be expected with such a small mother.

Posted in Pek

Childrens song

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Hakke hakke puf puf!Why are children’s songs always so sweet and unrealistic. I think it is better to just be honest and tell the truth.

We received a CD with Dutch children’s songs and some of these songs were so very sweet and childish. I could not resist myself and made an improved and more realistic version. There are probably still some problems with the rhyme but that can be fixed.

Advantages compared to the original:

  • Honesty about the public transport
  • Added counting up to 10
  • Removed ‘hakke, hakke’

Continue reading →

Roque Nublo

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Gran Canaria, roque Nublo!
Right in the middle of Gran Canaria you find a nice piece of nature and in the middle of it all a nice big rock called ‘Roque Nublo‘. The name simply means rock in the clouds.

This rock used to be revered by the original inhabitants of the island who thought it was a holy rock. On this photo you see the rock and on the background the volcano of Tenerife, the Teide, which is also the highest point of Spain.

Visit dad and mom

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Father Kees and mother Nel!
We just enjoyed a nice visit. My father and mother visited us and they were just in time to witness pregnant Ana’s with a big belly. We had nice talks about old times and new. Exchanged stories about our childhoods, watched photos from our wedding, ate, drank and played some games of Parchis.

The next time me meet there will be one more family member. What a change that will be. Hope to see you soon.

Another miss with Google+; I want integration!

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Puzzle!My digital life started a long time ago with a small website of a server of the University. Afterwards the website moved to xs4all. Later it moved to the Digital City Leiden. Followed by Geocities and finally to my own domain ajebe.com. The last few years my site has been located on leiden365.nl.

First the sites were just static HTML. Afterwards PHPnuke, and afterwards WordPress for my blog and Gallery for the pictures. Now I just use WordPress and am looking into a combination of WordPress and Drupal for the future.

This is my current situation. My own blog, and various profile pages and publications, messages, software, pictures, movies, etc. all over the place. A lot of things have their own little spot and are located in a specialized part of the internet. To me it seems logical.

Information should be available everywhere but right now the fragmentation this causes makes it very difficult to get a clear over all picture. I want integration! There are a lot of tools online that don’t integrate at all. The problem is that everyone wants to keep the things they have and the things they get. The same with information. Once I type something somewhere this becomes an asset for the company where I wrote it. Sharing this information makes it loose some of it’s uniqueness and consequently some of it’s value. When you loose value as a company this will probably translate into loosing advertisement dollars.

There are a lot of different places on the web to leave content of value behind. Facebook, Hyves, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Drupal, Reader, Gmail, etc. All these sites have little integration and they all strive to keep the consumers on their sites. It is not uncommon to have similar discussions going on on different sites that are not technically related. This sometimes requires people to create (write down) the same content (or opinion) on different places.

The new social web 2.0 is a nice step upwards from the old information web but the next web needs to change to survive. It is weird but everyday I visit the same list of websites to keep up to date. Sometimes I add or remove a website, but the new web foremost needs to integrate services. The social web needs be really get a single face. We need to take away the need to post the same opinion over and over. We need to take away the confusion about where the most recent discussion is taking place and who are leading the discussion. The new Google+ is exactly the same as all the stuff we already have. We are still at 2.0 and we’re not moving forward.

I don’t want to visit the same list of sites every day to see partly the same information spread all over the place. All this searching and checking is a tremendous waste of effort. I want a single way to find information and find all related information at the same time.

I don’t want my software, pictures, opinions, messages all in different sites with all of then their own counters and comments. I just want all in one!