brain tags Je Maintiendrai

Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day, a day on which thousands of bloggers write about the same topic to raise awareness, and this year’s theme is Poverty.

Just like last year, I signed up to participate without thinking. But now that I start writing I realize that I am by far the right person for writing on this topic. Right now I am sitting in my own house behind my €1400 Macbook with a high speed broadband internet connection. What am I supposed to know about poverty? I (and all my readers as well) probably belong to the richest 1% of the world.

For me poverty is something they show on TV. Only once in a while I see poor people begging for money on the street, and I know that I can ignore them because I happen to live in a country with excellent social services that will take care of these people. For my own conscience, I make my contributions to some NGO’s to pay of my guilt debt. When I read back these lines, it sounds very cold, which is not how I am, but there is a great deal of truth in it.

Only twice in my life I actually saw poverty with my own eyes, when I visited Lesotho and Thailand, and it greatly affected me. More than that, it made me realize how lucky I am. We dedicate about 2% of our income to charity, which is an amount we won’t even miss, but which makes a great difference for the people depending on it.

I encourage everybody reading this to do the same: realize how lucky and incredibly rich you are, and donate 1-2% of your income. Together we can stop poverty.

TagSupplementals Plugin

I just found a very interesting plugin for Movable Type: TagSupplementals. As the name says, the plugin provides extra features for working with tags.

I am using the plugin on El Canasto to create a Related Entries list on each individual entry page. The related entries feature of this plugin has two weighing modes: constant gives each tag the same weight and simply sums up the number of tags the entries have in common, while idf gives each tag a weight of 1/freq, where freq is the number of entries tagged with that tag.

Other features of the plugin, which I currently don’t use, are: a tag count, related tags, a listing of all tags used in an archive, tag last update date, etc.

Evento Blog España

The EBE is Europe’s second largest blogging event (after Les Blogs in France) and will take place in November in Sevilla. And yes, on November 14 I will take the airplane to Sevilla to be present at this event.

When the event was first announced I doubted whether I should participate due to the high costs (plane ticket and accomodation; the EBE itself is free) and decided not to go.

What made me change my mind? Well, part of the program is the election of the best Spanish blogs, and my blog El Canasto makes a very good chance of being elected as the Best Business Blog! In the last partial rankings I held the first position, while previously I was number two.

Of course, the EBE is also a great place to meet some people in real life, people I have been working with for quite some time. I am also looking forward to meeting tons of new people, making new connections and new plans…

I am looking forward to participate at the Evento Blog España.

Lights on

Sometimes you have to let go some good habits to adapt yourself. When I came to live in Spain, I was used to drive all day with the lights of my car turned on for better visibility.

However, the people over here do not have that custom, and friendly as they are, they tried to warn me to tell that I forgot to turn of my lights. That is nice if it happens a few times, but actually it happened several times a day, and after a week I was getting quite fed-up with it. So I stopped driving with the lights turned on during daytime.

This week, the Spanish governement started a campaign to tell people about the enhanced security when driving with the car lights turned on. Guess who is happily driving around with the lights on again?