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31
(nothing here yet)
I created this entry, and all other files for March, but then did
not know of anything sensible to write, and kept looking at
the above note for the rest of the day. Now there is something here,
but does it count as a vaild entry. I probably are going to
remove this entry, next week.
This was written with a
Toshiba T1000 laptop, which I bought second-hand
a few weeks ago. The first thing I did, was writing a program
(syncd.c)
to transfer files between Linux and DOS floppies.
(Follow-up)
Yesterday evening Li-Xia and I watched the movie
`Rain Man'
on video.
For me it was the third time I saw it, but for Li-Xia it was the
very first time. (I think it is the only movie that I saw it twice in a
movie theater.) I would definitly regard it as one of the best movies
I know off. It is hard to say whether
I think it is the best, because sometimes it is very hard to compare
movies with each other. Rain Man is about two brothers, who although
being very different share a common problem of not knowing how to
express emotions. There is not an obvious answer to who is the most
normal person, although Raymond definitly behaves abnormal on first
sight.
Raymond, is a very talented autist. Again the third viewing made me
think about my own `autistic' tendencies. Don't get me wrong, I am
not in any way claiming that I am autistic, as I am clearly not.
I was a very quieted child, and could intensly play with toys for an hours.
(Yesterday, when my parents visited me, my mother recalled this fact.
One of the interesting things of getting children, is that it brings
back many stories about your own child life, when you discuss the
development of your children with parents.)
It was only discovered when I was 7 years that I was near-sighted.
Because of this I lived mostly in a world of my own, until my early
teens, and displayed behaviour (as talking to myself alot) that
in to a much higher degree is also found with autistic persons.
I feel also that it took me a very long time (until my mid-twenties).
before I learned to relate to others at their level.
Often I feel that writing diaries (thus also this one) is also a spin-off
of this.
(follow-up)
Last night we heard Annabel cry around two o'clock in the night.
Because she became quiet after some time, we did not look at her.
Sometimes, when we go to look her, she does not want to sleep
anymore for a few hours. This morning I went to her, after she
had made some noices, and I found her sitting her bed covered
with her kotch. It was clear to me that it had been in the middle
of the night that she had thrown-up. Then it also turned out
that she was dirty. Li-Xia and I spend at least half an hour to
do the initial cleaning-up. (After which I could just make it
to church in time. Li-Xia stayed home to take care for Annabel.)
typing in bed
I typed this while laying in bed, with the laptop on my stomack,
pressing the keys with my fingers from the sides. I still have
troubles with finding the keys, so I have lifted my head, such that
I can read they keys.
Telegram style
Both Annabel and I have been ill since Sunday. We are recovering
now.
I found a page containing:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
</HEAD>
<BODY onLoad="document.mailme.submit()">
<!-- Howdy! yeah, the code is pretty darn simple, eh? Soon 1,000s of
people will be scamming email addresses in this manner. At least we
discovered it first. The real trick to make it stop? Put a bogus email
address in your browser's "email reply" ent. Or leave it blank-->
<form method=post name="mailme"
action="mailto:xxxxx@xxxxxxx.xxxxx.xxx?subject=scammed address">
<h3>Viewing this page automatically submits email to an address
which then sends you back email to prove it grabbed the message.</h3>
<input type=hidden name="scammed.the.address" value="did it">
</form>
</BODY></HTML>
I made a page like it. Please try it,
and by doing so send me an email, saying `Hello'.
Yesterday, when I worked again (a little), I had many ideas for things
to tell. Now I cannot remember them.
Maybe I should make a graph with the quality of my diary entries,
compared to the day of the week. I sense there is a strong correlation.
This week Robert Reeves contacted me. He is writing a paper about
the benifits and drawbacks of making your journal availible to the
public. He is especially interested in the web
published diaries like this one. He is also the first one that told me that he
read the whole diary. He even gave me a list of broken links :-).
Henk de Velde
is trying to break the record for solo sailing race around the
world. He is keeping a diary on the net about his progress.
(But the pages are in Dutch.)
The InterNetKrant of today,
said (in Dutch):
GELUK VAN VROUW BEPAALD DOOR HEBBEN PARTNER
Niet een kind of een baan, maar het hebben van een partner bepaalt het
geluksgevoel van vrouwen. Die conclusie kan worden getrokken uit de Algemene
Welbevinden Index van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS). Vrouwen
met baan en partner maar zonder kinderen blijken het gelukkigst te zijn.
Krijgen zij kinderen, dan vermindert hun topstemming.
It says that happiness of woman is determind by having a partner,
not by having chikdren or a job.
Women with a job and a partner are the most happiest
(according some quality of life index calculated by
Statistics Netherlands).
If they get children they become less happy (for an obvious reason,
I would say from my own experience).
I Heard of another ELIZA.
What about trying FreeWalk?
(Only works if you are on a SGI IRIX 5.3, which I am not.)
Preaching
This morning Gerhard achter de Molen, one of my favourite speakers spoke
during the sunday morning service. He has the same profession as
Jesus Himself;
he is a carpenter. His preaching is simple but direct, and often
he brings something with him as an illustration. This morning
he showed some slides (made by himself, I guess), with a song
about the love of God. He also showed a robe with knots, and
explained how God had been removing the knots in his own life.
He based his preaching on a text taken from Haggai:
Consider your ways!
You have sown much but harvest little;
you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied;
you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk;
you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough;
and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.
You look for much, but behold, it becomes little;
when you bring it home, I blow it away.
These are the verses that touched me most, but to understand why,
you might have to read the book yourself.
Afternoon nap
At two o'clock, I laided down on the couch with my Toshiba laptop
on my belly, in order to do some programming on
html2tex. Some small change
needed some thinking. I was tired, my eyes closed, and I
felt asleep, with the laptop still on my lap.
Around four, we wanted to leave, and I saw a truck from the fire-squad
driving through the street, and some youngsters hanging around. That ment
that there must be some fire close-by. When I walked to the living
room (which is not on the side of the street), I saw that the
field we look-out on, was on fire. It was only dry grass that
was on fire, not something to much to worry about. Just before I
left I saw how the fire-squad people were handing out some kind of
special brooms to some boys to help them exstinquish the burning grass.
(follow-up)
Snow in bright sun light
Susan came in to tell me that it was
snowing outside, while
the sun also was shining. And indeed, when I raised the blinds,
I saw the snow. The sun was shining brightly, be it a little
pale.
China
It seems there is a serious conflict between the two Chinas.
I just found a protest
from Taiwan agains the PRC on the internet.
English Proficency Test
Fill each of the numbered blanks in the following passage with one
suitable word.
Meindert
This afternoon Meindert, one of my old friends, phoned. We do not talk
so often, but every time we talk we cannot stop. We discussed the
benefits and problems of being married. He is single at the moment.
alt.spam FAQ
I took the alt.spam FAQ
and reformated it while reading.
Just before I left home, I phomed
Li-Xia to tell that I was on my way.
While putting on my coat, I suddenly felt very much in love with her,
realizing how much I love both her and Annabel.
Addison-Wesley going down-hill
In their new `Computing' catalog they announce a book with the
title Love Online, A Practical Guide to Digital Dating by
Phyllis Phlegar.
About words
Hanspeter Schmid
wrote something about
Mamihlapinatapai.
Cola and Tea
Did you every try to pour cola in a glass that you have used for tea
for a long time? It is an interesting experiment.
This afternoon I was waiting
in line with McDonalds watching
golf on the TV, when suddenly I
had to think about the use of
my life. I thought about all the
programs that I wrote, and plan to
write. They make some things easier
but not so much, and even if
they do, it does not seem to have
any real use. There seems to be
nothing new. Nothing is new under
the sun, all is vanity indeed!
I often get this feeling when
walking through the city on Saturdays.
I am looking for something new,
a book, or something else. But
it often ;leaves me with an
empty feeling.
And then I took the paper
napkin, and wrote down
all these words.
Today, Floor Vogelaar preached about
`Hearing God's voice', based on the following verse:
I will stand at my watch
and station myself on the ramparts;
I will look to see what he will say to me,
and what answer I am to give to this complaint.
One of the things he said was that God speaks to us through our thoughts,
that our thoughs are mixed with the thoughts of God that He speaks to us
through His indwelling Spirit. This reminded me
of what Andrew Rilstone
said about the ideas of C.S. Lewis about the nature of the bible
on the alt.books.cs-lewis
news group:
The chapter `On Scripture' in `Reflections on the Pslams' is his
clearest explanation of his beliefs about the Bible. Roughly, he does
not believe that the Bible is inerrant - he thinks that it contains
factual errors, bias, propoganda, even wickedness and immorality. It is
the folklore, literature and mythology of the Jews and the confused and
muddled papers and correspondence of the early church. However, God has
chosen to make that confused and muddled literature the bearer of his
Word; he speaks to us through it, although the individual words are
not the words of God. (He thinks that the Bible is an ordinary book and
also the word of God in the same way that human beings are animals who
are also the image of God.)
In the same posting, Andrew also wrote:
His essay `Fern Seed and Elephants' is a very interesting
attack/critique of the excesses of what was then modern Biblical
scholarship: his instincts as a critic, he says, tell him that the New
Testement is a much more historical document than most modernists
believe. (Unfortunately, he doesn't comment on the specific theories of
the Biblicat Critics - so he gives us no clues about whether he thinks
form criticism, say, is useful.)
There is also an interesting essay in `First and Second Things' on
modern translations of the Bible.
After the service I talked with Zuster Bouwman. `Zuster' is the Dutch
word for sister. She is the only lady in our church that is generally
addressed as `zuster', probably out of respect, because she is (one of)
the eldest woman in our church. Some of the younger people who grew
up in the church have the habbit of addressing some of the older
people with `uncle' or `aunt', followed by their firstname.
I had walked up to Zuster Bouwman because I had not seen her for some
weeks. When she saw me, she walked up to me and grabbed my arms
with her strong hands, and told me that she thanked God that she had
recovered from he illness again. She told me that she had also felt
spiritually weak when she was ill. She told me, that I should not think
that they (she and her husband) were so strong spiritual, and that they
too often felt weak. But by saying this she showed how strong she realy
is, spiritual wise, I would say.
(follow-up)
Yesterday, some people from our group gave a talk about Java. Today
I found an Java page solving pentomino puzzles. It only finds one solution.
I once optimized a program for a similar kind of puzzle,
called the Soma Cube. I am not the only one worked on this.
After a long night
a beam of shining light
Rude awakening
to find all the sorrows
- forgotten
and not seen in the dark -
in my heart
No time
to rub my eyes
Just time to go
Where do we all go?
Why do we all go
Do we go?
This is what Susan found at the bottom of
an email that she received from Olli Pihlajamaa. When I asked him, whether I could put it here,
he replied:
If You like to do so You are free to do that. It was just a feeling
written in one minute after looking out of my widow. The reply to the
Susan just happened to be in my Emacs buffer - so I put it there.
Late at night, I switch off the light, while
Li-Xia is reading a book,
and I said: 'I switched of the light. Did you notice?'.
Li-Xia replies with: 'Which light?'.
Michael Wayne Dunahee has been missing for 5 years now.
I can not imagine how I would feel if my child would be
missing.
Mad cow disease; who to trust?
It is interesting to see, how two authorities claim the opposite:
There are risks all around us, and it seems that advances in
technology, does not give us a happier life, with respect to
dealing with these risks. But even the experts do not agree!
Butter
Somebody posted the file
`buffer.jpg' in the
alt.folklore.computers newsgroup.
A rather of the topic posting, but very beautifull indeed.
Algebra
The last week, I have been trying to find some mapping to some
kind of execution rules to the process algebraic language
LOTOS/TM. The problem is that we do not have a LOTOS/TM
rewrite system at hand, which means I have been doing
the rewritting by hand using cut-and-paste. Makes me rather
dizzy after a while.
With the increasing complexity of computer systems and software,
they start to behave as unpredicatble as anything else around us.
From the start of the week my favourite editor, aXe, crashes
with the message Error: Cannot perform malloc, whenever
I open an editing window, while it has been working for more than
a year now. One of the system administrators just walked by, to tell
me that they have not been able to locate the problem. It seems that
nothing has changed, and that I am the only one who has problems
with it.
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