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.
Visit by the Ammers
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Monthly Archives: July 2011
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
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.
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.
Childrens song
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’
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
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!
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!
Drupal module – Access Unpublished
For some time now I have been involved with Drupal, creating quite a few websites. Recently my involvement with the Drupal community increased and I published my first module. The module is called ‘Access Unpublished‘ and it can be used to allow people to view content which is not yet published/public.
Normally when you create content for a Drupal site you will either want to make it public for the whole world to see, limit access to some users or user groups, or keep the data only for yourself. But what if you want to share some content and not require registration of the people you want to share with?
This is where my module is useful. It will provide you with a special URL that you can send to others, to allow them to access the content you created. The special URL can be shared, and only the people who have the URL can see the data.