RonMertens.com

I turned 30 yesterday. It was a pretty exciting day (but mostly because of the marriage proposal). I’m old now, but will still accept presents. Even with less than 6 mega pixels. No worries.

Good news- I got my check from iStockPhoto. I guess it actually works, this sell-your-photo online scheme.

I’ve also joined Shutterstock (another stock photo site), uploaded a few pictures, and am already selling pictures there.

How else did you think I had the money for Michal’s new Ring???

I just opened a web store to sell OLED-Info merchandise. It is operated by Cafepress, where you can design your own stuff (from license plates frams to hats) and sell them. It’s pretty cool. Check them out.

If all goes well, I’ll try one for MRAM-Info as well. And for Metalgrass. Thank you Mitzy for these lovely logos!

Yesterday I asked Michal to marry me… And she actually said yes!
This is pretty exciting. I can’t think of anything clever or interesting to write, I guess this is news enough.

I just finished a book called Freakonomics. It was a rather interesting book. It’s written by a young economist (And another journalist bloke). He likes to look into big sets of data and extract interesting facts. He then gives interesting answers like “Do sumo wrestlers cheat?” or “What is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?”. I didn’t like the fact that this guy is very much in love with himself (Before every chapter in this book there’s a short story from some newspaper saying how great he is. In his own book!). And sometimes he is not convincing. But all in all it’s a good book. Thanks Opher for the recommendation!

And here goes another web site: ExpressCard-Info is now officially on-line. It’s another Drupal-powered site. I’ve now got 4 sites on-line. The fifth is on the way, and the plans are then to stop, re-design my existing sites and focus on them, and on the sharewares.

Yesterday we went to see this movie (World’s fastest indian). It was one of the best movies I saw lately. We really enjoyed it, and not just because part of it is filmed in NZ. Thanks Ronit for the recommendation!

I got a new CD, by Azure Ray: “Hold on Love”. I first heard of Azure Ray from Nondas (Who else?). Excellent music, I really enjoy it.

I just ‘released’ my new site into the network. U3-Info is a site all about a new USB flash drive technology, making the drives much smarter.

Unlike my previous sites, this one is built using the Drupal CMS tool, I have to say I’m quite impressed with what can be achieved with Drupal. I haven’t yet made any design (theme) changes, I’m using the default theme. But I think it looks good even as it is.

I have plans for two new web sites, then if everything works okay I will transform oled-info and mram-info into Drupal sites. Then I’ll probably come back to the new sites and work on their look and design.

We just came back from a great week-end… The Jacob’s ladder festival is all about folk, irish, blues and country music. Lot’s of english speaking people (Mostly from the US and the UK), a lot of music concerts, some were really great (I really liked the Bluegrass music!). It was heaps of fun.