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Afstemming / Balance
In the afternoon, I went to see the exhibition
Afstemming / Balance
with works by Peter Struycken in andriesse eyck gallery, which has eight of his new works and four earlier
works (two from 2016 and two from 2014). The last series of works all have
twelve colour either in a twelve by twelve grid or on a twenty by twenty grid.
The colours are selected such that they are in balance with eachother with
respect to brightness and saturation. The lights in the gallery where off
because the works need to be viewed in daylight. Any other light source may
destroy the balance. It is not even possible to take pictures (with a digital
camera) of these works due to the limitations of the three colour channels of
the camera. Some colour just get out of balance destroying the effect of the
original works. I met with Peter Struycken and talked about him about the
works, most of which took more than two months to be made, and other matters.
Afterwards, I also visited galery Ron
Mandos where I saw the exhibition Lesssons of the Hour by Isaac Julien. I also visited the bookstores Boekie Woekie and Scheltema.
Colour correction
I wrote a script (for the MySample editor) to correct the colours in some pictures of the
Afstemming (Balance) works of Peter
Struycken. For each of these works he selected twelve colours with equal
distance hues and the same brightness and saturation. He spend a long time to
balance these at daylight conditions. When you take a picture of these works
with a digital camera the balance is lost because the blueish colour become
appear more bright and the redish/brown colour become darker. A side effect of
the balance becoming lost is that the pattern of the twelve by twelve or
twenty by twenty squares gets unintentionally the focus. The photographs of
the works and the
Afstemming / Balance exhibition were taken by Peter Tijhuis. The script converts the RGB to HSV, adapts the brightness depending on the hue, and converts it back to
RGB. The result of the correction is not perfect and probably also depends on
the colour settings of the monitor, but is hopefully a little better than the
original photographs.
Book
At 16:30, I received the book Rusty Brown
written by Chris Ware in
English and published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group in 2019,
ISBN:9780375424328,
which I had bought yesterday at 14:58 in the webshop of bookshop Scheltema for € 14.95. I had seen this book
last Saturday in the shop.
Books and such
I brought some books and objects home from the former home of my mother now
that she lives in a nursing home. Among them:
- De hobbit written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Dutch published
by Uitgeverij Het Spectrum N.V. in 1971, translated by Max Schuchart from
The Hobbit, ISBN:9789027400437. My mother read this to us. There is even a tape with a
recording of this.
- Le petit Prince written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in
French with translations of certain words in Dutch in the margin and
published by J.B. Wolters in 1958. My mother used this to learn French.
- Kastelen vanuit de lucht written by N.F.H.M. Bullinga in Dutch and
published by Slingenberg in 1997, ISBN:9789072275455. (I have some faint memory having given this book to
my parents, because it contains a picture of De Haar Castle, which we used to visit with my family when we lived
in Woerden.)
- Some housekeeping books that my mother kept between 1960 and 1973. I have
some rememberence of her keeping these.
- A painting that Annabel made for my mother.
- A box with Donald Duck books for when Andy
was visiting.
- Original Mastermind game.
- A tile that was given to a primary school students on the occasion of the
birth of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.
- A printed copy of my master thesis Een attribuut evaluator
generator in Dutct, which I later translated to English and extended
into Specification and Implementation of an
Attributed Abstract Program Tree Evaluator Generator.
- 5 audio CDs:
- The Royal Philarmonic Orchestra plays Abba Classic
- The Royal Philarmonic Orchestra plays Queen Classic
- The Royal Philarmonic Orchestra plays Beatles Classic
- Living Colours by Jan Vayne
- Maria Callas in concert
- Reproduction from 1981 of the Map
Rhenolandiæ et Amstellandiæ from
Volume 4 (Netherlands of Atlas Maior.
First compiler
This evening, I got my first 'real' compiler working. Actually, it is only the
first step of a compiler. The program cc1.c can be used to compile one specific program,
hex0_2.c, which can hardly be called a C program, into some
intermediate file, which with some kind of macro assembler and a program to
convert hexadecimal numbers to binary, resulting in a program, called
hex0_2 that does that: converting hexadecimal numbers to binary. In
the past weeks, I spend quite some hours debugging various versions of the
hex0_2 program with the edb debugger to fix bugs in the cc1.c program.
Rinus Roelofs: Mathematical art
I went to TkkrLab for the Cyber Saturday
presentation by Rinus Roelofs about
mathematical art. (It is about half a year ago that ago that I visited a
space.) His presentation is about folding flat shapes into 3D objects. The
oldest description is by Albrecht Dürer. Roelofs showed a number of animations based on these descriptions. He also talked about
Infinite
Regular Polyhedra. He experimented with all kind of constructions of basic
shapes where all the shapes are connected with straight angles, which if made
from wood with a laser cutter can be put nicely together.
The presentation, in Dutch, but with a lot of interesting animations, was
recorded and can be found on YouTube: CyberSaturday: Mathematische kunst door Rinus Roelofs.
Strange day
This morning, my mother passed away at the age
of 91. She already received end-of-life care for some days and at her age and condition it was not
very likely that she would recover from her illness. My oldest sister stayed
with her during the night taking care that she was comfortable. I am happy that
Annabel and I visited her last Tuesday for
about half an hour. She was only briefly awake and excused herself before
falling asleep again. I visited her on October 2 and had
a nice talk with her.
This morning, Conny handed in the keys of her
former home, where she lived for fourteen years. In the past months we spend a
lot of time moving things to our come and cleaning her home. Hopefully, we will
have some time for other activities, such as searching for border poles and
visiting exhibitions.
I went to the city to get some recent passport photo for the renewal of
my driver's license. At the shop I got another set of four of them and a medium
sized portrait photo with me smiling for free. After this, I went to
bookshop Broekhuis. There I saw the exhibition of Balance in Life with photographs by Jelle Rietveld as part of the Fotomanifestatie Enschede '21, which has the
theme: Colors of Life.
At 11:35:56, I bought Moleskin daily planner for
2022 and the book Room to Dream: A Life
written by David
Lynch and Kristine McKenna in English and published by Canongate Books in 2018,
ISBN:9781782118404, for € 17.95.
Meditate
Conny captioned this photo: "The Bodhisattva of the Echinacea purpurea at Usselo." When we walk through the grounds of the crematorium of Usselo,
I always sit here with my eyes closed and for some reason I often quickly get
into a meditative state and experience a deep peace. Likewise today.
Senior software engineer
Now that I am approaching the age of sixty and having sufficient financial
means to retire early, I notice that I have different requirements with respect
to working conditions than my less senior (as in age) fellow software
engineers. I also noticed that the standard job qualifications no longer apply
to me. I am less interested in the language and tools that are being used or
the application area. I no longer have the desire to 'develop' myself or being
'challenged' all the time. My requirements are primarily with respect to the
working environment.
One of the things that motivates me is if I can solve some problem for others
or help them in some way. So, having short communication lines with the users
of the software that I develop, is something I like.
I like working in a team, but I also like autonomy with respect to what I work
on. I do not want a 'boss' to tell me what to work on, but rather a 'product
owner' that tells me which issues have the greatest priority such that I can
make my own evaluation about what is the best thing to work on for me. (I
tend to feel quite responsible and I have the tendency to jump onto too many
things at the same time.) I also discovered it is nice to have someone to
reflect on my work who is not directly involved with my work. I have had some
bad experiences with Scrum and daily stand-up meetings. Although code reviews are a good method for finding bugs, the efforts of a thorough
code review does not always weigh up to the results and if changes may only be
applied to the main branch after a review, this might delay the development
speed and require additional rework during merging. I prefer a more chaotic
development method above a very structured one where there are a lot of
administrative steps.
I also like my current working rhythm, which consist of going to the office on
Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays to work six hours and working another six hours
at home, usually three hours on both the Tuesdays and the Thursdays. I often
spend these hours on one of the evenings or in the weekends if there is an
issue that I would like to finish for one of my colleagues to use the next day.
I find biking to my office for at most 25 minutes one-way a good distance.
Some years ago, I commuted for about 40 minutes and although I have no problems
with biking that distance, I find it just a little too far under bad weather
conditions.
Funeral
Today, was the funeral of my mother. The chuch services was at 11 o'clock. The church was almost
full, not only with family members, but also many from the town of Woudenberg. I spoke an in memoriam during the service. A neighbour shared
also shared some memories. The woman leading the service also knew my mother,
because she was quite active in the church, and also shared some memories. It
made me realize that my mother was a well known person. After the service we
went to restaurant Schimmel 1885, where we had a lunch with soup and
sandwiches. There was not a formal opportunity for condolences, but people just
walked around. I met with some of my cousins, most of which I had not seen for
years. With some, I talked a little longer, with others only briefly. At the
end of the afternoon, we had a private cremation with only the immediate
family. This according to her wishes.
Fotomanifestatie Enschede
This afternoon, I visited all locations of the Fotomanifestation Enschede, but
at one location there will only be an exhibition from November 11. I saw the
following exhibitions:
Dune: Part One
This afternoon, Conny and I went to see the movie Dune:
Part One for a second time. We both enjoyed it, even a little more than
the first time. The first time I felt a bit
empty after the movie, but this time I didn't. I think I now had more time to
take it all in and perhaps less looking forward to the 'high points' from the
book.
This months interesting links
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