RonMertens.com

So at first there was nothing, and then someone created Facebook. I really liked it at first - I found lot’s of friends (and non-friends) in there, and we are all happily connected. But now after a few weeks, it’s time to think what’s it all about. So the execution is great (I love how they built that site, and the user interface is a charm), and *everyone* is on facebook which is cool. But what’s the point of logging in there? To show-off to my friends the latest pictures from my latest trip? to write a witty quote or say that I love some sophisticated artist? That’s basically it - you can use it to impress some semi-friends who you wouldn’t have talked to in real life… kinda sad (mostly because I tend to do it still).

The thing about facebook is that you get addicted - I want to login! maybe Ahuva updated her Status! maybe Jeff asked another question! Maybe Michal is now a parsley!

The one thing I *do* like about facebook’s network is that it allows you to get to know people who were not your friends at all. For example many of my Metalgrass clients, or people who we work with in TripTouch are on facebook, and are now my ‘friends’. So it’s nice to see the people behind the e-mails. Maybe that’s what it all about, and it’s good to have facebook for that.

And on better books than face’s one - I just finished ‘The left hand of darkness’, by Ursula Le Guin. A great book by an amazing author. It’s so cool that she can create a world and a culture and history, it’s just so real. Recommended! Maybe I’ll go and update my book list in Facebook…

Well, we’re back. We’ve been on a sort-of-weekend (wed-fri) in Amirim - a veggy village in the north of Israel. We had a great time - celebrating 5 years together! Mazal-Tov to us.

Today we saw a great movie - “The Band’s visit” - it’s an Israeli/Egyptian movie. You should go too!

It was a day filled with events. First of all, things in TripTouch looks good - hopefully I’ll have updates soon, but I can’t say more now.

Then my own server (which runs all my personal domains - RonMertens.com, Metalgrass.com, oled-info, mram-info, StartupIsrael, mertero.com, and more. It’s also running the CafeTouch website) was blocked for about 7 hours (I’m not sure why, actually) and it took me quite some time to get it back up.

On the plus side again, I crossed the 100-readers marks on one of my RSS feeds - the oled-info one (big surprise). It now has 104 readers according to FeedBurner.
Other cool news is tha I uploaded the nice cloud-over-mountain photos (from grindelwald) to Shutterstock, and they sold 2 copies daily for the previous 3 days, which is cool

Michal and I also spent some time choosing things for our new bath in the new apartment - tiles, bathroom faucets and intert-putzes (or whatever it’s called). It’s so hard, but at the end we’ll have a good looking place I hope!

Anyway it’s time to go packing, we’re going to have a nice weekend up-north (in Amirim) to relax a bit and celebrate 5 years together (yeah, we’re hanging in there!)

A few days ago Sony announced their OLED TV, and there have been hundreds of blog posts and on-line articles about it. It’s nice to see OLED featured in lot’s of places, including Israeli newspapers such as Ynet, globes and TheMarker.

OLED-Info got pretty good coverage, it was even mentioned in the Economist story about the OLED TV (check out the “websites” section on the right side). For about 3 days the traffic surged around 3X, and now it settled back to only a bit higher than normal. But there were many new links added to the site, which is great.

Yesterday we saw the movie Stardust. It’s based on a beautiful book written by Neil Geiman. I really love the book - it’s a modern fairy tale, and it’s touching and altogether brilliant.

The movie was also a lot of fun! Highly recommended, especially if you read the book.

Exciting moment in world’s history - The first ever OLED Television from Sony.