Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win. A famous quote by Gary Lineker and I hope Spain will prove him wrong this evening. My advise for Spain is to play aggressive forward football. Don’t try to play the counter and wait for Germany to make a mistake. Germany doesn’t make mistakes in a final. With this strategy Spain should win with 1-3. If they are playing the waiting game they will loose with 4-1…

The little twitter bird is rebellious. I bet a lot of people having the twitter tool installed on their wordpress blog will see this error:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out)

My site was just crawling. I’m talking about thick syrup… Disabling the twitter plugin brought everything back up to speed. Needless to say that this plugin will be disabled until twitter gets his act straight. You can try to follow me when cliccking on the bird to your right. I love their service but the down time is just killing me…

Jaiku anyone?

Drat! California is on fire again., originally uploaded by Josh Sommers.

Sonoma County is still covered with a thick layer of smoke and yesterday was the worst day so far but there is also a positive side to all of this. The sunrises and sunsets are just stunning. The sun is bright red and it’s just beautiful to look at. Only problem is the darn smell of smoke…

Wow…

The following is a list of significant, active fires in California. Please use the information on these pages only as a reference. The sites are not meant to provide up to the minute evacuation or fire behavior information. Please refer to the fire information phone numbers provided on this site, and website links for additional information, and monitor your local radio stations for emergency broadcasts. If you live in a wildland area always have an evacuation plan in place.

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I was able to pull some old images from one of my websites through the Internet Archive. Finally some memories back. Having your database and hard drive crashed in the digital age is just a disaster. Look for the Maastricht album on my photography page.

Next step is scanning most of my hard copy pictures (oh yeah, old skool photography) and upload them here. Stay tuned…

We are fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful places in California and I love to take a drive in the weekends through the Napa Valley. There are two major issues though with living here: earthquakes and wildfires. The last one is causing some havoc lately…

Forecasters say a storm system that pushed into the Northwest touched off numerous thunderstorms across northern California on Saturday. According to Accuweather.com, the thunderstorms produced significant rain but also sparked lightning, igniting wildfires as the lightning bolts struck the extremely dry vegetation covering parts of northern California, predominantly in the state’s wine country.

So yesterday we drove towards Napa to see the fire with our own eyes. All day the sky was clouded with smoke and this morning a strange mix of smoke and fog was visible. Numerous fire planes were flying over the smoked covered hills West of Napa. By Sunday night the fire had spread out to Solano County stretching over an area as big as 3,500 acres. It looked pretty bad. I guess this is going to be a long and hot summer…

Update:

The major North Bay fires are:

In Napa County: Wild Fire, northeast Napa and northwest of Fairfield, 3,750 acres, 40 percent contained, started at 4 p.m. Saturday, being fought by 438 firefighters with 41 engines. Several residential areas under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders.

In Lake County: Walker Fire, near Indian Valley Reservoir, 2,000 acres, not contained, being fought by 54 firefighters with 12 engines, voluntary evacuations at Double Eagle Ranch and Bear Valley Ranchland.

In Mendocino County: Ninety fires were burning 7,625 acres. The largest are the Orr Fire at Orr Springs Resort, 200 acres, no containment; Navarro Fire, 1,400 acres, 5 percent contained; Cherry fire, 50 acres, 50 percent contained; Foster Fire, 50 acres, 50 percent contained; Table Mountain Fire, 1,000 acres, 5 percent contained; Mallo Pass Fire, 800 acres; and Juan Creek fires, 100 acres.

De Nederlandse verdediging was ronduit WAARDELOOS! Wat een aanfluiting… Respect voor de Russen en Guus. Goed gespeeld en een sterke aanval. En Heitinga: je bent een kut speler…

Life is pretty exciting on a professional level. Last week I got promoted  and I’m totally psyched about it! It’s so rewarding when a company is able to see your potential and show you their trust. I can’t express how happy I am and what all of this means to me.

With a promotion there also will be more responsibilities to take and for me this is the exciting part. We have a bunch of projects lined up and each and every one of them will be fun to work on. It also means a lot of work but the good part is that I love doing it. It’s no secret I’m a internet-junkie. It’s my job and the hours I spend online after office hours are equal if not more. So it pays of for me to stare at a screen 15 hours a day! Information gathered late at night I use during the day and vice versa.

For those not familiar with my job description: I’m a Search Marketing Analyst. Some call it SEO Developer or SEO Strategist. Basically it’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Lately SEO is a buzz word on the internet. Although SEO is almost as old as the first Search Engines (SE’s) appeared it got mainstream a few years ago. All of a sudden bloggers are optimizing their blogs. Numerous plugins pop up for Wordpress, one the most used blogging platforms. All for generating a better placement at the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Page) and thus generating traffic.

So it a nutshell:

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).  - definition taken from SEOmoz’ beginner’s guide

I could go on and on about my job description and I intend to do so in the span of the next couple of weeks. Another exciting part is the European Soccer Championship! Did I mention the Dutch are going to win 3-2 from Russia?

3-2…

Update: I was off by a mile…

We’ve been back from the camping grounds at Lake Sonoma since saturday and we had a blast. What struck me the most was the sounds you hear at night. Although it’s quiet you still hear a lot of ‘noise’. Birds, boars(!), bobcats (at least that’s what we thought) and various flying insects. In the morning the sound of bees was amazing. A constant zoom sound surrounded the camping ground.

Lake Sonoma is stunning. It’s a man-made lake 22 years ago. We had the fortune to arrive at Thursday so no campers were around. This changed at Saturday when all the day-trippers flocked in. At least we had 2 days of peace… I’ve updated the photography page with pictures of the weekend.

There was one little ‘accident’ though… I wiped-out pretty bad on the inner tube and bruised some ribs. At first I didn’t feel anything but the next morning I felt a little sore. The next few days it became worse and on Sunday I couldn’t move anymore. I’m just taking it slow right now and try not to over stretch things.

Despite my injury it really was a little holiday. Away from work, the internet, email, phone etc. 4th of July we’ll be back!