Ivana's journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
teuta's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 1:05 am |
Hop on the Beagle
Dutch TV is currently replicating Darwin's voyage with the Beagle. They have mounted an expedition, consisting of scientists, artists, a presenter, Darwin's relatives, and crew. They put all these people on an actual clipper. A boat with 3 masts and a boatload (29) of sails called "Stad Amsterdam". As this is the new Millennium, you can watch the previous episodes from your computer, check the webcam, the weather in Patagonia (where they are now) and learn all sorts of things from their website. Since a lot of the crew are British, large chunks of the program are in English. The coolness of these facts aside, after watching a few times, the program gets a soap opera-ish quality. All these people are stuck on a ship, but unlike say Big Brother, they all have something to say. The scientists examine the marine wildlife, the dust in the air. The sculptor sculpts and draws and photographs. They all interview each other. They talk about science, about Darwin, about sharing a cabin with someone who snores. | | Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | | 4:44 pm |
TED is cool, but
it would be also be cool to have something like LastFM for science. So you can tell when someone who's work you like has another paper out, find related research and look up when there is a seminar on something interesting near you. | | Friday, October 16th, 2009 | | 10:16 pm |
History
Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell (well, thereabouts, not to this day). This means that children in schools now will be writing papers about this historic event and looking stuff up on the internet. On Youtube. And what will they find? David Hasselhoff singing "I've been looking for freedom". Wearing a light bulb jacket and a piano shawl. I think its funny. | | Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | | 10:46 pm |
Polanski
Feel the need to complain, say about the American legal system or the spineless European countries who ask 'how high'? Why not complain about the decision by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware that because the Rocky Mountain Bank sent sensitive information over email, to a random person, the random person's gmail account should be wiped. It could be your account next time. Or complain about the NY police making up fake reports to go with their arrests. New York, the most international of all destinations, where the law enforcement officers pull their statements straight out of their rear. Or complain about the Texas police who out of the blue beat up a 12-year old girl in her own back yard. Complain about the Patriot act which is an American law, and as such concerns all our data here ... and on Facebook and on the various Google services. Complain about the European Commission allowing the USA to look inside the databases of European airlines, at your data. Hell, complain about the European countries in general collecting as much personal data as their little computers will store and finding the wrongest ways to share it. Sure Polanski is an old man and he drugged and raped a child a long time ago, and sure the 30 years should be taken in to account (but he did run). But there are so many worthier causes than that of a man who committed premeditated kiddie-rape 30 years ago. Now that I got that off my chest. Last weekend we went to Maastricht, where we visited with my supervisor from Bath and her hubby and with W's uncle and aunt. It made me realize again, that in all this time we have not introduced our parents to each other. Its just odd (I tried several years ago but then they - parents - had so much to say about it that I decided that they should arrange it themselves then.) | | Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | | 2:03 am |
So i went camping the other week - in Paris. W. had DrupalCon and we decided to make it a holiday. Cheap holiday so we camped (and i got a travel guide from the library). I'm not awfully good at planning (or keeping to plans) so i still had work to do when i arrived after the DrupalCon had ended. Spent the Sunday evening in town, where we were so lucky as to wander right into a festival. We had only strolled into the Parc de la Butte Rouge in the first place to see the artificial landscape including huge concrete 'rock'. Really, the Frech are renown for their wine and food but it's the parks that are truly amazing. Monday i spend behind (W's mom's) laptop. Then again, i could do worse than lying on my belly on my inflatable camping mat, in the grass by the Seine. With my head and laptop just in the shade but my legs in the sun. W went to town, to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and i was supposed to meet him at 5 in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Now, his phone could receive but not send text message and to make it extra interesting, had low battery so he could not keep it on. I'm sure anyone who has done any logic for computer scientists can appreciate the full fun-potential of this setup. With my inability to keep a schedule it was a sure winner. Needless to say i texted at 4 that i would not make it at 5, then at 5 that i would not make it at six... In the end i had him meet me at Shakespeare and Co at 9. I must confess that being forced by circumstance to make unilateral decisions was kinda nice. I got a present out of it too: W found a book by Brian Blessed. Yes, he liberally uses exclamation marks (sometimes 3 sentences in a row), ruffles peoples hair and is frank to the point where it makes your toes curl. Rest of this short holiday we went to musea, walked barefoot in parks and strolled by the Seine. The last day we went to see Inglorious Bastards in one of the two cinemas in the less-then-charming mall at Chatelet/les Halles. Unfortunately there was some French dialog and monologue. Which was not subtitled. Therefore, i'll have to see it again :-) | | Monday, August 24th, 2009 | | 8:58 pm |
Holiday
I'll just stick this here. I went on a trip with my mum and dad 2 weeks ago - the comments are in Croatian but they are not more informative then "nice walk" and such :-) | | 5:50 pm |
Daft old world, that has such people in it.
It seems i'll be doing a little work on a large research project that looks at religion - and tries to explain it. In high school i really enjoyed the lessons in Greek and Roman history. These people where so much like us, they thought, wrote, build things, and then they had these utterly crazy beliefs. It seriously bugged me that i just could not imagine believing the entrails of a sacrificial animal had 'answers'. Of course, I had never dreamed i would grow up to a world where the Halal meat section in the supermarket was as large as the free-range. Unrelated: i found out my gym closed down because they went bankrupt and that the building's owner, after being handed back the keys by the now out of business manager, discovered the remains of a weed-plantation in the attic. They own me some 50 euros i paid in advance. But really i just want my gym back. I'd be appalled if the media report is true and they took their weed but failed to pay their staff's last months wages. But mostly it is sad if they resorted to agriculture because they failed to make profit. They really had a good thing going. It would mean that there is no way to make a living providing in demand, cheap, high quality services. (As opposed to overpriced, impractical memberships that ensure members always pay for stuff they don't use - like other gyms do.) | | Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | | 11:35 pm |
Caramba!
This weekend minus10 is coming over for a visit, so that should be fun. I applied for a phd at this cool new thing they're starting at Southampton and i got a really nice mail back from one of the people that run it. These guys have been doing Agent Based Modeling for a while and i had to restrain myself form trying to include the dancing banana smiley in my reply just to illustrate my feelings. (I send plain text email, so i would have failed anyhow) So now i'm in search of funding - what a dread. I saw a job advert this week for a funding consultant at one of the two Amsterdam universities. I get the feeling i'm doing something wrong if i'm on my own behind my computer browsing the web looking for funding when others have consultants. Also i have a nasty cold that has been dragging on for two weeks now. Since i dont have a fever and have not lost my appetite (there definitely are bits of my backside i'd like to lose now in the bikini season) i am almost certain it is not the Scary Flu. My cousin visited last week and every time i sneezed we'd make 'Mexican' exclamations ("Caramba!") and pretend to shake imaginary maraca's. I have considered getting a sombrero, just to see what happens when i cough and blow my nose :-) | | Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | | 5:16 pm |
what were they thinking
I was looking up agentcities online - it was this series of 2day meetings where participants brainstormed about the use of (software-)agents. I got the page, but it turns out the domain is no longer active and is now for sale: http://agentcitiesuk.net/handcrafted2.aspNow i wonder what they were thinking when they made this site. I can see the UK connection. And the job-search links may make sense too - in these times. But the fantasy literature? Harry Potter & LotR, where did they come from. I'm also curious if the website was made by people or automatically generated by a software agent :-) | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 1:43 pm |
band names
band of horses flock of seagulls fleet of foxes I remember getting my mail attachments in ASCII, separated by these weird text strings. And now the very same are reused (i don't remember them literally) as band names :-) | | Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | | 1:43 am |
Side project
So two weeks ago i went to an event where public servants, hackers, developers and journalists talked about how to make all that public data (public in the sense it belongs to us all *and* in the sense it is out there) available to the public. And by available to the public i mean provide an interface so that the data becomes useful to the public. There is a similar, maybe even more advanced thing going on in the UK: http://rewiredstate.org/Day itself was fun. There were some examples, there where some good ideas, there was some coding. There was this journalism student that wanted to make an app that would tell him when the government changed a document on their webpage, because he found that often when this happens it often means there is something newsworthy going on. I dont mean just regular site updates but statements that have to be revoked and such. I was intrigued and over the course of the day we (i and another developer) came up with a architecture. Later I hacked up a working proof of concept. And a how-to. Basically a copy of the page is downloaded and then a versioning application is used to check for changes. Wget is used to retrieve a webpage (- mirror so only new content is downloaded) and all it links to (within domain), this goes in a folder that SVN sees as a working copy. So then it gets committed and all you have to do is ask SVN for a diff.  It was a good feeling to be able to think this up and then to be able to make it work. Of course in my poc it only works with a very tiny test webpage. I tried to wget the page of one department (minus any word, pdf, video or audio) and it was still, ahem, quite large. I am now tempted to start a blog in dutch, check my howto's spelling and showcase it. But i wonder if this is worth the effort - well its not that much effort but if i'm going to start a selfpromotial blog then that will require effort. Otherwise its just silly. I found that almost all the other attendees are on twitter and have selfpromotional blogs. Some of them mention this idea but only as an idea, but not that it is now one step past the idea stage. Also, this Twitter thing leads to more proliferation of nonsense:  | | Monday, May 25th, 2009 | | 11:20 am |
| | Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | | 9:09 pm |
Fish geekery
Darwin's dreampond (Darwins hofvijver) is an excellent book. Its about exploration. About little fish called of cichlids in a gulf of Lake Victoria, and about life in Tanzania, about evolution and the way life takes its course. The drama from the english title is caused by one man with a bucket. The Nile perch from the bucket proceed to multiply and eat the cichlids. Well - not all of them. More then ten years after the book was published the University of Leiden is looking for a phd student to continue the research. :-) | | Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | | 11:05 pm |
www
Whats so really cool about the internet is there is no way to go overboard. Anything you do, but may find too pretentious or weird to share with the world, someone has done something much more weird and pretentious. Via the always informative b3ta: the christmas sweater project. I liked this one too (warning cervicular imagery, not for the faint of heart). I've been trying to work out how best to compress my videos. My camera makes interlaced video, 720x405, so its kind of ok but not really good. And then of course i have to see what youtube will do. Im starting with the most 'urgent', my brothers gig of last november. Then i plan to move on to new years eve or maybe my holiday moving-postcard-flics. Pretty, maybe even arty-farty but bland by internet standards... | | Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | | 12:56 am |
From the pink petri dish
The New Scientist has a section where readers answer questions from readers called 'Last word'. One of the questions was - why do girls like pink? One of the answerers was from India and she had only experienced this pink thing in the West. In India there is no specific girly-color. Apparently there is some research indicating that women like purplish colours. But what if there is either a small - very tiny - preference for purplish colors. Or, if among marketeers there is a tiny preference for the idea that girls like pink. Either will suffice to color girls' lives pink. I'm thinking of the grossly asymmetric fiddler crabs, only capitalist selection is quicker that sexual selection. Cooking shows seem to be popular? Add a dozen more to the weekly schedule. Vuitton sells ugly bags - a zillon even uglier knock-offs hit the market. Big Brother is well watched - so it sells worldwide. And sparks an obscene amount of other 'reality TV' shows. Most of the Dutch weeklies, even though they differ greatly in their place in the political spectrum, as well as their intellectual level - will for any given week write on the same topics. Topics that are also covered by TV. And i dont mean news topics, the newsworthiness so often comes from 'having featured in so-and-so'. Business cowardice coupled with conformism and 'monkey sees monkey wants' is all it takes to create a feed forward loop that leads to pink. A while a go some study showed that how much people liked a song was a function of how often they heard it. While this may not be true for all music and all people, it doesnt need to be for a good marketing campaign by the studio to be successful most of the time. Completely unrelated: happy birthday entropyjim! | | Friday, May 1st, 2009 | | 10:36 pm |
This flu thing
A well-respected, Dutch current events show that is not 'serious journalism' per se but does enjoy huge popularity with well-informed newspaper readers invited a virus expert. Before they asked him what his institution is doing (ie getting ready for the pandemic) they showed a clip from Outbreak. Aaarrrgh. Maybe its a good movie but its still a movie. Its make-believe. Grownups. On a show watched by half the country. The Spanish flu wiped out between 1 and 5 percent of the population, should this really be illustrated with a fairytale?! Also this week i read a piece about unmanned aircraft (currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan - probably Pakistan too). It started with something like "... when i was wee my pop took me to see Terminator 2 ...". I'm all for creativity, for 'painting a picture', i'm a huge sucker for story (hey, i worship Joss Whedon). But again: fairytale ≠ grim reality! FFS Apparently Ronald Reagan based his politics on The day after. Scary. | | Sunday, April 26th, 2009 | | 4:42 pm |
What if you're wrong - this blog entry is not about an amusingly weird guy
I know this amusingly weird guy. Among his features are his fascination with Steven Seagal movies, his compulsion to cite from his exhaustive knowledge of dutch sketches from the 80's and 90's (prompted or unprompted, several times a day), his morbid fascination with and reenactment of random stabbings (yes, Americans have Columbine, we have idiots walking the streets stabbing random people) and his talking about current events/the news as if it were his own life. But my personal favourite are his blind spots concerning everyday life. Amusingly weird guy visits his parents for dinner one or twice a week. He is single and lives alone, the rest of the evenings he goes out and gets a cheese roll. He gave up his attempts to cook after boiling one cauliflower, eating some of it and storing the rest in the fridge. He realized it was going to take him a while to eat his way through it and it was not so nice anyway. What puzzles me is that the solution to his 'problem' is within his grasp every time he goes to the supermarket. The choice of ready-made meals is huge and some of them are really good. Then there are the Ikea meals: get your chopped vegetables, get a jar of some sauce to go with it ... Of course there are solutions, this is not just his problem, we all eat. Everyone he knows eats. Why doesn't he copy the behaviour of others? He could ask his mom how she makes dinner, he could by a cookbook. He has witnessed others prepare food. I have often pondered how someone could reach the respectable age of 40 without being able to prepare their own food, or having any interest in learning to. But I only recently realised that i have more in common with amusingly weird guy then i'd like. When i studied in Delft i had a flatmate who was very loud and self conscious (which at the time annoyed me a bit) but was and is essentially a great guy. During the time we shared a flat this guy went on a 2 month trip to Tanzania and Kenya and another one to India and Nepal. Came back with stories and pictures and a aluminum water pitcher that is probably still in use at the student house. I on the other hand every summer took my books with me in order to make (usually) failed attempts to get some exams on the rebound. I always went to Croatia anyway. I do not get it. I had the example right in from of my nose. I didn't even have to think for myself, all i had to do was copy someone elses behaviour ... My favourite dutch stand-up comedian starts one of his shows with the following: "Imagine, that you're wrong (...) When you hear your own voice on tape, that always sounds terrible. But it is just your voice as other people hear it. Imagine, that its not only your voice, but everything! That you are really a more terrible person then you think." | | Monday, April 20th, 2009 | | 11:55 am |
Shoe battle
Background: in our bedroom Willem and i have an entire wall taken up by shelves with boxes. These boxes contain various junk as well as useful stuff. Sunday i packed some winter clothing into a box and i had planned to sort out my shoes. I think i miserably failed, here is a list of all the shoes i still have: - white sandals - beautiful but with heels and painful to walk in
- english shoes - black stiletto open shoes i bought in Bath (and i can barely walk on)
- kung fu shoes - very comfortable, made entirely of cloth. Even with the thick cloth sole walking on the street feels a bit yukky. Need to avoid dog turds, water, spittle ... Slippery on wood and marble, caused some spectacular and painful falls
- roman sandals - beautiful, comfy
- flipflops - very useful
- green flat eccos - been wearing them over 10 years, dread the day they fall apart
- brown suede shoes - comfy, a bit like the ones above but few years 'younger'
- sliver second hand 70's dancing shoes - wear *maybe* once a year, but hey silver, 70's, must have
- off white toe peep high heels - pretty and i can even walk in them (but not too far)
- black heels - pretty and the only shoes i have suitable for job interviews and funerals
- 4 stripe sneakers - made in china but very comfy and with a distinct Bruce Lee style sleekness
- red plastic very highheeled mule - very cool, molded in one piece (gotta love the design)
- purple/black Madonna ankle boots - very lovely
- black lace-up boots - falling apart, but the only all-black shoe i have that is comfy to dance in
- platform sandals - worn out but i walked a lot in these shoes and they were extremely comfortable. I have kept them because i know this shop where they make their own shoes (got the roman sandals there) and maybe someday i'll ask them to make a new pair modeled from these old sandals.
- cheap ass black shoes - i wore when i had temp jobs washing dishes that required me to wear a white shirt/black trousers and shoes. I wasnt going to wear my good shoes on soapy tiles...
- olive green with pretty glittery things - very nice but not easy to find a matching outfit
- pink shoes with glittery thingies - i should probably throw out...
- tevas - everyone needs tevas
- black and brown outdoor shoes - that i bought in Minnesota and i mostly keep as a souvenir
- pretty brown leather all-purpose boots
- pretty suede boots - best worn under short skirt
- heavy, hiking-like winter boots
- antarctica boots - no laces (for cold fingers), lower half made of rubber (for the 2 days each year when the canals freeze over and i can skate!)
That is 24 pairs of shoes, without counting my running shoes and my gym shoes. Why? I dont want to be the kind of person with 24 pairs of shoes. For the last year, since we moved in in April 2008, i have had this wall of boxes bearing down on me causing me to foster herioc plans of throwing half of the stuff out and repack the rest (and take it to storage downstairs). Humbug. Of the 24, in the last two weeks i wore: the black heeled shoes, the off white shoes, the kung-fu shoes, flip-flops, teva's, the brown suede shoes and the green old shoes. And my indoor gym shoes. | | Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | | 6:16 pm |
Words, i need words
This week i wrote 2 postcards for friends who recently had a baby. I find writing even the touristy kind of postcards hard (achieving 'witty', avoiding 'corny'). The 'hooray! a baby' cards need content, or at least i presume that i am expected to write something more than "The weather is nice - wish you were here". I find it especially difficult to steer clear of writing my own hangups: "wow you are brave, taking on such a huge responsibility", "Are you sure about this?" (ok, too late for that :-)). On the plus side, the new parents are so overwhelmed that maybe it doesnt matter at all what the card says. Why would they care about words, between the sleep deprivation, the baby's needs, the huge reality of the new responsibility, the physical pain and mutilation caused by giving birth. Not to mention the disturbing trivia. (Who knew the mother's hormones can cause the infant to develop milk-producing breasts? Don't worry, once out of the womb the chest quickly deflates) I actually send one of them this card: the canary says: You fucked 9 months ago! First time i got to send baby-cards to people who (i hope) share my sense of humour. (ie cartoons made by artists who spent their teens watching Beavis and Butthead.) | | Monday, April 6th, 2009 | | 11:25 pm |
|
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
