RonMertens.com

Yesterday we went to one of the best concerts we’ve ever been to - Willin Fools. They’re an Irish-music band, with great music - they got us dancing and bouncing for almost the entire gig. A lot of fun! If you’re in Israel, you can still catch them - they playing a few more times in Tel-Aviv (and maybe in other places too).

We also met with Meni (A wonderful Irish dancer we saw dancing a few times in Jacob’s ladder festival), and Abe (The drummer from EverGreen, whom we also heard in lot’s of gigs). We’re part of the gang now!

We got a new design for CafeTouch. I think it looks better than before.

We also added some more internet cafes, and there’s more content like links or news.

I just finished an interesting book - Linked. It’s all about the science of networks. It begins nice. This guy argues again Reductionism. He says that western science had this notion that the best way to study something is to take it apart, study the bits, and then understand how everything is built. It might work on a radio or a telephone. But it doesn’t work on the human body or other complex things. Yeah - we know about atoms and molecules - but it doesn’t help us understand how our bodies function. I like this kind of thinking - that’s part of what’s wrong with modern western medicine as compared to more ‘holistic’ methods.

Anyway, so he says we need to study networks. The book deals with several models for networks, going through several interesting examples - the internet routing network, the WWW, living cells, terrorist networks, movie-actors network, and more.

But overall it was rather disappointing - because I’m not sure if I really did learn anything ‘useful’. It feels like this ’science’ is in rather early stages so they don’t have anything exciting to say. Yet.

If you haven’t heard of Twitter - you should check it out. It’s a micro-blogging community tool. Micro blogging means that your blog posts can be really small, sent with your mobile phone via SMS messages. I read someone’s twitter blog for the first time, and was actually horrified. This guy blogs every hour or so - when he goes to the coffee-shop, order the coffee, drinks it, and pays the bill. Is real-life so boring we can’t keep an hour to ourselves without blogging?
The question is - why do these guys need to tell the world every little thing they do? And why do they seem to think that anyone will care?

Come to think of it - why do I write my blog? And why are you reading it?

About a month ago, I started learning Shaolin Kong-Fu. So far it’s excellent - I’m learning a lot, I’m getting in better shape, and interestingly, it really makes me want to get better, and so I exercise a lot, and I feel better, more agile and ‘quicker’, sort of.
It’s a shame I didn’t start before. I thought about it for years, but finally Michal pushed me into starting (with some help from my chinese-medicine doctor Doron). Well - better late than never.

Now I just hope I’ll continue to go and practice, and not give up soon, like usually happens with those sort of things.

Oh, and watch out! I’ve got a sword

We’re working on a small side project - an internet cafe directory. The site is called CafeTouch. We’ll start adding content (i.e. actual cafes) slowly. There are several internet cafe directories on the web, but the information is usually not updated (most places are closed. We also hope that CafeTouch will be used as a community site by internet cafe owners - with a blog, links, and later a forum and other features for these guys.
This time I used the Joomla CMS (usually I use Drupal). It was just better for this kind of site, and I must say it is quite nice. I still find Drupal easier (well, I have been using it for more than a year…).

Since I’m working almost only on TripTouch these days, I don’t have time for Metalgrass and my web sites. So I made a few decisions -

1. I’ve closed down the Metalgrass blog, and also the AdSense forums. I just can’t seem to write 2 blogs, and soon I’m gonna start the TripTouch blog, so something’s gotta give.
2. I’m looking to sell my two small sites - ExpressCard-Info and U3-info. If anybody is interested, please let me know…

I just finished reading Dracula. It’s one of those books that were on my waiting-list for years, and I finally found the time to read it. It was surprisingly good - I really enjoyed it. It was quite modern (it was written in 1897) - written as written journals and newspaper clips. Recommended to all the fans lovers out there

We just came back from a great weekend - the Jacob’s ladder festival. It’s an anglo-saxon folk festival - which means the music is mostly irish/english/country, and most of the crowd is from those countries - which means that you almost only hear english around you. Feels like a real vacation. The music was great, too. I really liked the country bits, and there was also a beautiful performance by ‘La Vashe Kiri’ - an israeli band playing east-european music (romanian, armanian, kleizmer, that sort of thing) - that was the highlight for me, anyway.

I even got Michal to do some square-dancing with me, and it was cool (for the short while it lasted).

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote here. The last few weeks I’ve been busy with two things - finding an apartment, and TripTouch (The Travel 2.0 startup).

We finally found an apartment - it’s in Herzelia (where we lived about 2 years ago, we like that place) and hopefully we’ll be moving in the end of 2007. It’s pretty exciting!

We’re trying to raise money for TripTouch. It’s not easy, but hopefully we’ll have good news towards the end of May… But you never know. So most of my time is spent with meeting investors, lawyers and such. In the rest of the time I try to do a little programming, and the site is advancing nicely.

That’s it for now… Hopefully I’ll have more updates soon.