Ron Mertens’ blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 -

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]