I have no words to say, on this slow and useless day

Earlier tonight I posted my 1,000th photo to my Flickr account (all in less than four years), which is quite a milestone. Especially if you consider that I didn't used to take photos at all. Most of the photos that are on my Flickr account have been uploaded directly from my mobile phone. There's something to be said for such direct uploading of photos. It removes a complete step in the process of putting your photos online. Also, since you are pretty much unable to edit the stream of photos as it all happens real time, it gives a very honest view of what you are doing in your life (It is kind of implied that your photos don't always need to be perfect).

Anyway, on to the next 1,000 photos. Or something

In my old wallet, I carried my bank pass, my chip card, my credit card, my insurance card, my gym pass, a couple of business cards, some banknotes and a lot of change. It was bulky and I stopped actively using it about two months ago, at which point I decided to only take the most important cards and the banknotes with me and put them in my front pocket. This was of course, a great improvement, but the free roaming of cards and banknotes inside my pocket still left something to be desired. Since yesterday I own a Slimmy, a minimalist front pocket wallet that solves these problems, without the added bulkiness.

Long time, no post, I know. Life is a bit slow, although I'm doing fun things in between.

Anyway, I'm quite happy to tell that starting tomorrow, I'll be working a full-time gig at my current employer (as opposed to the half-time gig I've been doing up until now).

It's strange, the first time in over two years that I'll be working full time again. But, I'm looking forward to it.

Let's bring you up to speed in a round of updates:
- I saw the movie Juno with logpoes a few weeks ago. Good movie, quite amusing.
- I saw Persepolis with bakenius. Was a great movie. Loved the animation style.
- I bough an Airport Express today, to be stream music to my stereo. Works like a charm.

More later..

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

Pi Pie
uws reminded me that it's Pi Day again. So, happy Pi Day!

The image that I reposted yesterday was also part of a larger Flickr group "Song Chart", where many more song lyrics have been turned into charts or formulas, one way or the other. It's a great effort. Some of my favorites are this, this and this one (pic below).

ORIGINAL
Originally uploaded by boyshapedbox.

Heh.

(via Kottke)

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I've begun using SuperGenPass to improve the quality of my passwords across the (many) different sites where I have accounts. Basically, SuperGenPass uses a master password and the domain name to generate a password that is specific for the domain. This approach, combined with a handy bookmarklet makes sure that the increase in security does not come with a high cost in efficiency. The bookmarklet simply takes the existing password in a password field and uses that password as the master password, so the login procedure for a site is extended by just a simple mouse click.

There's a realy nice image from APOD of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with accompanying text. The LHC is the largest particle accelator around, and will be finished in May. Parts of the LHC are produced by the Nikhef institute, which is right down from the hall where I work. They even have a countdown clock hanging in the main hallway to countdown to the moment when the first experiments are executed. It's been in place since I work at my current job. And it's nice to slowly see LHC news everywhere.

(via Jeremy Zawodny)

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I like the idea of opening up the search results, like Yahoo is doing. It opens up a ton of new possibilities, like including the complete first paragraph of Wikipedia pages, etc. And of course, this will be an amazing opportunity to make intelligent use of microformats. Will definitely be playing with it once it is available for the masses.

So it's been a busy few days. First there was the official graduation ceremony (photos here), which was last Thursday, and was fun, and a nice way to end my career as a student.

On Saturday, I saw the movie No Country For Old Men, which was awesome. I always like the films of the Coen brothers, and this was no exception. Fully deserved the four Oscars, which it got last night. (Bourne's Ultimatum got three which also pleases me).

And yesterday I saw the geekfest people again. It was good catching up again. Photos are here.

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

I just created my first pipe using Yahoo! Pipes, which is a great product. Easy enough to use, and dragging the links around to form connection is very smart.

There's only one thing missing though: When can we create and use our own modules? Such a feature would instantly turn it into an even better killer app.

Originally published at Breyten Ernsting. You can comment here or there.

Topper is a kind of an interesting take on a search engine. Their frontpage has a blurb that is filled with all the right marketing words, but that doesn't really describe the service right. The basic idea of Topper is that it will use user input (as relevance statements) to "learn" to re-rank the results. In itself, that is an idea worth investigating. We can see on Topper however, that the problem of this approach is not in the limited amount of user input, which they seem to handle quite well. This is probably based on some boosting method.

The real problem for Topper is how to present such an approach visually. Topper shows relevance scores, which change as you provide more input. However, the result list itself is never changed, which leads to strange results that will confuse most people. It took me a while to get it.

Nevertheless, this will be a good learning experience for the team responsible for developing Topper. I'm curious to see if they can get the interface right in the future.

The Guild is a nice online show about a group of people who are in a World on Warcraft Guild. Funny as hell, and good acting.

Today marks the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller, the 25th anniversary edition. Now, Thriller, the record itself, is one of the first records I remember listening to (or at least the singles -- But then again, almost every song was a single anyway). Besides the new collaborations, the record also contains the original versions of the songs. Seems like a good way to compare the new with the old.


The Girl Is Mine (2008)
This track features Will.i.Am, from The Black Eyed Peas. Now, I find the Black Eyed Peas mostly annoying, so I'm not sure if this is good news. The new R&B beats are actually quite decent, and in spirit of the original track. All the other things are plain dissapointing. Much, if not almost all of the power of the original song is in the dialogue between Paul (McCartney) and Micheal. The reworked version however, is completely stripped of Paul's contributions, replaced by Will.i.am's vocals which are just off track.

P.Y.T. (2008)
Again Will.i.am on this track, and I can repeat much of the same things of the last track, except that I don't like the beats. But the original is not super either.

Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (2008)
This time it's not Will.i.am, but Akon instead. While the AutoTune corrections in this song are a bit too much, I think this version is actually decent. Good beats, and the instrumentation is well done.

Beat It (2008)
I already said that I find the Black Eyed Peas annoying, and this includes Fergie, which is on this track. However, Fergie's singing quite fits this song. Otherwise, the changes to this song are quite minimal, except that the guitar riffs are much more diminished. Which is a big shame.

Billie Jean (2008)
I think this is a very dangerous track to touch, given that it's such a popular track, and that it's still a floorfiller. This remix is done by Kanye West, and this version ain't bad at all. Of all the reworked tracks, this is the one I like best, even if it hasn't got the beats of the original.

Overall, the new versions aren't that noteworthy. The good thing of the record though, is that all original versions are also present. So hopefully (young) people that will buy this record, will buy it for the originals (even if maybe the new versions got them interested in the first place).

And the best thing of this record? Thriller isn't reworked.

It's been a while.

First: I've succesfully defended my thesis, which means that I'm done with everything study-wise. Now all that's left is the graduation.

The past days have been active, volleybalw-wise. I played a tournament on Saturday, trained on Monday, played a game yesterday and tomorrow I'll train again. The next weeks will be a bit more quiet :)

On Monday I submitted my thesis work as a paper for a conference. Yesterday I extended that paper with two more pages, and now it's done.

I'm defending my thesis coming Friday. If you wanna be there, just leave a message :).

Project Kill Day went well today, but I put in 9 hours of work today, and now I'm quite tired. Good thing that the last item clearly says: Take some rest -- So I'll hit the sack not too late to be fresh again tomorrow.

I did some things differently though. For example, waking up as early as suggested isn't really my thing. Instead, I just woke up an half hour early, rushed through my morning ritual and ended up at work at 9AM, which is about an hour earlier than usual. Also an hour early before (most of) my colleagues, which gave me the time start working well. Other than that, the walking quickly worked well, and also having to decline helping other people (which I usually like to do -- This was pretty hard), simply because I was too busy. Other than that, I tried to minimize social interaction, but it's hard when your (work)roommate is having his birthday ;).

Now the question is: did it work -- after all, such a day is meant to move things forward n a big way. I'm happy with what I did today. I didn't got it moving as far as I initially wanted, but that's okay, since I ran into something unexpected (This feedparser bug, spent almost 2 hours writing proper Media RSS support for it -- Not of enough quality to roll a patch though.), but in the end I managed to fix that, and also managed to get the state of the project in such a way that I can lay it to rest for the coming 2-2.5 weeks.

Tomorrow will be a project kill day at work. The intention is to push my project forward, and in such a state that I can leave it to rest for the coming 14 days, so I can get into full time thesis mode. I haven't done such a day before, so I have no idea if it'll work out for me. I'll let you know.

Thesis work is progressing well, btw. Final experiments should be finished somewhere by Friday. Then I have still 10 days to finish writing.

I use the Smultron text editor (on OS X) for writing my thesis in LaTeX. One nice feature which I discovered today brings the active buffer into full screen mode, which hides the menu bar and the dock and all pretty much everything else, to turn the editor in basically nothing more than a simple text field. Since you can't see other apps, you less quickly distracted.

You can activate the full screen mode from the View menu, and get back into regular mode with the Esc key.