A while ago a was asked by Kilian to share seven things about me. The hype of seven things is cooling down a bit, so I will not link to seven other people to share their things. I hope it if you don’t mind me showing off some personal details.

• I’ve been a lifeguard for about eight years. But unlike the images along the article at Wikipedia show, we train in a covered swimming pool since it is not that sunny in the Netherlands. Currently, I train a bunch of children to become a lifeguard. A few years ago I launched a Dutch website to promote the sport, but I haven’t updated it in a long while.
• Last year I finished my high school. I now study Artificial Intelligence at Groningen University, and I really like it so far. Since AI is a broad subject, I don’t really know what I’m going to do later. It can be robotics, but also something more close to the subject of ‘Internet’.
• I like watching movies, and don’t really follow series. Since it became more of a habit to watch several movies a week, I recently started collecting and rating them on this webpage. An actor I really like is Edward Norton. He has portrayed several characters extremely well, so it is a pity he hasn’t won an Oscar yet.
• I have a weird habit to say a word or sentence for a few weeks after I heard it or made it up. Sometimes it comes from a movie, sometimes from someone else. It is really annoying for people in my surroundings (sorry!). Problem is that it keeps going on and on with a lot of different sentences over the years.
• The Rubik’s cube is my slave. I can solve it, but not extremely fast: in about 40-45 seconds on average. Unlike most people think, it is quite easy to solve. The hardest part is solving it fast. I very recently started this list of Rubik’s cube appearances in feature movies to combine cubing and watching movies.
• Liquids I drink often are—in no particular order—coffee, beer, water, milk and Taksi Tropical Fruit. The latter is only available in the Netherlands. It is a not really a fruit juice, but it comes close.
• From time to time I like to imagine the faith of people I meet on the street or in the train (a bit like in the movie Lola Rennt). Most of the times it is a nice way to make jokes of people anonymously.

So that’s seven things. If you have questions or comments, I hope the form below does not shy you away.

So it is my birthday today, I am 20 years old now. And because Kilian wanted me and other people to smile, I decided to give away a present that makes you smile, hopefully. Here it is.

How many browser users does it take to change a lightbulb?

• How many Microsoft Internet Explorer users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  None. The IE user just has to call someone who “does something with computers”, and shout “help, it does not work anymore”. That person has to come over to his or her house in order to solve this problem.
• How many Mozilla Firefox users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  There only has to be one smart guy who writes an add-on to change lightbulbs, to solve the problems thousands of other Firefox people have changing lightbulbs.
• How many Opera users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One. Since Opera has a built in option to change a lightbulb as of version 2.1, he or she only has to navigate to Options->Change lightbulb or use CMD+SHIFT+ALT+L.
• How many Safari users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Safari users are smart enough to change the lightbulb all by themselves, they don’t need their browser for that.
• How many Google Chrome users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Google Chrome users can easily close the tab where the lightbulb was opened on, and restore it. They can also use light incognito.
• How many Netscape Navigator users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Two, one to change the lightbulb, and another to control the switch to make the lightbulb blink.
• How many Flock users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One plus a few friends, since he or she can easily ask other people how to change a lightbulb with the various community options built in the browser.
• How many Maxthon users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  Every Maxthon user has a custom mouse gesture for changing a lightbulb, it looks pretty much like an lightbulb itself. So the answer is: one.
• How many Konqueror users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  One, to look up a new lightbulb on their hard drive, or download an new one from the Internet.
• How many WorldWideWeb users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  A couple of thousands. They improve the concept of lightbulb by building a tunnel 100 meter underground in Geneva and throw a few elementary particles in there to make one massive source of light, heat and radiation.
• How many Lynx users does it take to change a lightbulb?
  None. They can’t see if the lightbulb is broken, so they don’t know it has to be fixed.

If you have any additions to this list, please comment here and maybe I’ll add them. (I would really like to add one for Mosaic.)

I could give a list of nice blog post I wrote this year. I could post a cool movie related to web development. However, I would like to do an mind experiment on how to markup the year 2007. Oh yeah, with HTML.

2007 is in my opinion just an chain reaction of both interesting and boring things. Like always we have the option to choose, so I pick the first one. ‘Things’ is multiple, so a good start is using a list. Here we go.

The element name is, as you can see, year2007. I couldn’t find if this is an allowed name in the DTD specification, but I could just see <2007> in my browser if I used that one.

Another thing I ran into was the fact that some events are really general, but some are personal. So I also use the type attribute to indicate which one it is. The attribute can be used on the year2007 element itself, or one of the list items. So now we are talking about semantics!

Only missing is when the events happened. Okey, in the year 2007, but that is not precise enough. So the datetime attribute could be used on the list items. User agents may want to export the dates to a history e-book, for example. So have a look at the example with usage of the datetime attribute.

I am lazy, and since this is a bad joke I will not write a full DTD for all this. However, if I had written one, I could use a good validator that can read custom DTDs and Doctypes to validate the cool document I will markup later. Writing one would not be that difficult, though.

Now we have some kind of structure the list can be filled with some real events. You could expect it, I added some general and personal events that happened in 2007.

To add some style, I made a style sheet to indicate the differences between general and personal events. Since personal events are very important for me, they are a bit heavier. Just a simple CSS2 selector, nothing new invented. Check that out.

By the way, happy new year!

29 November next I’ll speak in Groningen at a Fronteers meeting. I’ll talk a bit about Fronteers itself: what is it, why, who et cetera. Also, I will tell something interesting about classes and ids: how to optimize the usage of these attributes.

The meeting will take place in ABN AMRO Business Corner of the Euroborg, and is organized by Wisdom/Ordina. Two other people will tell something interesting. Stefan Wobben is going to talk about usability. The way Wisdom/Ordina handles front-end web developing, will be presented by Alexander Kroon.

The meeting will kick off at 18 o’clock, and it is (of course) possible to meet colleague front-end developers. Hope to do that, and see you next Thursday!

Update: the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

Today is my nineteenth birthday.

Drawing by El Bosque