Michael Jackson dies, beer wins.

Michael Jackson, a man once known as The Beer Hunter, died yesterday. An obituary can be found at All About Beer. A sad day for beer lovers worldwide...

This is the man that inspired me to maintain Boersma's Beer Page, a collection of links to other beer-related resources on the internet, for almost 9 years. It can now only be found with the help of the Internet Archive.

I feel blessed for having shaken the man's hand, handing him my beer-fraternity's gift for friends (a beer glass with out logo, plus the means to hang it to a wall) and having spoken with him briefly when he visited a beer-related event at my campus.

As Michael writes in his last column, "for the moment, I had cheated Mort Subite." In the end, Mort Subite won.

I hope you'll consider selecting that link and learning a little bit about this beer, or any other beer for that matter, in honour of Michael...

Register for Euro IA! (and apologies, and an update)

I realize it's been 2 months since I last posted and I guess I owe you, my readers, an apology. I have neglected rule number one of blogging: post, post, post! Before I explain some of the reasons, I'd like to urge you to register soon for Euro IA, Europe's premier conference on information architecture and associated fields, to be held on September 21-22 2007 in Barcelona, Spain. After next Tuesday, August 21, the price goes up.

This year the organizing committee (of which I am again a proud member) has increased the number of presentations by creating a parallel program during 8 of the 12 slots. This allowed us to keep the breaks long (the Euro IA is also a social event!) but still have more presentations by European practitioners, plus the odd American.
Have a look at the list of presenters, the program (PDF) and the list of posters, and register!

And why has it been 2 months since I've posted? I can think of 2 reasons:

• Holiday! With my girlfriend and our son, I have taken 3 extra-long weekends off to spend some time together and away from work. We camped in the garden of friends, stayed in another friends' house while they were on holiday, and enjoyed the hospitality of my brother-in-law and his family. Since Kasper is such a lovely kid, he features in all pictures, I am lucky to feature in one or two...


• Work! With a team of colleagues at Info.nl, several excellent freelancers and many contributions from the client, we have been working hard on getting more sections of the new SNS Bank website ready for publication. Six teams, compiled of several types of of designers, marketeers, product managers, editors and programmers, are working in parallel. Since I helped create the interaction concept I am responsible for guarding that concept and keeping it alive in all sections. This means I am a member of all six teams... The first section, the one for Savings products is already online with more to follow later, probably in a big-bang style.

There; an update on my personal life, my work, and my hobby, all in one posting! Any requests for what's next?