Moving around...

So, off to the lab to do, well, not much. Yesterday I started some work (took 1.5 hours, accompanied by a high pitch wail from one of the access verification points stuck in access denied mode, a broken waterbath and nobody to help resolve these issues as it was Sunday) which required another hour of work today, so enough time to go to the accountants and arrange matters. Apparently I'm now chairman of this whole building thingy. Wonderful. My other remaining housemate has the other function.
Some hectic driving and creative interpretation of the instructions later we reached Hilversum (via Doorn, for logic's sake). The less said about that the better.
Tim's house was next up - it's a brilliant place to live, I must say. I could even feel at home there, even though it lacks slanted roofs.

On the other side of things: Nobody is ever interested, I know this is an extreme case, but come on: Parking officer 'distressed' at dead man's fine.

Unix, Linux, etc.

My other machine is a...
Actually, I'm letting it go through a couple of identity crises at the moment. Though it's old(er) and unreliable I can say that testing different OS's and distributions are fun. So far:

• Windows ME. Final verdict: Absolute ****. Probably the worst version of Windows out there. Has something against Internet Explorer and is the main reason that I ditched that and went to Mozilla and later Firefox.
• Windows 2k. Final verdicht: n/a. Installer hangs due to hardware conflict. In general 2k isn't too bad. Really.
• freeBSD. Final verdict: Very decent. Free, stable and fast. As it's less standard, getting things to run can be a bit more of a problem. Flash in firefox is doable, so is getting support for realplayer. Nvidia drivers are available, and it runs freevo. The ports collection is brilliant.
• Ubuntu (based on debian). Final verdict: Nice if you want an instant workstation. Somehow confusing if you want anything else though. Don't have the patience to figure this one out.
• Next up: Gentoo. We'll see.
  

Minor Updates

The list of blogs linked in the sidebar has increased somewhat. If I'm missing anyone, please feel free to tell me.

As my birthday (Uhm, still need to plan the party, this may once again become a UC gig, though), St. Nick, etc. etc. is coming up, I may link to a wishlist as well soon. Though I need to think of things to put on it... Maybe I'll just set up a different blog (not monitored) and let everyone fight things out via comments.

The State of Things

The Lab: Okay, I have inserts in the plasmids. My comment last week was: lets wait for the sequencing - there's still enough that can go wrong. Like a skipped base pair in the beginning of the sequence. So the short of it is - most of the sequences are useless for expression.

The Street: The main shopping street, right round the corner, has seasonal decorative lighting spanning accross the road for the entire length. Awh, how cute!

The House: Groundfloor neighbour is moving out. Anyone need a 41 sqm room in Utrecht and has enough cash to buy it?

The Room: Moving the furniture around a bit, figuring out where the posters will go and how they'll get there. Amazingly enough, I can pack a double bed, a 205x80cm desk, a dining table, a two person couch, A large, medium and small cupboard, a kitchen unit, a bathroom with toilet, shower, washbasin and washing machine, more than 5 metres of shelves, two bedstands and a lot of junk into a 20 sqm. room and still have enough space to move the furniture around. And I also can still walk around without running into things.

The blog: Getting a bit dull. Random links:
Learn to dance with Napoleon Dynamite (well, if even K. is sending me a link...). And, no...
Also ran into TISM's music vid again. The bunny is still brilliant. And also, music out of windows sounds.
For those who have a holiday and are bored: go plant a garden. Though I once planned to hang window sill baskets on the baggage carrier of my bike and grow geraniums, I doubt that anyone else is up for that, so here's the virtual garden (game).
Meanwhile, on the Ad front: A big add (Also large file size, nearly 7Mb).

Back to that rotating view

A short history of the file you can see (two posts ago): As said, I went to the Kröller Muller museum some time ago. They recently opened a work by Krijn Giezen, called 'Kijk uit'. The museum site isn't very helpful, or well designed for that matter, but the sponsor has a bit more information in Dutch here. From the top of the stairs I took a series of 20 pictures that I then sent through automatic processing. The software is in demo and can be found here. There is no commercial end-user license yet, but products can be used as long as the use of the software is acknowledged. After some cropping and resizing I had a base image that I then imported into Flash MX 2004 (yes, I have Studio MX under student license, one of those side effects of taking a multimedia course). Currently the only steps there are setting up a single motion tween (10 minutes of work to tweak it). I'm hoping to find time and inspiration to use it as the base for something new.

About those commercials...

I promised a few people to link to the new commercials of a well-known soup brand. I checked the times (clock is visible when a cup is handed over). (5.11 Mb MPEG-1 each).

16:01 Nuclear Powerplant
16:02 Airport

The End of the Stairway

I'll have some fun with this later. Apologies to those without flash. Loading sometimes takes a while (100kb).

A day at the Kröller part II

As for actual paintings, the following are two that I actually took the effort to take a picture for. The first one is a van Gogh, which is strange in my case, as I'm usually not such a fan of Vincent.
The painting is actually hung in a reasonably modern frame (not shown) which actually works well with it. In general, a frame seems to be able to complement a painting, or absolutely ruin it, even if you're not looking at it directly. I'm not too sure about the colour of the walls - that is, the extent to which they can influence the opinion one forms of the paintings hung on the wall. In the case of the Kröller Muller museum, this a vague kind of bleached purple (which gives a lot of noise in digital pictures when shooting at a boosted ISO value of 1600). The Groninger museum had quite brightly coloured walls in the exhibition I visited last time, this actually worked quite well too.

Anyway, the other painting, which is more my style is by Jan Toorop and is entitled Fatalism. It's a very dark picture (hence the large amount of noise that I can't filter without losing detail). Somehow Charley Toorop (same family) is better known, but personally, once again, I tend to go for Jan Toorop's work.

As for the pictures taken outside, here's a little explanation. The whole day had misty weather and sunshine only came late in the day. This weather, in my opinion, works brilliantly for black and white pictures, but it doesn't stop me from throwing in some colour, if I want to see what happens. The other advantage is that light becomes a bit more visable in the haze.

A day at the Kröller

Now, the reason I had a camera on me last time I was at UC was not because of Hermans' farewell do, but rather because I was heading home and a day at the Kröller was planned. It is a shame that the museum is being renovated, but was still nice to go there. The really good thing about the Kröller is that photography is allowed (as long as you don't use flash), so I can post two pictures later on (those need heavy editing, the museum knows perfectly well that it's very difficult to get a decent photo of most items). In the meantime, I've been fooling around with the pictures taken in the park and the museum garden. Some of the better ones are included in the post.
The new thing at the Museum is a climbable work entitled something along the lines of 'watch out', and it's basically a really long stairway that goes up and continues above a hill. The pictures of this are also still in the 'to edit' folder...

Still a sausage

No, I'm not turning this into a cooking blog. Just wondering why anyone, especially a certain brand of meat-free protein source, would call a product a roll (even in Dutch), when it's still clearly a sausage. Okay, most veggie sausages are awfull - but has this lead to a widespread trauma amongst vegetarians?

P.S. Actually, come to think of it, the product description in itself would be a bit dubious under certain circumstances.

Soup?

Sometimes I have the feeling that I have just as much sense of what's going on as I have sense of what's in my soup at the UMC. Which is worrying. For the soup, that is.
In the meantime, posting here seems to be somewhat more limited. Maybe its just the fact that I don't have much time to find interesting things (though I guess I never really had that). The labwork is not that interesting to write about, nor are my pathetic attempts to set up a freevo installation in freeBSD (audio is working, video should, but doesn't list the directories that I specified and the CDs don't seem to work).
My room has seen a few upgrades. I'm only missing one cupboard and some small solutions. Nothing new there - people are still invited to try to figure out when I'm in and drop by. Which won't be this Saturday as there's a guest from England at my parents.

That Hermans goob-bye drink is tomorrow, let's see if I can do a literature meeting and 80 mini-preps in 75% of a day, and navigate around one other borrel, a graduation of someone I barely know and all the other random stuff (I don't know, the incubator blowing up?*). There goes the lunch break...

I'll try and remember to write something that makes more sense soon...


*Actually, breakdowns haven't happened too much: It only rained in the hallway once (and that washing-up bowl didn't quite manage to catch the water), the power has failed twice and someone 'replaced the blue toner', which involved taking out the black toner and trying to put a blue one back in. All in all, that's a very decent score, especially considering the recent evacuation in Went and the fire in Kruyt.