Madame Bovary - Really?

My faith in women was soundly shattered last night.

I recently read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and it was one of the worst reads ever. It was actually quite expertly written, but I seriously couldn't stand the main character. About every other page I was begging for someone to slap her, that is how vapid, silly, and just a stupid girl I found her to be. Not just now and then, no, All The Time.

So I was thinking: "Well, this Gustave Flaubert obviously has to be some kind of character who either hates women with a fiery passion or some kind of recluse who hasn't met a proper woman in his entire life."
That's basically how I justified the horribleness (yes it's a word) of the main character (Madame Bovary, BTW, but I guess that's obvious)

Now, last night, Eric Larden was couch surfing at my place. Was great fun, we jammed a bit together (He is a much better guitarist then me, but we still managed some fun tunes) and we had plenty to talk about.

However, at one point he notices Madame Bovary lying around my apartment somewhere and he mentions that a female friend of him had recommended it to him. I mention that I absolutely hated it and why. (How vapid and silly the main character is.) At this point he starts laughing.

Why? The reason his friend had recommended the book was, according to her, it was surprising that even though written by a male author, the depiction of the woman was spot on.

Please god no. *sadface*

Rollcall - Name the webapp

Hey all!

So I've been at hackcamp since wednesday and we presented our hacks yesterday. Now I did work with my colleagues on hacking the bike trainer into a game controller, but I got quickly distracted by my own little idea...

The Bike Controller - Photo by Jessica Meats

The challenge
Now back to my own little project. I've personally dabbled in writing songs over the past, sometimes more successful than other times and always fun. However, I was on twitter the other day when I realized that every second, thousands of people are actually writing lines of text. And I was wondering, if you combine those intelligently, you could basically generate song lyrics about anything!

So that became my personal hack for over the weekend, and the preliminary app should be online here: http://tweetusmerula.appspot.com/

I realize that right now it only works rarely (working on that) and the rhyming/matching/story algorithms are not exactly intelligent yet, but it does generate fun songs now and then and I will get around to fixing all these problems.

The bigger problem I have right now though, is the name. I originally wanted to call it "songbird", but that apparently is some kind of mp3 player. Than I tried several others, but they all didn't fit or were very taken. Even "Merula" was taken (Which I thought of since the blackbird is the most common and apparently in The Netherlands the most popular songbirds), so that's how I ended up with Tweetus Merula. Not exactly catchy.

So there's my challenge! The one who will help me find the perfect name for my lyrics-from-twitter-generating-webapp will get an awesome prize  from me! Thanks!

Twittergenerated #geektrip Anthem

As a first result of my webapp, this song was generated by loading "geektrip" into it:

The Geektrip Anthem
Geeks certainly know how to barbecue
They're interested in what you're up to
4 more to go
yes you do!


day 1 photos of tomscott cbetta mseckington and others
Anyone on the geektrip want to talk to Reuters
This is like the methadone getting delievered
The international HackCamp has started
Netherlands here we come!
This will be awesome!

Geeks certainly know how to barbecue
They're interested in what you're up to
4 more to go
yes you do!

At geektrip playing with MongoDB and Scala futures
Still need to see how fast it charges

Geeks certainly know how to barbecue

They're interested in what you're up to

4 more to go

yes you do!

Geeks certainly know how to barbecue

They're interested in what you're up to

4 more to go

yes you do!

The world is AWESOME!

It is! For Real! Absoluteshizzly! Yay yay yay Marina and the Diamonds rocks and sunshine and happy and life and water and yay! God I'm crazy this morning and I'm crazy ass loving it! If someone secretly slipped me drugs last night... Thanks!

Also, if any of my neighbours are reading this, I don't apologize for the loud singing and the jumping around for the last hour... It's a gorgeous day and you should be awake! But I hope I haven't made your day any less awesome (No matter how awesome your last night was). Today is party day!

Projects

My life is usually a long series of little projects I'm currently working on. Some have a clear target, some last forever, most never get past the "Whoa, that would be awesome!" phase.

This is of course besides (and sometimes in harmony with) the stuff I do to work and live.

So, just to clear my head a little, here's a little list of stuff I'm currently working on (Roughly from highest to lowest priority):

• Run the Marathon of Rotterdam - Fairly on schedule with my training schedule
• Get better at programming - Reading books, focusing on TDD, SCJD @ work
• Lose weight - Not going so well, even though I do feel like I'm losing fat with all the running
• Get my driver's licence -  Got theory, exam is planned for the 9th of March
• Write more music - Not going nearly is good as I want.
• Make more music - Practice for my bands, practice piano, flute etc. etc.
• Write more - This is a bit of a result of that, also stuff at work.
• Watch the top 250 movies - Not in a rush, seen a few.
• Get better at SCII - Not going so well, still, lots of fun.

If I take a look at this list then I have admit that it's actually not really a list of projects. It's more like a list of good intentions. And as we all know, good intentions serve primarily as awesome pavement in certain coolly challenged mythological places. Taking another look I realise the only things significantly moving forward are those with a clear goal (i.e. the marathon and driver's licence). Ergo, to get other stuff moving forward I need more specific projects. Less things to do at the same time would probably also help, but that rarely happens with me.

OK, so for Write more music: I'm going to jump into FAWM. I don't believe I'll have the time to still write 14 songs (though that will of course be a secondary goal) but I do want to write at least 10 more songs during February.

And for write more... Hmm, I've been wanting to delve deeper into classical music for quite some time now, so I was considering doing a bunch of reviews of interesting classical pieces, but I now realise that would probably strain my time even further, while I might as well write about the FAWM thing. OK, so, at least 10 more songs in february and the results will be documented here.

Yay, clear goal!

Nike+ and the joys of google

Well, yesterday I finally got myself to initialize my Nike+ bracelet thingie and set up a brand spanking new profile at http://my.nike.com/Angry_B8 . (I wanted to use it to prepare for the Bruggenloop coming sunday)

However for some weird archaic odd reason, they appear to; A. require a profile picture before your profile can be shown and 2; Require this picture to be smaller than 200 Kb ... Weirdness, what is this, the nineties?

Anyway, so I remembered I always used to use this awesome program for picture viewing which also had great conversion (and primarily batch conversion) capabilities, but I couldn't remember the name.

So I googled: awesome program for picture viewing and batch conversion
And tadaaa! The third result: IrfanView! Excellent!

I love the internet :-).

Petitie voor gehandicaptenzorg

Deze keer een post in het Nederlands, omdat het gaat over het zoveelste falen van het huidige Nederlandse kabinet.

Het gaat om de volgende petitie: http://redhetpgb.petities.nl/

Mijn broertje woont in een prachtig droomhuis (www.hetdroomhuis.eu) waar 10 gehandicapte kinderen zorg op maat krijgen, waar mensen elkaar kennen en waar de kinderen altijd in de buurt zijn van mensen die oprecht van ze houden en ze de tijd kunnen geven die ze verdienen. Dit is allemaal mogelijk door een eindeloze hoeveelheid inzet van ouders, goede doelen en andere belangelozen in combinatie met de PGB regeling, die opgezet was om exact dit soort initiatieven te stimuleren.

Door de (mijns inziens harteloze) plannen van het huidige kabinet zal bij ongewijzigd beleid het Droomhuis in Wageningen er in 3 jaar tijd ruim 30% in budget op achteruit gaan. Dat zou betekenen dat er drie tot vijf verzorgers ontslagen moeten worden waardoor alle tijd en ruimte die er nu is voor bijvoorbeeld integratie in de samenleving en gewoon spelen verloren zou gaan.

Nu is het doel van deze petitie het kabinet op andere gedachten te brengen, zodat ze niet gaan bezuinigen op de PGB's, waaruit o.a. de zorg voor onze kinderen in wooninitiatieven betaald moet worden.

Morgen staat het debat gepland met de kamer, al zijn er nu signalen dat het wellicht een week wordt uitgesteld. Dat zou al mooi zijn, maar alle kleine beetjes helpen.

En is het niet bekend dat je het niveau van een beschaving kan meten aan hoe zij voor hun zwakste zorg? Ik hoop van harte dat wij ons beschavingsniveau op zo'n peil kunnen houden dat de honderden prachtige wooninitiatieven voor gehandicapten in Nederland de huidige kwaliteit kunnen behouden.

Bedankt! (Ook namens mijn broertje)

Internet

Well hello!

This is just a quick little post to explain the silence (Not that it is at all necessary). I'm in the middle of a move (Or actually I'm already done) and I do not have internet yet in my new apartment. (Which does have an awesome awesome awesome view... Yes, three awesomes)

Ergo.

Have fun!

In Retrospect

I grow silent in the shadow of my failures.
Though they stand as a monument to improving me,
I grow silent in the shadow of my failures.

Though I fly on the wings of my successes,
I grow silent in the shadow of my failures

Unfortunate

“It’s not like it’s going to matter”
“How can you be so sure?”
“From the minute you picked up that bandana she was lost to you, and you know it.”
“NO! I refuse to accept this!”
“Fine by me, it’s your funeral.”

As he felt the blood running down his temple his mind wandered back to that last brief conversation. He had been certain that the kid had been wrong. His inability to face the truth had never been a problem before, but this time Reginald had known for certain it would get him killed.

He had never expected this though. How could he? All your life, there is only one point of view that matters. You are always the lead character in your own story. Your own world by definition revolves around you, so you will be the hero of your own story. You will be the one who comes out on top, since if you don’t come out on top, you won’t be there to experience the story, therefore there is no story.

An explosion in the distance made him turn his head.
Aargh, wrong move.
            Even though he was pretty sure he had stopped moving his head, the world had not stopped moving. Round and round it went, as if his body had finally realized it had been spinning round the world at about 1600 kilometers an hour for the last 53 years.

He closed his eyes.
This is getting me nowhere.
           When he opened his eyes, the frantic spinning of the world had come to a screeching halt, but his head was now officially on the floor.

It’s a rude awakening when you discover that actually, you were just a supporting character in someone else’s story. It’s especially painful when that message arrives via a stray bullet ricocheting of a golden care bear statue. A bullet which hadn’t even had the decency to be aimed at him in the first place!

He wasn’t even sure if the kid was the hero of this story. Who knows, maybe the explosion he had just heard had blown him and his girl sky high, to the further glory of some other shmuck who was probably never going to get anything real done either.
Maybe this is our eternal fate then, to be supporting characters of supporting characters in a never ending loop of senseless misdirection and superiority complexes…

He had given up on trying to feel anything, the pain had gone a long time ago and despair just seemed silly at this point. As he felt his consciousness prepare for a silent exit, a thought occurred to him.
What kind of name is “Rambo” anyway?

The Fall - lilypond is fun.

As the title says, I've been brushing up on my lilypond, which is like LaTeX for sheet music.

A long time ago (Somewhere in the whereabouts of december last year) I promised my sister to write a duet for two flutes so we could play it together. Well, since then I've worked out several iterations of ideas that all ended up dying (Due to various reasons, dying phones and laptops being some of them).

However, now I think I've got something that I'll stick to as the main theme for one of the three or four parts that the piece will have. Working title for this part: Fall (Originality can always be forced onto the title later).

Yeah, so I didn't quite work out the accidentals and phrasing for the second part yet, but so far, it's a start. I had actually recorded it at first, but then when I was finally happy with how I thought it had sounded, it turned out my microphone had not been turned on... Figures.
By then it was also quarter past ten so I couldn't really continue without seriously annoying half the neighbourhood. Anyway, after that I decided to brush up on my lilypond and show this thing instead.

Updates are ready to be installed. Goody.

Alternative intro

<unnecessary intro style='informal'>
<stuff about me you don't want to know />
</unnecessary intro>

<standard blog body text subject='intro' feel='semi-angsty' humor='kinda' spelling='lousy'>
<point type='inconsequential' value="null">
</standard blog body text>

<ending type='nonsense'/>

Whee! Let's up the geek-level!

Blog ID 3304881280812352969

So.

This will be my wonderful addition to the utter pile of crap that is at least ninety percent of the internet.

Why? Well, a friend once told me that when you create a blog, you should do it properly, or you shouldn't do it. I wholeheartedly agree.

This blog will probably be about the opposite. Even more likely it'll be somewhere inconsequential in the middle, with no real relation to a solid statement like that whatsoever.

Because, as I reckon it is for most people, I do have a lot of crap on my mind. Ideas pop up all the freaking time which make no sense at all and which have no relation to each other whatsoever. Opinions are another one of those things that seem to creep up on me (Again something I suspect other people will be able to recognise).

All this needs a place to go to (though I guess, not really), but I have no need for expectations or vague self-imposed deadlines. Ergo, this little spot of blogosphere has been reserved to be my least pretentious creative toilet.

Easypeasy.

Hmm, Pie.

P.S. Of course the question arises, why on earth (or in this case, the internet, which probably counts as well) would you put your creative excrements out on the web for everyone to read? Why not lock them up on a hard drive or god forbid, write them down on a piece of paper? Well, I don't really know, perhaps I'm just an attention seeking bastard, geek-style. Meh, Possible