Mark Monster

We have a girl again! Our second child is born on March 18th at 20:05. We’ve given her the name Elin Theonne Adrianne. She weights 4010 g and is 54 cm long. I, my wife and Maren love her very much and will give her all the love of the world.

Isn’t my family a beauty?

I just came across a site that looks awful but has a very nice feature. It’s just small, just like this article, but I thought this tool is so handy, everybody should know about it. It notifies a user that a specific site has been updated. The basic usage is through e-mail but it’s also possible to make use of your personal RSS-Feed. Take a look at it yourself. ChangeDetection.com.

A lot of people in the USA have heard of Mint or Wesabe. Those are so called Banking 2.0 applications that do advanced reporting on your incoming and outgoing money. This is an area where no bank I know of does the right thing. I have used ABN Amro internet banking and Postbank internet banking, and must say it works, but lacks a lot of features, specially reporting. But a dutch Banking 2.0 application is being built right now. It’s called Qash. I subscribed for the beta and last week I my request was accepted. I must admit it’s still beta but it worked at a glance. Take a watch how you can import your banking data.

I’m not sure how long I will be using Qash, but for now I like it. You can subscribe for the beta on the home page of Qash.

It has been more than a year since the relounce of my weblog. Just last week I started adding advertisements from Google Adsense to my blog. I do this because I hope to earn a little bit from the ads to pay the hosting bill.

I now have two small ad-blocks in the side bar, between the tag-cloud and the archives and after the blog roll.

Also the search is now done through Google. This way there are also ads displayed in the search results.

And finally I made ads active in the RSS-feed.

YES! It’s a girl and we have given her the name Maren Anne Hilany. She’s born on August 11th at 15:06. She weights 3955 g and is 52 cm long. I’m feeling so much love for her no one can possibly understand. Time for some photo’s taken from my beautiful daughter Maren.

Isn’t she beautiful?

It’s time for a little bit of prioritizing so I might be blogging a little bit less. But I’m sure everyone understands this.

How can you combine sporting with entertainment? Yes I’m not really a sportive guy. But playing a game on the Wii every once in a while is something that’s more my thing. A few months ago I ordered the game Wii Fit. This game is a very strange game, because are we sure it’s a game? It helps you do some yoga, strength training and aerobics. This is more like sport isn’t it? But yes one of the four categories you can sort of do/play is a game category, it’s about balancing. I tried this category first off course. Its exactly what it says its all balancing games.

I’m not entirely sure how the game works internally. But the game comes with a board that looks like an ordinary scale but has the intelligence to determine where your balance is. It’s just perfect for all the things you don’t want to know, like your BMI. I’ve just played the game for half an hour, but I really like it.

During the Microsoft DevDays in May 2008 I found the book Blogging Heroes and bought it. Since I’m a blogger myself I thought I could learn a lot from the best appreciated bloggers in the world.
And yes this book is about the worlds finest bloggers. Bloggers like Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, Peter Rojas of Engadget and Eric T. of Internet Duct Tape have told their story.

The interviews covers things like monetizing, getting traffic and the enthusiasm in blogging. Although the blogs are very large with tens of thousands readers and a crew of 4 or maybe 10 people that can make a living of the blog, things I have got no ambition to. Still things like "Think every once in a while about you goals for blogging" or "Before blogging think about at least half a dozen articles before even considering blogging". Just a very good read for everyone involved in blogging.

This is actually very nice. I’ve been reading the blogs lifehacker.com and lifehacking.nl (in dutch) for some time now. Some time ago Gina Trapini published a book called Upgrade Your Life, I haven’t had a chance to buy and read this book. But a few days ago lifehacking.nl published a dutch lifehacking book called:100 Lifehackingtips om prettiger en efficiënter te werken. This book can be downloaded as an e-book for free here. I haven’t started reading the book yet, but I think all people interested in lifehacking will like it. E-book reading can be done on the computer but I like using an e-bookreader.

It’s almost three years ago when I got my first experience in getting a chair massage. I really liked it. Specially if you look at a job when you sit most of the time. This in combination with working on a computer can result in RSI. I’m a Software Engineer and am constant aware of the risks of RSI. I always try to make as much movements during the day as possible, getting coffee for everyone for example, to prevent RSI. But this might not be enough.

Since a few months I get a chair massage. I try to get one every month. The man who does my chair massage is Jerry Elkhuizen who has a company in giving massage. I highly recommend him for chair massages. You can contact him through his website: laatjeeensmasseren.nl.

Yes, yes Yvonne and I are going to get a baby. This will be a very big change in our life. It will be our first child, so we had to prepare everything, a little shopping; spending a lot of money and reading books about pregnancy and becoming a parent.

A few weeks ago we made a so called 3d-echo of our oncoming child. If everything go’s exactly the way it could go our baby will be born on 08-08-’08.