25-Aug-2010
My brain needed a rinse, and as everybody else has been away this summer (for work in my other half’s case, but he did get his dose of culture shock) I thought I’d treat myself to a bargain day-ticket for the train. It was about a quarter of the normal price, with some restrictions— only valid on the national network and not on the local networks, which thwarted me on one stretch, and not valid until 9:00, which I didn’t mind much because otherwise I’d have taken the 8:45 at the earliest.
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Posted: 25-Aug-2010 |
/places/expeditions |
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Doesn’t need comment, does it? Picture is worth n words.
Posted: 25-Aug-2010 |
/life_and_art/wonderful_world |
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0 comments
24-Aug-2010
Awesome, that instruction leaflet on how to carve a mouse from an apple. It didn’t even come out a cartoon mouse, though it wasn’t very realistic, more like those mice from illustrations in children’s books that may or may not wear clothes. If that and the A2-sized comics about the ever-growing family were part of the magazine that had sent reporters to the festival in the school, I want a subscription!
The festival was splendid in itself: singing, prayer, interesting clothes, exotic people. I think it was in fact a music festival, but I got all kinds of culture from it. And money. When I found myself nibbling money I stopped immediately, though the gold coins were nice and sweet, the silver coins nice and spicy, and the little strips of what looked like cardboard and served as paper money interestingly crisp. Only the big brown-skinned man in a fur coat who everybody was shunning (presumably because he was infected with something catching) paid his due with a pile of normal five-cent coins, that nobody touched for fear of infection.
I don’t know why the children’s choir had to sing in the dark, but I do understand that the gym, where we first saw them, wasn’t suitable to do that in: it had the kind of high-up windows that gyms have that nobody could reach to cover with something the light wouldn’t get through. That was probably the reason that only six children and an old man were at a table on the other side of the gym from where I was at another table —and occasionally on it— collecting —and occasionaly eating— the money.
On second thoughts, what I heard of the children’s choir (at some kind of service for a saint) leads me to think that in the dark they would have sounded even more amazing.
Posted: 24-Aug-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself/dreams |
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21-Aug-2010
I’ve started validating all my webpages so I can put them in a portfoiio without cause for embarrassment. It’s fun! Seeing validator.w3.org turn from red to green is exhilarating, especially when lots of errors go away with very small adjustments. The angry “72 errors” I had on the FAQ on House Between the Worlds turned out to be one <h2>something</h3>, two
<p>…</li> and a spurious </a>.
Many of the errors the validator finds are in forms and scripts that I didn’t make: the statcounter script has a target="_blank" that’s never used because the counter is invisible, and anyway I wouldn’t want to use it even if the counter wasn’t invisible because I don’t approve of it (here’s a good explanation why). The mail forms I use are horrible, because no value is in quotes and I have to do that all by hand. On the to-do list: learn to make my own mail forms. Oh, and any page with an embedded map needs to be Transitional, not Strict, because
even if there is a way to edit the map script to validate as Strict it’s probably too much work.
WTF moment: The detected DOCTYPE Declaration "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">" has been suppressed and the DOCTYPE for "HTML 4.01 Strict" inserted instead, but even if no errors are shown below the document will not be Valid until you update it to reflect this new
DOCTYPE. So, I did X instead of X, and the validator doesn’t like that and wants me to do X instead? On second thoughts I know what caused this: I’d validated the map page as Transitional to see if that would work (and it did), and then set the validator back to Strict instead of autodetect. Of course it registered that I’d changed it, but not what I’d changed it from or to.
I’m learning a lot from validating. That <form> … </form> isn’t a containing element in itself but needs <p> or <div> or <table> inside it; that you can’t have headings inside a list (well, I already kind of knew that but I’d been getting away with it); and, perhaps most importantly, the confidence that I already write nice neat HTML without making glaring mistakes other than typos and cut-and-paste glitches.
And all my CSS validates on the first try. Woohoo! But I don’t dare try the blog…
Posted: 21-Aug-2010 |
/wireless_life/web |
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30-Jul-2010
In the not so distant past, Google had a nifty feature: when you
searched for something that was rather like something else more common or
more popular, it asked you “Did you mean [whatever else]?”, but searched
for your literal query anyway. Sometimes the [whatever else] helpfully
corrected a typo or a misremembered name, but more often it was
wildly and sometimes hilariously off.
Apparently they thought it wasn’t good enough, or their users were too
stupid, so they changed it. When you searched for something that wasn’t
common or popular, it showed you the first couple of results for what they
thought you wanted, and a <hr>, and then your actual search
results. Of course, the first results were the same as the former “Did
you mean X?” and so, usually, wildly and hilariously off. The times I’ve
screamed “No! I did NOT mean X! If I’d meant X I would have typed X!
Stupid Google!” can’t be counted on the fingers of one hand any more.
Read more ...
Posted: 30-Jul-2010 |
/wireless_life/web |
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1 comment
29-Jul-2010
This is a US fire hydrant, the kind I used to wonder at when
watching (original US) Sesame Street on German TV as a kid:
(Warning: 3 more pictures after the cut)
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Posted: 29-Jul-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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27-Jul-2010
Amersfoort railway station. One of several posts marking a
bump in the floor (apparently the future location of the electronic ticket
gates), the only one with a sign on it. According to Secunda, “perhaps it
means ‘no lying on the floor with your arms and legs in the air’”.
Posted: 27-Jul-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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So I’m a single parent without any children— other half is in India,
Prima and Tertia at camp, and Secunda cat-sitting for friends who don’t
want their ancient cats to be alone at night so she only comes to dinner.
I expected that I’d be able to do a lot of work that’s otherwise swamped
by distraction and domesticity (like migrate the server), but nothing
seems to come out of my hands. Apparently I need the distraction!
I’d promised Secunda that we’d visit her godmother, my cousin the nun,
who lives in The Hague, and today seemed the day for it so I bought a
special-offer day-ticket for two and we hopped on a train. On the train I
realised that I hadn’t informed the godmother of our intentions, but my
phone battery was flat and Secunda didn’t have her phone with her (“we’re
that kind of people”, she said). But being a nun, the probability that
she’d be at home was very high so we didn’t worry.
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Posted: 27-Jul-2010 |
/places/expeditions |
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23-Jul-2010
If you haven’t heard of One Million Giraffes, this
is your chance to help someone make history. This person is going to prove
to a friend that they can collect one million giraffes by 2011, not
made on a computer or store-bought, but anything else goes.
When I’d sent in mine, made of
cinnamon bread —excellent for making giraffes, it bakes to the right
colour scheme— I got email saying “Your giraffe is now out on the field
playing around with the other 921 992 giraffes.” Now there are
922 349, including the one Secunda
made out of her end-of-term test papers.
Posted: 23-Jul-2010 |
/wireless_life/web |
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In crawl, that is. This morning I could do every other length for
about half an hour: crawl one way, breaststroke back, repeat. No need to
rinse as I was in the water already. My legs are doing some of the work as
well now, and I manage not to hit or bump into anyone because I can
actually see other swimmers underwater.
Last week a woman, who had seen me struggling at first, complimented
me on my improved style. I can’t see myself, but I knew I couldn’t be
as messy and splashy as I started out. Still, it’s nice to hear it from
someone else.
With all this I must have overstrained my muscles or depleted my
blood sugar or both, because when I stopped at a traffic light my leg gave
way and all I could do was to fall as gracefully as possible on to the
little bit of grass verge. As I was picking myself and my bike up, a man
who had seen me go down while driving past came up, “are you all right?”
“Oh yes, I can fall,” I said, and when i realised that probably wasn’t
clear, “I know how to fall.” And when he still looked puzzled, “Elegantly.
Thank you, anyway.”
I cured the weakness with chocolate digestive biscuits and aloe-vera
juice (with lemon, which has the fewest additives, only honey and lemon
juice; the variety called ‘natural’ has artificial grape flavour, as if
it’s natural for aloe vera to taste like artificial grapes).
Next: build up enough stamina not to have that happen again. And keep
my right ear in the water at all times, even when taking a
breath.
Posted: 23-Jul-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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08-Jul-2010
I don’t know why someone taped a network cable to the floor of the
swimming-pool entrance hall. Perhaps because they don’t have wireless.
Posted: 08-Jul-2010 |
/wireless_life |
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05-Jul-2010
Last week when I was putting the groceries in my bike bags a girl aged
about eighteen tried to give me a flyer for a new service apartment complex
—expensive poky flats for the affluent over-sixty. I’d already passed
billboards advertising it, so I knew immediately what it was, and said
“how old do you think I am?”
“Dunno,” she said.
“I have kids younger than you, and a husband and a house, and we don’t
want to live in an old people’s home for a long time yet!” I said.
She started to protest, “it’s not an old people’s home”, but then she
saw the picture on the flyer —for the first time, it seemed— and shut
up.
Read more ...
Posted: 05-Jul-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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21-Jun-2010
When someone noticed it was amended to “3,50 each, 3 for 10” as originally intended. I don’t think anybody would have wanted to pay one euro for the privilege of buying three jars of honey at once.
Posted: 21-Jun-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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A bit disturbing, too. This was on a children’s merry-go-round, of which the rest was decorated with cartoon characters that Disney, Warner Bros., Marvel et al. are unlikely ever to have seen royalties for:
Click the picture to enlarge.
Posted: 21-Jun-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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The summer fair has long gone, fortunately, but the big sign with rules that graced all its obvious access points is still worth posting:
Let me draw attention to the most remarkable detail:
That’s not the Dutch spelling. The Dutch word for alcohol is “alcohol”.
I wonder if anybody took it literally and had a beer on the fairground without technically breaking the rules.
Posted: 21-Jun-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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0 comments
We had a friend over the other day, who is a math whiz (and so are his wife and their seven-year-old son), and he gave me the equivalent of an earworm:
Doing whatever math you like on only four fours, make all whole numbers from 0 to 12 inclusive. I think you have to use all of your fours, because otherwise it would be too easy.
I told him I’d work on it while swimming, and in three-quarters of an hour I managed to do 0-5 and 7-9. 4 itself was hard for a while until I realised that 4/4 is 1 (which I’d already used to make 1 and 2) and that I could use up another four by raising that to the 4th power. This also gave me 5, and my first instance of 3— I got a much simpler 3 later, (4+4+4)/4.
6 had me stumped until I got home and wrote my sums down. Strange, because several of my attempts to get 4 had come out 6, so I thought when it was actually 6’s turn “oh, I’ve done that” and went on to 7.
Can I do factorials? (4 - (4 / 4)) ! + 4 = 10. I got a flash of insight about 12 too, but 11 is still beyond me.
Posted: 21-Jun-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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4 comments
The Chinese shop sells this; it took me a while to realise that it doesn’t slime you for all it’s green.
It does help that there’s “Dieters’ drink” next to it— it’s unlikely that that’s the drink of some apparently German people called Dieter.
Posted: 21-Jun-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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0 comments
02-Jun-2010
He keeps coming to my attention by a kind of serial serendipity. Jaap de Berg wrote in the language column of
Trouw basically
what I wrote in 2008, prompted by a news item in another paper about President Obama: “as if he were
a modern-day Hansje Brinker, able to do heroic work with one finger kilometers
under water”. Here is a link; may not persist, may disappear behind a paywall after some finite amount of time, may be behind a paywall even now. If you can’t see the article and you want to read it (in Dutch, of course), please communicate.
This made me look up the
Wikipedia article, which turns out to be surprisingly good and complete. And of course, there’s a non-zero chance that the boy with his finger in the dike —if, which I doubt, he existed at all— was also called Hans, or rather Hannes.
(Also, a student wants to quote my names deconstruction; recognition at last!)
Posted: 02-Jun-2010 |
/words/reading |
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01-Jun-2010
This is what Google Maps made of a walking tour in my home town that took
about 50 minutes without stopping at the places meant to stop at:
Not that the original route survived contact with the enemy
me when I actually walked it. I think the current version takes even less
time.
This version, on the other hand…
(Note that there’s not a single place marked on this map where I’ve
actually been, unless “G” is Halifax, where I landed once on my way to
Toronto and eventually Edmonton.)
Posted: 01-Jun-2010 |
/places |
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28-May-2010
Please, whoever dispenses days, take this one back. I’m not satisfied.
In fact it started yesterday afternoon when Prima went to the dentist and I
was as nervous as if it was me. When she came back with a clean bill of dental
health, smug and loud, I was still high on adrenaline. Choir practice didn’t
help much —if anything it makes me more hyper; and this was a good one— and
I was too awake to go to bed, so I went to bed late —my other half is away to
Brussels for the Libre Graphics
Meeting— and slept badly, and had nightmares about Prima’s SO breaking up
with her and nobody bringing any friends home because I was so weird and scary.
(Neither of which is in fact true, of course, as is the way of nightmares.)
Read more ...
Posted: 28-May-2010 |
/o_tempora/frustration |
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23-May-2010
I wanted to write about how the Ökumenischer Kirchentag was, among all the other things it was, a feast of diversity. But I got distracted.
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Posted: 23-May-2010 |
/church/thoughts |
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20-May-2010
Completely forgot to mention food in the bits-and-pieces post, but that was plenty long already and the food deserves a post of its own anyway (yum, German food!) Now I need tags rather than categories, because this is the third post about the Kirchentag and they’re all in different places.
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Posted: 20-May-2010 |
/domestic_blend/food |
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I wanted to do a coherent blog post (and in fact I did do a coherent blog post) but I had all this stuff left over that wouldn’t cohere. Ah well.
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Posted: 20-May-2010 |
/places |
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2 comments
18-May-2010
(for what it’s worth; it was fun, and I think I mostly agree)
Your rainbow is shaded
indigo.
What is says about you: You are a proud person. You appreciate cities, technology, and other great things people have created. Friends count on you for being honest and insightful.
Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.
Posted: 18-May-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself/memes |
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0 comments
So that was the Ökumenischer Kirchentag in München. Lots of good conversations, some very good; one friendly argument (I can actually argue in German, only I can’t come up with the words quickly enough when it gets heated. I was the Asker of Stupid Questions[1] in that argument, very useful); several chances to help. We handed out CDs to interested people, wrote “www.bibletime.info” on slips of paper and programme books for anyone who saw it running on the demo laptop or on mine and wanted to use it themselves, talked to the Messe neighbours (among others, LUKi, the Linux users’ group for church workers, and took turns getting excellent free coffee from the next hall. And on the Saturday night we went into town and sat down in a random bar that looked all right
(Tresznjewski,
Theresienstrasse) and it was not only all right, but the beer was awesome (Ayinger
Jahreszeitenbier, for the
record). They also did awesome fruit drinks.
[1] As in “you say there are several reasons to prefer Microsoft; what reasons exactly?”
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Posted: 18-May-2010 |
/wireless_life/kde |
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06-May-2010
Probably because I was cringing at the disrespectful treatment of the flag, of course. There are worse earworms
to have.
I grabbed the text and translation (though I will comment on the
latter) from the Wikipedia
entry, which also has the original sixteenth-century spelling and two
different English translations, one to fit the meter and one to fit the
meaning. Corrected one obvious typo and some punctuation.
Read more ...
Posted: 06-May-2010 |
/words/singing |
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0 comments
I’ve started trying to teach myself front crawl again (and googling to find
out the correct term in English gives me the BBC Sport Academy tutorial, which I’m definitely going to
peruse when I finish this post). [ETA: I wasn’t allowed to
watch the masterclass movie because I’m not in the UK <grr>; the
tutorial itself tells me mostly what I’ve already found out by trial and
error.]
Read more ...
Posted: 06-May-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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0 comments
02-May-2010
The bottom sheet currently on our bed is so worn that there’s actually a tear
in it, about where my shoulders are— but it’s also been on the bed the other
way around, so it may have been worn through mostly by my other half’s
feet. The tear was tiny last night and I let it be, but today I’ll have to
change it because my tossing and turning (other half is away for a week and
whatever science says I sleep worse when I’m sleeping alone) made it large
enough to poke a hand through.
It reminded me of a folk
song: (note that the lyrics I know are those of the folk group Perelaar
and may not completely match scientifically recorded lyrics)
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Posted: 02-May-2010 |
/words/singing |
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26-Apr-2010
The part of my brain that usually handles earworms has branched out and
presented me with a name running persistently through my mind, the name of a
person I don’t remember ever having come across in the flesh or in writing:
Betty Taminiau.
I googled it, of course, and found nothing that rang a bell. I did find Jan
Taminiau the fashion designer, Bert or Bart Taminiau the field-hockey player,
Renske Taminiau the singer, Aart Taminiau the artist, and several others (not to
mention the 63 million occurrences of Betty). Until then, I hadn’t even been
sure that the name actually existed.
In all its rarity it’s such a normal name that I can’t believe
I haven’t read it somewhere and the earworms department has just found it in a
cubby-hole and dished it up for me to look at. She sounds like someone who
compiles cookery books, or someone from the Dutch WWII resistance,
or even both: “the culinary writer Betty Taminiau, who saved twenty-three Jewish
girls by hiding them in her cookery school.” I can see her now, still pert and
lively at ninety-four; I can’t decide whether she has a tribe of
great-grandchildren or only a morose black-and-white tomcat.
I do sometimes “get” characters like this, but they usually fit into
something I’m already writing. Not this one. But if I don’t find a pre-existing
Betty Taminiau, I’ll have to write something to make her exist; her name is
much too splendid to let it go to waste.
Posted: 26-Apr-2010 |
/words/writing |
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0 comments
25-Apr-2010
“You” here means you-the-reader, at least old enough to read this by
yourself.
Without knowing your height and weight at any time in your
life, I can prove to you that there has been a moment that your weight in pounds
was exactly the same as your height in inches.
Read more ...
Posted: 25-Apr-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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22-Apr-2010
Please try to keep the outside world out of your renderings, because it was
very disturbing to have a big cupboard in my website (yes, I know websites are
usually 2D and the cupboard was 3D) every time my other half’s cold made him
snore. At least I have a good idea of the website now; it happened to be the one
I’m actually about to make. I must look into drop-down (or rather,
drop-sideways) menus, because the dream ones looked splendid.
I did like the game we were playing with cards and the objects pictured on
them. All of us, especially Tertia, preferred the fruit deck, even though we
didn’t get to eat the fruit. The Really Strange Objects deck would have been
nice too if there had been enough physical Really Strange Objects to make a
sizeable set. The sort-of-like-a-glove thing there was a card of fell out of a
collection of other stuff later, but even if we’d had it in time it wouldn’t
have been enough. I haven’t a clue about the rules now, but it must have been
akin to Happy
Families. This was outside the junk shop, which also had a really nice old
book that I didn’t buy for some reason, and a tiger-striped cat that could
change shape (as in: long and thin cat, chubby cat with short ears, small frisky
kitten; not from cat to anything else) at will.
Then, at the renovated school, you made me marvel at the movable walls,
though the girl showing me around (not one of mine, though all of mine actually
attended that school) was more jaded about them and kept saying “yes, it does
move but we’re not supposed to do that”. All I was amazed about was that they
could move, even the little glass doors the size of a cat-flap in the
very high doorstep which the girl said were only in case of fire.
And now I’m still wondering whether the appointment (to go somewhere and do
something fun) that I realised was NOW instead of sometime in June and I wasn’t
prepared at all, making me wake up at 6:05 unable to go back to sleep, is real
after all.
Posted: 22-Apr-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself/dreams |
link |
2 comments
21-Apr-2010
My current signature is “Time flies like an arrow. What do time butterflies
like?”
It’s probably a rhetorical question, but one answer I’d consider is “Greased
lightning.”
Posted: 21-Apr-2010 |
/words |
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0 comments
14-Apr-2010
At the station where I delivered my other half to a
train going in an easterly direction, expecting to get him back late Friday
night, I spotted this. Hard to overlook with that colour.
I spent a few minutes saying “one two two? a hundred and twenty-two?
honderdtweeëntwintig? één twee twee?” to it, but nothing much
happened. Only a few passengers looked at me with puzzled expressions.
Perhaps I should have found the person or thing who was 122 instead and asked
him/her/it/them “What’s that yellow box for?”
Posted: 14-Apr-2010 |
/life_and_art/signage |
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0 comments
On one of the last days that the swimming pool was still open before they
closed it for maintenance, I saw two unfamiliar birds in the road that was
already closed for maintenance. Black and white, the size of a gull
but slimmer, long red beak, aggressive movements, and when they
saw me coming with the camera they flew away shouting “Peep! Ta-PEEP!”
We don’t seem to have a bird guide, and online taxonomy sites didn’t help
much, but I think they were oystercatchers.
There aren’t many oysters to be caught in our town (those at the restaurant
across the road from our house have already been caught by someone else) but
Wikipedia says “they breed far inland”. The map on that page shows them not
quite so far to the east in the Netherlands, but the picture looks exactly like
the birds I saw.
Posted: 14-Apr-2010 |
/life_and_art/wonderful_world |
link |
0 comments
08-Apr-2010
I figured I could go swimming on Holy Thursday and Holy Friday before
services; the only drawback I could see was that swimming makes me hungry.
Well…
Read more ...
Posted: 08-Apr-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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0 comments
04-Apr-2010
Services sung: 9
Services to go: 0
Time: 0:30 Total: 3:45 Grand total:
20:02
Congregation: about 30
Beards: 5 Headscarves: 4
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, 1 adult acolyte, 1 teenage acolyte
Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 2 basses
Coordination: splendid (but then everything seems splendid today)
Tunefulness: ditto
Strangeness: after the service, someone noticed that there were rather a
lot of Greeks in the church and we hadn’t sung the Greek troparion, so
Choirmistress consulted with Fr T and he did all the verses again for us to
sing the Greek troparion to.
Posted: 04-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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0 comments
Services sung: 8
Services to go: 1
Time: 3:15 (that’s very fast) Total: 3:15 Grand total:
19:32
Congregation: a multitude at the beginning, still half a multitude at
the end
Beards: many Headscarves: lots
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W (who was hearing confessions almost the
whole time until it was time for the priests’ Communion, poor man), 3 adult
acolytes, 2 teenage acolytes
Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 3 basses (er, 2 baritones and a
bass; one of the baritones sang tenor some of the time)
Coordination: everything from seamless to chaotic
Tunefulness: Easterly
Voice: splendid, apart from the fit of hiccups, probably from
swallowing air while singing very fast and loudly
Strangeness: isn’t everything strange at Easter? We had so much fun in
the choir that Fr T remarked on it in the altar. And one of the altos can
read in Portuguese on a proper chant tone!
Posted: 04-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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0 comments
03-Apr-2010
Services sung: 7
Services to go: 2
Time: 3:05 Total: 5:40
Grand total: 16:17
Congregation: steadily growing from 6 to about 30, lots of children.
Families came especially to see the church being made white.
Beards: 7 Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, Fr Deacon P, three adult acolytes and
a teenaged acolyte
Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 1 bass
Coordination: er, this service is chaos
Tunefulness: mostly okay
Strangeness: In the middle of the Epistle the reader had a fit of
coughing and Choirmistress took over. When Fr T came out to bless the reader
he said “Peace be to you both”— a nice touch! Talking about blessings, Fr T
didn’t give the final blessing until we’d sung “Father, bless” a second time
to alert him to it.
Posted: 03-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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0 comments
02-Apr-2010
Services sung: 6
Services to go: 3
Services at which I was the only alto: 1
Time: 2:35 Total: 2:35
Grand total: 13:12
Congregation: about 12
Beards: 5 Headscarves: 4
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, Fr Deacon P, three adult acolytes (the
teenagers were doing dishes at Choirmistress’ house)
Choir: 5 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor, 1-2 basses (one bass, another choir
member’s partner, was summoned especially to sing the Canon)
Coordination: surprisingly good considering how tired we all were.
Tunefulness: we didn’t even go very flat on the Lamentations.
Strangeness: Either Fr Deacon P naturally has a very loud voice or he
hits the acoustic sweet spot of our church exactly, the way I miss it exactly
and nobody can understand me; either way he sounded way too loud until
Choirmistress slipped him a note “softly, please!” After that it was
just about perfect.
In the middle of the Canon I suddenly realised what
this Holy Week is about (I agree completely with
Father Stephen: “Throughout the week there will be verses from a hymn or
some other small phrase that I’ll not have noticed before — that […] will
redefine the day or take me somewhere I have not been before.”) and couldn’t hold
back tears. This year it’s about the humanity of Christ. For the first few days
I already suspected it might be that: from all the readings and texts He
appeared to me as teacher among His disciples, Man (as opposed to God, not as
opposed to Woman) among the people around him, suffering in His human body. The
words that finally drove it home were something like “even in the grave His two
natures weren’t separated”— as human as He was, he carried his God-nature
within him all the time. No wonder the grave couldn’t hold Him.
Posted: 02-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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2 comments
Services sung: 5
Services to go: 4
Time: 1:15 (and about 20 minutes to venerate) Total: 6:20 Grand
total: 10:37
Congregation: I estimated 40, Prima estimated 80
Beards: at least 7 Headscarves: 5
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, two teenaged acolytes
Choir: 4 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 1 bass (back from Russia just in
time)
Coordination all right, except that Choirmistress clean forgot that
this is the service in which I usually do all the readings because of the sung
Alleluia verses, and gave the readings to the reader with the stronger voice
who didn’t know how to sing them.
Tunefulness: mostly okay, even excellent in places, except the
thing at the end for venerating the icon of the Grave— we’re always so
tired that we can’t keep the pitch.
Strangeness: Well, not singing the Alleluia verses. I thought for a
moment that the sung verses had been abolished without anybody telling me,
but it was an honest mistake.
Posted: 02-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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Services sung: 4
Services to go: 5
Time: 1:55 Total: 5:05 Grand total: 9:22 (did I add up
wrong, or have we really had 17 minutes more than in 2008?)
Congregation: 8 or so
Beards: 4 Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, one adult acolyte
Choir: started out SAT, gained another soprano and another alto
(Prima) during the Third Hour
Coordination, tunefulness, voice, knees: nothing remarkable
Strangeness: The choir-book was still in beta, so every now and again
someone (usually the person who happened to be reading) noticed a typo and
someone (not always a different person) made a note of it on the page. I
took the book upstairs after Matins and made even more corrections.
Posted: 02-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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01-Apr-2010
Services sung: 3
Services to go: 6
Time: 3:10 Total: 3:10 Grand total: 7:27
Congregation: between 6 and 12 at various times
Beards: 3 (briefly 4) Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W and an acolyte; all of them in fact
outside the altar.
Choir: 4 sopranos, 2 altos and a lone tenor.
Coordination: Better than this morning, much better than last year.
We did accidentally skip one sedalion, a pity because it’s the one I like most
of all (the text, that is; it’s a normal one in the 7th tone, not very difficult
or interesting).
Tunefulness: so-so; the Beatitudes ended up somewhere in the cellar
of our voices.
Voice: normal.
Knees: feet and buttocks, really. Most of the choir sat down at some
point. I didn’t really have a place to do that so I leant against the wall.
Strangeness: I wrote a few years ago, somewhere I can’t find at the
moment, “Pilate is a wimp” because he has Jesus in front of him, finds
no fault with him, but then goes with the flow and fails to let him go; but
this time I really listened to the Gospel of John (John 18:29-19:16) and realised that
Pilate keeps trying to release him but is hampered by pressure from
the multitude. Perhaps I’ve been roleplaying some more kings and nobles in
the meantime, so I can imagine better what it’s like to be in that position.
Posted: 01-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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2 comments
Services sung: 2
Services to go: 7
Time: 2:22 Total: 4:17
Congregation: about 10
Beards: 6 (all but one of the men present) Headscarves: 2
Crew: Altar: Fr W (Fr T couldn’t get the day off from
teaching), Fr Deacon P (late because of traffic), 2 adult acolytes
Choir: 8 (4 sopranos, 3 altos and a tenor)
Coordination: Shaky, because the clergy wasn’t consistent— they’d
never served together before. But we pulled it off eventually.
Tunefulness: Well, when we had a pitch, we tenaciously
maintained it.
Voice: okay
Knees: starting to feel them
Strangeness: An acolyte who wasn’t actually acolyting tried to light
the chandelier, but he got such a large dose of resistentialism that it
took him the Vesper hymn, two prokeimena and almost two Old Testament readings
to get all the candles lit.
Also, just as Fr Deacon P was reading about Peter, “before
the
cock crows”, the neighbours’ cat mewed loudly on our roof terrace which has the
church’s skylight in it. Later, at coffee. Fr W recalled it, saying “before the
cat mews”— which will probably make me remember it forever.
Posted: 01-Apr-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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31-Mar-2010
Services sung: 1
Services to go: 8
Time: 1:55
Congregation: about 16, who came in eight by
eight, some were on time
and some were late.
Beards: 4 Headscarves: 2
Crew: Altar: Fr T and his son the acolyte.
Choir: 5, for a while 6: SS(S)AAT.
Coordination: good, with some small glitches like singing “Alleluia” four
times instead of three.
Tunefulness: excellent
Voice: okay
Knees: those didn’t bother me, but calves and feet did after
almost the whole day in the kitchen doing eggs and pascha and prosphora.
Strangeness: The Gospel in Matins immediately follows the opening
troparion, without a prokeimenon in between; on the other hand there’s a
dangling prokeimenon in the First Hour without anything following it except
the rest of the Hour. (I had issues with the dangling prokeimenon two years ago, too.) Also, I think this was
the first time ever that I’ve announced “Kontakion in the second tone”.
A bunch of us hung around for quite some time after the service taking
away the spent candles, changing the black draperies for white, and talking
planning-style talk (also talking about my new glasses; they’re rather obvious).
This might be a “don’t want to leave” Holy Week. Eventually we all said
“now I’m going home”— and found that it was raining.
Posted: 31-Mar-2010 |
/church/holy_week_2010 |
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Pictures made with the webcam my other half got as a perk— that’s why
they’re grainy. Not because he got it as a perk, of course, but because it’s a
webcam. I polished them a bit with Digikam, but one can only do so much.
Read more ...
Posted: 31-Mar-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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0 comments
30-Mar-2010
Our laser printer is ten years old, and though it usually does a very
adequate job there are some things it has difficulty with. Printing more than
one copy of something from OpenOffice, for one.
Read more ...
Posted: 30-Mar-2010 |
/wireless_life/applications |
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0 comments
25-Mar-2010
Outside the supermarket, a few meters to the side of the entrance, there was
this puddle of red ink-like liquid. Surely it can’t all have come from the
little container lying in it?
Nobody was paying any attention to it, and when I took four pictures from
different sides nobody paid attention to me, as if the whole thing was
invisible.
It was still flowing: in the first photo there isn’t any liquid in the
crack between the tiles, and in the second there is.
My best guess is theatrical blood, but I’m open to suggestions.
Posted: 25-Mar-2010 |
/life_and_art/wonderful_world |
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24-Mar-2010
For Ada Lovelace Day 2010. An overdose of Real Life precluded my Plan A
(too busy when I ought to have been doing the groundwork) but fortunately I had
a Plan B.
Fake tag for search engines: ALD10
Read more ...
Posted: 24-Mar-2010 |
/wireless_life/web |
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0 comments
22-Mar-2010
Is plomeek soup
made with
- a chunk of plomeek, like pumpkin soup?
- a plomeek, like cauliflower soup?
- a bunch of plomeeks, like carrot soup?
- a bunch of plomeek, like sorrel soup?
- a couple of plomeeks, like onion soup?
- a pound of plomeeks, like lentil soup?
- a pound of plomeek, like spinach soup?
[ETA:
- some different plomeek, like fish soup?
- some different plomeeks, like vegetable soup?
- ingredients prepared in the plomeek style, like julienne soup?
- something in it that looks like (a/the) plomeek, like alphabet soup?
Or even (though I don’t think so) made in honour of someone called
Plomeek, like Jenny Lind soup?]
Googling doesn’t give much information, except that the plomeek soup
on the set of one particular episode of Star Trek was actually chicken
soup. Which is soup made from, or with, particular parts of a chicken,
except in Korea where it’s soup with a chicken in it (like vermicelli soup).
Posted: 22-Mar-2010 |
/domestic_blend/food |
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0 comments
19-Mar-2010
(i.e. what I was about to write before I got distracted by cause-of-death
statistics)
News happens because it’s unusual. You don’t get headlines of
“10-year-old cycles to school successfully” or “Babysitter rocks infant
to sleep” or “Girl not abused in fencing practice” (well, except by a bunch of
people about her own age, consensually, with sabres). This is not news. News
is “10-year-old hit by car on way to school” or “Babysitter shakes infant
to death” or “Girl abused by fencing master”.
That person X does something unusual (and therefore newsworthy) to person Y
doesn’t make it more likely that it will happen to me, or you, or any of our
children. Especially not if person X has been caught for doing whatever they
did. If anything, that makes it marginally less likely because there’s one
fewer person running free who would be inclined to do this thing to someone.
Most people don’t make the headlines; most things that happen in the world
aren’t news.
See, that’s why I don’t let myself be scared by news items.
Posted: 19-Mar-2010 |
/o_tempora/frustration |
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2 comments
In 2008 in the Netherlands 102 people aged 10 to 15 died: 3 of infectious
diseases, 25 of various kinds of cancer, 3 of metabolic diseases, 5 of mental
illness, 6 of diseases of the nervous system, 14 of heart disease, 1 of
pneumonia, 1 of asthma, 3 of stomach or liver disease, 1 of kidney failure, 6
of “unknown or incompletely described causes”, 17 in traffic accidents, 5 by
suicide, 1 by murder or manslaughter and 1 of “other external causes”.
Again: 1 out of the 102 was murdered. And that’s only the 10 to 15 age
bracket, in which most people don’t die at all.
Read more ...
Posted: 19-Mar-2010 |
/o_tempora/frustration |
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12-Mar-2010
Yesterday morning, as I was putting groceries in my bike bags outside the
supermarket, I caught myself singing along to In the
Bleak Midwinter coming from the muzak speakers. The muzak at
that shopping mall is mostly “easy-listening classics” — not so easy for me,
because I know most of the music and I keep waiting for the twist, the
surprise, in every piece that they’ve carefully edited out to make it suitable
for muzak. But never mind about that.
Read more ...
Posted: 12-Mar-2010 |
/o_tempora/frustration |
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I don’t know (well, in fact I do know; post about that later) how I got this
earworm about 3 months late or 8 months early; it’s a St Nicholas song. But the
lyrics are deliciously complex and I’ll dissect them for fun.
Read more ...
Posted: 12-Mar-2010 |
/words/singing |
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26-Feb-2010
Just now that the Krita sprint is underway there’s a power cut. Extremely local, though: our house (though not either of the neighbours, or the church), the shop opposite, and a handful of shops around the corner. The power went out at 9 and when we called the energy company around 10 they said “someone is on his way already, but it may take some time to clear up.”
In the next few hours, three vans and a small digger appeared with a total of nine men. Two came in to apply a voltmeter to something in our meter cupboard. There was already a hole in the road a bit further on, with two men in it and two others staring into it while the digger driver looked on with some interest. After taking measurements in our house and presumably some of the other affected houses. they started to dig a hole in front of the restaurant on the corner.
My other half took the hackers down to the church cellar, where they did have electricity, a kettle and a coffee machine, though no network because the server is out too, of course. (And anyway, nobody ever has any signal in the cellar, phone or wifi.)
When I went out to take some pictures, the workmen showed me the cause of it all: a burnt-through coupling the size of my forearm. As I’m writing this at about 15:40, someone is wrapping the new coupling in what looks like heavy-duty duct tape.
Epilogue: at 16:45 the power was back, minutes before I came in from getting more firewood. It’s not on the website of the local paper yet.
Posted: 26-Feb-2010 |
/domestic_blend/household |
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19-Feb-2010
I pass this sign practically every day and have always wondered why whoever made it included
“3” instead of only “1 t/m 175” or even “1-175”. Until this morning, when it suddenly dawned on me that
it’s actually a very elegant way to say “only odd numbers in this
building”.
Posted: 19-Feb-2010 |
/places |
link |
1 comment
08-Feb-2010
Most people will think this is the meat of the story, but I still intend to write a hotel review too.
Read more ...
Posted: 08-Feb-2010 |
/places |
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07-Feb-2010
I’m splitting this into four parts because otherwise it’s too long; parts may still be boring. If you only want to read about FOSDEM, Part 2 and for my hotel review/recommendation, Part 3.
Note: It’s possible that some parts aren’t up yet. In that case, please try again later.
Read more ...
Posted: 07-Feb-2010 |
/places |
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1 comment
29-Jan-2010
Not that I’m a developer; the nearest that I come to that is “KWord alpha tester” (which reminds me that I haven’t checked out today’s version yet). But I’ve wanted to stand behind a stall for a long time, and this is a nice opportunity. Also, I’ll go and see something of Brussels on Sunday, for instance the Hallepoort (Porte de Hal if you prefer French to Flemish). I’m determined not to do anything useful, like volunteer for another half-day of Fosdem or even go to church. Perhaps the hotel I’ve just booked a room at (Euro Capital Brussels) is full of Fosdem people, but I won’t let them sway me.
Posted: 29-Jan-2010 |
/wireless_life |
link |
1 comment
21-Jan-2010
Spent about half an hour mending Tertia’s bike tire in front of the house.
Greeted by 2 acquaintances and 5 complete strangers who passed on foot or on bikes.
Talked to 1 neighbour (a nice old lady) when she came back from shopping.
Dragged bike out of the way of 1 delivery lorry.
Accepted mail from 1 postman who was confident that the woman in the road belonged with the open door behind her.
Asked 1 young man not to throw his cigarette end on the ground practically at my feet. Young man’s friend agreed with me and kicked it in a grating.
Declined 2 offers of help, one of them very sexist.
Showed 1 person the way to somewhere just around the corner, but hard to find. Helped 2 pairs of tourists with their maps (we live in a very confusing spot because all the road signs seem to say different things).
Got a screwdriver to fix my own bike light, but of course Tertia went to school on my bike this morning so I couldn’t.
Posted: 21-Jan-2010 |
/places |
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18-Jan-2010
The swimming pool has a new access system. This means that everybody needed a new pass. First we got a very wordy letter explaining that all sports accommodations are in a new conglomerate now, and the various antiquated computer systems are being updated, yadda yadda, ending with one small paragraph saying that our passes would stop working and we should go and get a new one at the other pool on the other side of town. Then we got another letter to apologise for the unclearness of first letter, saying that we could use our old pass until January 4, and would get a new pass after January 11, right at our usual pool, and in the week between we would be let in on showing our old pass.
January 4 came and went and the old pass still worked. So did January 11. On the 14th, a new beepy machine had suddenly appeared on the gate, but the gate was open so I walked right through. This wasn’t the idea: I had to come back and have my pass changed. Ten minutes of waiting, a new photo even worse than the one I had, and then the beepy machine told me that my pass was valid until 1-13-2010. WTF? Even in the US date format it would be 1-14-2010. The woman behind the counter said “impossible that it says that, we don’t have a 13th month” so firmly that I thought I’d seen it wrong, but when I came out she asked me to beep the pass again and yes, 1-13-2010. I had to do it twice more for two different men both called Jan to see it too.
Tech support was called. Tech support didn’t believe it either, but they said
they’d look into it.
The next day —Friday the 15th— the beepy machine told me that my pass was valid until 1-14-2010. Had tech support, er, fixed it, or was it something strange and US date format after all? Today —Monday the 18th— my curiosity was satisfied: 1-17-2010.
Apparently my pass is always valid until yesterday. So why does it let me in?
Posted: 18-Jan-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself |
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17-Jan-2010
I wish I could rememer poetry in dreams, because what you gave me this time was amazing. A king (presumably played by me, but rather unimaginatively called George) who was given a wooden box with three cakes and a prophecy, making him travel the world to find three people to share the cakes with, one with the innocence of a child, one with the vigor of a grown man (I think) and one with the wisdom of an old man. In the end it turned out, of course, that these people were all himself at various stages of life. But the entourage! If I could write it up as a story it might even be publishable.
(But would three cakes stay fresh that long? Ah well, must have been a magical box.)
There was much more, ordering chocolate sprinkles that when they arrived were more like Spätzle and carrying lots of groceries into a house I’ve never seen, but presumably mine, helped by random passers-by, but it pales beside the box with the cakes.
Posted: 17-Jan-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself/dreams |
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08-Jan-2010
This little Christmas-tree angel is older than I am. I think my parents got it the first Christmas after they were married, in 1954.
There’s also a glass house that’s still from my parents’ decorations, but I forgot to take a picture of that. Next year…
Posted: 08-Jan-2010 |
/domestic_blend/myself/favourite_things |
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