Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

lifestyle of a monk:

“I usually get up at about 5 a.m. and then take a shower. I then
prepare myself to go out on the alms round. It takes a while for me to
put on all of the robes. I then leave at about 6 a.m. When I come back,
I put all the food on a tray and sort it out. For example: curries,
desserts and drinks. We then give some food to the Buddha image and do
some chanting. After that we just eat until we are full. I then usually
go back to sleep for a few hours. Sometimes I walk around the temple
grounds and chat with other monks. Sometimes we watch t.v. We do this
until lunchtime which is about 11 a.m. We cannot sit down for lunch
later than 11.30 a.m. Most people think we cannot eat after mid-day.
But that isn’t true. If we don’t get up from the table, we can actually
eat all afternoon! But no-one is going to do that because that is
crazy. In the afternoon I might sleep again or chat with the other
monks. Sometimes I watch t.v. In the late afternoon, when it has become
cooler, we then do our chores. We sweep around the temple and water the
plants. At 7 p.m. I go with a group of other monks to the big meeting
hall to chant. Not everyone goes. It is your choice. We chant for about
one hour. After that, my group of monks usually goes to sit by the
river and drink and chat. When I say drink, I mean soft drinks! We are
not allowed alcohol. We chat there until about 9 p.m. Then we go to
bed.”

Solid state disks:
“And, it will change the way your software runs. When there’s little
penalty in saving to disk, there’s no reason not to. Your changes are
stored as your writing the memo, or playing with the spreadsheet. I
won’t shed a tear over the loss of the Save button.”

A great walkthrough of getting started with Amazon’s EC2.

Ryanne gets harassed by some guys on the street, and instead of walking on, she takes out her camera and confronts them. A great moment for videoblogging.

I installed flock but for some reason pages loaded really slowly (compared with FF) so that’s it for me. Bye!

I published the first version of the poorbuthappy guide to Colombia in PDF format (PDF, 1MB). It’s kind of stapled-together quality, and needs a lot more work, but I thought I’d get it out there. As it goes, it’s a pretty decent backpacker guide to Colombia, and more up to date than any of the commercial guides. And free, too. It’s written by the collective intelligence of 100s of travelers. I’m planning to build some systems that’ll make it easier to gather that information.

Anyways, it’s ugly but real good. I don’t think you’ll appreciate how good until you actually use it. :) Not shy today, me.

Does anyone want to analyze the loudness of the cheers during Jobs’ keynote speech, and correlate that with what he was announcing, and propose suggestions for how to improve it?

Here’s a free business idea: branded SecondLife-like experiences.

1. Build a Second-Life tool (hey, it’s open sourced, how hard can it be?)
2. Sell branded, managed versions to everyone with a brand: a Star Trek world, a Disney world, you get the picture.
3. Help these brands monetize.

Easy!

It’s taken some time for me to learn to just click on the little RSS icon in the address bar, which then automatically opens my Bloglines subscribe page. I used to hunt around for an RSS link on the page, and I still do sometimes. The new way is better though, nice and consistent, even between FF and IE.

Steve Jobs makes mistakes too: “As other studios throw in with us as 2006 rolls on …”

Nothing o TV? Watch Steve Job’s MacWorld keynote, complete. It’s entertaining.

At least according to this picture it is. I’m not in the US, anyone want to try him :) Say I like the phone but won’t be able to afford it.

Now that Apple is doing the iPhone (and it’s looking good), I wonder if Cingular (their partner) will open up the platform a bit more. I don’t think so - Apple isn’t known for being very open, they wouldn’t have pushed it.

I agree with Ethan Zuckerman: open sourcing SecondLife is cool, but it’s still a closed platform. Hence any comparison between SL and the internet itself are thoroughly mistaken.

Installing the me.dium.com Firefox plugin (I got an invite) is painful: you gotta download, restart, then it takes 5 minutes to show a login page, then I can’t find the submit button on the login page. And why am I installing this again? (Value proposition??) I disabled it.

“Recently I began to work on an essay about why there are no longer any
good essays about why there are no longer any good novels. In
performing a survey of the literature, I was able to trace things back
to Umak of Sur, who in 6000 B.C. etched into clay a complaint that the
quality of Sumerian pictographic prose had gone down terribly since the
new Gods had been introduced.”

More

For search engine optimization, I recommended SEOmoz to someone the other day, purely based on their blog. Apart from the blog, recommendations from people I trust and personal experience, how else am I supposed to know if they’re any good? In a field so full of idiots, finding a firm that seems to do good work is a godsend. (or godsent?)

Aha it’s the first working day of the year! And I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be doing this year yet. :)

A question about OpenID: if you click “Allow” some site access to your id, do they get access to your email as well?

This screencast convinced me to try OpenID, and now I’m sold and I’ll be looking for openID signin buttons on every new site I visit.

What also convinced me is that hardcore geeks I respect seem to think it will work.

Looking for female speakers at your tech events? Ryanne started http://femaletechyspeakers.pbwiki.com/

OpenID looks promising. You can use it to log into wikitravel, vox, and lots of other sites. OpenID sounds as if it shouldn’t work, but it does. Kinda like wikis. It’s secure and everything.

To create an account, do this:

1. I went to http://www.myopenid.com/ and signed up for an account. Confirm email.

2. Add two lines to my site’s homepage petervandijck.net as explained here: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers Try view source on http://petervandijck.net/ Those 2 lines mean that I can use http://petervandijck.net as my openID instead of the openid.com one. Easy.

Done! It was only 2 steps!

3. To try it, go to http://wikitravel.org/en/Special:OpenIDLogin and try to log in there… WORKS! Also go to http://simonwillison.net/ and log in… WORKS!

Great! This took all of 4 minutes.

I think openID will take off in 2007, with the geek crowd. In 2008 you’ll start seeing it in some large sites owned by Yahoo/Google etc.

Why do I think that? It seems a well thought-out system, open, and adoptable in the sense that it’s not too geeky hard.

My first blogpost ever on this blog was January 16, 2002. 5 week anniversary in about a week! It was about ethnography and usability :)

A good interview with Om Malik

Seems like 2007 will indeed be the year of offline access. Finally! Hope the dust settles soon and some usable frameworks/approaches are found.

Good article on getting into that flow state.

1. Have a purpose, like: I’m going to write an article about flow state.
2. Be motivated.
3. Make sure it’s difficult enough.
4. And more good stuff in the article.

ProtectMyPhotos seems like a good solution, and they have a free low-res plan (I think it just means that they only back up low-res versions of your photos). Worth a try!

I played around with the BigContacts demo, a CRM system. Nice, useful Ajax, seems like a useful client management/sales tool.

Google coop has a bug today: doesn’t accept valid urls like google.com:

This might be a good time of the year to check out a list of Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts.

Hey, it’s my LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petervandijck

Jay explains clearly why MyHeavy.com went WAY over the line and is basically a spam blog, even though they’ve had 12.5 million in funding. They have the balls to add THEIR watermark and preroll ads on OUR videos, without attribution, basically violating licenses all over the place. Call the laywers.

From Target.com:

(via giantant)

The US is just too crazy, I’m outta there. (via Aphowhateverhardtospell); Why Is Genarlow Wilson in Prison? It is the story of a 17 year old “good” kid who will spend 10 years in
prison for child molestation and be forever on the sex offender
registery for having consentual oral sex with a 15 year old. One of the
interesting twists in this case is that this would not have been his
fate had he had vaginal sex with her (oral is a felony; vaginal is a
misdemeanor).

“Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their
accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot
your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a
change.”

Comic templates to tell product development stories. Cool.

Recreating history one image at a time: 1 picture a day based on an historical event.