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..

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.

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 :)

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'm fashionably late, but happy new year everybody!

Let's take a moment to step back and look at what happened in 2007. 2007 was a very successful year for me. I finally got my Bachelor degree (This is undoubtedly the best achievement of the year), I started pursuing a Master degree, I took up playing volleybal again, and I went on a vacation trip all by myself (well, for almost a full week anyway ;). And these are only the "big" things that happened.

Now, 2008 will also be an important year. Why? Well, I'll just predict what will hapen this year:

• I will get my Master degree (and hence, graduate and not be a student anymore)


• I will get a new job


• I will blog more often


• I will also be blogging somewhere else


• I will finally have some time to do fun mash-up projects


• I will become active again in the Drupal project


• I will become active again in the Roomware project

Heh. Well, let's look back in a year and see how much of this will be true.

I'm working in a team project for a course to develop methods to automatically generate summaries of concert videos. We have worked hard to develop them, and have succeeded in developing three different methods, and we are ready to test them now. We test our methods using an evaluation study, involving real users. And yes, we still need users, so if you're inclined to provide us with your opinion on our methods, that would be very much appreciated :).

We've setup a special website for this purpose, where you can find instructions on how you can participate. Yes, participating includes watching videos! So, please go read them thoroughly and participate. Evaluating a video will only take you about ten minutes. The username is user08, and the password is pass08 (zeros, not o's).

Thanks in advance!

After considering several options, I just ordered a new one. Should be arriving next Monday, if everything goes well. It's a 2 GHz machine, with 1Gb internal memory, a 500 Gb drive and a DVD Burner. Which should be more than enough to run a server. And it'll run Linux. Why no Mac? Well, the Mac Mini is a) quite expensive, and b) doesn't have nearly as much hard drive space as my new one has. And hard drive space is important.

It seems that 2007 will be the year of computer hardware failing on me. Back in march, my laptop crashed severely, and was replaced by a MacBook. Today, my 8-year old server refuses to start up. Yes, that's the one hosting my music. Currently pondering options about what to do.

So remeber that little problem I had with the renting corporation? The guy that I spoke to on the phone just came by, and explained what it was all about. Apparently they are investigating the housing situations of some other houses too, since it's unclear either if these are uninhabited (I know of at least two where there are barely ever any people around), and since this "helpful" person in the neighborhood reported my appartment as such, they decided to investigate me as well. But the guy (who was much nicer in person than on the phone btw) took a quick look of about 30 seconds, then signed something on his form and left. So, problem solved!

I still owe luna_puella some answers to her questions... As for the rest of you, you know how this works, right?

1) If you had a note toaster, what kind of notes would you leave on it?

Although I'm forgetful, I don't think the notes would be of any help. So the more likely option would be to draw rnadom doodles on it. Or, given my thesis, I might just write mathematical formulas on it ;)

2) You complained recently that Amsterdam is only famous abroad for it's weed and red light district. What else should it be famous for, in your opinion?

Well, it is also famous for it's canals -- Which is good, and most people do recognize that, it's just lower on their list somehow.

3) Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I don't know. Generally, I'm not the type that looks much ahead. My focus is now, as it has been in the past couple of years on graduating. And with that moment drawing nearer and nearer, I realize that I should start thinking about one or more new goals.

4) What is the best musical discovery you have made recently?

I'll take "musical discovery" a bit broader. Lately I've been listening a lot to a couple of CD's. Eisley's second album is surprisingly good, and I dare say it's even better than their first. The songs are more heavy and better produceed, but it's still an album that grows on you when listening to it more often. Siouxsie Sioux's solo album (Going solo is a bit wierd when your band is called Siouxsie and the Banshees) is also something that I've been listening to quite often. It's surprisingly accessible. Lastly, I've been only listening to PJ Harvey's new album, which seems pretty awesome, and looks like I'll be listening more to it in the coming months.

5) What... is the capital of Assyria?!

This is ambiguous. Do you mean the capital of modern day Syria (which is Damascus), or do you mean the capital of the old region of Assyria? Assyria has had two capitals, Assur and later on Nineveh.

In the past couple of weeks I've said to various people that working on my thesis felt a bit like swimming in the dark. The main reason being that up until now no serious scientific effort was given to the area I'm working on, and that I missed the necessary data to evaluate my ideas. Combine these two things and it makes things quite difficult, and also a bit boring.

However, yesterday I received results of experiments which I performed in August, and today I finally got the data to perform the experiments on my own. These two developments should make it all a lot more interesting, and fun too!

By the way, the missing of data was not unforseen -- I'm just happy that the day is finally there that I don't have to wait anymore for that to become available.

Over the weekend, I saw two movies. The First was one called 'Disturbia', about a guy who is placed under house arrest and starts to spy on people with his binoculars, purely out of boredom. He then suspects his neighbor of being a murderer. Plotwise, this was a predictable movie, but the execution was nevertheless decent.

A day later I saw 'The Bourne Ultimatum', which is absolutely fantastic, espcially the superb camera work, which adds to the excitement.

Ok, time for some meme. Reply with a comment if you want five questions. Most of you know the drill by now.

fub asked me these questions:

1. You describe yourself as a working student. When will it be time to graduate?

Funny you should ask that, I graduated as a bachelor in science yesterday ;) -- But that aside, I've started a one-year master's course in February. I'm still on schedule, which means that there's a real possibility that I'll be graduating for real in February '08. And I'm doing all that I can to make it happen at that moment, because it's time to move on.

2. When the web was born and people started creating personal homepages, it was fresh and new, and you looked at it no matter what was on it. But soon enough, people decided that they couldn't be bothered looking at fuzzy pictures of other people's cats, surrounded by animated GIFs, and personal homepages went extinct (with the exception of a few fossils in the Geocities zoo). Why will that not happen with personal blogs and other user-generated/Web 2.0 content? Or will it?

I'm not sure if I agree that people were fed up with watching at people's personal homepages. Look at the modern MySpace or Hyves profile, and you still see that people are very successful at creating pages that look damn ugly and still have moving GIFs in them, combined with flash movies and widgets and stuff. I also do think that the personal homepage went extinct -- the format just changed. For example, if I watch other people's Hyves profiles, I'm increasingly greeted with the message 'Welcome to my site!', which suggests that public profiles replaced the classical notion of a personal homepage (Probably because it's much easier than creating a 'regular' one).

But despite these objections, I'll bite ;). Whereas creating a personal homepage (in the traditional sense) is mostly about a technical innovation, I think that beyond the hype, the concept of Web 2.0 is more about a change in the way we think and how we treat our personal information. Because technically, it was perfectly possible to have a blog in 1992, when HTML 2.0 came out. Yet, it takes until 1997 when we see the first blogs in the wild, and it only starts to become popular in 1999. Of course, this change in thinking is stronger than any technical innovation. But this doesn't necessarily mean that blogging will change, however.

3. What is the most interested thing you discovered in your research?

This is a difficult on, for I have done not that much research, and an important part is still to come (I'm considering only my work as a Student). I think that being able to correctly predict the opinionatedness for blog posts in slightly more than half the cases was pretty interesting, because it used relatively simple features, and no form of language modeling at all.

4. What is your favourite programming language? Why?

There was a time that I would have blindly said PHP -- It is the programming language I've used the most in the past six or seven years and I like it for it's simplicity and that you can have working things quickly. However, I tend to lean more towards Python these days. It's simpler, and the OO stuff feels somewhat better.

5. It seems like you lived all your life in Amsterdam. Will you ever move elsewhere?

I have indeed lived all my life in Amsterdam. Within The Netherlands, I doubt that I'll move to another place. Outside of the Netherlands it depends on what comes on my path.

Some of the pictures need a bit of clarification. For example, while we all thought fub's new job was in the IT business, I found out in Cologne that it's actually something completely different:


Second of all, there's this mystery that I hope logpoes and apneist can help me solve:


Why do divers need T-shirts and baseball caps? ;-P

I've uploaded the (unedited) batch of photos I took during my vacation, which you can see over at Flickr.

A few hours ago I came home again, after being away for 10 days. In short, this is what my itinerary looked like:

Day 1 : Train to Prague
Day 2 : Wandering about in Prague
Day 3 : More wandering about in Prague
Day 4 : Train to Budapest
Day 5 : Wandering around in Budapest
Day 6 : More wandering about in Budapest, Train to Cologne at night
Day 7 : Wandering about in Cologne with myriverbed
Day 8 : Train to Paris and Wandering about there with my brother
Day 9 : Even more wandering about in Paris
Day 10: Train back to Amsterdam

It also means that in the first 8 days, I managed to travel across 8 countries, which is really a lot. But I've certainly had good times!