Arie Middelkoop's blog

Departementsuitje 2009: boerengolf!

2009-06-16T21:14:00.005+02:00

Hier is na lange tijd weer eens een reactie van mij! En wel over het departementsuitje van afgelopen week. We zijn gaan boerengolfen. Zie de actiefoto's om te zien wat dat nu precies is. Helaas was de accu van mijn eigen fototoestel leeg. Om dit verhaaltje te schrijven heb ik daarom wat van de foto's die door Gerard en Pedro gepubliceerd zijn genomen.

Wat we precies met het departementsuitje gingen doen was een goed bewaard geheim dat pas op de weg naar het evenement werd onthuld. De dag van te voren wisten we alleen dat het om een landelijke activiteit ging en dat we dikke sokken mee moesten nemen. Gezien het slechte weerbericht had ik nog wel per email gevraagd of we nog paraplu's mee moesten nemen. Dat was niet nodig, hoewel ik onder andere als reactie kreeg dat ik een padvindersmotto ten harte moest nemen: op het meest onverwachte voorbereid zijn en elke fysieke uitdaging kunnen weerstaan.

Dat laatste viel toch wat tegen. Ik moest ten eerste door de stromende regen fietsen. Nu zijn ze de weg tussen mijn huis en de bushalte opengebroken, en daar kon ik nog maar net langs. Met al dat puin hadden mijn banden wat moeite, en uitgerekend mijn achterband ging lek. Ik kon nog wel de bus halen, maar wat een lekker begin van de dag. Grr!

Maar ik was er op tijd en daar gaat het om. We werden per bus opgehaald, maar deze liet nog even op zich wachten. Dat was maar goed ook want er moesten nog veel meer collega's op komen dagen:

Uiteindelijk vertrokken we met een man of vijfentwintig. De dubbeldekkerbus waar we in reden had wel plaats voor vijftig of meer man, dus we konden nu nog lekker lui zitten. Maar dat zou snel veranderen.

Eenmaal aangekomen kregen we eerst een boerenmaaltijd. Soep, melk, brood met kaas en ham, en nog meer brood. Alleen het volkorenbrood was niet te eten. Met een gevulde maag werd het plan onthuld. We moesten groepjes vormen en klompen aantrekken. Daarna konden we van start gaan en ons een weg naar de overwinning slaan:

De spelregels waren eenvoudig. Ga het weiland in. Sla de bal in zo min mogelijk slagen in het gat. Ga dan door naar de volgende. Het eerste probleem kwam al snel naar voren: waar zitten die gaten eigenlijk? De gaten werden aangegeven met palen en er was er inderdaad een in de verte zichtbaar. Dus we konden van start gaan. Toen het volgende probleem: hoe sla je zo'n bal wel? Niet dat ik ooit eerder golf gespeeld heb, en veel deed het er ook niet toe. Als bal wordt een zachte opgeblazen bal gebruikt, van ongeveer de helft van het formaat van een voetbal. En als golfclub een stok met daaraan een klomp. Dus ja, knallen maar:

Zoals je kan verwachten valt dat toch behoorlijk tegen. We hebben diverse malen de bal uit sloten en bosjes moeten halen. Dit maal niet door mij toedoen! En als je niet uitkeek vloog niet de bal maar koeienstront om je oren! Overigens bevielen de klompen zeer goed, ondanks de pijn aan de voeten. In het drassige gras met verse koeienvlaaien zou ik niet graag met mijn normale schoenen gelopen hebben.

Af en toe kom je ook nog wat hindernissen tegen, zoals deze boom. Gerard adviseerde mij de boom eerst om te hakken (het omhakken van bomen was het onderwerp van een vorig personeelsuitje waar ik nu nog de horrorverhalen van hoor), alvorens tot schot te komen. Maar het lukte zo ook wel:

Eerlijkhalve moet ik zeggen dat het eigenlijk niet lukte. Ik sloeg voorzichtig en de bal rolde niet ver genoeg door. Het is toch vrij lastig zo'n balletje goed te raken. Ik heb diverse malen gehad dat ik wat minder voorzichtig deed en de bal een forse mep verkocht, maar daarbij de bal in de grond drukte en liet opstuiteren in plaats van een "homerun" te slaan. Of met de bal op twintig centimeter van het gat nog drie pogingen nodig hebben om hem er in te krijgen...

Een andere vorm van obstakels waren koeien:

Als een levend schild beschermden de koeien de paal. Een poging van mijn collega om de paal te bereiken mislukte omdat een koe in de weg lag. Het leek er even op dat we moesten rennen voor ons leven toen de koe geraakt werd. Het beest stond op, keek verbaasd om zich heen, en besloot verder te gaan met de orde van de dag, namelijk gras eten.

Maar dan is de grote vraag... waar moet die bal nu in?

Door de regen van de afgelopen dagen was het volgelopen. Dus vonden we het wel goed als de bal in de plas terecht kwam. Dat was een stuk eenvoudiger en scheelde een heleboel ergernis :P

Na deze sportieve activiteit stond er een culturele activiteit op ons te wachten. De bus reed ons rond in de omgeving van de Utrechtse heuvelrug en een gids gaf ons commentaar. Het commentaar bestond aanvankelijk uit "Links ziet u twee koeien. Oh, en rechts ook nog een paar." Wat later werd het meer een huizenjacht. Alleen raakte ik wat ontmoedigd van de huizenprijzen. Zelfde met de befaamde economiecrisis van het moment zijn die nog niet veel gezakt. Twintig miljoen voor een kasteeltje is nog een beetje boven mijn budget.

Maar concluderend, het was een geslaagde dag. Aanvankelijk leek mij golf behoorlijk suf, maar ik heb me kostelijk vermaakt en vaak dubbel gelegen van het lachen omdat er iemand weer een bal totaal verkeerd sloeg!

Yay! Online tests!

2009-02-20T23:45:00.002+01:00

Hey, I'm not that much of nerd...
really...
...

If you disagree, fear me!

Again a year older...

2009-02-08T00:40:00.004+01:00

Yay. My birthday today. Although I'm not too enthusiastic about it. I can't celebrate it properly because I'm in Brazil now. But I can at least try to approximate it. For that I need to fix a birthday-cake first.

Annette gave me a link to a recipe for baking cakes for total dummies. Well, not even for dummies, because to me this specification was still so ambiguous that I needed some extra explanation. But, with some help, I managed to get all the essential tools and ingredients to get started.

To be honest, this recipe is indeed extremely simple. In principle I only needed to put the right amounts of the ingredients in a bowl. The main difficulty was getting these five eggs inside... without small pieces of the shell. That went pretty good this time, in contrast to last time, when I broke the glass instead of the egg.

Yes, it's going to be a chocolate cake. With pieces of nuts inside. It took me a long time to mix everything. Ok, typing behind the computer with one hand, and mixing with a spoon in the other, isn't the fastest way to do it. But hey, it worked in the end!

The numbers are a bit of a failure. The cream didn't really work out, and using a tea spoon to "paint" is also not a good idea. I should have bought pre-prepared cream. But well, for my first cake, the result isn't that bad!

Who wants a piece?

On my way for the Next Blog Post

2008-11-29T19:28:00.003+01:00

This blog was silent lately. The next posting is really coming soon!

The first month, I stayed at a temporary place, Lucilia's apartment, together with my supervisor Atze. When he returned to the Netherlands, I moved to a students' apartment nearer to the university. without internet. (insert dramatic silence)

Since I'm of course working so hard at the university that I can't blog there, there was nothing else that I could do than delivering the necessary TCP/IP packets that make up my next posting myself. This was not easy, as I will explain below.

By land...

Here, I'm running along a beach near Buzios. This is a city near Rio de Janeiro. The beaches here are beautiful. Especially when the sun is shining: then the water is this nicely blue that you can see on pictures. And also warm, such that it is a real pleasure to float around in it.

The beaches were desolated because it is spring time here, and, unfortunately, the weather was cloudy during our two-day stay. That proved to be traitorous. Without a sun, I did not go through the trouble of putting sunblock on. Well, I walked around like a freshly boiled lobster the next weeks...

By sea...

Not even a sea can stop Captain Arie! Aye mates, full speed ahead! And another bottle of Caipirinha for the captain! Safe to say that we didn't really go in a straight line...

By air...

Brazil is a big country. To go from one place to the other, by air is often the only realistic possibility. I'm barely visible at this photo, but I'm getting flight lessons from Cristo Redentor at the Corcovado.

We verified here that people are not to be trusted. There were multiple possibilities to go to the statue: with a special train, or the first part by car ourselves, park, and then the last hundreds of meters with special vans. While we were considering our options, a guy that was waiting at the parking place of the train station said that the parking costs were high (but not unreasonable) for foreigners, but that he could get us there for half the price. We didn't go for his offer, which indeed turned out to be a scam, because parking was actually really cheap.

From the top of the Corcovado, you have a good view over the city. Then you realize how big the city actually is. And also that there are many places where you as tourist better stay away from. These Favelhas, poor neighborhoods run by heavily armed drug dealers, are dangerous, especially for foreigners. In fact, the small lake near where I stayed previously, was located near the edge of a Favelha. I often wondered why there was so many police around there, and why I heard so much fireworks while running around this lake. It turns out that the drugdealers use fireworks as a means of warning and communication.

A bridge too far...

Ai, ended up at the wrong side of the river. Flying is tiring, so how to cross? Fortunately, there was this rope bridge around. Initially, it was one meter above the water level, but the ropes were flexible and I ended up waist-deep in the water. My clothes were in my bag, which I had tied tightly to prevent the bag from hitting the water. This was only a partial success...

There were fortunately no crocodiles in the water. Or other nasty creatures. Walking around half-naked in the forest is not a good idea. It took me an hour to make sure that there were no ticks remaining trying to bite their way through my skin. Ieuw!

*snif* First a shower...

All this traveling made me sweaty. This refreshing shower was really needed. Getting to this place was nasty. The stones were smooth and I slipped and crashed hard. Sitting was a bit painful for a while :+

Arbeiten...

So, all this trouble, where is the actual posting? For that I have to disappoint you for now. After all the above effort, I really had to go back to work. So, I'll save that for the next time!

Arie in Brazil

2008-10-05T15:43:00.006+02:00

Hello everybody, my greetings from far-away Brazil! I'm in Brazil to work on my Ph.D for half a year. In the mean time I bathe a bit in the sunlight, while you are having bad weather in Europe ;)

I took this picture in Madrid, while I was waiting to board the intercontinental plane to Brazil. I had a bit of mixed feelings at that point, because after boarding this plane, there would be no way back.

In Brazil, my current hostess and colleague Lucilia was waiting in front of her apartment.

One of the dogs was greeting me.

This is a view from one of the corridors of the university. Since it is never really cold here and never excessively hot, the rooms are connected by corridors in the open air. This seems a typical architecture that I also see in normal buildings.

Me in one of the labs here. The tables are a bit low, but fortunately, this lab has at least chairs with a cushion (unlike some of the others). Guess were are a bit spoiled if I compare offices in Utrecht with the labs here ;)

"het poststuk" of "de post stuk"?

2008-09-11T18:21:00.004+02:00

Ik ontving recentelijk een brief van administratieve aard. Deze brief was naar meerdere personen gestuurd, maar bij een aantal enveloppen was men vergeten een postzegel op te plakken. Waaronder degene die ik ontving. Met als gevolg dat de post de brief wel verwerkte, maar als gevolg mij wel vereist om op staande voet het dubbele bedrag te betalen door twee postzegels te plakken op de volgende boetekaart:

Het is opmerkelijk dat het dubbele bedrag gevraagd wordt. Ik ben niet verantwoordelijk voor de onkunde van de post om op het moment van versturen te controleren of de brief wel van voldoende postzegels voorzien is, dus de extra kosten die ze daarvoor maken ben ik niet bereid om te betalen. Bovendien lijkt het me sterk dat dit uit te drukken is in termen van een extra postzegel.

Als ik de brief niet wilde hebben, dan is het niet nodig om het bedrag te betalen, maar dan moet ik de brief wel retour sturen naar de post. Hoewel ik begrijp dat de post een vergoeding wil hebben voor haar dienst, is het onredelijk om van mij te vereisen dat ik dan op staande voet deze in een brievenbus stop, wat mij minstens uren kost (10 minuten om daadwerkelijk een brievenbus te vinden, en de rest van de tijd om mezelf te motiveren dit daadwerkelijk te doen).

Maar vooruit. Laten we maar doen wat er op de boetebrief staat. Ik moet "het poststuk" aan de boetekaart plakken en er "geweigerd" opschrijven. Maar, met mijn Noordeloos-Nederlands kan ik het verschil tussen "het poststuk" en "de post stuk" niet onderscheiden. Dus maak ik de post stuk door de brief in tweeën te scheuren. Veel letterlijker kan ik het niet interpreteren. De inhoud heb ik er uiteraard uitgehaald, want er staat nergens dat ik dat er in moet laten zitten. Eens zien wat ze hier van vinden:

Mission "Visa for Brazil" Failed

2008-09-02T16:52:00.002+02:00

End of this month, I leave for Brazil to do part of my research for half a year there. To do research, I need a visa. And it turns out that this process is very complicated...

Let's start with the OK part. To apply for a visa for Brazil, there turned out to be many prerequisites.

To start with, I needed a Conduct of Good Behaviour, which is a document issued my the Ministry of Justice, that states that you are not a criminal. I went to the municipality to apply for this document, but they didn't know how to deal with it, because normally you only need these documents when requested by an employer with a written letter. In the end, they said that they would submit my application if I would get a print of the web page of the Brazilian Embassy where it was listed that a conduct of good behaviour was required. And I needed to fill in a form which needed some information about my identity and a choice for screening profile that they perform on your criminal record. This, surprisingly, did list a profile for a visa. After returning with all this information (the local municipality is only open in the mornings, so that was some days later), they did send it to the Ministry of Justice, and one week later I received the document by mail. Great!

The next document was a proof of birth in the Netherlands. But for this, I had to go to the municipality in the city where I was born! At least, there they worked in a more professional matter and I got the document with only an hour of waiting.

Then a proof of residence in the Netherlands for at least twelve months. For that I needed to go to the local municipality again, and there again they didn't know what to do with it. They decided to give me a proof that I live in the municipal for more than twelve months (since I was born actually; I never moved outside the municipal). Phew, we are getting somewhere.

I also needed a document that I had sufficient income. The people at the personnel department helped me by giving me a document listing my gross income (which is a lot higher than my nett income; I now realize where this difference in money is needed for...)

Some of the other requirements were easy: two photos, and a passport that is at least valid for six months.

Then I could finally fill in the main form (a badly formatted word document) and go to the embassy to apply for the visa! Which I tried today and which is the bad part of the story.

To get the mood right, let me first say that it rained the entire day.

The day started fine. I needed to go to the embassy in The Hague and when I arrived in Utrecht, the train to The Hague was already waiting for me. But then the first thing went wrong: I needed to take bus with the number 22, but the driver didn't know about the bus stop where I had to leave. So, I queued for a long time at this information desk, where they told me that the name of the bus stop was "Mauritskade" and not "Mauritslaan" (all streets there are either ...laan or ...kade). The driver of the next bus that turned up fortunately knew where I had to leave the bus.

I left the bus at bus stop Mauritskade, and needed to go to number 19. Assuming that this would be the street Mauritskade, I saw number 14, and walked around a bit to see in which direction the higher numbers are. These buildings are all so big that walking around takes a while. But, number 19 was nowhere to be seen. After some roaming around I finally found it, but it turned out to be the Embassy of Iran! A picture of me looking at this building in the most curious way is probably decorating the desktop of the director of Homeland Security now.

After roaming around even more, I coincidently walked in yet another road, which turned out to be the actual Mauritskade, and I finally found the location. A friendly man opened the door, but when I told him that I needed a Visa, he told me that I actually had to go to the embassy in Rotterdam! (Grr, why did the people at the municipal tell me to go to this address in The Hague?!).

Then I arrived in Rotterdam. The embassy should be at the "Stationsplein" which is connected to the station. So, that should be easy to find. But I didn't exactly know where and this Stationsplein and the buildings around it are big. So, again after circling a bit I found the right entrance, and with the help of some computers inside, I found a way to the embassy desk inside this mace.

Now I could finally get this over with, at least that is what I thought. So, with a big grin on my face I dumped this huge pile of documents on the desk. I first had to convince the guy from the desk that I am not a student any more, but employed by the University (I was still so young he said).

The guy behind it looked through it all, but did not accept the document that my professor wrote: I need a license from the Ministry of Science in Brazil for my research. And whatever I tried, he did not want to give me a visa until I have this license. He even said at that point that I obviously overlooked the requirements, because it was listed there. Well, I had studied these requirements a long time, and all I could think of on how to satisfy this requirement was this letter of my professor! At that point I would really have liked to grab this guy by his tie and pull him over his desk! But he may still be of use to me...

At least, if I manage to get this license. If not, then I have to take my fallback option: going to Brazil as a tourist. Since I get paid by the university in the Netherlands, there is basically no difference. But I wonder if the officials in Brazil agree if they ever find out...

Freiburg!

2008-08-21T13:54:00.008+02:00

Ik ben op vakantie in Freiburg. Ik zou eerst met mijn ouders meegaan naar Lermoos in Oostenrijk, maar halverwege konden ze mijn aanwezigheid niet meer verdragen en gooiden ze me uit de auto. Daar moest ik met de trein maar verder zien te reizen. Echter, de ticketautomaat op het station wilde niet meewerken. Mijn ATM-kaart werd niet als geldig betaalmiddel erkend. Gelukkig had ik mijn creditcard bij me. Na een lang gevecht met dit apparaat wist ik uiteindelijk een kaartje tot Freiburg te bemachtigen. Verder kon ik niet komen, want zoals onderstaande foto al aangeeft houdt daar het spoor gewoon op!

Wat kan je vervolgens in Freiburg doen? Bijvoorbeeld hiken in het Zwarte Woud. Zwemmen in een bergriviertje is niet aan de raden, want het water is ijs-en-ijskoud.

Ik beklom een kleine waterval, maar dat mocht blijkbaar niet van een magische fee, want ze betoverde me en ik was opeens erg klein. Gelukkig was het effect maar van korte duur.

Van dit soort klimacties wordt je kleding vies en is het aan vervanging toe. Tijd voor een dagje shoppen dus, bijvoorbeeld in een stadje in Frankrijk, wat nabij Freiburg, aan de overkant van de Rijn ligt. Frankrijk is tenslotte het land van de mode. In een museum waren de kledingstukken van volgend jaar al te bewonderen. Het zit wat zwaar, maar het is wel hypermodern. Er kan bijvoorbeeld een headset ingeplugd worden, zodat met een druk op de knop allerlei belangrijke omgevingsinformatie ter attentie gebracht wordt.

In Frankrijk weten ze bovendien wel wat lekker is...

De pret van dit ijsje is echter maar van korte duur. Nabij Freiburg ligt ook het Europa Park. Dit is Duitslands grootste pretpark en er zijn nogal wat attracties die een stevige maag vereisen. Zoals een waterglijbaan waar je met een boomstam vanaf gaat en kleddernat van wordt als je achterin deze boomstam zit. En een achtbaan die eindigt in het water en waar je je afvraagt hoe je daar ooit droog uitgekomen bent.

Ook de Eurostar, een achtbaan in het donker, mag niet ontbreken. Deze wilde achtbaan stopt nogal abrupt. Het personeel van deze achtbaan is niet alleen in het bezit van een EHBO-diploma, maar hebben ook een volledige tandartsopleiding doorgaan. Naast deze zenuwslopende attracties zitten er ook nog wat misselijkmakende bij, zoals ronddraaiende vliegtuigjes, en rondtollen de koffiekopjes.

Probeert deze ridder mij hier uit te dagen voor een gevecht? De kleding die we in Frankrijk tegenkwamen bleek erg van pas te komen...

Er is bovendien voldoende ongein te beleven...

Maar daar eindigt het niet! 's Avonds kun je er ook naar de bioscoop. De film "Narnia 2" werd er gedraaid. Het bijzondere van deze bioscoop is niet alleen het enorme scherm, maar ook water, wind en trileffecten voor het publiek, wat de film een extra dimensie geeft. Plus dat ik in het gebied geweest ben waar de opnamen van de film zijn gemaakt en wat scènes herkenbaar zijn. Dat het verhaal zelf uit alleen maar vechten bestaat en ik bijna in slaap viel is dan helaas weer een minpunt.

Ik vermaak mij dus wel in Freiburg. Helaas is het over een aantal dagen al weer tijd om naar huis te gaan. Als mijn ouders mij tenminste weer mee willen nemen...

Skydiving!

2008-07-01T00:08:00.008+02:00

Skydiving is something that I wanted to do one time in my life, but also one of the things that is so far on the bottom of the list of things to do that you actually never get to do it. Until Akil convinced me to join him with skydiving. After phoning around a bit, Akil managed to get an appointment for a tandem jump at the airport of Teuge. Perhaps it was a bit of madness, but it certainly was a thrilling experience!

Here is a recorded video of the dive:

It was a tandem jump, so I didn't have to do a thing, except for dropping down and enjoying the ride. Actually, I had to put my body in some banana form and do something with my arms too... Anyway, being able to jump alone would be nicer, but taking sky diving classes is very expensive in terms of time and money, so this is a good alternative.

An airplane took us about three kilometers high. That takes quite a while. The airplane circles up slowly. In the mean time we had a marvellous view of the surroundings, especially due to lots of sun and the little bit of clouds.

The plane levelled (giving a funny feeling in the stomach) and we could jump out of the plane. I originally thought that I actually had to dive out of the plane, but apparently you leave the plane in a sitting position. This is again a funny feeling while accelerating to about 200 km/h, but that only takes a couple of seconds.

During free fall, I grabbed a foot of the camera man and tried to flip him around.

Yes, all this sky diving is really great. Falling in between the clouds, and seeing the ground rushing towards you.

The parachute was opened after thirty seconds without any problems. Given my reputation for attracting problems, it is actually odd that everything went well...

Also an surprise was that the parachute opens slowly. I originally thought that it would open up instantaneously giving rise to some dramatic effects. No, it all happened very gently.

And I landed safely. It may not have been as exciting as I expected, but it was a wonderful experience nonetheless!

The Lucilia Trip

2008-06-10T19:15:00.007+02:00

I'm going to Brazil for half a year to work together with Lucilia and Carlos, whom I met when I was in Uruguay some months ago. Lucilia was in the Netherlands to visit the AFP and TFP conferences, and after that she stayed a week in Utrecht. Two Sundays ago, Doaitse, Atze and me took Lucilia on a trip through Rotterdam and the delta werken of Zeeland.

We started with the mills of "kinderdijk". Unfortunately, the weather was cloudy, limiting the view. Otherwise many more mills would have been visible.

Then we crossed the river using a ferry to get into Rotterdam. She's still nice to me here, but guess that 'll change when I become her hard working slave in Brazil ;)

In Rotterdam are these strange houses. I climbed up the roof to see how it looks from the inside, but that didn't reveal more, except that I grow nuts from the weird angles.

We crossed the Erasmusbrug, and took a tour along the harbours of Rotterdam (ECT and others).

We took a café-break in Doaitse's mobile home on one of the harbours, where we had a view on the Maeslantkering.

The following images speak for themselves:

Always annoying to get sand in your shoes.

We visited some more of the Deltawerken in Zeeland, and ended up at attraction park Neeltje Jans, with the main intention to see a video of how these Deltawerken are constructed, and for a boat tour past a "stormvloedkering".

A spare part of the stormvloedkering shows how big these components are. This spare part is now used for climbing and abseiling. I did not climb it though; didn't want to give the others a hearth attack.

Instead, we observed the feeding of seals.

And entered the hurricane simulator!

The following sequence of images indicates why I need to escape to Brazil:

Starting slowly...

Gaining speed...

You can guess what the final image looks like ;)

This big slide is definitely the best attraction of Neeltje Jans! Doaitse and Atze turned into young buys, running on the stairs, almost throwing a woman with child off the stairs just to be the first one up for another round. Not that I behaved much more mature. Nogmaals!

We had a nice day as tourists and Doaitse has been a great tour guide! Atze has more pictures on his website.

KiKaRun 2008

2008-06-08T21:08:00.005+02:00

Today, I did the KiKaRun. The result on 10 km: 45 minutes and one or two seconds.

The event was much better organized this time. The starting numbers were delivered by mail to everybody who registered online. My number was 1026. Curious fact: I walked past number 1025 when leaving the parking lot. Furthermore, we did start at the scheduled time, instead of the 45 minutes of delay of last year.

This time I made sure that I started near the front. This time I only hopped from group to group, instead of overtaking and being delayed by loads of people on small roads.

Nevertheless, this 10 km was hard. The heart rate is an indication how much effort I put in, and it was excessively high:

I never knew that I could maintain these heart rates for such an amount of time. In fact, I didn't even know that I could still reach a heart rate of 201. The device did not malfunction: with these heart rates, you're experiencing a lack of oxygen, and my breathing was erratic, especially during the last part, with the feeling that you're suffocating and all the insides are burning.

I did look relatively normal at the end of the run though:

Still, my time was not much better than the Utrecht Singelloop more than half a year ago. I had the impression that I improved a lot in the mean time, although that might have been more on the longer distances. Then again, it was extremely hot and sunny now, and I was still recovering from biking to Utrecht the whole week because of the bus strikes.

It was nice to participate with a running event again. The next one? I'm afraid that I am not going to participate with another running event soon.

Ingeschreven voor de KiKaRun

2008-05-18T21:40:00.007+02:00

M'n oude KiKaRun shirt is mijn favoriete sport-shirtje. Door het vele gebruik en het wassen is deze echter achteruit aan het gaan. Tijd voor een nieuwe! Daarom ga ik dit jaar opnieuw meedoen met de 10 km sponsorloop van de stichting KiKa (Kinderen Kankervrij). En om weer eens een keer een wedstrijdje te lopen. En, vooruit, ook voor het goede doel.
(en om een tweede kika-beertje te kopen, als maatje voor het beertje dat nu het voeteneinde van m'n bed bewaakt...)

Ik hoop dat het inschrijven en dergelijke dit jaar wat soepeler gaat dan vorig jaar. Toen kon men de toestroom aan deelnemers niet aan en werd de start een half uur of meer uitgesteld. Bovendien startte ik toen achteraan en duurde het vervolgens een paar kilometer voordat ik mezelf tussen de horde langzame mensen door kon wringen.

De laatste wedstrijd die ik gedaan heb was de marathon van Utrecht en dat is alweer een paar maanden geleden. Daar heb ik onlangs een finish-foto van ontvangen:

Tijdens de KikaRun kan ik gelukkig met wat luchtiger kleding lopen. En met een afstand van slechts 10 km ben ik ook niet zo'n wrak als ik over de finishlijn ga :P

Strikes in Public Transport

2008-05-15T19:07:00.005+02:00

Public transport is on strike for two days. This is certainly annoying, but has not been a problem so far. Instead of traveling by bus, I traveled by bike. Despite my uncomfortable city bike, and a considerable distance of 32 km, biking was quite nice due to good weather and not much wind. And as important, it takes me about as much time (1 hour and 15 minutes), depending a lot on traffic light, bridges, and other people. I also tend to be more awake when I arrive.

Biking this route is sometimes a bit dangerous. The roads are crowded and I generally go much faster than the people on them. Fortunately, this has not resulted in a crash yet. But what people do on their bikes, it is truly amazing. At one point, there was a girl in front of me putting a ribbon in her hair with two hands, while biking down a steep road down the bridge near Vianen at high speed. Insane!

Unfortunately, the weather is changing. It is not going to be much fun when it rains buckets of water. So, hopefully I can go by bus tomorrow again...

Death Gate book series

2008-05-06T17:20:00.002+02:00

We had a wave of free days in the Netherlands. I planned to do a lot of useful things during this time, but the weather was so great that I ended up doing not much at all. Ah well, it is also important to take some rest now and then.

I spent several hours in the sun trying to read through the first few books of the Death Gate series. Trying, because I have mixed feelings about these books. Each time that I finally convinced myself that I do not like it, the story gets interesting enough to keep on reading.

This fantasy story takes place in a world where the Earth is split apart in four realms, interconnected with Death Gates through some intermediate area called the Nexus. These realms are weird. For example, there is a realm of air, consisting of some flying islands. Survival in these worlds is generally difficult. For example, there is a shortage of water in the realm of air, and a shortage of energy in the realm of stone. What one world has as shortage, the other world has in abundance. Apparently, some form of exchange between wold was intended but never took place. Now people survive by adapting to the circumstances, using powerful magics to compensate for some of the shortcomings.

The story is about the experiences of Haplo. He is extremely powerful, and his people were considered demigods before the world was split. At that moment, his people were thrown in a deadly maze called the Labyrinth, and he is among the few of his people who managed to free themselves. He investigates the realms and has to create chaos such that his people can take over the realms when enough are freed. The other main character Alfred, is also extremely powerful. His species were apparently behind splitting the world, and are the ancient enemies of Haplo's people. Of the two, Haplo is physically and mentally strong, whereas Alfred is clumsy and a coward, but that seems a matter of appearance. Haplo and Alfred travel a lot together. Their interaction is very entertaining: they are enemies but the circumstances require them to cooperate.

Basically, of the first few books, each book covers a realm. Each book introduces its own key characters and relates the problems of the world and how these characters cope with these problems. I'm afraid that these characters are often not very interesting. I mean, why would I care about a girl who spends her whole life seducing others and admiring herself in a mirror? And that she has a soft skin, wearing tight clothes, and... mmm, let's read that part again...

Anyway, the mystery behind what actually happened, and the Haplo and Alfred combination is quite interesting to read. And gradually some other characters were introduced such as a mad wizard who acted quite out-of-character (could have been my role-playing character), and my favorite: Haplo's dog (who seems to have a scheme of its own).

All in all, I'll finish the books that I have (the first four) although I'm not sure if I'm going to read the others.

But, the free days are over. Time to work again. And to eat, because aside from reading I also did a lot of sports these days, and now my pants are way too big again...

Role playing: introducing Brunt

2008-04-27T16:47:00.005+02:00

With Alexey, Eelco, Andres, and some other colleagues and students, we started to play the role playing game Ars Magica. Sitting behind a table, and guided by our story guide Andres, we send our imaginary characters from one adventure to the other.

We play a group of wizards that were given the task of setting up a base of operations in a desolated area near Marseilles in southern France. Surely, this task is a piece of cake for a group that can wield powerful magics. Actually, just getting to the place already turned out to be a problem: the equipment was stolen and one of the group members was almost killed when retrieving the equipment.

Neither did we receive a warm welcome when arriving at the place: a construction team that was supposed to prepare the place for our arrival was into hiding, afraid for some magical monster that is thought to dwell in the caves nearby. A hunting party has disappeared, and our own investigation gives us reasons to believe that it was a plot to lure the construction workers away to steal our money. We're still in the process of uncovering this mystery, to discover what happened to the missing persons, and to find those responsible for it.

In the mean time, a magical stone was discovered in the caves. It appears to radiate a strong magical aura, and has the print of a hand on it. We think that the stone is connected somehow to the other mystery. Attempts to manipulate this stone by magical means have failed so far.

Aside from these obstacles, there is also my character called Brunt...

Brunt is not part of the original group. He arrived at the place by accident floating unconsciously on a burned trunk in the sea. Being of medium height, skinny and wearing peasant's clothes, his appearance is quite negative. Brunt made his impression on the others even worse by casting some huge ring of fire around him, claiming that he was cold, but almost hurting the others in the process.

Brunt has several problems: he does not appear to have a recollection of how he ended up on the burned trunk, and does not seem to remember a lot about his time before that either. On top of this, Brunt is addicted to magic. He grabs every opportunity to use his magic, but often can't control it anymore as soon as he begins, becoming a danger to himself and everybody around him.

The others have yet to decide what to do with Brunt. They need to find out what his story is, and how to make his behavior less erratic. Since he managed to survive for at least 27 years, one would expect that he wasn't always as severely in this state. Perhaps a planned trip to Marseilles will reveal more...

[update, a session later]
Our characters did get some more clues about who stole the money. We now have a couple of references to persons who might be involved. We also obtained the name of one of the badguys in quite a creative manner (the exact story is not decent enough to describe here). And it turns out that this guy is dead as well. No additional background info about Brunt has been revealed so far. By accident, Brunt created some trouble that gave us some additional information about a secret meeting going on.

[update, another session later]
Marseilles turned out to be a small disaster. The characters got ambushed in a street. We escaped from that, but then the city guard came and Brunt mistook them for the killers. To cut a long story short: the effect is two or three of the city guards incinerated, dave's character invisible on the ground and critically wounded, brunt captured with a disguise that wears of the next morning and also critically wounded, the city is on fire, and the characters of the others are either far away or too fatigued to do anything useful...

Lernet 2008

2008-04-08T19:58:00.005+02:00

I went to Uruguay for the Lernet 2008 event, together with several of my colleagues. Similar to my previous blog posts, I just write a couple of lines about the things not directly related to the event itself.

There are many stories related to my stay in Uruguay, which are of course, not true. For example, that I was dragged to the plane by these two convicted criminals after having consumed too much alcohol:

Marcos was caught smuggling cheese; I don't recall anymore why Juan had difficulties obtaining his suitcase at the Montevideo airport.

One of the reasons for visiting this event was for me to promote the UUAG system:

For some reason, the conference room was the hottest room in the Hotel. We tried to steal an airco unit:

Alas, that attempt failed. Fortunately, it didn't take long to adapt to the heat. What was difficult was adapting to the chairs. The hotel was very proud at their historically-correct chairs, but after half an hour I already couldn't find a square cm on my butt that didn't hurt.

The Uruguayans seem to be suffering from a national disease. They all walked around with a can of hot water tugged in their left shoulder and a flower pot with some tea-like flower-powder called matte in their left hand. Then they would pour water in this flower pot and force everybody around them to drink from it:

The poison did not appear to affect me much, although I was caught dancing the Tango later on:

More than six years after having practiced the Tango, I effectively did not know any of the moves anymore. Not that it mattered very much: you just push the girl in a direction and follow the steps she takes to get there :P

We took a couple of days to explore the country. We uncovered parts of a giant at one beach:

The fingers were quite cold to the touch, but gradually grew hotter during the day. Fortunately, we left Uruguay before the giant could come out of hibernation.

As an aside, the story goes that Doaitse calculated where the feet would be given the current orientation of the fingers. Apparently, these stick out on the other side of the earth, at a beach near to his vacation house on the island Terschelling of the Netherlands...

On one of our expeditions, the weather was not as sunny as it was supposed to be. We felt quite at home with typical dutch weather:

Fortunately, these two Latin American residents of a museum were willing to share an umbrella with one of our younger attendants of the event:

There were some hills several kilometers away from our hotel. My first attempt to run towards such a hill and then climb it failed. Each time when I was near the start of the hill, I hit a fence. So, I decided to climb another hill, at the other side of Piriapolis. It turned out that dogs roam free through the city, and that I appeared to be a dog snack. There was one particular huge dog that kept chasing me; each time I turned away it started running towards me, and each time I turned to face him he backed off. In the end, I got halfway up this hill.

Some attempts later, I decided to climb a hill with a cross on it. According to local information, this hill would be ten kilometers away from the hotel. So, after my presentation I had a free afternoon, so I ran towards this hill. Unfortunately, I got lost and it was extremely hot (I regretted not taking water with me already after fifteen minutes). Having roamed half the country side, I ended up climbing the wrong hill. But at least I could get a clear view towards my intended target from here:

The hill I actually climbed appeared to house a archaeological artifact. Not much more than a bunch of stones though:

We found more rocks at one of the outermost points of Uruguay. There was so much wind that I had a hard time not being throws off the rock and having to fly down into the stones beneath:

They already arranged my funeral parade:

Most of the pictures I have of this parade will not pass the adult filter on this blog. The parade consisted of waves, where each wave stared with some people waving around with huge flags, then some young girls doing a dance with only limited clothing, then somewhat older young girls wearing what you only in theory could still call clothing, moving around in such a way to maximize shaking of their body parts, followed by some people playing the drums.

We ate health food! For example, these chocolate thingies:

And Chivito's!

And I wasn't the only one:

All in all, we had quite some fun in Uruguay, but I can assure you that we also did some work there. Really!

Jaarbeurs Utrecht Marathon 2008

2008-03-27T19:08:00.005+01:00

The Marathon of Utrecht took place last Monday (second easter day). I finished with a time of 3:50:51, which is about eight minutes faster than last year. The overall conclusion is that it went extremely well the first 33 km, but then my legs blocked, and I had to go on with a severely reduced pace. Too bad, because a much faster time was in my grasp. But I did finish, and actually faster than last year, so I'm quite happy. Always good to leave some room for improvement :)

The weather predictions were quite bad. Easter has been extremely cold this year, with snow and temperatures near zero. And indeed, we've seen all the weather types the Netherlands has to offer: lots of cold wind, snow, but also often a hot sun. We alternated a bit between freezing and being cooked alive. Fortunately, my long summer clothes (1 long legging, two sweat shirts, and a wind jacket) protected me sufficiently from the rather harsh weather conditions.

The following graph shows progression along the route:

A lot of people clustered depending on expected end time. There was a group led by a person with green balloons with an expected end time of four hours and a purple group for 3:45. I started somewhere near the end. I originally intended for a four hour time, but the moment I started running I had the impression that I should be able to run faster. I overtook the group with the purple balloons after a kilometer or so. I had the impression that they were actually running not that fast, but I decided to stick with them.

Not much of interest happened during the run. Once I joined the group, I basically switched to auto pilot, running sometimes up front, and sometimes taking shelter in the middle of the group. I took some food and drinks every five kilometers and that pattern repeated itself for many kilometers.

Until I took some drinks after 33 kilometers. I sprinted ahead a bit to give myself some time to properly drink some water. But when I rejoined the group (or, actually the hand full of people that were left of it) my legs started to hurt and it slowly grew worse. I could keep up but I realized that I could only keep this pace for about two to three kilometers, but not eight kilometers. Angry with myself for failing so relatively close to the finish, I dropped off. Then matters grew worse, because it is much harder to push yourself once you are running alone. Fortunately, there were a lot of people shouting encouragements that kind of force you to keep on going.

I lot a lot of time the last several kilometers, but I did manage to reach the finish in a relatively good shape:

In fact, by not pushing myself to the limits near the end, it felt more like a hard training. I did not feel as depleted as last year, and I did not suffer as much afterwards :)

Marathon Prep: Final Training

2008-03-16T17:01:00.006+01:00

The Marathon of Utrecht is next week Monday (second easter day). I received my start number yesterday, it's 696. With 7 days remaining, I just completed my last training with a 3:30 hour run (approximately 37 km). The weather sucked (rain all the way), I hope it is going to be better next week. Nevertheless, it went quite OK, so despite all the setbacks two months ago, I think I'm going to do just fine.

I've been training hard the last two months, with each week two long distance trainings (20+ km and 30+ km respectively), two times general fitness (1:30 hour cardio, 1 hour strength each time), condition training with spinning (50 min), and some minor exercise at home. It totals up to a high training volume, although with a low training intensity because I was afraid to get hurt again. All this physical training fitted well with the mental exercise of writing a paper at work. On the other hand, this amount of training comes nowhere close to the training volume of marathon training schedules (which contain five running sessions a week...).

So, this coming week I focus on recovery: a lot of eating and sleeping. Maybe a tiny amount of exercise (fitness and spinning), but no real training, only to prevent getting stiff. Then I should be rested and ready to run the marathon...

Hard work?

2008-03-08T21:32:00.005+01:00

Ping! I'm back from Uruguay and I'll do a write up as soon as I have all the images.

But first I have to focus all my attention on a paper that I have to finish this Monday. As you can see it involves a lot of hard work:

Well, actually...

Verjaardagskado?

2008-02-08T23:53:00.000+01:00

Mijn tweelingzus gaf me een kado vanwege mijn verjaardag. Maar er zat een merkwaardige barcode op!

Wat zou het kado geweest zijn?

Back on the run!

2008-02-03T13:35:00.000+01:00

Woohooo! I can run again!!
The seemingly endless stream of energy, the vibrations resulting from each impact with the ground, I so missed it...

I injured myself six weeks ago. Somehow I lost stability in my right knee and did not get it back. Despite huge effort to enhance recovery, each attempt to run thus far was extremely painful and often resulted in having to stumble home for many kilometers.

Not anymore! I just ran the half marathon distance (21 km). There was an occasional pain surge, muscle spasm, or just the feeling of my knee 'locking up', and I was afraid plenty of times that things went wrong again. Concentrating on the running technique, or changing pace or step size helped and I managed to keep on running. Probably psychology plays a role here as well, and I regained my confidence slowly.

It's about time. The marathon of Utrecht is only a handful of weeks away and I need to practice for it. To protect myself, I deliberately ran only 21 km. Next week I'm going to run my "normal" 33 km. Then I can take some rest when I'm away to Uruguay, and hopefully I can squeeze out a 40 km or two in the weeks just before the marathon...

Paintball, or: Bravo's farewell party

2008-01-27T00:50:00.000+01:00

Saturday morning. The weather was perfect for some mountain biking. It was almost time for a new edition of our Unite To Bike event. At least, that is what bravo thought that we were going to do. What he did not know is that in secret a whole different event was organized, to `celebrate' that he is going to emigrate to the United States. The following picture reveals what we did instead:

(Who is who? Solution below.)

We caught bravo totally by surprise. He was waiting for us wearing his biking clothes. But as soon as he saw us all he knew something was going on. Indeed, instead of going to the Drunense Duinen, we went to Paintballcentrum het Gooi in Nieuw Loosdrecht for some indoor paintball.

We received a short introduction about how to use the weapon, and how to behave during the games first. Then we got the important gear: a semi-automatic gun with 150 paintballs, an overall for some basic protection, and a mask to protect the head. We were split in two teams and could enter the game area. Finally we were ready for some killing.

The game offers a lot of excitement. The game takes place in a dimly lit open area, with lots of objects and some walls in it. It takes only a single hit to take you out and the opponent can be anywhere. Adrenaline starts building up and the heart rate increases until there is room for a single thought only: kill or be killed!

At first you are afraid that getting shot hurts a lot. At least, many people claim that paintbal hurts. This fear goes away soon. Actually, it was quite disappointing that getting hit was not painful. I've been shot at many times, even from a meter distance. Sure, you can feel it when you get hit, but pain is a gross overstatement. It adds a nice flavour to the game though.

Unfortunately, the first game sucked hard. I did not wear my glasses, because I was afraid that moisture in the mask would condense on the glasses. Normally, that is not a problem, since I can see enough without glasses. Unfortunately, for paintball that was a bad idea. The game area is dark, the mask was blurring vision a bit, and I just did not get enough contrast to distinguish people (and their team indication). I did not fire at all the first game; I was too afraid to hit my own team members. Therefore, I did put on my glasses the remaining games, which improved my situational awareness considerably.

Paintball is not easy. The area is rather small, but open, so you can get shot from many places. There are small objects and (open) walls everywhere, so you can't maneuver or run very well. Rambo style does not work for this game very well, defensive tactics are much more suitable. Team play is even more difficult. It is already hard to determine what next action to take yourself, let alone try to do something coordinated. That requires knowledge of the area, tactics, communication and timing. Ah well, we just play for fun, so it does not matter much anyway.

We played four matches: three times team death match and capture the flag one time. There was a special game at the end, all versus bravo, who had to cross the area in a bunny suit. *pats* *pats* *pats*.

After the game, we went for dinner to The Ostrich (African) and finished the day at some cafe. It was fun. Now, what about the real 'Unite To Bike'? Date and times anyone?

(left-to-right: blitznl, armijn, amiddelk, visser, ikwildrpepper, bravo, niksnut, EyE, bart)

'Start to run' Podcast

2008-01-23T22:41:00.000+01:00

In het Hardlopen-topic op Gathering Of Tweakers forum plaatste iemand een linkje naar de 'Start to run' Podcast. Dit zijn een aantal .mp3-bestanden waar je onder begeleiding van muziek en een vlaamse dame aangemoedigd wordt om te hardlopen met als uiteindelijke doel vijf kilometer te kunnen rennen zonder stoppen. Aanrader voor mensen die ook eens met hardlopen willen beginnen!

Wat ik hiermee moet? Voor die vijf kilometer hoef ik het niet te doen want na vijf kilometer kom ik pas op gang. Echter, de muziekkeuze en het lieve stemmetje wat af en toe tussendoor komt is wel leuk, dus naar de mp3-speler ermee ;-)

Ik heb de vijf kilometer wel eens goed verprutst.

Dutch Functional Programming Day, 2008

2008-01-13T16:11:00.000+01:00

Last friday, the yearly Functioneel programmeren dag (DFPD) took place at the Open Universiteit in Utrecht. The idea is that practioners of functional programming in the Netherlands get together to listen to a number of talks and get to know what the others are doing. I went to this event together with many of my colleagues and students.

The organiser of this event, Johan Jeuring, announced that he would be interested in blog posts, so I decided to write this short post. In fact, I recall that I wrote a small post about the previous DFPD as well. It embarasses me a bit to say it, and no offence to anyone, but apparently the previous times it was the food that made a lasting impression. I can truthfully say that it's different this time. The talks were definitely more interesting, especially for students at our university, although at some points maybe too technical for this event.

So, what did we do the entire day? To start from the beginning, the first task was to enter the building of the open university near the center of Utrecht. My bus stopped close by so no problems there. I saw one of our students, Remy, and we looked for the entrance. It seemed to be closed. Looking around, we couldn't find another entrance. Wondering whether this really was the place, Remy dared to press a magic button next to the door. After an unnerving long time something happened. The doors suddenly opened. We were expected after all...

There were quite some people at the DFPD that I saw at previous DFPDs, conferences, or other events. However, there were also other people, mostly students, that I did not see before. Maybe it is an idea to wear name badges next time.

The major part of the day consisted of talks, with a few breaks and a lunch in between, and drinks at the end. I liked the last two talks of the day in practicular, with Doaitse giving a talk about parser combinators that even I could understand, and Rinus about his nice iTasks system, although I heard that talk before at the IFL/ICFP conference.

Afterwards, we walked to a cheap italian restaurant for dinner. The traffic in Utrecht is dangerous for world-oblivious functional programmers, but at least half the visitors made it to the restaurant. Several hours later I returned home.

Pakjesavond!

2007-12-25T00:58:00.001+01:00

Wederom hebben we dit jaar in huize Middelkoop weer een enorme berg aan cadeautjes gekocht en onder de kerstboom geplaatst:

Tot het moment van uitpakken daar is moeten deze cadeautjes wel bewaakt worden om te voorkomen dat nieuwsgierige ogen (lees: mijn moeder en zussen) alles al inspecteren om te raden wat er allemaal onder de boom ligt. Deze taak wordt door deze heuse "draak" op zich genomen:

Nu blijkt dit beest voornamelijk heel lui te zijn zodat ik zonder gevaar ook eens stiekem van te voren kan spieken wat voor cadeautjes er voor mij gekocht zijn. En jawel, ze zijn me niet vergeten:

Na een avondje gourmetten is dan toch het moment aangebroken dat we de cadeautjes gaan uitpakken. Wat zou er in deze grote doos zitten? Voorlopig ben ik eerst bezig mijn handen uit de knoop te halen:

Het blijkt een klok te zijn! Nu vraag je je misschien af wat ik met een klok moet. Dat is een goede vraag. Nu ben ik onlangs samen met mijn zus een klok voor haar nieuwe huis wezen uitzoeken. Tussen al deze klokken bevond zich ook een klok waar ik zelf direct verliefd op was. Blijkbaar had mijn zus dat aan de anderen doorgegeven en hebben ze dat voor me gekocht. Een aparte klok want in plaats van wijzers die ronddraaien, draait in dit geval de hele klok rond! Tonen kan ik hem nog niet, want het blijkt een heel bouwpakket te zijn wat in elkaar gezet moet worden:

Vorig jaar hadden we mijn vader een puzzel van tweeduizend stukjes gegeven. Dat bleek wat te hoog gegrepen. Dit jaar proberen we het opnieuw, maar nu met eentje van vijfhonderd stukjes:

Mijn zus haar vriend wil het misschien niet direct toegeven, maar hij blijkt lego nog steeds erg leuk te vinden:

Hoewel lego niet meer mijn ding is moet ik wel toegeven dat het Star Wars lego best grappig is. Verder hebben we hem nog drie wekkers gegeven, hoewel het nog maar de vraag is of hij daar echt eerder mee op gaat staan.

Mijn zus en moeder hadden van te voren al stiekem gekeken welke pakjes er zijn en waar ze liggen. Tenminste, dat waren de verwijten die ze naar elkaars adres maakten. Echter, een vandaal heeft de cadeaus door elkaar gemixt. Dus nu moesten ze alsnog de berg cadeautjes door om een geschikt cadeautje te vinden om te geven:

Mijn vader, Richard en ik zaten wat mysterieus te doen over onderstaande DVD box. Waarom dat mijn moeder en zussen dachten dat het daarom wel over blote vrouwen moest gaan zou ik echt niet weten. Het gaat hier tenslotte over het tweede seizoen van Battlestar Galactica. Dat is een drama/sci-fi serie, dus zoveel bloot komt daar niet in voor...

Uren later zijn dan eindelijk al de cadeaus uitgepakt. Onder andere heb ik onderstaande boeken (gedeeltelijk van mezelf) gekregen:

Ik ben vooral benieuwd naar de onderste vier boeken. Deze serie van George R.R. Martin zou vergelijkbaar en beter moeten zijn met Lord of the Rings van Tolkien. We zullen zien. Voorlopig heb ik weer wat leeswerk voordat ik ga slapen :)

Film 'Stalingrad' (1993)

2007-12-21T23:55:00.000+01:00

Het is de laatste weken koud in Nederland. Vooral wanneer ik moet wachten op de bus. Dan sta ik een kwartier tot half uur stil en ondanks warme kleding kan ik niet stoppen met rillen. Om de kou te relativeren heb ik de film Stalingrad gekeken. De film laat een aantal Duitse soldaten zien die mee moeten vechten in de slag om Stalingrad. Dat is heel veel afzien in de kou.

Het verhaal omvat echter meer dan dat. Terwijl computerspelletjes en standaard oorlogsfilms een bepaalde veldslag romantiseren, wordt bij deze film duidelijk gemaakt dat oorlog een groot drama is en dat een heldendaad voornamelijk een langzame dood tot gevolg heeft. Verder wordt het verhaal verteld vanuit de kant van de Duitsers, wat bij conventionele films juist de bad guys zijn.

Wat ook benadrukt wordt is dat de soldaten zelf normale mensen zijn, maar door hun leidinggevenden (doorgeslagen, zie ook de film Das Experiment) gedwongen worden om oorlogsmisdaden te plegen. Zo is er een scene waarbij de soldaten een groep Russische krijgsgevangen en dorpelingen zonder aanleiding moeten executeren. En een scene waarbij een Russische vrouw getoond wordt die misbruikt is en zichzelf van het leven wil beroven om van het leed af te zijn, maar de trekker niet durft over te halen.

Ik heb deze film nog nooit op televisie gezien. Desondanks is het een aanrader om eens te kijken. Terwijl ik de dekens van mijn bed nog eens warm om me heen sla bedenk ik me dat ik niet moet zeuren tijdens die paar weken dat het koud is in Nederland, het had veel erger kunnen zijn. Dat het een uur duurt voordat mijn tenen ontdooid zijn is altijd nog beter dan ze helemaal niet meer hebben ;-)

Unite To Bike V: Coast Edition

2007-12-16T18:18:00.000+01:00

I mountain biked in the Schoorlse Duinen today. This area is between the sea and the places Schoorl and Bergen in Noord Holland. The route is through a bit of forest and dunes. The track consists mainly of dry sand, which can be a bitch to bike through, but was actually quite traversable due to frost.

It was very cold outside initially (minus two degrees Celsius), even with a winter legging, biking legging, sweat shirt, thermo shirt, and wind jacket. Biking kept us warm after a while though. My fingers were only frozen in the beginning, which was fortunate because I needed them to brake and to shift gears. So, the cold wasn't a problem, and the weather was actually beautiful: dry, clear sky, not much wind, and lots of sun.

The track started in the forest area. Compared to the Drunense Duinen, it did not seem to be that difficult. The up hill parts were much easier, although the down hill parts gave me quite some bumpy rides.

About half way the track we entered the dunes. The sea was close but we could not see it.

That did not stop us though. We deviated from the track and found the sea. Crossing through the sand of the sea was great fun.

But, we did not forget to go back to the original route to complete it :)

More images here.

IPA Herfstdagen 2007 on "Beyond Turing"

2007-12-01T18:40:00.000+01:00

Mon, Nov 26, 2007

The IPA Fall Days event took place at the conference hotel Willibrordhaeghe. In Deurne, some village in the middle of nowhere, close to Eindhoven. This is done on purpose, to keep everybody together in the pub of the hotel during the evenings and nights, instead of going in small groups to pubs in a city. Despite being a remote location, it was in theory straightforward to reach the hotel. I took the train from Utrecht CS to Eindhoven CS, and then a train to Deurne. However, reaching Eindhoven proved to be difficult. One of the track switches at about ten minutes from Eindhoven CS malfunctioned. After half an hour the train pilot decided to backtrack a bit and take another track to Eindhoven, causing a total delay of about three quarters of an hour. The delay made me a bit uncomfortable because I didn't have that much slack time on my schedule. Eating the bar of chocolate that I had with me appeared to be a good way of passing the time. Finally, at Deurne, I got some directions from a woman on how to reach the hotel by foot. She seemed to be a bit surprised though because she said that it was quite a walk. I had an option to take a bus or taxi, but the weather was nice and I had just enough time left to go there by foot. I did reach the hotel in time, with two minutes remaining.

The first sessions were about quantum computing. That is still a mythical subject, although I think that I would find it less intimidating if I would have a better understanding of the subject. The second talk in this session was given by a truly sweet German girl, but I could not understand a single part of her presentation. Compared to what we do even our most difficult techniques appear to be trivial compared to what she is doing. I lost count of buzzwords of mathematicians like 'positive definite matrices', 'tensor products', 'basis in some vector space', 'eigen values', 'complex numbers', and this all mixed up with probability theory and super positions of quantum bits. Well, good to know that there are also very smart and bright people in this world.

The conference hotel is build inside an old monastery. It is a four star hotel. That is probably a hotel with more stars than I have been inside before. Anyway, the room I have is gigantic (it's at the corner of the building). Normally, the room should have been shared with another Ph.D. student, but that student did not show up so I had the entire room for my own. Not that I intended to sleep a lot, we could do that during the talks ;-)

Tue, Nov 27, 2007

It's 0600 in the morning. There is a lot of noise below my window. Apparently, my room is located next to where chickens are kept. And the roosters are waking up. Grr, there are still a couple of hours before the first session of today, let me sleep!

There were a couple of interesting talks during the sessions of Tuesday. Among the notable talks was a story about a table made my Philips that could detect the shapes of objects on it by having many LEDs and sensors and finding out which sensors do not get light from which led. Also interesting was a talk about creating a video preview (not a trailer) automatically from a video by splitting a video in small atomic continuous scenes and then composing a preview out of that by doing a local search using scoring function that takes many movie features (such as action, music, brightness, sharpness, motion) into account.

Furthermore, I have been lobbying among the Ph.D. students to get them to give a small talk about their research at the open session tomorrow. An attempt to get speakers beforehand by putting an announcement on the mailing list failed. Asking the people during the breaks, lunch and at the bar proved to be more successful. Now I just have to force them behind their laptops to assemble a couple of slides. But, after lunch they all pleaded to me to allow them to first play some boardgames and they promised to spend some time on a presentation afterwards.

After browsing to my presentation a couple of times, I joined the games as well. We played a game whose name I can't remember anymore, but it was very funny. We were all persons in a village and among us where two werewolves. The werewolves kill one person each night. In turn, the village people hang one person each day. The goal of the game is to kill the werewolves before everybody is dead. This is made difficult because nobody knows who is who. Who is lying and who tells the truth?

An interesting game. Somehow I managed each time to convict the persons that were actually werewolves but that's probably just luck. Although one time the others did not believe my innocence and hanged me. They all were eaten as a result (they should have listened ;-). Anyway, only half an hour left till midnight. Full moon. I'm getting hungry...

Wed, Nov 28, 2007

During lunch we took a walk since we did not go outside for two days. Somewhere along the way we encountered the gardener who was trying to get a broken branch out of a huge tree. This gigantic branch was stuck for the moment, but some wind could cause it to get loose and injure some people on the way down. The gardener climbed in the tree using a ladder but could not come close enough to push the branch out. We exchanged some ideas to solve the situation, and I volunteered to climb the tree if I could get some ropes, but the gardener either did not have any or did not allow me for insurance reasons. It is not clear how he got the branch out because we had to go back for the afternoon sessions.

The last time slot was reserved for the open sessions which I had to organize. I managed to get six others to present their work and a seventh asked to participate at the very beginning of the session. Including me that meant eight talks. That was not that bad considering that everybody expected only two or three talks. Unfortunately, the lab session on sorting networks ran a bit late, so we only had one and a half hour. That was not a problem because the attendees wanted to hear all presentations and did not care if it overran the schedule a bit. A got positive reactions about the open session so I guess it is going to be on the schedule again next IPA days.

Frank and I went to the gym after dinner. I did not have my usual gear with me, so I had to improvise a little. No shoes, just a t-shirt and a sport legging. Not that the hotel has an extensive gym anyway, although it is rather modern with fancy equipment. There was an all-in-one strength training thing, a cross trainer, and a thing for running. I did some running but that resulted in blisters after a few minutes due to the lack of shoes while running on a rather rough surface. I used the cross trainer instead for a bit of cardio-workout. Some workout after several days of sitting on a chair felt nice. There was also a bike. It has a fitness test option. I activated that mode and after three minutes it gave me a low fitness rating :o Maybe it has something to do with the glasses of wine during dinner...

Thu, Nov 29, 2007

I almost overslept this day. We were in the bar till deep in the night the day before and for some reasons the roosters did not make the usual noise. The weather outside was dark and gray which neither gave the impression that it was already daytime. Not that I was the only one, I was actually one of the first at breakfast.

After lunch we went again for a walk. I went to my room to fetch my coat. However, I could not leave my room anymore because the lock was stuck! That happened before but then after several minutes I was able to open it. Now I tried and I tried but it did not give in. I checked the windows but jumping out of the windows was a little bit too risky - I was not that desperate yet (GET ME OUT!!! GET ME OUT!!! :P) I tried again a couple of times with no success. I was just looking up the phone number of the reception when the phone rang. Cynthia asked if I still wanted to go for a walk so I told her that I was stuck in the room. That apparently was very funny, but at least she got a key from the receptionist and set me free.

Later I received another access card and I was about to write that I did not encounter any problems anymore until I discovered that the problem remained and I was locked again! Since this was the last night, the problem was "solved" by giving the key to Cynthia with the promise to unlock me at eight the next morning. Some people asked if I wasn't afraid to be locked in, but that wasn't the case: I could always have jumped or abseiled out of the window without much problems if the need was high enough.

The Thursday evening was concluded with the so-called social event. We were divided in three groups and played a three-teams version of "Zeeslag". In this game your group commands a naval fleet and has to attack the fleets of the other teams. Each time gets a number of ships with a certain size and fire power and puts them on a ten by ten grid. Each round you can deliver shots at the grids of the other teams and hear if you hit anything. By carefully distributing your shots you try to discover where the ships of the other teams are hidden.

We (team C) got best out of the first few rounds. The other teams had lost some ships and we still had all of them. That gave us an advantage in sheer firepower. However, that resulted in a political issue: the other two teams grouped together and attacked us exclusively. That eventually weakened us considerably.

Then team A made a crucial mistake. They stopped attacking us and attacked team B instead. That was their downfall. Now they started to attack each other and our best strategy was to attack team A exclusively. As long as team A attacked team B we would get statistical information on team B which would be useful for later when team A was destroyed.

It rained shots on team A. Their only ship left was a two-square submarine. But we could not find it. We methodically fired at each two-square field left on their grid. Until their was no hiding place left. Still they said that their submarine wasn't hit. Impossible! It turned out that due to some miscommunication we apparently had hit their submarine already at the sixth turn but that they had mistakenly said that it wasn't a hit.

That was a bit of an anti-climax because that little hit would have made a major difference. Therefore, the current situation was not fair for team B and team C, therefore we did a little sudden-death game which was won by team B.

Fri, Nov 30, 2007

We only had sessions until lunch at Friday. I wanted to walk back to the train station of Deurne (20 minutes). The others joined me. Alexandra wanted to walk as well but her luggage was too heavy. That was easily solved by me carrying her bag. It wasn't that heavy but I was glad when we arrived at the train station ;-)

No problems occurred on the way back and I finally arrived home to connect myself to the internet once more after being disconnected for a week! That basically concludes my summary of the IPA Fall Days. The talks and abstracts can be found at the IPA Fall Days website.

Het is maar dat u het weet

2007-11-30T20:29:00.000+01:00

Zo lossen we problemen in Noordeloos en omstreken (in dit geval Meerkerk) op:

En een goed bedoeld advies:

"De ondernemer is geen koe die gemolken moet worden.
Maar het paard van je wagen moet trekken."

Storming the beach

2007-11-25T20:31:00.001+01:00

Statistics:
- 5 times wet feet (failed to escape the waves);
- 95 minutes running;
- Several kilometers through loose sand due to the upcoming sea.

A pirate with a Ph.D.

2007-11-20T21:53:00.000+01:00

Can research be this easy?

"I have no use," suddenly said the face, "for gold or silver, and the way you have to talk to me is delicately and with respect, as I am a pirate with a Ph.D., well-educated and by nature extremely high-strung. Other guests have been here and needed sweetening up - and when I've given you a proper pounding too, why, you'll be positively dripping with good manners. My name is Pugg, it's true I rob, but in a manner that is modern and scientific, for I collect precious facts, genuine truths, priceless knowledge, and in general all information of value. And now, let's hand it over. Very well then, I'll count to five - one, two, three, ..."
(Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, The Sixth Sally)

It's very crowded in our corridor for some reason nowadays. Since I work at the beginning of the corridor a lot of people pass my room. That means there's plenty of opportunity for knowledge robbery!

Give me your knowledge, otherwise...! ... eeh...

Anyway, I already have a pirate hat and I almost chopped off my arm... so, now I only need a Ph.D. ...

Bachelorvoorlichting

2007-11-18T19:01:00.000+01:00

Vorige week vrijdag en zaterdag was er bachelorvoorlichting op de Universiteit Utrecht. Er werd informatie verschaft aan middelbare scholieren over de bacheloropleidingen die we aanbieden. Het voorlichtingsprogramma van de informatica opleiding bestond uit een introductiepraatje, een aantal mini-practica en de mogelijkheid om wat vragen aan onze studenten te stellen in een info-ruimte.

Een half jaar geleden hielp ik mijn collega Bastiaan met het geven van het computerpracticum 'Turtle Graphics'. Deze keer was Bastiaan er niet bij dus moest ik het alleen opknappen. Het bleek nogal moeilijk te zijn om een computerruimte te reserveren omdat op vrijdag de ruimten ingepikt waren door een practicum voor onze eigen studenten. Uiteindelijk kon ik onofficieel een computerruimte innemen. Het prepareren van de computers op vrijdag was nog aardig wat werk, vooral omdat de computers in een irritante anti-diefstal kast zitten waardoor het lastig was de usb-sticks erin te steken. Gelukkig kreeg ik wat help van mijn collega's Jeroen en Stefan. Tussen die sessies door moest ik wel de instellingen terugzetten voor de volgende sessie, maar dat kon ik wel alleen af.

Het idee van het 'Turtle Graphics' practicum is dat er door de bezoekers geprogrammeerd gaat worden. In de niet-standaard programmeertaal Haskell, zodat bezoekers die al kunnen programmeren geen groot voordeel hebben. Bovendien laat het zien dat er bij onze opleiding aandacht wordt besteed aan eigenschappen van programmeertalen en niet specifieke programmeertalen zelf. De bezoekers krijgen een programma aangeleverd wat een schildpadje simuleert. Door stukjes in het programma te wijzingen kunnen er opdrachten aan het schildpadje gegeven worden. Bijvoorbeeld het plaatsen van een stap voorwaards, of voor het draaien naar links of naar rechts. Het schildpadje voert bovendien een pen in zijn schild zodat hij een streep op het scherm zet als hij zich verplaatst. Dit heeft als gevolg dat er een tekening op het scherm ontstaat. De bezoeker krijgen als opdracht om bepaalde tekeningen te produceren.

Voor de geïnteresseerden: download de opdracht met bijbehorende software hier (55 MB, Windows only). De opdracht zelf staat in de PDF-file. De simulator (zoals vermeldt in de opdrachtomschrijving) kan gestart worden door op Start.bat te dubbelklikken. Bewerkt het programma met een teksteditor zoals ConTeXt of met Kladblok.

De opgave werd met veel enthousiastme ontvangen. Ik moest de bezoekers bijna letterlijk het lokaal uitschoppen. Bovendien namen meer mensen dan verwacht de opgave mee naar huis zodat ik tussendoor snel nieuwe kopietjes moest gaan maken. Daarnaast moest ik na elke sessie bij elke computer de aanpassingen die een bezoeker aan de opgave heeft gemaakt weer terugzetten. Daarvoor had ik een kopietje van de opgave in een hoekje rondslingeren. Een aantal onverlaten had dit echter gemerkt en aanpassingen in de kopie gemaakt. Met als gevolg dat bij de volgende sessie er een aantal mensen begonnen met een opdracht die al half af was...

Verder ging alles wel goed. Men wist me wel bezig te houden. Vooral op zaterdag was dat goed te merken. Tijdens een sessie help je de bezoekers met problemen die ze bij het maken van de opdracht tegenkomen. Op zaterdag waren er echter meer ouders bij en die bestookten me in de tussentijd met vragen over de opleiding in het algemeen. Dan ben je voortdurend door het lokaal aan het racen om iedereen te woord te staan. Niet dat ik recht tot klagen heb want daarvoor sta ik er tenslotte.

Nu maar hopen dat de bezoekers over een aantal jaar voor een bacheloropleiding van de Universiteit Utrecht kiezen :)

Just a scratch

2007-11-15T22:59:00.000+01:00

I've been working on erasing "glue" from the stairs of my sister's home the last couple of weeks (among other things). That job is almost finished now. I used glue remover as a first attempt but that stuff is ineffective, expensive and not healthy (understatement!). I've been using another strategy ever since. The glue gets softer by heating it up using a 2000 Watt "hairdryer" (550 degrees Celsius temperature) and can be scratched off relatively easy with a scraper. It takes more strength but in the end it is more effective.

I noticed today that this work is not without dangers. I was working on a vertical part of a step. Vertical parts are more difficult than horizontal parts because body weight cannot be used to put in pressure on the scraper. In this case a lot of pressure on the scraper was needed because a nail made it difficult to clean the area around it. So, I scraped and I scraped, but suddenly the nail got loose, and I lost grip instantly, causing the scraper to slip and scratch along my left arm instead! The scraper is not only very sharp but also heated up to several hundred degrees due to the hairdryer. A combination that can cut through flesh easily...

Fortunately, I've been lucky. Apparently I had lowered my left arm in a reflex to regain balance. Therefore, the scraper only burned through the outer skin, missing a big vain by only a few millimeters. Phew! At that moment I was also home alone so if anything bad had happened... Anyway, my arm seemed to be still in one piece so I decided to finish cleaning the step and then inspect the damage to my arm after that. Apparently the skin was burned and blistered. By the time I finished the step the pain was killing me so I ran to the kitchen to put water on it. My buff came in handy. Made it wet and tied it around my arm. At least I could continue working this way as long as I regularly made it wet again.

Guess the pain killing effects of the glue damp I breathed in and the bar of chocolate I ate are wearing off, since my arm hurts like hell. Couldn't sleep because of it, so decided to write this down instead, as it seems to help. At least the skin damage doesn't look too severe (I took a picture of it, but decided against publishing it ;-). It should heal in time. I can sleep in peace now.

Huisje opknappen

2007-11-01T23:26:00.000+01:00

Mijn zus en haar vriend hebben een huis gekocht. Voordat ze erin trekken moet er heel wat verbouwd worden. Ik help mee om het een en ander op te knappen. Nu ben ik met een bijzonder vervelend klusje bezig: het verwijderen van de vloerbedekking van de twee trappen.

Aanvankelijk ging het nog wel. Met een mesje een hoek van de vloerbedekking oplichten en vervolgens trek je het met een harde ruk zo los. Maar dan blijkt er onder de vloerbedekking een schuimachtige dempingslaag vastgelijmd te zitten. Deze laag liet zich niet zo makkelijk verwijderen. Lostrekken lukt niet want het breekt af in kleine stukjes. Ofwel, dat werd schrapen met een verfkrabber. Na een drietal stevige uurtjes zwoegen is ook deze laag verleden tijd.

Maar helaas, het echte werk moet nog beginnen! De trappen zien er nu als volgt uit:

De groene laag is de lijmlaag waarop het schuim heeft gezeten. Deze laag moet er ook nog af voordat nieuwe vloerbedekking erop kan. Deze laag is niet makkelijk eraf te schrapen. Erger nog, ik moet daarvoor dusdanig veel kracht leveren dat niet alleen de laag maar ook de stukken hout eraf vliegen.

Tijd om een hulpmiddel in te zetten. Er is nog wat vloerlijmverwijderaar:

Dit blijkt nogal gemeen spul te zijn: als het op de handen komt dan moet het meteen met water afgespoeld worden en het mag alleen in een goed geventileerde ruimte gebruikt worden. Uit voorzorg dienen alle deuren en ramen opengezet te worden. Nu hangt er toch al een enorme verflucht rond, dus dat laatste negeren we maar. Om de handen te beschermen vond ik nog wat handschoenen:

Gynaecoloog Arie meldt zich. Rectaal onderzoek inbegrepen!
(je moet wat doen om de buren af te schrikken die komen klagen dat je teveel herrie maakt om acht uur 's avonds)

Een dikke laag lijmverwijderaar er op, tien minuutjes in laten trekken, en aan de slag dan maar (de handschoentjes hielden het niet lang vol):

Het verwijderen van de lijmresten gaat d.m.v. de lijmverwijderaar al een stuk beter, maar nog niet van harte. Het spul maakt de lijmlaag broos maar trekt net niet diep genoeg in. Sommige gedeelten veeg je zo van het hout af, terwijl je bij andere gedeelten wel aan het schrapen kan blijven. Daardoor is de laag wel wat minder dik geworden, en bij een tweede insmeer- en schrappoging gaat het er wel goed af.

Anderhalf uur verder en een liter vocht lichter is het op het randje na eindelijk gelukt:

Drie traptreden gehad, nog 21 te gaan...

A poem from "The Cyberiad"

2007-10-28T15:41:00.000+01:00

From The Cyberiad:

"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Turl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscript go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cos 2 fie!

Whether or not the combination of love and mathematics/physics/computer science is impossible, I'll leave to readers of xkcd.com ;-)

KiKa nieuws nr 5: '2025: kinderkanker geen levensbedreigende ziekte meer'

2007-10-26T20:18:00.001+02:00

Een tijdje terug heb ik met de KiKaRun meegedaan. Dat is een sponsorloop om geld in te zamelen voor de stichting KiKa dat onderzoeksprojecten naar kinderkanker financieert. Zowaar kreeg ik gister een krantje per post waarin o.a. de renners nogmaals bedankt worden voor het inzamelen van 75.000 euro tijdens de KiKaRun.

Er staat een opmerkelijke uitspraak in een artikel van dit krantje. Namelijk dat het een realistische ambitie van KiKa is om na te streven dat kinderkanker in 2025 geen levensbedreigende ziekte meer is. Hoewel dit goed nieuws is, lijkt het me sterk dat je een realistische schatting kan maken over hoe ver dit onderzoek over een jaar of 18 gevorderd is. Aan de andere kant is er de laatste jaren veel voortgang geboekt op het gebied van DNA analyse. Dus we zullen wel zien, in de tussentijd zal ik mijn steentje blijven bijdragen door met de KiKaRuns mee te blijven doen.

Ach ja, is het krantje toch nog een beetje interessant en is het niet alleen maar weggegooid geld.

"Well of Echoes" book series

2007-10-24T22:03:00.000+02:00

Some famous dutch author died recently and the news is filled with it. Without disrespect, but I couldn't care less, except that I know that it is sometimes very annoying when an author dies. Among my favorite books are those of the "Wheel of Time" series which "is known for the extreme density of its plot, the intricate detail of its imaginary world and constructed languages, and complexity of relationships and interactions among characters". Unfortunately, the author of the series, Robert Jordan, passed away before he could finish the last book called "A Memory of Light". It is a pity because it took eleven books to put all the pieces in place, and with this last book the game would finally be played (or actually, the hell would break loose). Hopefully some relatives will finish the book using his notes. Some other series are waiting in the mean time.

I read the "The View from the Mirror" series by Ian Irvine when I was in Austria two years ago. A nice aspect of this series is the unconventional development of the characters. Standard in any fantasy story is that the world is in trouble and the main characters are somehow the key in solving the problems. However, with this series, the characters (one male story teller and an over-sensitive girl) are rather useless to begin with and become even less suitable for the task at hand as the story unfolds. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and stumble with it until the end. Or perhaps a bit earlier when the only option for the lovers to be together is to betray the world...

Recently, I encountered a sequel to this series called the "Well of Echoes". The story takes place several centuries after the end of "The View from the Mirror". Things did not fare well and the people are loosing a war against a superior force. The world is on its knees and the main characters get involved against their will, but somehow have to live through it. This time the characters do have a lot of potential, but are less perfect in character. One character is naive, another is jealous and sometimes mean, and yet another just wants to advance in his career over the backs of others. They all suffer terribly (abuse, accidents, illness, deaths), even the characters on the "wrong side". Actually, the distinction between good and bad side dissipates as the story develops. The interaction between the characters and the ways they deal with their problems, uncertainty, and stress, is intriguing to read.

So, I can definitely recommend this series. But I have to say that the story makes you feel a bit sad. During reading you ask yourself how things can ever get worse for a character just to find out that it can. There is not much relief. Perhaps that things cheer up a bit later on, but that's something I still have to find out because I'm only halfway through yet...

Maliebaanloop (Utrecht, 2007)

2007-10-21T17:32:00.000+02:00

Maliebaanloop 2007, Utrecht
Afstand: 10 km
Bruto tijd: 46:40
Netto tijd: 46:07
Snelheid: 13.0 km/u
Foto's

Vandaag heb ik met de Maliebaanloop in Utrecht meegedaan. Deze hardloopwedstrijd gaat over de Maliebaan (doh! ;-) en rond het Wilhelminapark. Omdat ik twee weken geleden al de Singelloop gedaan heb wilde ik dit loopje eigenlijk overslaan. Er deden echter zoveel bekenden van me mee dat ik dat niet kon maken, dus heb ik wederom de longen uit mijn lijf gelopen!

De Maliebaanloop is wat kleiner van opzet dan bijvoorbeeld de Singelloop. Maar met een man of 1200 is het toch lastig om mijn medelopers op te zoeken. Met Chris had ik bij de Stadsschouwburg afgesproken dus dat was geen probleem. Maar Arthur en Timo waren wat moeilijker te vinden. Uiteindelijk hebben we elkaar in de omkleedruimte ontmoet en konden Chris en ik onze spullen bij Arthurs zus dumpen (zij heeft ook de foto's gemaakt). Gelukkig want bij een kleinschalig loopje zoals dit is geen garderobe waar spullen veilig achtergelaten kunnen worden.

Ondertussen kondigde de start zich al bijna aan. Er was nog net tijd voor de standaard rituelen van een hardloper voor een wedstrijd: opwarmen, rekken, klein beetje eten (Kitkat Chunkie's en bananen! :9) en je helemaal volgieten met energiedrank. Kort voor de start nog een tactiekbespreking (Timo, Chris, ik, en Arthur):

De details van de besproken tactiek zal ik verder niet openbaar maken. Het feit dat er het woord "meidenbillen" in voor komt en door mij uitgesproken is zegt waarschijnlijk genoeg. Bij de start sloot Peter ook nog aan, en toen kon het feest beginnen:

De route is eenvoudig: eerst de Maliebaan heen en terug, dan twee keer via de Maliebaan naar het Wilhelminapark en terug. Dit heeft als nadeel dat het wat saai is, maar aan de andere kant kan je hierdoor wel goed inschatten hoe ver je bent.

De start ging nogal langzaam. Het was zo druk dat het moeilijk was om mensen in te halen. Langzaam dunde het rennersveld zich wat uit en ging onze snelheid omhoog. Chris en ik steefden voor een vergelijkbare eindtijd en gingen gelijk op. Arthur en Timo hadden een ietwat minder ambitieuze eindtijd in gedachten maar wisten de eerste vier kilometer goed bij te blijven, daarna braken Chris en ik uit.

Na het eerste rondje Wilhelminapark begon ik te merken dat ik me toch aardig aan het inspannen was. Mijn ademhaling was op zich in orde, maar in mijn maag maakte een branderig gevoel zich meester en mijn beneden begonnen wat slapjes aan te voelen. Ik begon me zorgen te maken dat als Chris het laatste rondje Wilhelminapark een stapje sneller zou gaan lopen, dat ik het dan wel eens erg zwaar zou gaan krijgen. Ik ben het lopen op hoge hartfrequenties niet gewend, je lichaam voelt dan wat ongemakkelijk, en het is voor mij lastig in te schatten hoe lang ik dat vol kan houden. Na acht kilometer zakte Chris opeens in, maar gelukkig kon hij toch al snel weer op snelheid komen. Dat gaf mij de gelegenheid om op adem te komen voor de eindsprint. Veel energie had ik niet over voor de eindsprint, maar de laatste kilometer heb ik toch de snelheid een stukje opgeschroefd. Buiten adem, en blij dat het er weer op zat, ging ik over de finish.

Bij de finish stonden Peter (die 6 km gerend heeft) en Koen (die gewoon enorm snel gaat) al te wachten en kort erna kwamen ook Chris, Arthur en Timo over de finish. Na wat gedronken te hebben konden we tevreden naar huis gaan.

Dit was niet de eerste keer dat ik de Maliebaanloop gedaan heb. Vorig jaar heb ik de Maliebaanloop ook gedaan. Dat was mijn allereerste hardloopwedstrijd. Ik kan me nog goed herinneren dat ik toen wat gespannen was omdat ik nog maar een aantal malen afstanden van 12 kilometer had gelopen. Ondertussen ben ik een marathon en twee 10 km loopjes verder. Dat is ook te merken. Niet alleen mijn gemiddelde snelheid gaat langzaam omhoog (ik richt me nog steeds meer op uithouding dan op snelheid), maar ook de week van spierpijn zal achterwege blijven ;-)

En wat nu? Voorlopig heb ik geen wedstrijdjes gepland staan. Begin januari is er een halve marathon over het strand. Dat lijkt me wel een bijzondere ervaring. Ik ben sowieso al weer een jaar niet op het strand geweest...

Utrecht Singelloop 2007

2007-10-07T21:40:00.000+02:00

Distance: 10 km
Time: 00:45:35
Speed: 13.2 km/h
Speed 0-5 km: 14.9 km/h
Speed 5-10 km: 11.8 km/h
Rank: 678/3064
Videos
Parcours

(ai, did I really look that tired?!)

The Utrecht Singelloop took place today and I participated. It has been quite a while because I do not often take part in running games. Especially because I focus on endurance and not so much on speed. My practice sessions normally consist of runs around 21 - 33 km which you have to run at much lower intensities compared to the 10 km of the Utrecht Singelloop. Nevertheless, it is nice to run through Utrecht. It offers a chance to run on roads that you normally traverse by car or by bus. And I got free entrance tickets from Aris van Dam :)

The preparation for this event was less promising for several reasons. A while ago my Suunto footpod broke and recently my heart rate belt as well. That makes it rather hard to run at certain speeds or heart rates. Also, the last months I followed a training program that is less focussed on running. I've become heavier (73 kg compared to 65 kg) which makes it even harder to run at higher velocities. And, finally, I recently returned from the ICFP conference in Freiburg (will write about this at a later time) where I was virtually strapped to a chair to listen to talks 9 days long. I returned two days before the Utrecht Singelloop, so I hoped to do one moderate 10 km training and take one day of rest. Unfortunately, it turned out that spend one evening clearing walls in my sister her new house, and I had only one evening to prepare. Despite all this, things weren't so bad, although my legs felt tired during warmup and the second part of the run.

The run itself was nice experience. The weather was nice, with a bright sun. There were about 3000 people. We all started at the Catharijnebaan. It is an impressive sight to see the enourmous flow of people running along this road. Also a bit annoying because there happen to be a lot of people in your way. I wasted a lot of energy in order to get past groups of people. Then I ran along the Catharijnesingel, which I recognized from many trips with Bus 12. This path flowed into the Tolsteegsingel after 3.5 km. If I remember correctly, Arthur told me about the Utrecht Singelloop when we were biking there once to go the movies.

Some time later I ran through the Wilheminapark. I took a few sips of water at a refresh point at 5 km and continued my run. In general I was feeling well at this point. I couldn't tell for sure without my heart rate monitor, but judging from my slightly higher-than-normal breathing frequency, I was running at an high intensity
but not too high. My legs were starting to tire though. Nothing of immediate concern, but the entire route I was taking over other people and I was thinking if I should continue that or drop down a bit and join a group of runners and save some energy for the end. I decided against that and continued as before although a bit more conservative with energy. I did not have the impression that I was slowing down, but according to the data collected from the checkpoints, I actually dropped back from 14.9 km/h to 11.8 km/h! I'd expect that I would notice the difference between 15 km/h and 12 km/h. Apparently not. Perhaps the amount of time it took to drink some water at the refresh post influenced the average speed a lot. Anyway, good objective for a next time: run the entire 10 km at 15 km/h :)

The Maliebaan popped up at three quarters of the route. I recognized the Maliebaan from the Maliebaanloop which takes place later this year. I participated last year. The memories distracted me a bit, and I unconsciously had been increasing speed a bit. Breathing somewhat faster now, I was happy to see that we were approaching the finish (only a few kilometer to go). The remainder of the route took us along the same route as the start. At the 1000m mark I increased speed again, and this time I started to feel the burning sensation in my lungs that indicated that I was creating an oxygen debt. At 500m I started to worry if I could hold on this way. Luckily, the road turned at the finish came into view and before I knew it I was past the finish line.

I could take my well deserved rest the remainder of the day. Which happened to be carrying 22 pieces of heavy wood up to the attic of my sister's new house and polishing many of the walls with "schuurpapier"...

Zomervakantie 2007

2007-09-16T16:56:00.000+02:00

Vorige maand ben ik op vakantie geweest naar de Pyreneeën in het zuiden van Frankrijk van vrijdag 17 augustus tot zondag 26 augustus. Met een groepje van acht personen hebben we ongeveer een week lang allerlei outdoor-activiteiten gedaan en een leuke tijd gehad. Het heeft even geduurd maar hier is mijn verslag van de vakantie. Een aantal details weet ik niet precies meer of zijn wat geromantiseerd, maar daar moet je dan maar doorheen lezen ;-)

(Groepsfoto: Jorieke, Anneke, Priscilla, Paul, ik, Rachel, Dennis, Bram, en Peggy)

Vrijdag, 17 aug (op weg)

Ik twijfelde de hele zomer of ik wel of niet op vakantie zou gaan. Aan de ene kant wilde ik wel op vakantie maar ik wist niet precies wat ik precies wilde gaan doen en er kwamen ook allerlei zaken tussendoor, zoals een weekje naar Cambridge voor de Microsoft Research Ph.D. summerschool en het vak software engineering waar ik de prakticumbegeleiding van verzorg. Uiteindelijk heb ik toch de knoop doorgehakt en ben naar het reisbureau Globe in het naastgelegen dorp geweest. Daar wist men wel te vertellen wat voor soort reizen wel geschikt voor mij zijn en een uur later was mijn reis geboekt, om een week later te vertrekken. Met de bus naar camping Le Canigou in de buurt van het kleine plaatsje Espira in Frankrijk.

Ik zag er eerlijk gezegd wel een beetje tegen de busreis op. Meer dan 24 uur in de bus, terwijl ik na een paar uur al geen vierkante centimeter biloppervlak meer kan vinden dat niet pijn doet. Wat als je nu nodig naar de wc moet en hoe vaak stopt zo'n bus nu eigenlijk?

De busreis viel achteraf reuze mee. De bus vertrok om half een vanaf het jaarbeursplein in Utrecht. Daar bleek dat er meerdere groepjes en dat de bus op een aantal plaatsen in Frankrijk vakantiegangers uit zou laten. Ik had op dat moment nog geen flauw idee welke van deze mensen bij "mijn" groepje hoorden. Degene die naast me zat moest bijvoorbeeld naar een andere camping toe voor een wat meer strand-georiënteerde vakantie terwijl ik juist de bergen in trok. Bij de drie keer dat bus gestopt is om ons de gelegenheid te geven om naar de wc te gaan en wat te eten zag ik twee jongens (Paul en Dennis) met dezelfde bestemming, dus we waren in ieder geval al met z'n drieën.

(Tussenstop, Dennis en Paul links)

Het eten was overigens een haastklusje. We hadden 45 minuten om wat te gaan eten. Na een bezoek aan de wc ben je al snel een paar minuten verder en vervolgens blijkt dat het wegrestaurant de plotselinge toestroom van klanten niet aan te kunnen zodat ik een half uur in de rij heb gestaan. Er bleef niet veel tijd over om het eten naar binnen te werken. Ofwel, geen warme maaltijd nemen maar iets wat je snel kan afrekenen of zelf kan meenemen. Een goede leer voor de volgende keer.

's Avonds keken we een tweetal films in de bus (Cars en White Chicks) om vervolgens te gaan slapen. Niet dat ik veel geslapen heb, want ik lag in een dusdanig verkrampte positie dat m'n nek en bovenbenen het niet zo fijn vonden. En ik lag wat samengeperst tussen het raam en degene naast me. Maar met elke keer een beetje wegdommelen rust je toch wel uit en eenmaal 's ochtends waren we al bijna op bestemming. Het laatste stukje werden we in busjes vervoerd naar de camping toe. Daar kwamen we tegen de middag aan.

Zaterdag, 18 aug (aankomst)

Bij aankomst werd al snel het een en ander duidelijk. We waren met een groepje van acht (Dennis, Paul, Anneke, Jorieke, Rachel, Bram, Peggy, en ik). Daarnaast was er nog een groep met instructeurs van Stam outdoor die ons bij diverse activiteiten begeleid hebben. We hadden ons eigen kamp met een aantal tenten, wat tafels, een wasbak en een koelkast. Dat is de plaats waar we sliepen, ontbijten en onze vrije tijd door konden brengen. De instructeurs hebben hun eigen kamp waar we drinken en beleg voor op brood konden halen, waar we verzamelden voor activiteiten, en waar we 's avonds aten en af en toe een film keken. De twee kampen waren gescheiden door een riviertje dat was door de camping liep en via wat rotsen kon daar "eenvoudig" overgestoken worden. Een aantal stenen en planken lagen los, dus enige voorzichtigheid en nuchterheid was wel geboden om een nat pak te voorkomen.

(Anneke durfde de oversteek wel aan)

De tenten van ons eigen kamp werden nog opgezet toen we aankwamen, maar we konden wel lunchen op het kamp van de instructeurs. Het eten was goed geregeld: drinken en beleg konden we elke dag uit de grote tent van de instructeurs halen, en 's avonds werd er voor ons gekookt. De deal was wel dat wij dan zouden afwassen, wat op zich een goede deal was, want het eten dat voor ons gemaakt is smaakte goed. Deze eerste dag was bedoeld om met elkaar kennis te maken en om uit te rusten van de busreis. Het was een warme dag met felle zon, zodat we onze tijd dan ook hebben doorgebracht aan het watertje bij de camping. Het potje volleybal meiden tegen jongens dat we gespeeld hebben zal ik maar niet beschrijven, want we werden volledig ingemaakt. Het water bij het strandje was alleen geschikt voor mensen met een wintervacht. Tijdens het canyonen en raften later in de week was het water net zo koud, maar toen droegen we gelukkig wetsuits.

De eerste avond aten we overigens niet bij de instructeurs maar bij het cafeetje van de camping. Echte Nederlandse patat met Remia mayonaise en een kippepoot. Ik ben niet zo'n fan van kluiven, maar na zo'n busreis wil je wel eten. Er werd ons op het hart gedrukt dat we goed moesten eten en drinken want er werd flink wat van ons gevergd in de week die komen zou. De rest van de avond hebben we, zoals de meeste avonden op ons eigen kamp, doorgebracht met pokeren en mexicaantje. Het koelde ondertussen flink af. Geen flauw idee hoe koud het werd, maar je zag je adem condenseren, dus onder de tien graden moet het wel gezeten hebben. Daar had ik, en eigenlijk de rest ook, niet op gerekend. Maar met een vest en een lange broek was het goed te doen. Meer problemen had Rachel want ze had geen slaapzak bij zich en dan is de nacht erg koud (ze heeft dan ook later in de week een slaapzak gekocht).

Zondag, 19 aug (watervallen)

's Ochtends was ik al vroeg wakker en we zouden pas wat later in de ochtend opgehaald worden. Wat stijfjes van het stilzitten in de bus besloot ik eerst maar eens een uurtje te gaan rennen en zodoende de buurt een beetje te verkennen. Bergen of heuvels zijn er niet bij mij in buurt in Nederland, dus het was wel een mooie kans om eens bergje op en af te rennen. Nabij de camping was de berg Le Canigou, waar het eerste stuk zich prima leende om tegenop te rennen. Bij terugkomst en na een douche waren de anderen ondertussen ook opgestaan en konden we gaan eten.

(eten bij onze tent)

De eerste dag zouden we twee dingen gaan doen: watervallen bezichtigen en mountainbiken. Het mountainbiken is helaas niet doorgegaan omdat gedurende de ochtend het weer begon te betrekken en het ging regenen op de mountainbikelokatie. De stenen paadjes waren daardoor te glad zodat het mountainbiken te gevaarlijk was. Dat was erg jammer: het weer was zo ongeveer het enige wat ons deze week tegen gezeten heeft.

Maar 's ochtends hebben we wel wat watervallen kunnen bekijken. We liepen over wat paadjes en rotsen en konden de natuur bezichtigen. Uiteindelijk kwamen we uit bij de uitgang van de Llach (spreek uit als: "jak"). Dit is een heftige canyon waar we zelf de donderdag doorheen zijn geweest. Nu zagen we er wat fransmannen van grote hoogte in het water springen en over de watervalletjes glijden. Toen dachten we nog dat die lui krankzinnig moesten zijn, maar een paar dagen later stonden we er zelf ;-)

(ik op een rots)

(Jorieke, Anneke, Paul, Rachel en ik)

Maandag, 20 aug (canyoning)

Op maandag stond een 'normale' canyontocht gepland. Geschikt voor ons outdoor-kneusjes die nog nooit eerder gecanyond hebben. Ook dit keer gingen we pas laat in de ochtend weg, dus kon ik 's ochtend weer mooi van de gelegenheid gebruik maken om een uurtje te gaan rennen. Ik paste er wel op met niet al te hoge intensiteit te rennen, want het canyonnen beloofde wat geklauter en geklim waar ik nog wel wat energie voor over moest houden. Desondanks ging het toch niet helemaal goed. Ik had mijn oude renschoenen meegenomen en daarbij niet gezien dat de voering bij de hiel kapot was. Dit kapotte stukje zorgde voor nogal wat schade bij m'n hiel wat alleen maar erger werd gedurende de week (maar ik kon nog steeds zonder al teveel pijn lopen, dus het viel wel mee).

Voor het canyonnen kregen we een wetsuit en een klimgordel met glijvak. Zo'n gordel bevestig je aan je middel en benen en bevat een achtvormige metalen lus voor het abseilen en twee karabiners voor het zekeren. Het glijvak gebruikten we om over de gladde rotsen te glijden (glijbanen, watervallen, etc). En een helm niet te vergeten. Al met al loop je er aardig lullig bij met een wetsuit en een helm ;-)

We werden met busjes bij de canyon gebracht. Daar moesten we eerst een eind klimmen om bij de ingang van de canyon te komen. Dat bleek een stevige en steile klim. De rugzak met klimspullen die ik droeg maakte het niet veel makkelijker. Uiteindelijk bereikten we de ingang van de canyon en kon de pret beginnen. We gleden en klauterden wat door het stromende water totdat we bij de eerste sprong aankwamen. Dit was een rots, niet veel hoger dan een paar meter. Vanaf deze rots moesten we het water in springen. Dat zag er toch wat minder makkelijk uit dan je zou denken als je eenmaal boven staat. De rots liep wat schuin af zodat er ook nog een meter naar voren gesprongen moest worden. Bovendien moest er ook op de houding gelet worden: naar voren kijken, gekruisde armen, recht lichaam en benen intrekken bij het landen op het water. Achteraf niet zo moeilijk, maar je moest je er wel even toe aanzetten.

Daarvandaan was het weer klauteren en glijden tot de tweede sprong. Dit was een vervelende sprong, niet zozeer omdat deze wat hoger was, maar omdat de plaats om te springen een smal plateautje was waar je net met je voeten tegen elkaar aan kon staan die bovendien schuin naar beneden liep en waar ik maar net genoeg grip had om te blijven staan. De moeilijkheid van het springen is het goed uitkomen als je land, en daarvoor moet je stabiel staan voordat wje springt. Niet alleen om te voorkomen dat je op rotsen land, maar ook omdat het verkeerd terechtkomen in het water niet fijn is naarmate je van grotere hoogte springt.

Halverwege kwamen we een flinke waterval tegen waarin we gingen abseilen. Dat was best leuk, maar het viel de dames in onze groep op dat de heren een tijdje wat minder soepel liepen. Tijdens het abseilen hang je in je gordel waarbij de bandjes tussen je benen het een en ander afknellen als het niet helemaal goed zit. Desondanks is het een mooie ervaring om te abseilen in een waterval, op de plons water die je in je gezicht krijgt na :)

(Abseilen)

(Glijden)

Aan het eind van de canyon was er een sprong van negen meter voor degenen die het durfde (dat waren wij uiteraard allemaal). Alleen bij de springplaats komen was wat lastig, daarvoor moesten we een stukje wandklimmen en een stuk horizontaal langs de wand. Tijdens het omhoogklimmen gleed ik met mijn tenen van een steunpunt af en viel naar beneden. Een paar meter maar omdat ik gelukkig gezekerd was en kon ik de klim weer voortzetten. Voor de verandering was de sprong zelf wel goed te doen. Op deze hoogte begin je al goed te merken dat het even duurt voordat je het water raakt. De klap in het water is heftig. Ondanks dat mijn helm goed vast zat was deze na de sprong half over mijn ogen terug te vinden. Al met al is zo'n sprong een hele sensatie.

Eenmaal terug op de kamping hebben we flink gegeten en eind van de avond sloten we af met een feestje in het cafetje van de camping. Daar ter plaatse ging een van onze begeleidsters, Stephanie, ons de Salsa leren. Het was een beetje improviseren omdat Stephanie de pasjes voor de man niet precies wist. Dat ging eigenlijk best goed. Tenminste, ik heb weten te voorkomen dat ik op de voeten van Jorieke stapte. Ondanks dat er foto's van gemaakt zijn is er gelukkig geen bewijsmateriaal van mijn geklungel :-P

(Paul en Anneke aan de salsa)

(Stephanie legt het ons uit)

Dinsdag, 21 aug (fort bezocht)

Oorspronkelijk stond er voor de dinsdagochtend en middag wandklimmen en abseilen op het programma. We klommen de busjes in om een uur of wat naar de klimlokatie te reizen. Helaas kwamen we er daar achter dat ondanks de felle zon in het dal het regende op de berg. Vanwege de gladheid kon het klimmen daarom niet door gaan. Tja, wat doe je dan? Dan ga je maar als een toerist een dorpje en fort bezoeken en foto's maken.

Om bij het fort te komen moesten we eerst een stuk steil omhoog lopen. Weliswaar niet zo steil als we bij het wandklimmen zouden hebben gedaan, maar het was toch een stevige klim. Dat moet voor soldaten die vroeger het fort bestormden flink afzien zijn geweest. Kom je uitgeput met je zware wapenuitrusting boven, wordt je vervolgens neergemaaid door een boogschutter. Gelukkig stond voor ons de poort open.

(naar binnen)

Binnen het fort was er een route voor ons uitgestippeld zodat we een stuk van de buitenmuren, kerkers, kelders en buitenplaatsjes konden bezichtigen. Dat het fort goed te verdedigen was bleek wel uit het aantal smalle gangetjes, schietgaten, en hoogteverschillen. Aan het eind van de route mochten we "vluchten" via een lange trap naar de voet van de berg. Met meer dan zevenhonderd treden was dit een flinke afdaling. Ik heb meerdere groepsleden horen klagen over trillende benen toen we beneden aankwamen. Zo hebben we toch nog onze klim- en daalactiviteit gehad :-)

(naast een schietgat)

Maar er stond deze dag nog meer op het programma. Omdat er nu al twee activiteiten niet door konden gaan kregen we eind van de middag het touwbanenparcours op de camping als gratis activiteit aangeboden. In boomtoppen boven de camping zijn plateautjes aangebracht die op verschillende manieren met elkaar verbonden zijn. Bijvoorbeeld met wat houten balken die in de lucht hangen, of met een staalkabel. Het is vervolgens de bedoeling om van het ene plateautje naar het andere plateautje te gaan. Ik zag toevallig een tijdje terug het programma Ford Broeillard waarbij de deelnemers via staalkabels hoog in de lucht sleutels moesten zien te bemachtigen. Daar had dit wel wat van weg, maar dan net wat minder extreem (geen leeuwenkooien onder je maar rotsen). Het heeft ook wel wat weg van de klimtoestellen in een speeltuin maar dan serieuzer. Het lijkt misschien wat suf, maar de plateautjes zitten hoog in de bomen die zelf nog eens op heuveltjes staan, zodat je vele meters boven de grond zit. Hoewel dit een van de leukste activiteiten is die we gedaan hebben, heb ik me diverse keren afgevraagd waar ik mee bezig was :-)

(Het begin van het parcours, Peggy en Bram zijn al onderweg)

(Een foto op een makkelijk stukje :-P)

Zo moesten we bijvoorbeeld het riviertje over via een staalkabel voor je handen en een staalkabel voor je voeten. Zodra je halverwege bent wordt het moeilijk omdat de kabels daar wat slapper hangen en je afwisselend voorover of achterover helt. Goed vasthouden dus en ervoor zorgen dat je niet met je voeten van de staalkabel glijdt. Toch was dit absoluut niet gevaarlijk. We droegen een klimgordel met twee karabiners en een tokkelblokje. Met de karabiners konden we ons voortdurend zekeren. Dus als je zou vallen, zou je in ieder geval niet helemaal naar beneden vallen. Het hele zekerwerk is wel een gedoe, want je bent de hele tijd aan het overklikken naar het volgende aanhechtingspunt. Aan de andere kant geeft het ook wel een leuk gevoel om balancerend op een plankje dat tussen twee staalkabels in gespannen zit even rustig je karabiners over te klikken. Het is bovendien een goede oefening om de uitrusting te leren kennen.

(Dennis maakt zich klaar om te tokkelen)

Een aantal korte stukjes tijdens het parcours en een lang stuk aan het eind van het parcours moesten we een stuk tokkelen. Daarvoor plaats je je tokkelblokje op een staalkabel en bevestig je je karabiners aan het tokkelblokje. Daarna ga je aan je zekeringstouwtjes hangen en roets je zo naar de overkant. Dit is verreweg de makkelijkste en leukste manier om bij het volgende plateautje te komen, hoewel het bevestigen van het tokkelblokje wel wat spannend is omdat je dan met twee handen los op het plateautje staat.

Woensdag, 22 aug (raften)

Op woensdag stond raften op het programma. Brian, onze raftinstructeur, had ons de dagen van te voren al warm gemaakt voor het raften. Ik keek er daarom met het nodige verlangen naar uit. Met busjes werden we bij de raftlokatie gebracht. Daar bleek dat er nog twee andere groepen gingen raften en ook nog een groep ging hydrospeeden (op een soort van bodyboard het water door).

Na het aantrekken van wetsuits, zwemvest, helm en het oppikken van een peddel kregen we eerst een half uur instructies door een overenthousiaste instructeur van een ander groepje. Hoe je moet zitten, hoe je moet peddelen, wat je moet doen als je in het water valt, op welke manier je moet zwemmen in verband met stenen op de bodem, wat als de raft omslaat en je komt er onder te zitten, enzovoorts. Ik diende hierbij als voorbeeld om het een en ander mee te demonstreren op het droge. Al deze instructies kwamen nogal dreigend over, maar direct erna kregen we wat groepsspelletjes om het moraal weer op te beuren (zoals peddeltje doorgeven waarbij degene die de peddel laat vallen een dansje moest doen). Helemaal enthousiast konden we, na nog enkele woorden van onze eigen instructeur, konden we eindelijk met de raft het water in!

Gedurende het eerste stuk was het water nog rustig en konden we eerst wat oefenen met het gelijkmatig peddelen en het uitvoeren van instructies van de instructeur. Bijvoorbeeld "in de boot!", wat betekende dat we met z'n alleen in het midden van de raft moesten gaan zitten en ons voorbereiden op een botsing. Ondanks het rustige water werd het al snel duidelijk dat het niet helemaal voorspoeding zou gaan: het water was te laag en we waren te zwaar, zodat we met enige regelmaat op onderwaterrotsen vastliepen.

Aan het einde van het rustige stuk liepen we dusdanig vast dat we alleen met wat gewrik vrij konden komen. Daarbij kantelde de raft gedeeltelijk waarbij een aantal van ons, waaronder Rachel en ik, overboord gingen. Daar gingen we dan, met de stroming mee en met hogere snelheid dan de raft. Het werd al snel duidelijk waarom ons verteld is om met de benen naar voren te zwemmen. Voortdurend knal je tegen stenen op de bodem en de achterkant van je lichaam kan dat beter hebben dan de voorkant (experimenteel vastgesteld, een paar keer met je onderbuik of lager tegen een steen botsen is niet fijn). Na een tijdje kwam ik tegen een rots tot stilstand en kon daar wachten op de raft.

En toen moest het echte werk nog beginnen. Na het eerste stuk werden we allemaal naar de kant gehaald en moesten we oefenen met zwemmen in het wilde water. Dit om te voorkomen dat je in paniek raakt wanneer je uit de raft valt in de wilde tweede helft van de rit. We gebruikten een gekantelde raft als trampoline om een keer met salto het water in te springen.

Tijdens het wilde stuk kwamen we langs een grot waar je wel ik kon komen maar niet meer uit. Daar kregen we als boodschap dat als iemand op het punt staat uit de raft te vallen dat we degene dan meteen aan z'n zwemvest moeten pakken en anders meteen weer binnenboord moesten halen. Dat leverde een aantal benauwde gezichten op, maar achteraf was het water daar rustig genoeg dat er weinig was om je druk over te maken.

Afgezien van diverse stenen waarop we vastliepen ging het wilde stuk voorspoedig. Ik ben niet meer uit de raft gevallen. Een keer ging het bijna mis, ik was aan het vallen ("daar ga ik..."), toen raft en ik tegen een rots aanbotste waardoor ik weer terug de raft in werd geduwd ("...niet"). Gelukkig maar, want het had best pijnlijk geweest als ik tussen de raft en de rots gekomen zou zijn.

Aan het eind was er een paar meter hoge waterval. Daar gingen we snelheid voor maken om er mooi doorheen te vliegen. Helaas liepen we ook hier weer vast, ditmaal op de rand van de waterval. Dusdanig stevig dat we via een reddingstouw van de kant er afgetrokken moesten worden.

Donderdag, 23 aug (canyoning)

De heftigste activiteit hebben we op donderdag gedaan. Het zou eigenlijk een rustdag zijn, maar tegen bijbetaling konden we een extra activiteit gaan doen. Onze instructeur Daan durfde het met ons wel aan om de canyon de Llach te betreden. Deze canyon is in vergelijking met de canyon die we aan het begin van de week gedaan hebben een stuk extremer. Er vallen af en toe wat doden en met enige regelmaat gewonden. Alleen in de week dat wij er waren hebben we al twee keer een reddingshelikopter over zien vliegen die daar gewonden kwam ophalen. Maar er kon ons weinig overkomen als we goed op zouden letten (gladde stenen, etc.), de instructies opvolgen en geen geintjes (zoals duwen) zouden uithalen. Dat het echt wel serieus was bleek wel toen we de dag van te voren geen alcohol mochten drinken en vroeg naar bed moesten gaan.

(Voorbereiding)

Ook ditmaal stonden we vroeg op. De uitgang van de Llach is maar een paar kilometer van de camping vandaan, maar de ingang was minstens een uur rijden met busjes (vooral om op hoogte te komen). Dit keer hoefden we niet te klimmen om bij de ingang te komen, alleen een klein stukje af te dalen. Toch ging dat mij niet makkelijk af. Van mijn rechterhiel had ik door middel van een vierdubbele pleister niet zo heel veel last, maar mijn afgesleten renschoenen bleken niet veel grip meer te bieden. Verzwaard met het dragen van een van de drie zware tassen ben ik diverse malen stukken naar beneden gegleden. Meestal was er een aantal meter lager wel een boom waaraan ik me vast kon grijpen, maar ik ben een keer lelijk gevallen met als gevolg dat ik nog maar met moeite op mijn linkerbeen kon staan. In het begin merkte ik er nog niet veel van, op wat krachtsverlies na, maar het werd steeds erger naarmate we langer in de canyon zaten. Dit, in combinatie met te gladde schoenen, heeft het een en ander aan ongemak en gevaarlijke situaties veroorzaakt, maar gelukkig is alles wel goed gekomen.

De ingang gaf al meteen aan waarmee we te maken hadden: we begonnen met een sprong van negen meter de canyon in. Daarna was het niet meer mogelijk om terug te gaan en moest iedereen de afdaling door de canyon maken wat uiteindelijk een uur of vier zou duren. Net zoals bij de eerst canyon hebben we stukken geklommen, gegleden, gesprongen en door watervallen geabseild. Alleen was het nu wat meer: verder klimmen, langer glijden, van hoger springen en dieper abseilen (in watervallen). Naast al het geklauter en geploeter hebben we ook van de natuur kunnen genieten. Zo'n kloof, uitgesleten door het stromende water gedurende duizenden jaren, ziet er erg mooi uit. Dat heeft wel een indruk achtergelaten. Maar het geklauter en geploeter nog veel meer. Ik zal een aantal hoogtepunten van de afdaling toelichten.

De tweede sprong was meteen de hoogste sprong. In principe konden we in plaats van springen ook abseilen, maar dat kost veel tijd en op elkaar wachten in koud water is ook niet zo'n pretje. Vandaar dat we alleen aan de Llach mochten deelnemen als we ook alles zouden springen. Rachel had wat moeite met springen van grote hoogte, maar wilde toch erg graag mee. Ze had met de instructeur Daan afgesproken dat ze een keer mocht abseilen. Die zou ze dan voor de hoogste sprong bewaren. Daan vertelde haar echter dat dit de hoogste sprong nog niet was, om nadat Rachel gesprongen had, lachend naar beneden te roepen dat het wel de hoogste was (zodat uiteindelijk iedereen van ons alle sprongen gedaan heeft). Deze hoogste sprong was twaalf meter. Dat dit hoog is blijkt wel uit hoe lang het duurt voordat je een plons hoort wanneer je een tas naar beneden gooit. Daar gaan gewoon seconden overheen. Toch was het erg gaaf om de sprong te maken. Aftellen, je schrap zetten, op de juiste manier vallen om vervolgens hard in het water te landen. Toen ik daarna op wat rotsen stond te kijken hoe de anderen naar beneden kwamen vallen zaten m'n benen een klein beetje te trillen. Of dit door de kou of door de adrenaline komt is me nog steeds niet helemaal duidelijk ;-)

Halverwege kwamen we bij een grote glijbaan uit die de "Surprise" werd genoemd. Wat deze verassing was werd pas tijdens het glijden duidelijk. Het begon met een steile glijbaan, maar eindigde in een meter of acht vrije val ("WTF! Ik vlieg!"). Voor degenen die zich niet in konden houden en naar beneden keken stond nog een tweede verassing te wachten: een enorme plons water in het gezicht. Onze instructeur wilde even showen en ging head-first naar beneden. Hij stuiterde helemaal van de adrenaline want deze poging was gelukt, terwijl zijn vorige poging hem wat gekneusde ribben had gekost (verkeerd landen in water komt hard aan).

Een eindje verderop zat een niet eens zo hoge sprong wat voor Paul en mij verkeerd had kunnen aflopen. We moesten van een waterval afspringen, maar zowel Paul als ik hadden daar geen goede grip om te gaan staan. Dus sprongen wij van iets verder. Verspringen is ook een vak, vooral als je wegglijd bij je afzet. Ik hoorde later dat er tussen Pauls helm en de rotsen er beneden hooguit een centimeter heeft gezeten en bij mij hooguit tien centimeter. Zelf heb ik daar niets van gemerkt, maar degenen die na mij sprongen waren er wel van geschrokken.

Uiteindelijk kwamen we zonder al teveel kleerscheuren bij de uitgang van de canyon. Toen bleek dat we alleen nog "even" de canyon uit moesten klimmen. Viel dat even tegen. Op een gegeven moment stond ik met m'n tenen op richeltje, en was de volgende richel een meter verderop, zowel horizontaal als verticaal. Ik bedacht me dat er een makkelijkere manier was om deze overbrugging te maken. Ik controleerde of ik goed gezekerd was en sprong naar beneden om een meter verderop weer omhoog te klauteren. Ach, het heeft wat schrikreacties veroorzaakt, maar het werkte wel :-P

Hoewel dit zeker de heftigste activiteit is geweest gedurende de vakantie, raakte je aan het eind wel gewend aan het glijden, klimmen en springen. Vlak voor het einde begon ik het erg koud te krijgen na vier uur lang in het koude water gelegen te hebben. Ik was daarom blij toen we uit het water konden kruipen. De tocht heeft precies lang genoeg geduurd. Deze dag zal me het langst bijblijven.

Vrijdag, 24 aug (bergwandeling)

De laatste activiteit was een jeepsafari gevolgd door een bergwandeling (hiking) naar drieduizend meter. Stephanie en Priscilla kwamen ons 's ochtends vroeg ophalen, maar we waren nog aan het eten. Na snel onze spullen bij elkaar gesprokkeld te hebben haasten we ons naar de ingang van de camping want de jeeps zouden niet op ons wachten.

(Bij de Jeeps)

Anderhalfuur hobbelen in de jeeps later kwamen we op onze bestemming aan en wandelden we naar boven. Helaas was het nogal mistig. Hoewel het uitzicht mooi was konden we helaas niet ver kijken. Met mijn nieuwe bergschoenen was het naar boven lopen geen probleem. Ik maakte me wel zorgen over de weg terug. M'n stabiliteit was na de Llach niet echt super en het was geen makkelijk pad om over af te dalen. Dat viel achteraf gelukkig mee, vooral omdat wat ervaringen opgedaan bij andere bergen na een tijdje weer terugkwam, zodat ook ik als een geitje naar beneden kon lopen.

De top zelf stak net boven de mist uit. Op zich is dat ook wel apart. Op de paar stenen waar je op zit na was alles wit. Aan de andere kant is het ook wel jammer, want we zouden daar een mooi vergezicht gehad hebben.

(De top)

(Een vogeltje!)

Op de camping kregen we een barbecue als laatste avondmaal. Er stond een pan sangria voor ons klaar. We hebben een poging gewaagd om deze leeg te drinken, maar dat is ons uiteindelijk niet gelukt.

(Brian, onze raftinginstructeur, aan het koken)

Zaterdag, 25 aug (boogschieten)

Het weer was de hele week wat wisselvallig geweest. Af en toe een beetje zon, veel wolken, en af en toe een spatje regen. Net zoals de eerste dag was de laatste dag opvallend zonnig. We hebben onze spullen ingepakt, en daarna een tijd aan het strandje doorgebracht.

(Af en toe konden we ook luieren)

Rond drie uur 's middags gingen we ter afsluiting boogschieten. Op een roos. We mochten wel op zwijntjes schieten als we die zagen, maar dan moesten we wel "zelf de pijl terugzoeken die je misgeschoten hebt". Ik moet, na een aantal keer op de roos geschoten te hebben, zeggen dat het onwaarschijnlijk is met onze schietkunsten om bewegende doelen te raken :)

(Zet die appel maar op je hoofd!)

Aan het eind van de dag werden we naar de bus gebracht. Daar bleek dat er twee bussen zouden komen en dat wij allemaal in de eerste bus ingedeeld waren, op Rachel en Priscilla na. Het was wel jammer dat we niet als gehele groep samen terug konden reizen. Gelukkig zaten we wel bij elkaar in de bus.

(Op weg naar huis :-( )

Zondag, 26 aug (vertrek)

De busreis zelf ging voorspoedig, op een ding na: de airco stond op erg lage temperatuur. Voor Anneke en Jorieke was het nog erger want die zaten bij de airco welke als een gek aan het blazen was. Ik had er helemaal niet op gerekend en heb het de hele reis koud gehad. Een goede leer voor de volgende keer om tenminste een vestje of een dekentje in de handbagage te stoppen.

Al met al is het een erg mooie vakantie geweest. Een leuke groep en goede begeleiding. Dat je aan het eind van de rit wat kleine blessures en verwondingen opgelopen hebt hoort er nu eenmaal bij. Deze tijd zal ik me nog lang herinneren. Het is zeker voor herhaling vatbaar!

Meer foto's
Op Hyves

Bye bye wisdom tooth nr 2

2007-09-13T17:15:00.000+02:00

My first wisdom tooth was removed six weeks ago. The surgeon didn't want to remove the second (and hopefully last) tooth at the same time. Therefore, today number two was scheduled for extraction. To be honest, the first time things went without much complications. But, as they say, that's not a guarantee that the second one will go equally well.

This time I knew the drill. Get sedated, let them rip the tooth out and sew the wound, then taste blood for a week or so. Annoying, but not really a problem. The real nasty thing the first time was getting the sedation which was quite painful (although it only lasted seconds). This second time it didn't hurt at all. I could feel the needle being moved into position and the liquid dispatched, but no pain. I have to say that just before this event I did some two and a half hours of running and one hour of swimming, so I was probably bursting with endorphins (painkillers made by your own body) ;-)

I'm now waiting for the sedation to wear off. I do not expect pain, except maybe some complains from my stomach because I am not able to eat for some time....

Het leed dat badkamerverbouwing heet

2007-09-10T22:32:00.000+02:00

Kom je, zoals ik, twee weken geleden terug van vakantie, dan zijn er een aantal dingen waar je naar uit kijkt: je eigen bed en eens lekker douchen. Niet dat de douches op vakantie slecht waren. Maar het is wel eens lekker om onder een douche te staan die je niet om de tien seconden opnieuw aan hoeft te zetten en waar je altijd warm water hebt. Maar dat van die douche zat er voor mij niet in: de badkamer is in verbouwing. In plaats daarvan hebben we de oude ijzeren badkuip met pijn en moeite naar buiten gesleept en kon er gedoucht worden met een gieter warm water. Die douches op de camping waren zo gek nog niet ;-)

Nu, twee weken later, zou je wel denken dat die badkamer ondertussen klaar is. Dat is helaas niet het geval. De "vaklui" hebben er nogal een potje van gemaakt: de douchecabine is zo scheef gemonteerd dat de deur niet dicht kan, de sifon van de wasbak zit scheef, de stop voor de afvoer was niet goed gemonteerd, en het e.a. is verkeerd gekit zodat er water van de douche achter de tegeltjes kan komen. Ofwel, douchen is voorlopig niet mogelijk. En als ik zie hoe bedenkelijk de "vaklui" kijken, dan zal het nog wel even duren voordat alles in orde is.

De overloop en trap hebben we ter bescherming tegen stof bedekt met wat sterk papier. Ook de mand van onze hond hebben we weggehaald om wat extra ruimte te maken. Alleen snapt onze domme hond dat niet en claimt alles wat op een kleedje lijkt als zijn mand:

Tot slot maakt m'n zusje blijkbaar af en toe gebruik van mijn wasbak want her en der in mijn kamer kom ik make-up doosjes tegen...

Vacation aftermath

2007-08-28T21:09:00.000+02:00

I'm back from vacation! We had a wonderful week with many challenging activities. The only downside was the weather. Mountain biking and mountain climbing had to be canceled due to the rain. But we had our share of fun with rafting, two times canyoning, and hiking.

I'm also still in one piece. My arms and legs are full of small scratches and tiny flesh wounds. Rocks are somehow a bit harder than my skin ;) Anyway, once I have move time I'll write a bit more about the vacation.

Now, I have to decide what I am going to do the coming weeks. The 10 km Utrecht Singelloop is approaching (October 7). I would like to start training for it, because I want to run it at 13 km/hour or perhaps 14 km/hour. Unfortunately, a damaged part of my old running shoes caused a blister on my right heel. It grew worse during the week, up till the point that I can barely walk with a straight face anymore. Guess running is out of the question for a while in order for it to heal. Ah well, too bad, but there are other ways to work on my condition, such as spinning, and the cross trainer at fitness. I'll be ready!

Fun with a Buff

2007-08-14T22:36:00.000+02:00

I am a bit inactive on my blog at the moment, and will be the coming two weeks because I'm going on vacation this Friday. Ten days of outdoor activities (mountain climbing, abseiling, rafting, mountain biking, etc) lie ahead of me. These activities take place near the French place called Espira de Conflent at the start of the Pyrénées. Since this is my first outdoor-type vacation, I bought some additional gear. Some of it can come in handy, such as a small med pack, a tiny pillow (I knew it would be small, but I never expected it to be *that* small), and a micro-fiber towel (a requirement after reading the "Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy"). Other things I bought are utterly useless but fun, such as my National Geographic Running Buff.

What is a Buff anyway? There are many translations of the word buff in the dictionary, none match exactly, but it is about a piece of microfiber cloth that can be folded and worn in different ways for different purposes. This type of cloth has the advantage of transporting moisture easily and has a very fine weave so it does not irritate or damage your skin. Handy beneath a helmet, or as a headband to prevent sweat from dropping in the eyes. It may not be that useless after all.

I experimented a bit with it. Folding this piece of cloth is not entirely trivial. There was a page with instructions included, but those were a bit difficult to comprehend or only showed the end result. I managed to get a few of them done however. See the results of some attempts below. Later I discovered that there is actually a website with movies showing how to do it in proper way. Definitely have to check that out.

Headband

I always have problems with the earphones of my mp3 player. They never stick to my ears during running, either due to impact vibration, or blown away by the wind. This headband presents a simple solution:

Pirate

Yarr! Become a pirate in a matter of seconds. I do not know the use for it, but it certainly looks cool:

Now I just have to find out how to fold it the right way. It is not exactly right at the moment. There is an online demonstration that shows an easy trick for it.

Bandit

I am not thinking about robbing a bank, but...

Actually, the cloth is thin enough to breath through and can act as a dust filter this way.

Wrist

It is easy to take it with your, by just putting it on your wrist. It is as light as a feather anyway:

Cap

Or fold it as a cap to protect your head against the sun, or to wear below a helmet:

If you know some other uses for a Buff, feel free to comment :)

KRO Nationale Karaktertest 2005

2007-08-07T22:44:00.000+02:00

Op nu.nl staat een berichtje dat de de website van de KRO een test bevat met een vraag over een al lang overleden persoon. Je kan je afvragen wat de nieuwswaarde van zoiets is, maar het nodigde mij uit om eens die test in te vullen met het volgende resultaat:

Performer 1 :o
Romanticus 2 :o

Conclusie: daar klopt natuurlijk geen bal van :P

Nu moet ik hierbij zeggen dat de titels wat misleidend zijn. Zo is een performer iemand die de beste wilt zijn. Maar ik wil helemaal niet de beste zijn, dat ben ik namelijk al! ;) ;) ;)

Leuk! Verstandskiezen trekken...

2007-07-25T16:19:00.001+02:00

Vorig jaar zei de tandarts tegen me dat ik beter mijn verstandskiezen kan laten trekken door een kaakchirurg omdat ze niet verder zullen groeien. Kiezen die maar half doorkomen zijn moeilijk schoon te houden en dat zou in de toekomst tot narigheid kunnen leiden. Beter op een gunstig tijdstip de kiezen laten verwijderen in plaats van met haast als het ooit pijn gaat doen, aldus de tandarts. Een gunstig tijdstip vinden bleek moeilijk te zijn. Het verwijderen van verstandskiezen kan resulteren in nogal nare en pijnlijke neveneffecten waardoor je enkele dagen niet erg fit bent. Het is daarom erg makkelijk om excuses te vinden: ik moest eerst een aantal maanden afstuderen, vervolgens kon het niet omdat ik net een aantal maanden aan het werk was, daarna was ik met mijn marathon training bezig, en tot slot stond mijn uitstapje naar Cambridge in de weg. Dat is allemaal verleden tijd. Geen excuses meer. Dus ben ik afgelopen donderdag, na een jaar van rekken, naar de kaakchirurg geweest.

Ik keek niet bepaald uit naar vorige week donderdag. De horror-verhalen die je de dagen van te voren van mensen hoort maken je niet vrolijker. Bovendien moest ik 's ochtends eerst naar de normale tandarts voor controle. Als ik ergens een hekel aan heb dan is het wel de jaarlijkse afspraak bij de tandarts. Een half uur tot een uur wachten in de wachtkamer, om hopelijk na vijf minuten inspectie weer buiten de deur te staan. Deze keer duurde het wat langer omdat het tijd was voor een rontgenfoto die om de drie jaar gemaakt wordt. Gelukkig was was alles in orde, en zag de dag er opeens een stuk zonniger uit. Zelfs de kaakchirurg leek niet meer zo'n obstakel.

Mijn ouders gingen mee zodat ze me terug konden rijden omdat ik daar zelf niet meer toe in staat zou kunnen zijn. Of ik zou op de heenweg wel eens per ongeluk de weg naar het ziekenhuis kwijt kunnen raken. Dus daar liep ik dan door de gangen van het ziekenhuis als een Saddam Hussein op weg naar mijn executie, geëscorteerd door twee beulen. Na het halve ziekenhuis afgelopen te hebben om mezelf te registreren was het wachten aangebroken. Het foldertje dat ik bij registratie kreeg stelde niet gerust. Er was een hele lijst aan complicaties die konden optreden met daarbij de stappen die je kon nemen om het effect ervan te verminderen. Er stond bijvoorbeeld dat de zwelling van de wang na een dag of drie op z'n hoogst zal zijn. Een dag of drie! Ai!

De procedure begon met het maken van een röntgenfoto van de hele kaak. Dat is dus foto nummer twee, maar wees niet ongerust, ik ben nog niet gemuteerd in een meedogenloos monster. Ik werd daarna op een tandartsstoel in de isoleercel...eeh... een erg klein hokje geplaatst waar ik moest wachten totdat de arts mij een verdoving zou geven. De arts kwam binnen, deed de deur dicht met luide klik, stelde zich voor en ramde zonder waarschuwing vooraf de spuit erin. En nog een. Een nogal vervelend gevoel wat gelukkig maar een paar seconden duurt. Het intrekken van de verdoving duurt even en ik werd alleen gelaten: "probeer je te ontspannen". Ok, no problem, will do. Langzaam voel je dat je leven aan je lichaam onttrokken wordt. Uiteindelijk is een helft van je wang, kaak en tong wat gevoelloos. Praten gaat was lastig. Na een tijdje gaarkoken werd ik naar een andere kamer gebracht voor de daadwerkelijke ingreep. Dat was eigenlijk een anti-climax. Je krijgt een doek over je hoofd zodat je niets kan zien. Vervolgens krijg je te horen dat er veel druk op je kaak komt te staan, maar dat dat normaal is. Wat gerommel in je mond gevolgd door wat acties met naald en draad later en je kan weer weg.

De ingreep valt achteraf wel mee, maar de nasleep is vervelend. Je hebt de hele tijd een bloedsmaak in je mond en de belofte dat pijn zal volgen wanneer de verdoving uitgewerkt is. Ik kreeg wat receptjes mee voor pijnstillers die ik bij de huisarts kon halen om in te nemen nadat de verdoving uitgewerkt was. Eenmaal thuisgekomen ben ik in de zon gaan liggen, en zat half in slaap te wachten tot de verdoving uitgewerkt was. Toen ik merkte dat de verdoving begon weg te trekken, maar ik niet veel meer pijn voelde dan een simpel vleeswondje heb ik maar besloten om geen pijnstillers in te nemen. Wat eten betreft heb ik het de eerste dag maar bij wat water, melk en papjes gehouden. De volgende dag kon ik weer normaal eten. En nu een week later kan ik ook de nog steeds herstellende kant van mijn gebit weer gewoon gebruiken.

Dus achteraf viel het wel mee. Helaas wilde de arts niet allebei mijn onderste verstandskiezen tegelijk trekken. De verdoving is daar te gemeen voor en het type kies te lastig. Dus moet ik over een paar weken weer. En behaalde resultaten in het verleden bieden geen garantie voor de toekomst. Bah!

Microsoft Research Summer School 2007

2007-07-14T20:05:00.000+02:00

Last week has been an interesting week: the Microsoft PhD summer school 2007. Microsoft Research finances me to do my research, and they organized this summer school event to get the PhD students they finance together for some socializing and networking. In fact, the advice we continuously received was to talk to as much researchers everywhere and anywhere as possible (even those that are in way different fields of research) and to put in a lot of effort to build social networks. I've met the other PhD students sponsored by Microsoft Research, a lot of PhD students from the university of Cambridge, and several researchers and top managers of Microsoft Research. We've had discussions, lectures, and did several fun things together. Read on for a summary of the week.

Videos and pictures of this event will become available at a later time.

Monday, 9 July 2007

I left my bed at 05:00 to go to Schiphol airport where my plane would travel to Stansted airport. It took some time to locate the check-in desk. After ignoring the advice from my mother to ask some people where the check-in desks of Easy Jet are located, I discovered that there is a corridor in a dark corner that leads to a third hall with check-in desks. Which, unsurprisingly, is the place where the desks of Easy Jet are hidden.

(testing my patience)

After waiting, checking in, and waiting some more, I could go to the gate. I first had to pass through security. There is a new system at Schiphol called the body scan. This system caused a bit of an uproar because it can see through clothes. The other thing is that it requires you to stand in a stupid pose with your arms in the air. For some reason, I was the only one of the hundreds of people that I saw go through this scanner that had to go through it twice. They couldn't get a good scan of me the first time. I wonder about the results of the second scan, because it took an awful lot of time before they let me through. They didn't search me though.

Ironically, with this strict security policy being in effect, they failed to discover that I had a water bottle of half a liter in my bag. I had entirely forgotten about that myself. It is not allowed to carry a casing that can contain more than 100 ml of liquid, and all these cases have to be put in a transparent bag. Lucky for them that I only carried water...

The flight was OK, as well as taking the train to Cambridge. In Cambridge, I had to go to a college called New Hall, for registration and for my room. According to my low-resolution map, New Hall was just a few mile away from the railway station, so I decided to walk to it (I did not have enough English money for a bus or taxi and didn't see an ATM yet). Apparently, I left the railway station the wrong way, and ended up following a cycle road towards the city center. After some random roaming around, I arrived at some park called Jesus Green and by accident took the correct road from there. After walking for a while, I started to get worried and checked my map, just to find out that I was within twenty meters of the destination.

A James Bond-like inspection of my room indicated that the rooms contained two beds, a big desk, a shower and a toilet. Excellent! There was only a slight problem that my universal power plug for charging my laptop and telephone didn't fit. It had the right shape though when I compared it with the power plug of one of the lights. By bending the plug a bit and applying a lot of force and effort, I managed to get it in in one piece.

At 16:00 a bus was waiting to transport us to Microsoft Research, where we received an introductory talk about the event and could have a quick chat with each other. The event had a great start with a Go Karting evening (picture of the track).

I did not kart before in my life, so this was quite an experience. We first had to put on a load of clothes: overall, raincoat, gloves, and a helmet. The helmet was rather tight such that the frame of my glasses was bent a bit while putting it on.

We were divided in twelve teams, with me in team Black. The people in my team were a bit skeptical at first and didn't weren't eager to drive, so I was the one to start first. It took me a while to get used to the kart. But I gradually went faster and faster, noticing that it is very well possible to slide through the corners at high speeds. Definitely lots of fun, but tiring as well. Somebody was supposed to chance with me after twenty minutes, but apparently, my team members went for something to eat and the first one to replace me turned up after half an hour. Soaking with sweat, I was glad that I could pass on the kart to the next team member (and take something to eat myself as well).

After a while, it started to rain and thunder, and the track became very slippery. I heard from the people driving at that moment that it was next to impossible to drive the kart. Definitely a lot of fun, but racing was out of the question. The rain cleared up after a while and the race continued. In the end, our team ended third and we got a small trophy as award. A great way to finish the first day.

Tuesday, 10 July 2007

We had to hurry a bit early in the morning. Lunch was served at 07:30. It was a typical English breakfast with baked eggs and sausages. At first, I thought that this food would be very heavy on the stomach, but it actually tasted very good. There wasn't much time for eating though, because the bus picked us up at 07:45 to transport us to the 'Judge Business School' for some talks.

The Judge Business School is a building with an interesting architecture. It is painted in fancy colors, and there are many open floors connected with balconies and stairs everywhere. It's the kind of building you typically see in Harry Potter-like movies. That's rather unexpected for a business school where you expect everything to be boring and formal. The same applied to the talks: although serious, they were not of the usual bad quality that you expect from business people, and some were actually very interesting. Although I'm still wondering about the purpose of lecturing us researchers about starting up businesses and meeting up with rich investors.

The first talk was presented by Hermann Hauser. He's the founder of several important companies, including the company that designs the ARM processors that are put in many telephones. He told us about the business models they used in his companies and how they contributed to the success of his companies. He had several funny anecdotes about Bill Gates. Another interesting talk was given by Mike Carr. He is the directory of research of the company 'BT'. It sounded like a big company, although I had no idea what company it was, until I later found out that 'BT' stands for British Telecom. He talked about how to create spin-off companies and how to get that important first customer. We went to computer lab of Microsoft Research after lunch for another series of talks. The last talk was about how to give a good presentation. That turned out to be a very good talk, with several interesting points to take in consideration the next time I have to prepare a talk.

We closed the day with punting on the river Cam and a dinner. I think punting is very familiar to dutch people as it closely resembles a 'schouw voortduwen met een polstok'. The water provided us with an excellent view at many of the massive college-buildings of Cambridge. I had already seen some of the buildings when I was in Cambridge last December, but the view from the water is different. The architecture of buildings doesn't really interest me, but I have to admit that these buildings look impressive. We all got back safely from the punting trip, and unlike some of the other tourists, we didn't fall into the water...

Wednesday, 11 July 2007

Aside from a lot of breaks (more cookies!) and several talks at Microsoft Research, there were basically two main events on Wednesday. The first event consisted of discussion sessions. We were partitioned in groups of around six people and each group had to discuss a certain topic. Computer science education in our case. Rick Rashid (the big boss of Microsoft Research) was leading our discussion group. Contrary to what many people expected, he didn't deviate from the theme that much, although he did offer to talk about Star Trek instead. We got one important piece of advice: never focus that much on a single research topic such that you get stuck.

The second event was, plainly put, extremely boring. There was a social networking event in the Judge Business School where we talked with people that are starting up their first businesses, followed by a two hour panel-session, where a panel of 4 'big' venture capitalists answered questions filed by these first-timer entrepreneurs. At the time of writing, I still don't have a clue why this would be of interest of us, aside from assuring that I do not want to have anything to do with starting up companies and socializing with these tie-bearers. The evening was not lost however, because we went with our own group to a pub, and that was great fun.

Getting back inside my room was a bit difficult though. It had absolutely nothing to do with the drinks of the pub we visited. The zipper of my wallet broke and I couldn't open my wallet anymore. The key of my room was inside my wallet. Fortunately, unlike in cryptography, brute force turned out to be a very effective strategy to retrieve the key, although it left my wallet permanently damaged state.

Thursday, 12 July 2007

We spent the Thursday at Microsoft Research, and attended a talk about mind-reading machines. We were not attached to some machines and mentally reprogrammed to become Microsoft slaves in case you wonder. We just like Microsoft Office and everybody should buy Windows Vista. No, the topic was inferring a person's emotions from a two second video clip of a person's face. A lot of psychology is involved to map facial reactions to a probability of a certain emotion. Remarkably enough, this system perceives emotions almost as well as people do.

The remainder of the day was filled with poster presentations. We got a chance to present our research to our fellow PhD researchers and some people of Microsoft Research. In my case, Simon Peyton Jones and Erik Meijer (the self-proclaimed Mad Scientist, who worked at the Software Technology group at Utrecht before he defected to Microsoft Research) showed up to ask some questions. My poster, carefully designed for my fellow PhD students who are from different fields, did not contain the level of detail suitable for people in the field, but at least it was a starting point for them to ask more detailed instructions. The poster presentations were exhaustive though and causing a sore throat, but they were very useful to get to know what kind of research the other people are doing. In fact, it would have been nice had these poster presentations be earlier during the summer school.

Friday, 13 July 2007

The word lecture marathon probably is the best summary for this day. We attended five talks given by researchers of Microsoft Research. Simon Peyton Jones gave the first talk, and actually a very good one. I liked his enthusiasm and his energic way of presenting the contents. Norman Ramsey, the current chair of the ICFP conference, also attended Simon's talk. I never saw him before, but he bombarded us authors of accepted ICFP papers with several rather large emails, so it was nice to see him in person. The other talks were somewhat out of my field of interest. Fortunately, we had breaks of half an hour between the talks. With cookies!

A barbecue was organized at the end of the day. Some of the people of Microsoft Research turned up for a quick bite, such as Erik Meijer and Luca Cardelli, and several people that did an internship at Microsoft Research. They said that they could get chocolate for free, which is of course a good argument to look for an internship there.

Saturday, 14 July 2007

I headed home on Saturday. The day started with a bit of a headache. Each bed in my room had two pillows. A thin and a thicker one. I normally slept on the thicker one only, but accidentally took the thin one the day before, resulting in a funny feeling when waking up. A shower solved this problem though. Then the next problem presented itself: how to take my poster home. The casing is too big to put in my bag, and carrying it separately is not allowed. Therefore, I just left the casing in my room, and folded the poster to fit it into my bag. Having solved the packing problem, I went for breakfast. I unexpectedly encountered one of my fellow students there. He should have been in a flight to Germany but accidentally fell asleep while waiting for a taxi to bring him to the railway station. I didn't have this problem, because I walked to the railway station.

The walk to the railway station turned out to be interesting. According to the map, it's just a straight road all the way to the railway station. That certainly wasn't the case. For some reason, I zigzagged along this road, but never encountered the road itself. In the picture below, the red route is the one I took, the orange one is the one I was supposed to take:

Fortunately, right at the moment I started to worry, there was a map of Cambridge in sight. Apparently, I was walking on a road parallel to the road I had to take. Although my course corrections didn't seem to help a lot. Until at some time later I encountered the Judge Business Institute, which according to my low-resolution map isn't that far away from the railway station. It's actually funny, I wondered the day before why they marked this building on my map in the first place and now I found a use for it. After that, locating the railway station was straightforward. In the end, my walk which was supposed to take one hour max, now took one and a half hours. Not that it mattered, I had enough time.

After a while, I arrived at the airport, checked in and had to go to the security check. This time I made sure that my bag was airport-compliant. Contrary to a large group of Portuguese kids that either had too much hand luggage or too heavy and were holding up the checks. In fact, I spent an entire hour waiting in line just to get to the checkpoint. Even worse, these annoying kids did not immediately take their hand luggage with them, causing the luggage to pile up to the X-Ray scanner itself. When my laptop came through, it hit the pile of luggage and the impact forced it to the edge. I saw it happening, so I ran to the machine, jumped halfway over the fence, and grabbed my laptop at the very instant it was about to fall to the ground. Obviously, the guys of security weren't that happy about it, so I grabbed my bag as well, and left quickly, avoiding their eyes.

The next obstacle is the shoes-check, but for some reason I didn't have to put my shoes through the scanner. At least, they didn't say anything when I and several others just walked past instead of queuing up in the lanes of the shoe-scanners.

Finally, I arrived at the gate, just to hear that my flight has been delayed one hour. I opened up my laptop and started writing this blog post. I quickly discovered that I can't write anything at all when people next to me are watching my screen. My wireless card picked up an access point. My browser was redirected to some sign-in page. Bored, I clicked on the sign-in button and, unexpectedly, I got signed in. Email, MSN, IRC, everything just worked! So I read my email, committed a bugfix for the UUAG system, and boarded the plane. After a fast flight and a bumpy touch down, I was finally home!

The trip to Cambridge was a nice experience overall. It is somewhat unfortunate that I won't see many of the other PhD students again. Some of them I might encounter at conferences in the near future, although most work in totally different areas. On the other hand, the event was exhaustive in a way, so I'll be glad to have regular working-weeks again :)

Duck tales

2007-06-30T19:54:00.000+02:00

"Now all listen carefully..."

Faculteitsuitje

2007-06-25T22:46:00.001+02:00

Dinsdag 19 juni was het dan eindelijk zo ver: de dag van het faculteitsuitje. Er was nogal wat reclame voor gemaakt, maar wel onder een sluier van geheimzinnigheid. De dag van te voren werd een tipje van de sluier opgelicht via wat last-minute emailtjes van de organisatoren: Slinger en Nieske. Om half tien verzamelen op Utrecht CS (eindelijk een keer uitslapen!) en wandelschoenen aantrekken. Het was achteraf dan ook niet zo'n verstandige keuze van mij om mijn normale zomerschoentjes in plaats van mijn comfortabele hardloopschoenen aan te trekken. Dat heeft me een aantal dagen lang pijnlijke voeten opgeleverd. Maar niet getreurd, want het was een leuke dag. Zelfs het weer was ons prettig gezind: de hele week was het slecht weer, maar tijdens het uitje scheen de zon.

Verzamelen

We begonnen de dag op het station. Ik was er een half uurtje te vroeg want mijn bus sloot niet goed aan op de verzameltijd. Maar na een tijdje zag ik al wat bekende gezichten en kreeg ik een treinkaartje in mijn handen geduwd. Daarop stond de lokatie waar het eerste deel van de dag zich ging afspelen: het spoorwegmuseum aan de maliebaan. Daar was ik zelf nog nooit geweest dus dat was wel leuk. We zaten langer in de trein dan dat het lopen is naar de maliebaan toe, maar de rit gaf in ieder geval het idee dat we echt er opuit gingen.

De foto's zijn gemaakt door Gerard Tel. Voor al zijn foto's, zie zijn fotoalbum.

Spoorwegmuseum

Eenmaal bij het spoorwegmuseum aangekomen begonnen we met wat koffie en een koekje, nog een koekje, en eeh, nog eentje om het af te leren. Vervolgens kregen we een rondleiding door het museum. Best indrukwekkend om te zien hoe primitief maar toch knap gemaakt de grote oude stoomtreinen zijn en onder wat voor omstandigheden mensen vroeger met de trein reisden. We kwamen nog een mysterieus karretje tegen:

Na wat wetenschappelijk onderzoek uitgevoerd te hebben (lees: aan alles rukken wat los en vast zit) kwamen we er achter dat het een oud brandweerkarretje was.

Na de rondleiding kregen we een theatervoorstelling. Hoewel deze voorstelling voornamelijk bedoeld was voor kinderen, was het voor ons ook leuk om te kijken. Een exentriek vrouwtje ging op reis met de Orient Express en liet zien hoe het er aan toe gaat tijdens de reis in die tijd:

Na de lunch liepen we wat rond door het museum. Samen met Bastiaan en Geert-Jan probeerden we nog de wissel van een oud treinspoor te bedienen, maar de bediening van de wissel zat helaas op een kinder/phd/postdoc-slot.

Uiteindelijk hadden we alles wel gezien en stond de trein op ons te wachten om ons terug te brengen voor het tweede onderdeel van de dag: een puzzeltocht door het centrum van Utrecht.

Puzzeltocht

We werden opgesplits in groepen en moesten antwoorden op vragen zien te vinden om zodoende de titel van slimste groepje in de wacht te slepen. Ons groepje bestond uit respectievelijk Gerard, ik, Jurriaan, Edith, Geert-Jan, en Bouke:

Hoewel het kijken naar de camera wat moeilijk voor ons bleek, was het met de intelligentie van ons groepje wel goed gesteld. Gerard ken ik voornamelijk als een van de beste docenten uit de tijd dat ik studeerde. Jurriaan was mijn afstudeerbegeleider. Met Edith had ik te maken toen ik allerlei formulieren moest invullen wat betreft voor mijn aanstelling aan de universiteit. Of preciezer: dat was de bedoeling, maar daar kwam ik pas achter nadat ik een kwartier met de verkeerde persoon had gepraat. Geert-Jan had ik toevallig de vrijdag een week eerder voor het eerst ontmoet. Hij was namelijk de aanvoerder van het team van ons departement tijdens het voetbaltournooi tussen het personeel van de faculteiten van de UU. Daar heb ik toen ingevallen (niet dat ik kon voetballen, maar er was niemand anders). Bouke had ik echter nog nooit eerder gezien. Om het gemiddelde IQ niet te ver naar beneden te halen, besloot ik maar om voor pakezel te spelen en de anderen het denkwerk te laten verrichten ;)

We hebben werkelijk het onderste uit de kan gehaald om de vragen perfect te beantwoorden. De opgaven bestonden uit twee type vragen: vragen die je alleen kan beantwoorden door een bepaald gebouw/beeld/object in utrecht aan onderzoek te onderwerpen, en vragen die zonder context beantwoord kunnen worden, zoals wat vragen uit een intelligentie-test en een sudoko-puzzel. We parkeerden de specialist Jurriaan op het domplein om de sudoko-puzzel op te lossen en keken maar eens tactisch naar de opgaven:

Naar een cafe gaan was een optie:

Maar ja, je wilt toch winnen he, en aangezien Jurriaan de sudoko-puzzel al af had gingen we verder op onderzoek uit:

In de huidige informatiemaatschappij sta je niet meer alleen, dus hadden Edith en Geert-Jan diverse mobiele hulplijnen paraat staan om wat Wikipedia-vragen te beantwoorden.

Uiteindelijk kwamen we nog een mystery-guest tegen die ons korte-termijn geheugen ging testen. Dit geheimzinnige figuur vertelde een verhaal met een onzinnige hoeveelheid aan informatie. Vervolgens moesten we een lijst met vragen invullen. Terwijl de mystery-guest zijn verhaal hield, dacht ik er nog aan om mijn mp3-speler op record te zetten. Een tijdje onopvallend in je broekzakken proberen te graaien wekt toch wat merkwaardige blikken op, dus daar heb ik maar vanaf gezien. Maar alle hoop was nog niet verloren! Want Gerard had met zijn fototoestel het hele gesprek opgenomen. Ironisch genoeg hebben we het toch nog voor elkaar gekregen om een van de vragen verkeerd in te vullen...

Pannenkoeken eten

Na al dit gepuzzel waren we behoorlijk uitgedroogd en uitgehongerd. Uiteindelijk eindigden we 's avonds in een pannenkoekenrestaurant. Jurriaan en Slinger probeerden mij te overtuigen om een pannenkoek met kaas, vlees en ander beleg te nemen. Echter, dan kan je het meteen ook wel pizza noemen, dus was ik eigenwijs en ging ik principieel voor een echte hollandse pannenkoek met allen wat suiker erop. Helaas was deze pannenkoek wel binnen drie happen op. Terwijl Jurriaan en Slinger een heel bord vol hadden...

Conclusie

Het personeelsuitje was leuk. Misschien niet zo spectaculair als mountainbiking in de mijnen van Limburg gevolgd door een spookhuisbezoek wat ik van iemand anders hoorde, maar het was geen dag die ik had willen missen. En vast een stuk leuker dan een schilderij maken of bomen hakken ;)

Mysteries and the 10th ICFP Contest

2007-06-23T20:29:00.000+02:00

The worlds most challenging programming contest is coming closer. Forget about the national, European or world programming contests. Those are for sissies that like to brag about their non-existent assembler skills. The ICFP contest is for Real* Programmers: 72 hours of non-stop programming to fight for the title "Extremely cool bunch of hackers" and to claim your programming language X to be the "Language of choice". Expect the best groups of programmers around the world to participate. Do you and your friends dare to stand up to this challenge? Then join the contest in the weekend of July 20 - 23!
Website: www.icfpcontest.org.

The contest is organized by the Software Technology department of the Universiteit Utrecht this year. Which means that we are working our asses off to create a challenging task (my colleagues more than me of course). Weird things are happing here in Utrecht though. It is as if someone or something is trying to influence us. Several weeks ago, there were rumors about our network and servers overloading because of a huge and strange spam message. That's not that spectacular, but a few days later we all had to unplug our computers during the weekend because there would be 1000 volts on the power grid to test it. Yeah right. And how to explain the network problems as of late (claimed to be causes by malfunctioning routers).

My colleagues Johan Jeuring and Bastiaan Heeren managed to get their hands on the spam message and uncovered something. The stream of data appears to contain pictures in a heavily encrypted form. Several members of the team joined the investigation and manage to decrypt some of the pictures. These pictures... they... they... make you question your sanity. Johan Jeuring documents everything on his blog, but here are a few links to these pictures:

Sleeping beauty?
Objects in Space?
Decrypted!
Interstellar public transport?
Whither, fairest, art thou running?
Core dump?
Close encounters of Arrow kind?

But don't worry. We know our responsibilities and will have the contest ready by the 20th of July, even with these kind of distractions. Just remember your own responsibilities: be there!

Not only the contestants will have a hard 72 hours. We organizers will be active in these hours to deal with unforeseen problems. How to stay awake for 72 hours? I'm not going to use fake stuff such as coffee, cola or red bull. These types of drinks are contaminated with bad stuff such as taurine. No, Real Programmers need Real Stuff: if I use anything at all, it will be top quality caffeine-based sport drinks, such as Red Max. If one is already guaranteed to keep you awake, consider a box with 24 of these things...

(*) Go watch the Polish-spoken movie Avalon if you want to know what 'Real' is.

'Werknemer mag niet meer dan 23 kilo tillen'

2007-06-18T23:35:00.000+02:00

Blijkbaar mag je als werknemer niet meer dan 23 kilo tillen en dat is blijkbaar een "historische gebeurtenis":

Het arrest is gebaseerd op de uit Amerika afkomstige NIOSH-formule. Deze formule wordt gebruikt om te kunnen beoordelen of bepaalde tilsituaties risico's met zich meebrengen voor de veiligheid en gezondheid van de werknemers. Een berekening met deze formule toont aan dat een tilnorm van 23 kilo geldt.
(bron)

Het opmerkelijke hieraan vind ik de limiet van 23 kilo, want dit lijkt me nogal laag. Het is moeilijk in te schatten hoe 'zwaar' iets van 23 kilo is, maar als ik zie dat ik bij fitness af en toe traploop met twee keer 10 kilo in mijn handen, dan lijkt het me dat als je echt tilt (op de juiste manier), dat je met gemak meer dan het dubbele moet kunnen tillen. Bovendien lijkt me dat de 'tilbaarheid' van een gewicht nogal afhangt van de vorm/massaverdeling van het te tillen object. Het valt bijvoorbeeld tegen om mijn 19" crt scherm te tillen (en veel zwaarder dan 23 kilo is hij niet), voornamelijk omdat het moeilijk vast te grijpen is en door de omvang het zwaartepunt ver van het lichaam af ligt. Het beschadigen van je rug lijkt me vooral het gevolg van het verkeerd tillen en niet van te zwaar tillen.

Ik kan me zo voorstellen dat dit voor mensen in de bouw een vervelende regel gaat worden. Van die potige kerels die nu voor dat zakje cement of die ijzeren pijp die ze normaal 'even' over hun schouder leggen, opeens de hulp van een collega moeten inschakelen. "Heeej Jan, leg die telefoon nou 'ns effe neer en help me dit pijpie sjouwe"

Running the Kikarun

2007-06-10T18:54:00.000+02:00

Today I did the Kikarun, a 10 km running match. Actually, it is not a real match, because there is no winner. We all ran to raise funds for the Kika organization. The result? A great success with over two thousand participants and result of 75.477 euros!

The run took place in Spaarnwoude near Amsterdam. The area is nice for running: around lakes, through forest, along pastures, and over a small hill. The weather was fine as well, although a little bit of sun and a lower humidity would have been nice.

We were supposed to start around 11:00, but the start was delayed half an hour, because there were still people registering for the run. Normally, registration close s some time before the start, but this event is all about money, and each registration counts for ten euro, so the organizers waited with the start. I hate waiting so I had plenty of time to show off with the running-shirt that I bought:

I like the shirt. It fits perfectly, and has nice colors. A lot of people bought them, and all those rows of orange people at the start just looks cool.

The bad thing about waiting more than a half hour is that I had to do my warm-up again. Once they announced the real start time, I ran for a few minutes, and joined the back of the line of waiting people. The start itself can best be described as utter chaos. There were four groups: 10 km in 50 minutes (my group), 10 km in more than 50 minutes, 5 km in 25 minutes, and 5 km in more than 25 minutes. These groups were supposed to start after each other with 15 minutes in between. Apparently, due to the delays, everybody started at the same time, and I was at the very back behind all those slow people :(

In fact, the first few minutes, the only thing I could do was just walking:

The road was too small and there were too many people in front of me. I wanted to run more than 13 km/h but I was stick behind people that ran less than 11 km/h. I tried to get past them, which is a sort of dance: I had to wait for an opening between people in front of me, accelerate, jump/turn through, and brake for the next wall of people. Not that it helped a lot and I could forget about setting a fast time. Pushing yourself through masses of people has its elements of fun though. I reminds me a bit of my neck-breaking maneuvers on ice skates or on a bike. Although not everybody appreciated it. "Hee, loop me niet voor de voeten!". Biatch! :P

We went uphill after about five kilometer, and entered a part of the route with broader roads. The people also fanned out a bit. I could finally gain some speed. I encountered the famous Dutchman Hein Vergeer (famous distance ice skater, although more recently known due to ice dancing on dutch television) near the top of the hill. There were more dutch celebrities participating with this event, although he is the only one I recognized, barely.

The density of the people increased even more, and their speed increased. I could finally run 13 km/h the last four kilometers, and slightly faster when I hopped from one group of people to the next. My parents were waiting for me near the end of the route, but had some difficulty taking a picture of me (although I waved):

This last part went great. I seemed to fly the last kilometers. I felt a bit of disappointment when I saw the finish, because I wanted to continue! Not that I had much of a choice, because people didn't clear the way after the finish, and I almost walked over a kid at the finish line in front of the camera of RTV Noord-Holland :o

To wrap up, I finished the 10 km in 51 minutes. Not bad considering the extremely slow first part. It was a relaxed run, but not too relaxed, since I had an average heart rate of 175 and a peak of 199. Ah, the time wasn't that important anyway. We have the Utrecht Singelloop and Maliebaanloop at the end of the summer for that :)

A familiar face was waiting at the finish: it appeared that Dirk IV (the statue of a cow) was kidnapped again all the way from Hoornaar (a village next to mine) and painted orange:

(I now also have one of these KiKa Bears that my mother is carrying :P)

Hedge Duck

2007-06-10T18:20:00.000+02:00

I knew that some ducks breed in strange places. But in our hedge?? It's about three meters above water level. That's gonna be a long way down for the little duckies!

The one-line change

2007-06-04T22:57:00.000+02:00

How difficult is it to change True into False in some file of the UUAG compiler:

Options { strictCases = True }

Actually... version history of the file in question:

[r181, 12:33:14] Option --strictcase now has to be supplied explicitly
[r182, 12:35:16] Now really turned off ;)
[r183, 12:47:45] Now *really* really turned the option off by default

To be honest, it's still not right, because now you can't turn it on anymore...

KiKarun (Kinderen Kankervrij) 2007

2007-05-27T19:03:00.000+02:00

Kika is an organization that raises funds to stimulate research with the ultimate goal to help kids suffering from cancer. They organize many events to raise funds, and the KiKarun (tenth of June) is one of these events. My niece, whose mother died of cancer last year, pointed me to this event, and I registered for the '10 km within 50 minutes' variant.

I do have some doubts about finishing within fifty minutes. Although I booked progress in increasing strength and condition after running the marathon two months ago, I also noticed a decline in running performance. So I tested myself today by running ten kilometers, and ... yes, I'm back in business! With an average of 12.9 km/h (46 minutes) and peaks around 13.7 km/h. Look daddy, I can fllyyyyyyy! Ok ok, I admit that I cheated a bit by eating a 200g bar of chocolate the day before :P

So, I shouldn't worry too much. If I can do it know, I can certainly do it when I'm properly rested. Otherwise there is always the magic cola power potion ;) Better be certain though, because some famous dutch people participate, and it would be a humiliation if 'Caroline Tenssen' overtakes me!

Time to be serious again. When I was hospitalized with a broken leg ten years ago, I shared the room with a girl suffering from a brain tumor. That kind of left an impression. So, I hope they raise as least as much funds as last year!

Mosquitos

2007-05-25T21:42:00.000+02:00

bzzzzt
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttt!!!

Mosquito's. I just hate these little creatures. Not only because they keep me awake if they breach the defenses of my room. Not only because their bites itch for ages. No, also because they tend to fly into my mouth when I'm gasping for air while biking or running. Ugh ugh ugh!

Unite to Bike IV: the mud strikes back

2007-05-17T19:48:00.000+02:00

Welcome for another report in the Unite to Bike series. Like last time, we crossed the Drunense Duinen with mountain bikes again. The circumstances were slightly different: cold and wet this time, instead of hot and dry. This is nice for mountain biking: it is easier to cycle on wet ground. It is a bit dirtier with all the mud flying around (but that is part of the fun), although we did not get dirty enough to become mud monsters.

Unfortunately, the bike I hired had a technical problem (why it's always me, I have no idea...). Once in a while the connection between the pedals and the rear wheel was temporarily severed. I could turn and turn the pedals without it helping me in going forward (especially annoying when climbing hills). Aside from that, the pedals also lost pressure, often causing me to slip from the pedals, which is actually quite painful sometimes. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and halfway I was practically out of the game. Fortunately, there was a flat asphalt road back to the starting point, and we drove back so that I could get another bike.

We started from the beginning again after taking lunch at the restaurant/cafe at the starting point. This time everything went well. One critical note: I was slacking a bit with an average heart rate of only 163 bpm. Ah well, don't have to push myself to the limits all the time. In fact, I had a great time going uphill/downhill dodging mud. So, until next time!

[update]
[21:05] <EyE> amiddelk: lijkt me duidelijk dat *wij* de mud overwonnen hebben

Defeated!

2007-05-05T22:57:00.000+02:00

Oh noes! Went running with Martin and Arthur yesterday, but Arthur out-ran me! I had to drop out the last kilometer, and we only ran five kilometer, which is practically no distance at all. The humiliation, good job Arthur! ;-)

There are a zillion of excuses to explain my bad performance, such as being a bit feverish the entire day, not eating in the seven hours before the running, biking an hour at high energy output, and half an hour at moderate energy output shortly before running, but it doesn't change the fact that I should have done better :P
This is a typical example of running out of sugars, or in dutch "de man met de hamer tegenkomen". It signifies how important proper nutrient intake is.

Fortunately, Arthur cooked a delicious meal for us when we got back. It was fun guys, until the next time! Although, maybe not at Martin's place, because if I already loose the way several times when biking back from Arthur's place in the middle of the night (which is a very trivial route), I doubt I manage to get home from Martin's place ;-)
Or come to my place. We could do 40km biking from Utrecht to Noordeloos, 5 km running to the swimming lake, a km swimming, and then 5 km back, turning it into a tiny triathlon.

Ad1: At the others, what about bowling as a next event? ("unite to strike")
Ad2: Martin, thanks for the references to some interesting research papers.
Ad3: When walking back the bikes:

[arie] hmm, distance to the bikes is only a few hundred meters
[arie] "sorry, but I just can't stop myself"
[arie] *sprint*
[arthur] "waaaaaah!!!!"
[arthur] *sprint*
[martin] "idioten!"
[martin] *stumble* *stumble* *stumble*

Uithof water troubles

2007-04-29T08:36:00.000+02:00

Last friday, the water tap at work produced oddly-colored water:

Momenteel komt er op de gehele Uithof bruinachtig gekleurd water uit de kranen. Dit probleem is inmiddels in behandeling genomen, maar het is nog niet bekend wat de oorzaak is.

Facilty Management en Huisvesting

I received this message too late. An old colleague borrowed my network socket while I was away to buy some new shoes, so I couldn't read my email when I got back. Being a bit thirsty, I refilled my water bottle in a bit of a hurry and didn't notice the color. I only took a few mouthful of water because tasted a little foul, but not enough to raise my suspicion; I'm having a cold so my nose doesn't pick up much smell anyway. In fact, I had no clue when someone mentioned the words "brown water". Until I reconnected my laptop and saw the subject of email message quoted above. I checked the contents of my water bottle... bah!

Marathon pictures

2007-04-25T22:43:00.000+02:00

Finally, the pictures of the marathon have arrived. Apparently, it took the company that took pictures at the finish more than a week after payment to email them to me. Anyway, I should not complain, these are the only pictures that I have of the marathon. My parents wanted to make a picture of me, but they didn't know that I would run that fast, so I was already finished while they were waiting for me at some place 15 km away from the finish :o

Anyway, as promised, here are the pictures. Click on them for the full 2000x3000 version:

The first picture is taken when I have about 50 m to go. The upper part of my face is white from sweat that dried in the hot sun. The same for the black parts of my clothes.

Check that guy in the background: can you guess what he is doing???

Unite to Bike III: Return of the Dunes

2007-04-19T20:19:00.000+02:00

People associated to the Software Technology group in Utrecht must be mad. Last Sunday, 15th of April, proves it. On this exceptional hot day, normal people tried to get some refreshment at the beach, but we went to a different kind of beach: the dry dunes of de Drunense Duinen. Not to relax I should add, but to cross a 25 km route through these dunes on a mountain bike. Twice.

This was actually my first time on a mountain bike, unlike the others. I was afraid that I would just spoil the fun of them by being too slow, especially when other participants excused themselves just before the event, and only the fanatics remained. The stories of previous times didn't bode well either, about biting the dust (or actually: sand) over and over again. On the other hand, how hard can it be, biking through some forest and a bit of sand? The inclusion of a helmet with the rent of the bike already hints to the answer of this question ;-)

In fact, the answer presented itself quickly enough. We raced through the forest, uphill downhill, uphill downhill. I was afraid of the downhill parts. It looked at lot like riding a roller coaster, except that in a roller coaster you at least feel safe. There were plenty of times while going downhill, bouncing around on the bumpy road or sliding through the sand, nearly hitting trees, that I wondered why in hell I ever accepted the challenge in the first place. But, the thrill of surviving yet another hill allows for only one conclusion: more, higher and faster!

I made many mistakes the first round though. I so desperately tried to control the bike that I spent more energy going downhill than uphill. This is not only bad for recuperation, but wrecked my lower-arm muscles to the point that I could barely hold on to the handlebars and couldn't press the buttons for switching gears anymore. I also sticked to much to the saddle, which definitely doesn't work when you go through a big bump in the road (my ass still hurts). And I used my brakes too way much, which most of the time only has the adverse effect. It's better just to go down unchecked and let the bike choose its own road. Good advice, but applying it in practice is a whole different matter. Fearless MTB-freaks like Martin and Arthur did set a good example though.

All in all, the first part of the trip went without too much trouble, except for one potentially embarrassing thing. I hit a big bump in the road and was thrown out of the saddle. When I sat back, my cycle pants were stuck behind the beginning of the saddle, effectively putting my pants down. And since you typically do not wear any underpants below cycle pants...

(no no, don't worry, I didn't loose my pants each time I stepped off or on a bike)

During a short break at the cafe about halfway the route, I joked with Arthur that he should call my mother and tell them that they lost me and only discovered my shoes somewhere in the sand. What happened next can only be classified as an Arie-only action. In the second part of the first lap, Dick and I got stuck in some soft sand. Dick managed to get moving again, but it took me a bit longer. I got separated from the rest, but that wasn't a problem because we only had a few kilometer to go till the endpoint. Except that I missed the last sign and accidentally started a new lap. I didn't notice that until I nearly crashed against the same tree as during the first lap. Still, I wasn't entirely convinced yet, because I thought that Arthur had said that there was a similar tree-situation near the end of the lap. So, I went on and on, but grew more anxious over time. I had run out of water for half an hour already and could already feel the effects of dehydration. Fortunately, I encountered some other mountain bikers who verified my hypothesis. The only sensible option I could come up with was backtracking in the reverse direction (probably I scared a few people that way...). Finally, I arrived at the starting point and joined the rest. They were already eating their lunch, so I didn't worry them too much, I hope :P

The second lap went much better though. It's all about confidence and fluency. I grew maybe a bit too confident because I crashed somewhere during the first half of the second lap. That raised the confidence even more though, because from that moment on I wasn't afraid to fall anymore and allowed me to take more risks. You then realize that mountain biking is much cooler than running, because there is speed and danger, which requires you to focus all the time. Definitely a lot of fun. The sole thing that was becoming more and more a problem were the lower parts of my arms. That spoiled the fun a bit combined with some blisters on my fingers. I learned from my mistakes though, so I don't expect this problem to occur again.

In fact, I can hardly wait till the next time!

Greetings,
The Sandman:

(it took me half an hour to get rid of all the sand)

P.S. I'm afraid that I forgot the statistics. Maybe Arthur still has them somewhere.
P.S. I seemed to have three backbones the following day.
P.S. Neither could I sit decently on any hard surface :o

Pictures were taken by Martin Bravenboer (source).

Fortis Marathon Utrecht 2007

2007-04-16T16:24:00.001+02:00

It took some time before I could start writing my story about the Marathon of Utrecht, and another while before I finished it, but here it is. The pictures and movies below are taken from other websites until material from better sources arrives.

(arie @ finish)

A week has passed since the marathon. I fully recovered after a few days, aside from some scratches and a nasty blister. All in all it has been a wonderful experience. The painful parts are easily forgotten and only the good memories remain. It is definitely something to do again - in a year or so ;-)

Just before the marathon

The week before the marathon I visited the IPA spring days, which is an annual conference-like event for software technology PhD-students in the Netherlands. Although this can be considered a mental training (mainly in patience), it forced me to rest and eat a lot for three days. It provided the opportunity to recover from the training and refill the energy supplies. Apparently that was needed because I ate about twice as much as usual.

In the end, my final preparation consisted of a forty kilometer relatively slow run the week before, followed by several days of rest, then biking about thirty seven kilometer twice, to work and back, on Friday, and an eight kilometer run on Sunday.

The biking and running turned out to be very important. Spending time in the bar between smoking PhD-students in the evening was definitely fun, but gave me a soar throat. I breathed a lot easier after inhaling a lot of fresh air during biking. Similarly, during running I had to make several micro adjustments to my running-form, because of an injury to my ankles that unfortunately was not healed at that time. Good thing I noticed that the day beforehand and not on the day of the marathon itself, because with those few adjustments I could run without much pain, except for turns.

Changing clothes

The days started early for me as I had to register and pay for the marathon early in the morning. Afraid for stomach problems I didn't eat anything fancy at breakfast; just my conventional two pieces of bread with peanut butter and a glass of milk. I expected to replenish the energy supplies with energy drinks anyway (that turned out to be the first mistake).

The marathon was properly organized. There was sufficient room to change clothes or to visit a toilet despite the several thousands of runners and hosts of other people. At each crossroads there was either a police officer or a traffic controller making sure that no crossing traffic interfered with the runners. And so on and so on. Except for one annoying thing: they did not provide a mechanism to attach the paper with the start number to your t-shirt! I was lucky to be able to attach it in an improvised way.

The start

About 800 runners of the full marathon grouped together at the start of the marathon. It was crowded and everyone was anxious to start. But relief was near, because after some incomprehensible announcements, the sign to start was finally given. What happened next can best be described as chaos. With that many people close together, the only option was the start running and to go with the flow like a fish in the current. The first few kilometers I had absolutely no idea where I was or how fast I was running. In fact, I couldn't even see the sides of the road because I was surrounded by other people. My watch couldn't give a heartbeat indication due to inference by ECG sensors of other people. So, I was running blind which by itself was a remarkable sensation.

After several kilometers the crowd gradually dispensed in small groups and awareness of the surroundings kicked in. I lowered my speed to something more comfortable. Initially the only goal I had was to finish the marathon. I also wanted to set a time below the four hours, but I wasn't entirely sure about that. A conversation the evening before convinced me to just try it (blame @ bravo!). So, the first thing I had to find out is where I was, to modify the speed according to schedule. There were distance signs each kilometer, but some of these signs belonged to the 6, 10 and 21 km runs, so it wasn't particularly clear in the beginning which ones belonged to which run. Finally, I managed to determine my position twice and verified that my new speed was approximately 11 km/h. Now I just had to stick to that for the remaining 37 km and everything would be OK.

During my speed adjustment process, there was a Belgian woman with a red t-shirt in the neighborhood. I recognized her from the start of the marathon where she said to other people that she wanted to set a time near the four hours. I adjusted my speed a bit to match hers, and while doing so I noticed that she was actually adjusting her speed to mine. So, I switched to my schedule-speed again and she followed side-by-side. Rather close actually since we regularly crashed into each other at turns. That was probably my mistake because I had a hard time making turns with my fucked-up ankles. Anyway, she had basically the same step size so we could run synchronously. In fact, we've been running closely together for the remainder of the marathon. Again, that was a strange experience because I am used to walk alone. It made running a lot easier though.

Checkpoint Kanaalweg (6 km)

Video
Appearance at 21 seconds
Pass checkpoint at 29 seconds
Speed: 11.0 km/h
Remaining: 35 km

The wind and the heat

The first half of the marathon went very well, although we had to run through open areas subjected to a lot of wind ("allez, straffe wind!") and the hot sun. These environmental conditions were taking their toll on people. I already saw many people that appeared to be running on their last reserves. Even some marines, of which you expect that they are though guys, were already reduced to walking instead of running. Some of the images of broken people that just keep on going, arose a lot of compassion as I very well know what they must have been going through. Luckily, we were still relatively fresh, although I became a bit worried about the woman on my side, because she started breathing almost twice as fast as I did. Strange, I felt somehow responsible and that only because I had to set the pace. I helped her a bit at places where we had to go straight against the wind by running up-front like a windshield and tried to keep a steady pace. I even saved one of the two mars-bar for her, although that was not needed since she was much better packed than I was. I have no idea where she stored them, but she had several bottles with sugar-like liquids in it.

Speaking about support and mars-bars, I took one mars-bar just before the 21 km checkpoint. I was getting hungry, because I thought that they would supply AA energy drinks each 5 km, but that turned out to be AA isotonic drinks (which is basically water with some minerals added). So, I took a few big bites and gulped this mars inside. That was the second mistake: it almost directly started to hurt just below my right lung and somewhere left below, making breathing a very painful process. The only thing that kept me going then was the fact that I was running with somebody and just had to go on. That gives you the focus to beat through it. The pain settled down ten minutes later and I ran normally again.

Victims

During the run we heard the sirens of ambulances several times. The marathon puts great strains on people. Once we saw a police car next to a man laying at the side the road. Apparently he had passed out and they connected some heart-monitoring equipment to him. Minutes later, an ambulance with blazing sirens overtook us, so that didn't bode well for him. That suddenly confronts you with the fact that a marathon is not an innocent training run.

Checkpoint Harmelen (29 km)

Video
Appearance at 20 seconds
Pass checkpoint at 44 seconds
Speed: 10.6 km/h
Remaining: 13 km

At the 29 km checkpoint in Harmelen was a presenter that tried to talk some courage into us. "Only" 13 km straight home and all the best from Harmelen. Well, it did help. As well as all the encouragement of people alongside the road or in their garden. At one particular point a police officer shouted in Dutch "zeg je wel lieve dingen tegen haar?" (you do say sweet things to her, don't you?). I didn't know what he meant with that at that time, I only realized later that the about ten centimeter shoulder-to-shoulder distance must have looked a bit odd :o

Checkpoint De Meern (35 km)

Video
Appearance at 33 seconds
Pass checkpoint at 52 seconds
Speed: 11.2 km/h
Remaining: 7 km

Steadily we ran several kilometers, although the running itself became more and more difficult. Each and every runner has trouble with the last kilometers. Fortunately, we encountered a large group of people that wanted to finish within four hours and had one guy upfront who would coach them to the finish line. We joined the group and from that point on it was just a matter of ignoring all the stress signals of the body and just keep up with the rest. The guy that coached us gave us useful advice and forced us not too walk too fast.

We entered Utrecht using a route I often took with the bus. Although it seemed much and much shorter when sitting in the bus instead of running it. Three kilometers to go. That's just the distance of my short running round. A minute or fifteen to go. That sounded like ages. Less than two kilometers. That's the distance I can sprint at maximum heart rate. Not that I watched the heart rate on my watch anymore: the number was alarmingly high and I told myself that I should not worry about it. It's this last part where you go for it no mater what the consequences are.

Checkpoint Kanaalweg (41 km)

Video
Appearance at 10 seconds
Pass checkpoint at 14 seconds
Speed: 9.7 km/h
Remaining: 1 km

Near the 41 km checkpoint was probably the worst part of the route: a tunnel. First you had to go down many meters followed by a climb. The video shows how much trouble we had just to climb it. Fortunately, there was a final water supply at the top. Only one more kilometer to go.

I somewhere lost the Belgian woman there. She probably didn't take the water and just went on. Not that it mattered anymore: that last kilometer is just you and the finish line. We encountered a 500 m sign. Somehow that distance seemed familiar, but I could not recall it. When I saw the 200 m sign I suddenly remembered it: 500 m is the sprint distance. I started sprinting but it was no use. Suddenly, after almost four hours, the finish line was there and I ran over it.

Finish

Video
Appearance at 11 seconds
Pass finish at 22 seconds
Clock: 03:59:03
Actual time: ~03:58:25

It is quite a relief to pass that wrecked finish line, I can tell you that! I could barely walk anymore. But that did not matter. I completed my objective and that is all that mattered at that point. And the 500 ml bottle with isotonic AA drink that I tried to suck dry as quickly as I could.

After-effects

I sustained only minor physical damage. My feet were a mess of blisters and scratches. My legs hurt a bit the first two days. All in all, only slightly worse than an average training. I did have an unstoppable hunger the entire week though.

The mental consequences were much heavier though. I slept badly the first two days because all the impressions just replayed and replayed when I closed my eyes. Luckily I had my work to concentrate on, because I noticed that when I was idle during lunch that my mind would also slip away.

The future

I don't know about my future intentions yet. I reduced the number of sports to only a few hours each week instead of more than fifteen. I'll concentrate on short distances, say ten or fifteen kilometer and train speed and interval. Those three months of training have been fun, but it became a bit boring in the end. Aside from that, it took way too much of my spare-time away.

Of one thing I'm certain though: this is not the last marathon that I want to run.

Good advice

2007-04-12T22:06:00.000+02:00

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen"

(from: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

I doubt I generalize a lot if I say that mothers tend to be over-protective. I reassured my mother that I don't do stupid things. To be honest, only when I'm asleep, but I didn't add that of course! However, then she just finds another thing to worry about, such as me being attacked when walking through the city in the middle of the night. No need to worry about that either. But if I tell her that, she will just figure out another thing to worry about, so I just play the ignoring-game like everybody...

Wohooo!

2007-04-09T20:01:00.000+02:00

Marathon of Utrecht
Distance: 42.195 km
Result: 3 hours 58 minutes

Finishing the marathon in less than four hours is a sort of holy grail for amateur runners. And I did it!!
(sorry for the brag)
(I really need a new pair of legs)
(maybe some new feet too)

More details will follow when I have time to compose a story, and receive the official times on disc, including small video-movies made at several checkpoints. For now, I can only give you a picture of my gear:

'Je mag alles van me weten, behalve...'

2007-04-06T18:30:00.000+02:00

Vandaag arriveerde er een nieuwe bankpas en creditcard. Ik was zelf niet thuis, maar gelukkig kon mijn moeder de envelop in ontvangst nemen, ondanks dat er overduidelijk op staat dat de postbode de envelop alleen na legitimatie aan de geaddresseerde mag geven. Ach, dat scheelt in ieder geval weer een reis naar een postkantoor in Verweggistan.

Een creditcard heeft blijkbaar tegenwoordig ook een chip met bijbehorende pincode. Hoewel de creditcard gekoppeld is aan dezelfde rekening als mijn bankpas, heeft het helaas wel een andere pincode. Dit is vervelend omdat ik de creditcard vrijwel niet gebruik, en je zult net zien dat als je hem een keer nodig hebt op vakantie, dat je dan de pincode niet meer weet. Ach, aan de andere kant, tegenwoordig moet je al diverse wachtwoorden, telefoonnummers, en codes onthouden. Dan kan dat ene nummertje er ook wel bij.

De banken mogen overigens wel hun reclamemateriaal gaan aanpassen. Ik ga nu tenslotte met twee pincodes door het leven, terwijl er in reclames gesproken wordt over een unieke pincode ("uw pincode" of "mijn pincode"). Dus, jullie mogen alles van me weten, behalve mijn pincode, want ik zou niet weten welke van de twee dat is ;-)

Of beter, ik kan je gewoon mijn pincode geven, dat is namelijk 2932.
(De XOR van beide nummers, dus daar schiet je effectief gezien niets mee op)

Final long-distance training

2007-04-01T16:18:00.000+02:00

Marathon preparation
Final long-distance training
Status: completed successfully
7 days remaining

Today was an excellent day for some running. Just the way I like it: sunny and hot, but not too much. I did not plan any route beforehand. Just took my default long-distance route and made some modifications. I took a slow and relaxed pace (156 bpm average heartbeat instead of 168 bpm). There is always a danger of hurting myself during such an extended training and I could not take risks this close to the marathon. However, it turns out that I ran 40.2 km in 4 hours and 4 minutes. That is faster and further than I anticipated (it did not even hurt). Almost the marathon distance itself. Yes, I enjoyed it. Can't wait for the real marathon now!

It is a bit funny now I think about it. I tried some jogging together with my sister about seven years ago. That were horrible experiences back then. Almost emptying my stomach after just a kilometer jogging, gasping for air, racing hearth, etc. A big failure. I basically was not smooth enough and sucked at walking, big time. This in sharp contrast to the current situation. Condition, strength, and coordination have increased since I restarted the project a year ago. I guess that I essentially relearned to walk. Nowadays running does not take much effort anymore. People sometimes tell me that I must be retarded to run distances like I did today. Truth is, I could not believe it myself a couple of months ago. And to be honest, a part of me still cannot. Yep, it is amazing how easily the human body adapts.

Anyway, this is my last real training for the marathon. The coming week should not contain any heavy training. Not that I could if I wanted it: have to go to the "IPA lentedagen" from Tuesday to Thursday. This is probably also the last long-distance training for a long while. Although it was fun, it is getting a bit boring, running all those hours all alone. With the summer approaching, it is going to be too hot anyway. I'll probably reduce training from 15+ hours to around 6 hours, say, two times fitness and one time short-distance running (with focus on speed improvement), but I did not decide on that yet.

First things first though: the marathon. With all those coughing and sneezing people around me, I hope I can keep the cold at bay for just a few days more. I also hope that my running shoes can hold on long enough: should have replaced them a few weeks ago...

No worries. Will finish the marathon. Crawling if I have to :)

Over nieuwsbericht: 'Autokennis van Nederlanders is onvoldoende'

2007-03-29T22:08:00.000+02:00

"Nederlanders weten weinig af van hun auto. De gemiddelde automobilist scoort met een 4,7 een onvoldoende voor de kennis van de technische en financiële aspecten van hun voertuig."
(bron)

Tja. Ik mag dan een jongen zijn, enige interesse voor techniek hebben, en ook een jaar of vijf mijn rijbewijs, maar mij moet je ook niet vragen hoeveel kleppen een cylinder heeft, of waar een intercooler voor dient. Ik vraag me dan ook af wanneer je als normale automobilist deze kennis nodig hebt. Neem de intercooler bijvoorbeeld:

"An intercooler, or charge air cooler, is a device used on turbocharged and supercharged internal combustion engines to improve their volumetric efficiency by increasing the amount of charge in the engine and lowering charge air temperature, thereby increasing power and reliability. It is also known as a charge air cooler, especially on larger engines that may otherwise easily self-destruct with high intake-air temperatures."
(bron)

Eeeeh... dat klinkt eerder als een futuristisch apparaat uit een science-fiction serie dan als een onderdeel van een auto. Als ik het goed begrijp kan je lekker doortuffen als het goed werkt, en heb je een groot probleem als het niet het geval is. Vooral gezien de laatste regel kan je daar beter met je eigen handen vanaf blijven. Dus eigenlijk maar goed dat ik er niets vanaf weet ;-)

AA-drank test

2007-03-25T14:46:00.000+02:00

Test of AA-drank
Marathon preparation
14 days remaining

I bought some bottles of "AA-drank". This is provided during the marathon every five kilometer in quantities of 200 ml. Somebody advised me to try it beforehand, because it can cause stomach problems. Quantities of 200-250 ml do not turn out to be a problem for me. Greater quantities however...

Training: six times 3.7 km + one time 12 km (total 34 km)
Weather: sunny, but heavy wind
Physical state: tired from heavy fitness and insufficient sleep. Decided to run the distance anyway because it's one of the last times I can run it, and I did not run much this week because some other things interfered.

Lap result:
lap 1: 0:17 (3.7 km)
lap 2: 0:35 (7.4 km)
lap 3: 0:53 (11.1 km)
lap 4: 1:12 (14.8 km)
lap 5: 1:30 (18.5 km)
lap 6: 1:49 (22.2 km)
Approximately 18 minutes each lap (+12 km/hour)
Heart rate around 179
250ml of AA-drank each two laps

These laps went fine. In fact, I felt really at peace while - with semi-closed eyes - listening to the wind rushing through the trees (left my MP3-player at home this time), bathing in the burning sun, and the feeling the vibration at each impact of my feet with the ground. Guess that is an example of endorphine kicking in. Too bad that some people returning from church ruined the fun by using the road as a race-track, forcing me to pay a lot of attention not to end up like a pancake (like some unfortunate ducks).

Running the same laps over and over again is boring, so I took a 12 km route for the final part. Since I did not want to take any bottles with me, I took 750 ml of AA-drank in one go. The effects were rather dramatic. Pressure was building up almost everywhere in my belly, making it very hard to breathe and increasing in pain with each step. I gave up after twenty minutes when my attempts to ignore it started to fail - when the cause of the pressure was trying to find a way out one way or the other. The rule is very simple: stomach problems means game over. I walked my way home, disappointed. After about three quarters of an hour, most of the pressure was gone and I continued my run with only a few km to go.

Too bad, but it is my own fault. At least I now stress-tested the AA drink. And I don't really need more practice for the marathon anyway. Although I should have known beforehand that drinking that much concentrated sugar is bad without having a direct use for it. In fact, it can be very dangerous:

"High sugar intake triggers other unwanted responses as well. When too much insulin is stimulated, it encourages plaque formation in the blood vessels. This is why adult onset diabetes is so closely linked with atherosclerosis and heart disease."
(source)

After returning home - while writing this blog post - I spent two hours performing steps on a fitness device, just to make sure that all the sugar has left my body.

To conclude: I managed to reach a stable speed around 12 km/hour. That again reinforces my confidence in the marathon itself. Still, I'm not going to change my plans for the marathon itself: that will be around 10 km/hour. No need to take any chances (and have to work the next day). If I really want to, I can always run another one.

Explaining my research

2007-03-20T16:54:00.000+01:00

People sometimes ask what kind of work I do. My reply is that I research how to deal with the complexity of the implementation of programming languages. Then people look at me as if I'm a madman (which might not be that far from the truth ;-). Or worse: "Oh, so you must be handy with computers?". Only an insider can comprehend such an explanation. This is unfortunate, because I think that an important aspect of research should be that it is worthwhile in a way. How can I explain to the average tax payer that my work is worthwhile if I can't explain it in the first place? Time to change that!

The problem is threefold. There are three concepts involved: programming, languages, and complexity of implementation (realization). When I designed websites in my past, my old boss used to say that a website is only good enough if my mother would be able to navigate it. So, I'm going to explain these concepts to you using an analogy that my mother is able to understand: kids.

To begin with programming. Programming is like raising kids: you carefully instruct a kid how to behave in which situation. The computer itself is actually a very young kid. You have to be very explicit in telling it what to do, and in a way it understands it. For example, "First open your mouth. Then take a bite. And only then swallow.". Not everything has to be explained. Opening the mouth, taking a bite and swallowing are instincts. A computer also has an instinct. It's called the processor, which knows about the computer equivalents of taking a bite, and so on. By combining these basic instructions, you can give a computer more complex instructions, teaching it. So, that is all what programming is about: instruct a computer to put some buttons on the screen, tell it how to behave when one of the buttons is pressed, maybe by storing the value of a text field in a database, or by putting some picture on the screen. Such a series of instructions is called a program.

The way you talk to the computer is very important. You have to use the right language otherwise it does not understand you. You don't talk to a kid like it is an adult, so neither do we programmers talk Dutch to our computer. We use a special language for that, called a programming language:

The real technology - behind all our other technologies - is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.
-- Andrei Codrescu

The language a computer can understand is just a long sequence of bits. It is hard to talk to the computer that way (unless your name is Neo). Fortunately, we can teach a computer other languages, making it smarter, raising it. Then we can talk to the computer as if it is more mature. For example: "Wash your hands after you visited the toilet", or in terms of a typical computer program: "take money from this bank account and ask the computer of the other bank to deposit it there. And try again later if it doesn't work the first time.". Learning these more advanced languages is done in the same way we teach languages to kids: by giving a translation from one language to the other. The program that does the translation is called the compiler.

Programmers want their computers to resemble grown-up kids. We do not want to spend our time on trivial details. So, we teach the computers to be smart enough such that we can speak to them in are grown-up language, and let the computer figure out the boring details itself (sometimes in a wrong way, which means that we have to give it some additional information to make the correct decisions). This is important: the demands on computer programs get bigger and bigger, and at some point we have to write so many instructions that we do not comprehend it ourselves anymore. So, more advanced computer languages are the future. This does put a burden on the compiler, because it has to perform more complicated translations. We arrive at a point where the implementation of the compiler itself becomes a very complicated computer program.

This is exactly what my research is about: with what kind of language can we describe compilers in an a way that they can both be complex and understandable? Here at Utrecht we already have a language/technology called Attribute Grammars that offers a great abstraction to describe compilers. Unfortunately, there are some big projects that use Attribute Grammars that still suffer from complexity problems. There are many other kinds of technologies and lots of use-cases to consider, so it will take a while before I can give a good answer to this question :)

Arriveert niet

2007-03-18T22:16:00.000+01:00

De volgende stikker troffen Jeroen Leeuwestein en ik aan in een bus van vervoersbedrijf Arriva. Gezien mijn botsingen met het openbaar vervoer sinds het nieuwe dienstrooster zegt dit geweldige plaatje meer dan duizend woorden:

(foto met dank aan Jeroen)

Nog een quote van de website www.arriveertniet.nl:

"Er valt wel eens een bus uit ja, maar dat is toch niet zo erg?" - Buschauffeur te Gorinchem, lijn 78

Ik moest er om lachen toen ik het las, maar is juist wel erg. Dit snijdt precies het probleem aan: we kunnen niet meer op de dienstregeling vertrouwen in onze regio. Zo gebeurd het nog wel eens dat ik bij een halte sta en de bus komt niet. Neem ik - als dat mogelijk is - dan een andere lijnbus (welke met een grote omweg gaat), of blijf ik wachten in de hoop dat de bus nog komen zal? Een keuze wat zo een half uur reistijd kan uitmaken.

Bachelor voorlichting

2007-03-18T18:02:00.000+01:00

Twee keer per jaar is er voorlichting van het informatica-bachelor-programma aan aspirant-studenten (a.k.a. scholieren). Dit keer was ik ook van de partij als opli..eeh..voorlichter (ach, de poppenkast om de studie in het juiste daglicht te plaatsen ;-). Samen met mijn collega Bastiaan gaven we een begeleid practicum (zoals eerstejaars studenten deze typisch krijgen). De scholieren en hun ouders moesten een virtueel schildpadje instructies gaan geven. Het schildpadje heeft een pen en kan daarmee over het scherm lopen. Daarbij laat het schildpadje een spoor achter en zodoende kunnen er tekeningen gemaakt worden. In feite programmeerde men dus plaatjes. Dat bleek voor veel van de bezoekers een aangename manier om actief met de opleiding kennis te maken - in plaats van langs de zijlijn toekijken hoe robot-hondjes voetballen.

Echter, nu loop ik op het verhaal vooruit. Op tijd op lokatie aanwezig zijn bleek een niet geheel triviale bezigheid. De dag begon al goed want ik had mijn wekker nog op mijn normale doordeweekse tijd staan (en dat is een uur vroeger dan gister nodig was :( Aanvankelijk was het plan om met de auto te gaan, maar m'n ouders bleken ermee weg te zijn. De bus kon ik nog wel halen, maar dan moest ik wel snel op mijn fiets springen. Een telefoontje richting mijn ouders gaf echter uitkomst: ze zouden binnen tien minuten terug zijn. Echter, vanwege alle werkzaamheden op de uithof waren mogelijk wat parkeergelegenheden afgesloten en het zou sowieso druk worden, dus raadden ze me aan om met de auto naar de bushalte te gaan (i.v.m. regen) en verder met de bus te reizen. Een blik op de klok wees uit dat het net zou moeten lukken. Ik was inderdaad op tijd bij de halte, ondanks dat m'n ouders er iets langer dan tien minuten over deden voordat ze thuis waren. Echter, er kwam geen bus opdagen. In het weekend rijden de bussen slechts om het uur en zoveel tijd had ik niet. Dus bleef de auto als enige mogelijkheid over. Dat ging gelukkig voorspoedig, hoewel een lange rij auto's de oprit van het universiteitsterrein blokkeerde.

Eenmaal binnen was alles netjes geregeld. Er liepen voldoende studenten rond om de bezoekers in goede banen te leiden en hun vragen te beantwoorden. Opvallend detail is dat er zo ongeveer evenveel vrouwelijke informatici rondliepen als mannelijke informatici. Waar hebben ze die zo snel vandaan gehaald? :o
Er was voldoende te eten (mmmm, paaseitjes :P :P) en er hingen wat posters. Zelfs een poster over het vak 'software project' waar een tweetal succes-stories van diverse projecten stonden, inclusief het project waar ik ooit eens project-leider van geweest ben. Ben ik toch nog een beetje trots. Dat het bedrijf onze software vervolgens nooit heeft gebruikt (omdat het bedrijf werd opgeheven) stond er voor het gemak niet bij...

Met de computerruimte waar we ons practicum gaven was het wat minder goed gesteld. Eén computer wilde geen beeld geven. Systeembeheer ging vervolgens proberen om deze computer weer aan de gang te slingeren, maar dat had alleen als gevolg dat een andere computer er ook mee ophield (raar :S). Er waren al niet zoveel computers in de zaal, dus er bleven er wat weinig over, maar door de scholieren in paartjes van twee te laten werken (wat doorgaans toch gebruikelijk is bij onze practica), paste het allemaal *net* bij iedere sessie.

Onze practicumsessies verliepen goed. Er was niet heel veel tijd, maar de meeste scholieren hebben toch een aantal van de opdrachten kunnen maken. Ze waren in ieder geval erg enthousiast. Dan blijft alleen de vraag over hoeveel zieltjes we hiermee gewonnen hebben ;-)

Recovery from setbacks

2007-03-12T15:48:00.000+01:00

Marathon preparation
Last week's summary
27 days remaining

Last week has been a bit disappointing. Two Sundays ago, when running through a village called Ameide, I stepped on a floor tile the wrong way and flipped my ankle. This is not the first time and normally my muscles compensate quickly enough to prevent damage. Unfortunately, my ankle was a bit weakened due to some inline skating the day before and responded too late. The reaction that I received with each step from my ankle became severe enough that when I reached the "Bazelbrug" an hour later I decided to go straight home (less than twenty minutes instead of two hours). These kind of minor injuries should not be ignored because recovery can take weeks (something I learned that the hard way). That turned out to be a wise decision, although some damage had already been done.

Therefore, I did not run any considerable distance last week, and no skating either. Instead, I visited the gym (fitness) three times to put a little pressure on my ankles to stimulate recovery. That appeared to work, at least my ankle did not hurt anymore when I walked the stairs. So, last Sunday I was back in business. I picked a three-hour route. After half an hour my ankle started to complain again. Not directly in a desperate way, but it made me a bit afraid for the continuity of my training. Fortunately, the complaints disappeared after another half hour.

On a more positive note: cola + sugar rules! I was a bit surprised how much sugar is required to get all the bubbles out. But the more sugar the better. It tastes really awful, but the effects... it's like the magic liquid brewed by Pandoramix in the Astrix and Obelix comics. One shot of this stuff and you get the idea that you can level a building with your bare hands (never try this at home, unless what you call your home is a box of paper).

Conclusion: everything seems to be ok now, although I'm still tired from the three hour run of yesterday. My ankle is complaining a little bit, but not in a way that I should expect problems. My muscles should have recovered a bit faster, but the delay is probably best explained due to some dehydration yesterday. The burning sun caused me to sweat more than usual and I only had my 500ml of cola to replace it. With the summer approaching, running large distances will be out of the question. Unless I first bike the route to distribute bottles at tactical places and then run it (mmm, that actually might not be a bad idea at all).

De dvd piraat

2007-03-11T18:33:00.000+01:00

Kom je moe terug van een paar uur hardlopen, tref je het volgende aan:

Tja, dan vraag je er ook om :)

Maar waar had ik ook al weer m'n spindeltje dvds gelaten...

Lessons from mountain bikers

2007-03-10T19:54:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with my uncle. He runs a dutch mountain bike team. It is a successful team, with several people performing well at (or win) dutch championships, and even qualify themselves for world championships. Although it is not a professional team as they do not have the resources to provide a living for the cyclists. My uncle mentioned a few things that are related to some of my previous blog posts and those will be the subject of today.

Recently, I wrote a small article about how easy it is to cheat in online gaming without being detected (see my blog post at February 26). I received a lot of response on that. Some people complained that I must be cheating myself because I know so much about it (never worry about that, since I do not have `strange' in-game actions). Most people were quite shocked by the fact that playing unfair is so easy. Clearly, the anti-cheat mechanisms leave much to be desired. This is unlike sports such as mountain biking. The only way to cheat there is to use drugs in too much of a quantity (those cyclists at the top all use food supplements). It is easy to test by taking urine samples. These tests cannot be fooled.

From this you would conclude that there are not many cyclists that cheat. This is not the case according to my uncle. The problem is that it is not possible to test everyone due to time constraints. The urine samples have to be taken by an authorized person, and the cyclist has to pee with this authorized person present (hell, I would never be able to pee in such a situation :/). Therefore, only the winners of a race and a few randomly selected cyclists are tested. The chances of being caught are low. Consequently, a lot of cyclists cannot stand the temptation of finishing up-front for once and use some illegal drugs. This causes a lot of distrust between cyclists: did he just have a good day or did he cheat?.

Even worse: trainers use cruel methods to force cyclists in using drugs. For example, they put a bunch of young cyclists together in a training camp and give each of them a few pills, say a blue pill and a red pill. The blue pill does nothing, but the red pill will make you (almost) win the race*. They have to choose themselves which pills they use. Some are fair and will not take the red pill, although they will see that some of their friends will take one. The cyclists that take the red pill win races and those who stick with the blue pill do not. At that point the trainer comes in and says ``I do not care which pill you take but if you do not win a race soon, we have no use for you anymore''. Driven by the fear of being thrown out of the community, even the strong-willed cyclists break eventually.

These stories are so familiar to stories I heard about cheaters and cheating in `eSports'. So, essentially there is not much difference between cheating in sports and cheating in eSports, except that eSports require a computer program as part of the game, and I can only hope that advances in computing technology offer more effective anti-cheat solutions some day.

The other subject of our talk was about nutrition. After approximately 90 minutes the muscles run out of glycine. The body switches to burning fat instead of sugar, which is rather inefficient. This is bad for performance. My uncle told me that the cyclists therefore use all kinds of special nutritions to refill the glycine stores. In fact, there are many variations: food for climbing hills, food for quick recovery after climbing a hill, and so on. In fact, my uncle laughed a bit when I told him that I use mostly water (in too little quantities) and just a Mars bar as solid food. According to him, there is a *lot* to gain using proper nutrition. He promised to give me some of the food so that I could try it. I'm curious if that really is the case. Running about 13 km/hour is relatively ease for me, except that the muscles in my legs fail after one hour at this speed (my body itself isn't even close to tired at that point). So, who knows what is possible in the future. But for now, I only have one objective and that's finishing the marathon itself. That I currently can only run this distance with a speed around 10 km/hour doesn't matter ;-)

I got one particularly interesting advice from him concerning fluids: cola appears to be a very good and relatively cheap energy refresher. I did not expect that because the bubbles in cola are problematic during running, but the trick is to put additional sugar in the cola. This takes the bubbles away and actually adds even more energy to it. It probably tastes like hell, but it is definitely something to try!

[*] For the geeks: did I take the correct red/blue order?

Tax forms

2007-03-04T22:10:00.000+01:00

Bah, spent a considerable portion of this day (ok ok, only one hour ;-) filling in tax forms. First I had to locate my passport somewhere to obtain my id number. Then the fun starts: searching through all my nicely archived pay checks to find the yearly summaries. After failing to locate these after a triple search, it turned out that I put them aside in a different archive because that would be handy (doh!).

The next screen required information about my bank account of beginning of this year and the beginning of last year, which I obtained from my bank's website, requiring a trip downstairs to fetch my ATM card from my jacket's pocket (grmbl, getting old and grumpy).

I skipped over the other screens. My aunt always used to say that if you have no clue what to fill in there, better skip it and let the tax people figure it out if needed. I'll just follow her advice and hope I don't get in trouble for tax fraud (might actually be a good way to quickly finish my PhD if they put me in jail for a year together with a laptop and internet connection :P).

Finally, the hardest part: signing the tax form with my DigiD username and password. Only, which of my zillion usernames and passwords could it be? After a quick search on their website, I could enter my id number and get a new password. But knowing these excellent security policies, they would probably send a new password by real mail, which takes a couple of days to arrive. Fortunately, I could do something else. They have a login form on their website that first required a username and then a password (not such a good security after all). So, I just tried a series of sensible usernames until I found one that worked. After trying a couple of my usual passwords, I also found a password that worked, and I could transmit the wretched form. Phew!

The worst thing is that I had to fill in information they already have about me. They could have calculated everything in advance and just require me to check it or add to it. In fact, I heard that's the case in Norway:

[Infinitive] ppphhhhhhewwwwww
[Infinitive] processed all outstanding forms to fill in
[Infinitive] like tax forms
[Muuuuuh] lol
[Muuuuuh] tax infin? ^^
[Infinitive] Muuuuuh: yeah tax forms suck!
[Infinitive] however... i paid too much taxes so I get money back... so it's worth the trouble
[|Olly|] it's not automatic in nl? i just send an sms with a code to the tax crap and everything is ok...
[Infinitive] bah, maybe I should move to Norway :)
[|Olly|] the only thing i gotta do is check that the information bout how much money i made etc is correct, which takes about 6,5 seconds
[Infinitive] I took me an hour :(
[|Olly|] lol
[|Olly|] touché
[Infinitive] and I thought we dutchies are much more civilized than those norway brutes :P
[|Olly|] :D
[|Olly|] the vikings prevail once again!

Well, at least I can share the pain with somebody else. My parents decided to fill in their forms as well. I heard my mother racing up and down the stairs a couple of times sighing about those stupid forms :D
(hmm, although I wonder how they did it, because they didn't ask me to install the tax form program for them...)

Field test

2007-02-26T23:24:00.000+01:00

With only one month remaining until the Marathon of Utrecht, I wanted to know for certain that I could run the entire distance of a marathon. Last Sunday I succeeded, although the experience itself has been excessively painful. The problem was that I took about two kilos of liquids with me, which created a lot of momentum when moving up and down with each step. That put a lot of pressure on my ankles and upper muscles of my legs, wearing me down much faster than normal. The last two and a half hour was basically a fight against the pain, not so much a fight against the distance. Endurance prevailed though.

Statistics:
* 4 hours and 36 minutes running
* 43+ km distance
* Speed around 10-11 km/h in the first part, 9 km/h second part
* 165 beats per minute average hearth rate
* used 1 liter water, 1 liter energy drinks, 1 Mars, and 1 cake

Luckily, the after-effects one day later where less dramatic. There is some damage at the bottom of my feet, and some of the muscles in my legs are complaining a bit. Walking stairs is hurting a bit for example, but I did some exercise (with slightly reduced intensity) at fitness without much problems.

Coming month I will focus on strengthening my muscles and less on distance (33 km is the usual training distance). I have the condition, now I just need the strength for faster times. I'll be ready...

Cheating in online games

2007-02-26T21:12:00.000+01:00

I used to play a lot of Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and Unreal Tournament 2004 in a competitive setting. I quit actively playing computer games more than a year ago (game usage statistics), but I play a game with some friends once in a while. Something that annoyed me back then and still annoys me now are cheaters in online games. I played versus all kinds of opponents: low, med or high, from all kinds of countries. Unfortunately, cheaters are encountered everywhere.

Cheaters are players that use a computer program to play the game for them (i.e. aimbots) or to reveal hidden information (i.e. wallhacks), typically to augment the player's skills. There are two different types of cheats around: publicly available 'obvious' cheats and bought cheats that are 'humanized'. The first type is normally encountered on publics. That is just a nuisance but not a real problem. Either leave the server yourself or kickvote the cheater. Or team up with two other good enough players and kill the cheater over and over again (that usually pisses them off). The humanized bots are worse as they are almost impossible to detect. These are normally used by players in a competition. The problem with these kinds of cheats is that it makes you wonder if the player is just extremely good or lucky, or is not playing fair. It destroys trust and respect.

Game developers try to counter cheating by creating anti-cheating tools. Unfortunately, these tools are not effective enough in practice. They are like a virus scanner that is updated only once in a few months: only effective against publicly known cheats (i.e. those that are free to download) and only for a short while until a new cheat is released. They are practically ineffective against so called private cheats. Those are cheats that are not publicly available, only by buying it from the creators.

In order to give a reason why these anti-cheat tools fail, I created a small proof-of-concept cheat (technically not really a cheat) and investigated why it is not detected. Read the full story on my blog-post at clanbase.

I wonder if better anti-cheat tools can be constructed. Essentially, we can't do much more than 'security by obscurity'. However, perhaps we can make it obscure enough using techniques from my research area...

Leven zonder mobiele telefoon?

2007-02-17T17:42:00.000+01:00

In het Algemeen Dagblad van vandaag stonds een artikel over het al dan niet zonder mobieltje kunnen leven. De conclusie dat je best wel zonder mobieltje kunt is niet echt opmerkelijk te noemen. Dat hadden ze net zo goed aan mij kunnen vragen, want ik heb gemiddeld eens in de maand m'n mobieltje aanstaan...*

* Daar gaat verandering in komen zodra ik een nieuwe telefoon koop (met abonnement). Dan moet wel eerst m'n huidige prepaidtegoed op zijn en volgens huidige berekeningen duurt dat nog wel een paar jaar :-)

Dat komt mooi uit, want ik zoek een telefoon met GPS, interne fotocamera en wifi, en deze combinatie is er naar mijn weten nog niet**. GPS kan ik goed gebruiken als ik ga hardlopen (of een andere activiteit) in onbekend gebied. De kwaliteit van zo'n interne fotocamera is doorgaans om van te janken, maar handig om onverwachte gebeurtenissen vast te leggen, of om een foto te maken van op bord geschreven notities. Wifi is dan weer handig om agenda en contactpersonen te synchroniseren. Uiteindelijk zou wel mooi zijn als je er ook nog mee kunt bellen...

** Maar zie: de diverse mogelijkheden van een Apple iPhone...

Valentine

2007-02-14T00:14:00.000+01:00

* arie opent vol verwachting zijn emailclient
* filtert al de spam uit z'n inbox
* ziet verder geen valentijnskaarten
* moppert wat: ook dit jaar geen valentijnskaart :(
* gaat dan maar slapen :)

Objective accomplished

2007-02-11T19:33:00.000+01:00

Yes, I did it!

I did this measurement in a sloppy way, so add about 2 km due to curvature of the road, etc.

Statistics:
Distance: ~37 km
Time: 3 hours 44 minutes
Speed: between 9 and 10 km/hour
Average heartbeat: 166 bpm (about 150 in the beginning; 177 at the end)

The weather was pretty bad: lots of wind and rain. Actually the rain wasn't a problem because of these nice clothes I have. The quality of the clothes continues to amaze me :)

A lesson for next time: take more water with me. The 500 ml I took with me (four small bottles) is insufficient. Instead, I think I need about two liters for this distance, preferably sugar based.

Technically, it should be possible for me to run the 42 km marathon of Utrecht in slightly more than four hours. Especially if I train my muscles a bit the coming months and make sure I take enough sugar during the run.

Decision time

2007-02-10T01:35:00.000+01:00

The Marathon of Utrecht is coming closer! I practically wasted all my spare time in training. Interleaved reading and thinking about stuff from work with physical exercise just to combine these seemingly clashing worlds (training schedules seem to assume that you have an infinite supply of time). I even watched movies and played some games while performing steps on a fitness device for multiple hours...

Anyway, the marathon is creeping closer and I have to make a decision: shall I pick the half marathon (21 km) or the full marathon (42 km)? Since I already ran 21 km in 1 hour and 50 minutes during training, I already reached my goal of completing the half marathon in less than two hours. In fact, currently I run 24km twice a week. My training schedule is much heavier that the minimum training schedule for a full marathon. So, one part of me is urging to go for the full marathon, but another part of me isn't so sure about that. A 42 km route looks very depressing when drawn on a map! :o

I have reached a decision. Sunday, I will take a 33+ km route. If I run it slowly, I expect to complete it - one way or another. If it doesn't hurt me longer than a week, I'll take the 42 km of the full marathon :)

Besides, how could I forget: 42 is the Ultimate Answer, so how could I have picked something different! /geek-mode

To some of my readers out-there: Yes, *this* time I'll take some water with me. I might be crazy, but I'm not stupid. I know I can sustain 2.5 hours of running without additional water, but that already leads to severe dehydration. I'm not taking any unnecessary risks when running more than three hours.

All about reading

2007-01-28T20:27:00.000+01:00

The posts I made up to this point are of an experimental nature because I'm not sure yet in what style to write my blog. A few colleagues of mine accidentally discovered this blog. They complained that the posts contain too much lingual errors - which isn't surprising because I just dumped what I thought without reading back - so, I'll have to pay more attention to that. I also got the advice to write the text in Dutch instead of English. However, I rather not do that since I anticipate some English readers. [Maybe one day I'll write down a post in Elfish. Then I'm sure that nobody will be able to read it :D]

Speaking about languages; some people dispute the genre of books that I prefer. I enjoy reading books in the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this genre there are some beautiful books, but some are truly hideous. For example, my favorite series is 'The Wheel of Time'. These books basically present a 'Lord of the Rings'-like story with less attention to describing the environment, and more attention to describing the social and political aspects of the story. Or in other words: epic battles, dramatic character interactions, sinister plots, and a lot of exploration in a post-apocalyptic world. The political-blah sometimes take the pace out of the story, which is rather unfortunate. On the other hand, there are quite some goose-bump/wet-eye moments during character development. Luckily, the dramatical parts are often followed by chapters of a more comical nature.

On the other hand, a lot of books do not have an original story. For example, most books contain a farmer boy and an evil wizard/god/daemon. This evil boss employs a powerful army that utterly defeats the army of the good people. While the good people try to hold on as long as possible, the farmer boy is th only hope to defeat the evil. This farmer boy then has to go on some dark quest, most of the time accompanied by some skilled party members and hunted by creepy monsters. After some adventures and close encounters, the farmer boy becomes a heroic king and defeat the evil boss and saves the world. This, for example, is a recurring pattern in the 'Shanarra'-series. It's nice the first few times, but becomes boring after a while.

Sometimes good books can be found at strange places. The Star Wars books for example. The movies were very original twenty years ago (in the cinema or television), but kind of standard nowadays. Like most merchandise based on movies, you would expect the books to be of low quality and have a bad story. A lot of one-book stories in this Star Wars universe employ the pattern that the galaxy is in trouble and Luke Skywalker has to fix it by almost getting killed and getting stronger in the 'Force'. Unexpectedly, the multi-book stories in the Star Wars universe are actually original and very good, such as 'The Heir To The Empire' trilogy by Timothy Zahn. This series introduces the best bad-guy ever (admiral Thrawn, who can anticipate strategic choices of his opponents just by studying their art) and my favorite character: Mara Jade. Intelligent, resourceful and dangerous: as a young girl she was abused by the evil Emperor to carry out his will all throughout the galaxy. Just before the Emperor was defeated by Darth Vader, he puts a final command in Mara's mind to kill Luke Skywalker as revenge. However, each time Mara encounters Luke, she finds an excuse not to kill him and they have quite some bizarre adventures together and grow closer. But how long can she delay her dead master's command?

But, liking these stories is a matter of taste. So, you can argue with me that these stories are bad, but it won't make me stop reading them :)

As a final note, I do not always have a disputable taste, as the following anonymous transcript of an IRC conversation shows:

[amiddelk] <- zzzzzt
[Ey] Nee, niet perse. Maar Grenouille streeft niet iets na dat ieder gezond mens onzin vindt: het perfecte parfum beinvloedt ook hen
[br] hmmm
[br] Ey sympathiseert met een freak!
[amiddelk] Grenouille... die naam komt me bekend voor uit een of ander Duits boek dat ik voor m'n duitse boekenlijst heb gelezen...
* br geeft amiddelk een Das
[Ey] amiddelk!
[Ey] Das Parfum!
[Ey] held!
[amiddelk] jaaja!
[amiddelk] was een mooi boek
[Ey] Daarom wilde ik naar deze film
[Ey] zie je, in Noordeloos lezen mensen allemaal goede boeken.
* amiddelk bewaart Eys uitspraak voor wannneer Ju mijn boekensmaak betwist :)
[amiddelk] <- nu echt zzzzt

So, there ;-)

A small step for a man...

2007-01-20T23:38:00.000+01:00

I have a confession to make: ice skating is not my thing. I basically suck at it even though my parents taught me the basics when I was three years old. Although I'm improving since I started last year and this year, there was one thing that annoyed me: I couldn't make efficient turns because I was not able to make turns by "crossovers" (putting the right skate left of the left skate). Last Friday I promised myself that *this* time I would do something about it. I stayed a few hours longer at my job and went to the ice halls in the evening...

Unfortunately, there were so many people at the ice hall that I didn't dare to try those crossovers. If I would fall, I would not only endanger myself (the skates of other people are sharp!) but several other people as well. However, after a few rounds of skating, the promise to myself returned. To be honest I have to say that I was really afraid, but the next turn I just did it. And guess what: it worked! I expected to land head-first onto the ice and then being sliced in pieced by the people after me. It didn't happen. Instead, "automatically" after I put my weight on to the left skate, it moved out of the way to make room for the right skate, and due to the turning speed it was actually quite easy to retain balance. I have to say that it took me more effort than two rounds as fast as I can and in fact I still can't believe I did it.

What followed is that I kept on practicing it the next hour. I'm still a bit afraid doing those "crossovers", but I realize now that it wasn't *that* hard. It just required some confidence and courage (perhaps some luck and some illogical reasoning as well). But, hey, I guess that's with most things in life...

A stormy day

2007-01-18T19:14:00.000+01:00

What a day today! There is a storm and everyone is in panic. Roads are full with cars, buses and trains are not driving anymore. A crane collapsed and took a bite from a building. Luckily I was inside another building at that time, but a colleague of mine was in a room next door. No casualties fortunately. Not that the building I was in was spared. The recently build front entrance couldn't stand the storm and the glass crashed on the floor in thousands of pieces.

Near the end of the day, the "big boss" send us an email that we better go home because of traffic problems. After some discussion, I decided to wait a bit till the storm was somewhat weaker, and didn't have that much problems going home. Aside from what phoning with my sister to make sure that we both could go home by car (good thing that I recharged my mobile phone yesterday, because I noticed that the power cell was depleted for several days/weeks already...).

Talking about phones, when I was waiting for my sister, an old man walked to me and he asked if he could ask a somewhat rude question. That reminded me of a question I had to ask a colleague today which for some reason was very hard for me (heartbeat must have been above 110 as far as I can estimate from the reaction of my body). Anyway, the old man apparently was stranded and asked if he could borrow my phone to call home for somebody to pick him up. No problem with that; the old man even wanted to put some money in my hands... because how could I accept money for just allowing an old man to phone home...

Dutch Functional Programming Day

2007-01-13T18:14:00.000+01:00

Each year, some people that are interested in functional programming in the Netherlands organize a meeting called the "fp dag". This event is normally organized by universities, but this time the event took place at the navy (don't ask me what the army has to do with it...). The difference? An identity check at the front door and a cook that treated us as if we were family of the queen itself, but the looks of a touch guy just back from some fighting in Afghanistan.

The talks themselves were not really exiting but not too bad either. In fact, that is the idea behind the event is to give an overview of what is happening in the dutch functional programming world, not to impress the audience with some neat knowledge. That certainly was the case, with a talk about what the University of Nijmegen is doing, a talk about what the Utrecht is doing, and a talk about a practical exercise (program the mind of players in a football game) that was successful in raising the interest of students.

I remember the fp dag of previous year due to the number of cake I ate (yum yum). I'm not sure yet what I will remember about this day. Probably the weird cook!

A bus too far?

2007-01-06T20:05:00.000+01:00

This will be my very first blog post. During my master's project, I kept a log of things that I encountered and thought important enough to remember for my master's thesis. Back then, I did this using my own private IRC channel and turning on logging in my IRC client... anyway, with these nice blogging facilities around, recording notes can be done in a much fancier way. So, I decided to write less work-oriented, probably uninteresting, remarks on this blog.

I actually didn't want to write this post yet. I wanted to go outside and run for an hour (physic's orders, will write about that later) , but bad whether prevented me from doing so. Instead, the best I could come up with is stepping on a fitness-thingie. Since there wasn't a decent movie available to watch, I decided to write this entry instead (doing those step-thingies and writing at my keyboard at the same time is a bit awkward though :o ). Anyway, here it is:

The first week of the new year has just passed by. Not much changed since the old year. Except one thing: new bus schedules! At first sight, these new schedules look interesting. I normally bike to a neighboring village to take the bus, but now they added a bus stop in my own village. Well, not really in the village: some distance away next to the gas station. There is no way to park my bike and if I could it would be stolen from me in a week. No problem though, I could walk to it. But being so far away, it takes at least ten minutes to get there by foot. Guess what; it takes me also ten minutes (sometimes even less) to bike those five km to the bus stop in the next village...! Pretty useless.

I can't really blame the guy that creates these schedules. Some high-ranking local government guy probably forced him to add a bus stop near my village. The location of the bus stop is actually the best location I could come up myself if I wouldn't want to require the bus to take a big detour. They should have said what they always said: my village is too much in the middle of nowhere for a bus stop (and the bus allocated to it) to be worthwhile, but that's probably the same as talking to a wall.

Ok, enough complaining for now. Will figure out a better subject for the next time!