Our car insurance is up for renewal next month, so I figured it's time to get some quotes to compare. TD already gave me a quote (over the phone), which was far more expensive than our current insurance from Aviva Traders. Let's see what the other players in this market can offer me.   more »

Should Bloggers Know XHTML & CSS? ask Nick of Performancing.com? The answer is: They should not have to.

However I did notice that cutting and pasting from articles or posts on the web into a rich text editor can be quite challenging and can possibly produce a lot of garbage HTML. My current solution: I try to remember to paste the text into a pure text editor and re-copy it from there before actually pasting it into the rich text editor of the blog.

By no means a perfect solution, but it seems to work fine in most cases for now. In the future the Blogging System/CMS should take care of these formatting issues.

James is going on a Feed Diet (WarpJam). A great idea. He started out by reducing the amount of feeds he subscribes to to 15 and then added a couple of new blogs that he had not been reading before in order to broaden his mind.

I recently started using Google Reader, and I do notice that I barely make it through the new articles in a day. So a Feed Diet might indeed be what the Doctor ordered, after all I also see quite a bit of redundant information in my feeds.

By the way I just meet with James the other night, and you should keep an eye on his company Names@Work. They are up to no good many good things.

I tried today to sign up for an account with digg.com and world66.com. The problem? I never got the confirmation emails.

Since I have access to the mailserver logfiles, here's one of the corresponding entries:

We try to reduce the amount of spam for the users of our non-profit box. One of the things we do, is to make sure that the sender address actually is likely to exist. So please, make sure it does exist, if you want us (and many other people employing this method) to receive your mail. Hey, nobody said it needs to be a real account or someone needs to read the mail there. Simply pipe it to /dev/null, but do set the address up. Thanks.

[Update: Digg activated my account manually after I emailed them]
 

Now this is why I love the Internet, and I am very impressed by who seems to have now embraced the age of the participation web: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has set up a Wiki on JotSpot for their The Peer to Patent Project. Maybe this is the first step in the much needed review of our patent laws, as the project is supposed to enable Community Peer reviews of Patents.

Apparently British scientists have created a made-to-order embryo that does not inherit a possibly cancer causing gene:

I feel torn. Torn between many different projects, and of course my newly expanded family enjoys the highest priority in my life. What is this blog about? What is the next project I should be working on? How can I work on as many projects as possible?

I think I am on the way. On the way of clearing the path, to use one of my employer's project name. I do think that "clearing the path" does not necessarily mean to get rid of things, even though it can be part of it. For me the most important meaning is to sort through the clutter. Organizing things makes things better and easier to follow.

This blog here for example. It's a personal blog. It will remain a personal blog. This probably means it will cover many topics of my interest. Then there is a neglected family blog, which is in need of a new name. Ah, and yes, it should not only be in English. Back to the i.m.fm blog... Some sub-topics (some of them quite popular amongst my visitors) should be moved to separate sites in order to unclutter this blog. I am mainly talking about some of my "consumer be aware" type of posts... And maybe the business stuff needs a new home as well? What do you think?

One day I will clear through (most of) the clutter, promise ;-) Unfortunately this blog here is not the highest cleanup priority on my list (my wife will confirm this, even though we probably still disagree on the top 5 rankings).

As the domain monetization and domain investing space gains more and more (negative and positive) attention, I think it's time for a reminder that I do have a separate blog about the domainer industry:

Domain Editorial: About and for Domainers