Beyond code

It has been a while since my last post, it has been very very busy in my life. First, yesterday was my birthday, so now I am 31 years old.

Since February 1st I am also no longer working for eBuddy, I moved on to a company called Infomedics in Almere where I have been spending a first hectic month as Business Architect. Besides getting to know systems and architecture I also spent a good deal of time talking to vendors. One nice thing during that month was that I went to Paris for a short business trip. After the first month I can truly say that I have absolutely no regrets in changing jobs.

This move also means that I have been doing absolutely no coding whatsoever. I attempted to do some in my spare time, but found that I have totally started lacking the will to program and fix bugs on several of my personal projects. I think it is time to leave it be for a while and just focus on other, and more importantly, new things.

One of these “new” things is my car. I purchased a second hand VW Golf from an acquaintance and have been taking weekend drives as well as daily commutes to work in it. Since getting it on valentine’s day I have driven it for 1704 kilometers (the odometer was at 31149 when I got it). During my birthday we just got in the car and drove for a couple of hours, eventually just making a circle around the IJsselmeer.

My Car

The other thing that still gives me great amounts of pleasure is photography. The last year I have hardly done anything serious with it, but now I am picking it up again. My old trusty Nikon D50 (a 5 megapixel camera) is very low-tech when put next to the specs of the current DSLRs.

While browsing foto konijnenberg to see current prices and listings I found that the new range of nikons is rather pricey, they always have been. My dad has a Canon 350D that has given him lots of joy over the years. Konijnenberg always has some interesting special offers and I eventually folded and ordered myself a new Canon 450D with an 18mm-200mm lens. The special offer saved me 533 euros so I am quite content.

Canon 450D

All in all it has been a very exciting month with a newfound love for photography and a somewhat bleak lining in that I totally lost the urge to write code.

Life canon, car, eBuddy, infomedics, Life, nikon, Photography, work

The company I work for eBuddy (blog) has found its way onto the Google Zeitgeist for 2007 as the 7th fastest rising search term for 2007 globally. This is of course massive news, only further confirming the popularity we have among the Internet folks.

Here is the actual image with all the results:

These results are also referenced by sites like Techcrunch but sadly they only report the fastest rising terms in the US…. (I just thought the Internet was a global thing?)…

Cool as this may be, it does pop the question ‘Has the address bar been obsoleted by the consumer?’. When I look around me, all the non-technical computer users seem to put a portal site as their start page, meaning each time they open a browser, they are confronted with a portal site. In The Netherlands, the site startpagina.nl is wildly popular.

If people don’t find what they are looking for on such a portal site, they just type the site name into the search box on the portal site, which most of the times is Google or Yahoo.

This basically means that companies actually need to invest some time and money in Search Engine Optimization if they want to be the top hit when the user performs their search.

Anyways, is the address bar obsoleted by consumers? I don’t think most of them knew what it was anyways; a big bar with lots of slashes and weird words like www and .com/.nl etc… they just want to go to the site called ‘ebuddy’ and do not want to type anything else I guess

Uncategorized addressbar, browser, eBuddy, web 2.0, zeitgeist