webhat's Journal: Strangest thing...

... is that I started blogging in 1999. I was asked to write SimpleNews1, a news input system able to create short bulletins on the front (or "landing page") page, this for the portal of the ISP I was working for.

I started blogging using SimpleNews to create a simple weblog for our department (IT/R&D) so we could post current updates to what was going on in the department and the various project. The department log was based on an project two colleges (Adrianus Warmenhoven and Michiel [Chielie] van Reenen) started at another ISP some years before moving to a new ISP. About once an hour they would write a current status of what they were doing at that moment. They called it nu.html. (Nu means Now in Dutch.) You can visit the current nu.html page to find out what Chielie is doing at the moment, or go back to one of the first entries.

As SimpleNews was a multi-user IT/Business blog it meant there was not much room for fun news, hobby projects, and things not related to IT so I expanded the module to include separate user and project spaces. Sadly I don't have a backups of the entries otherwise I would have put them online for posterity.

On the 17th of August 2003 I started posting to /. in the Journal - my first publicly accessible blog. And although I wasn't high volume poster it gave me a good feeling that people read my Journal. At the end of November I went to work & live in Zurich (Switzerland, CH), leaving Amsterdam (The Netherlands, NL). It continued as my blog until I came back at the end of April. On the 22nd of April 2005, with about 2 weeks to go before departure I laid out our2 travel itinerary.

It wasn't until the 12th of June3 that I found the time and inclination re-tell my travel story in the blog. (I don't like working on or playing with computers too much when I'm on holiday, too much temptation.)

We came back to Amsterdam around the end of October 2005 and went to our house in the Old-South borough (5 minutes walk from the Vondelpark) of Amsterdam. There we were told we'd been evicted for being a month late on the rent - this is ignoring the 2 months rent I paid as a deposit and the notice I gave them before leaving that we were going to be away for about 6 months. They thought we'd not planned on coming back. It took us only 3 weeks to find our current beautiful apartment in the center of town - not in the Red-Light-District, but in the borough 'Centrum'.

At the beginning of December I finally started working for the 2nd largest terrestrial and 3rd largest mobile carrier in the Netherlands, having ween offered the position when I was still in Beijing. I started working on Triple Play; "... three services; high-speed Internet, television (Video on Demand or regular broadcasts) and telephone service over a single broadband connection."4

In December I'd started writing in my Journal again, but by January the job had become so hectic that I hardly had time to continue during work hours. I stopped writing on the 6th of January 2006, shortly after finishing a Grease Monkey module for /. and posting about it in " Journal Protection in GreaseMonkey "

(This is a reprint from Yahoo! 360 )

• redhat

1. SimpleNews is a module for the Roxen Challenger and Caudium - a fork of Roxen Challenger - webservers. Under the name libroxen-simplenews, SimpleNews became part of Debian. (28th of February 2000)
2. My fiance and I.
3. On the 4th of May I posted the Journal Entry " Epic ".
4. Wikipedia: Tripleplay(telecommunications)