Is puzzle sunday late? Hmmm. Yes. I'm trying to find a house with 12 rooms at low cost in the middle of nowhere near the city centre.
Now that's an impossible puzzle. My husband had found something that seemed to resolve it, but unfortunately we were too late, the house was already sold...
So that's what I'm going to try today.
In the Netherlands most people use this site to find a home.
Hiëronymus van Alphen (1746 - 1803) said:
(in Dutch)
Mijn spelen is leren, mijn leren is spelen,
En waarom zou mij dan het leren vervelen?
Het lezen en schrijven verschaft mij vermaak.
Mijn hoepel, mijn priktol verruil ik voor boeken;
Ik wil in mijn prenten mijn tijdverdrijf zoeken,
‘t Is wijsheid, ‘t zijn deugden naar welke ik haak.
My play is to learn and my learn is to play,
why should my learning be this boring way?
Reading and writing is what gives me joy.
I exchange my toy 'hoepel' and 'priktol', [traditional dutch games for young children] for a book;
I want to find my passtime in prints,
't is wisdom, 't is virtue to which I hook.
Now I'm exercising at Scienceblogs commenting. I've got to be a good example for my children... Good excuse!
First I choose a subject that interests me, then I look for a post. Finally, I think about what I read. Do I have knowledge about it? Does a question arise?
Then finally I write a comment. Al through the process I might want to research, or look up a word in the dictionary. When I finish, I read my own comment and ask myself questions about what I wrote. Is it of good tone? Is it adding to the conversation? Should I leave a sentence, a word out?
I'm not minding about the competition for the #500,000 comment. But I did write 4 comments...
The BBC has a page on Leonardo da Vinci, the bright light of the Renaissance. On it, a test on what kind of thinker you might be. Or explore Leonardo's studio. It makes me think there was a very cool site on a filosofer on thinking somewhere in one of my first posts, about thinking monkeys, - seriously. Actually, what attracts me in her work is the original approach to the subject of thinking (besides that we're in a cannon together).
Of all fears, I think fear of success is the most difficult to tackle in adult life. Simply because it doesn't happen everyday that I get applause in front of an audience, or even worse a crowd, and it doesn't happen often that I get recognition for something extraordinary. I've survived school avoiding applause well. Everything is safe, so long as I stay in the shadows and don't have a drive to perform. But that's my problem: I have a drive to perform.
The sweat and heartbeat and memory failure in front of an audience, the trembling, the sudden case of muteness will not stop me of getting myself into situations where I will get invited to come on television or talk to important people.
On television, it's impossible to have poetic lines come out of my mouth or witty links tagged to my comments. I should avoid television at all times, but I cannot help it, after dropping a few lines I got another invite.
Is there any book or movie with this theme?
I 'm lucky oracle google doesn't dread.
Post # 201.
I found another way than google for finding contentblogs and feeds. It's http://www.blogscope.net/ . This site gives for certain keywords, you can do combinations, recent texts that appeared tagged with the same keywords. Very useful if you are a content writer to quickly look up a subject. In addition it has a very cool geotool that shows where a certain keyword is used on the planet.
At night I do all sorts of things. In my dreams I used to practise learning language, because in my dreams, there always was someone with endless patience listening. In my dreams I would practise an exercise in Maths that I didn't get immediately. In my dreams I learned. Today, I cannot sleep. What drives the drive to accelerate at times, or slow down at others? I think in the middle of the night of those who suffer just knowing it can help that someone pays attention, in a dream or outside of it all.
Translation from Dutch of this successful blogpost that gave me a rank 390 (out of 100 000) for one day.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Be innovative
An exercise in logic.
(1) the Dutch subculture of sixes (to go for a six out of ten as a student's strategy) is responsible for the lack of innovation.
(2) The minister said it, so it is true.
Number (2) unfortunately has to be dismissed because it isn't a valid formal logical argument (Dutch: drogreden):(a) argumentum ad hominem.
It will be difficult to tackle the first statement when there is no argument to support it.
So it's a challenge. (1) implies there is a connection between (1a) Dutch subculture of sixes and (1b) the lack of innovations.
Hmmm. *thinks*
(1) implies there is a connection between (-1a) subculture of excelling and (-1b) innovation.
Hmmm. *thinks*
Before taking out the model from M out of the closet... In verstand op nul, van Dudink I read there is a connection between somewhat lower grades and a higher creativity. On a Christian site about giftedness, I once read that creativity is associated with transforming the input (knowledge) obtaining another output. One child sees a heap of sand; another sees a heap of sand and hieroglyphs what may lead to questions... The second child may get less high grades for reproductive work, because it may give strange answers. Ergo: maybe a subculture of sixes should lead to innovation? Now I really don't understand anything anymore. Who is right, knowledge or power? Bas Haring, I judge.
4 to improve my organisational and planning skills.
Friday I promissed to tell how I got a 120 hits on one post in a few hours, which is my maximum. It was not on my English blog, but on my Dutch blog for a post on education.
What were the ingredients:
(1) a good post - original idea, humour, serious aspect, knowledge plus new angle
(2) topic is in the news
(3) 2 forums on related subjects where people know you, open a topic
(4) enough time to go visit some new blogs on a related topic to leave a fresh link, choose some blogs that are about the same as yours e.g. at the http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php
(5) Here I wrote:
go to http://www.ultralinking.com/, submit your blog address and immediately cut and paste their code into your blog. Then go back to ultralinking to check if you're submitted.
But as Mark comments, after 2 days of many new hits, I have to pay. I don't think they're a scam, but it's not no-budget publicity either. I didn't proceed to pay.
(6) react to an article in the news on a subject that is closely linked to one of your topics of interest. Leave a link.
Probably there was more to it... what
I forgot.
My son has trouble writing. So I thought I would get him to write maintaining his own blog. Within a few days, he had more visitors than I had... So now we're engaged in a sort of competition to beat each other with numbers of visitors. And it works, he writes more online than he would have on paper.
We are thinking of ways to attract more traffic. He was thinking out a secret strategy. It's so much fun.
In the meantime I discovered another tool that is fun for bloggers. It shows where a popular search label is located on a map. Notice this one is very local.
A friend is marketing his new brand of therapy. This makes me wonder how to reach intrinsically interested audiences. So I search for an article about fingernails and targetting audience. This is because I heard once that a certain group in Amsterdam targets people who have clean fingernails because they are more often open for therapy. Maybe they don't tend a garden? I'm finding not much of use, not the reason why the fingernails have to be neat. The closest I came to have my question answered was from Yahoo: why do we have nails and toenails?
Later on the day I reflect on my blog. Sometimes I try out some marketting strategy that I read about to realize that what I wrote that day doesn't match the new audience I reached. I shouldn't be playing, but planning. To return to one of my interests, learning through playing.
Today on puzzle sunday Burr's. I've created another blog where I want to collect links that I discuss here. Why Burr's? They are cut out (of wood) to practise scaffolding techniques. Remember scaffolding? In this case it's the building of problem solving. What steps will lead to a solution? Can you write down what you tried?
And what I like is that there is a description of a selfmade Burr that costs 1$.
I can visualize Burr making workshops around the world.
