Diary, January 2000

   Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
                             1
     2   3   4   5   6   7   8
     9  10  11  12  13  14  15
    16  17  18  19  20  21  22
    23  24  25  26  27  28  29
    30  31

Saturday, January 1, 2000

First day of the year 2000

Because Annabel wanted to see the fireworks, Li-Xia woke her up just before 12, while I was uploading some of my web files. (This process ran during the turn of the year. So both my PC and my provider passed the Y2K test!) Annabel was barely awake when the magic second was there. We entered the year 2000, not the third millennium as so many people proclaimed. (They are going to find out they were wrong before it really starts on January 1, 2001.)

We went upstairs to watch the fireworks from the window. While I was taking some video, we discovered that Andy was screaming. After taking him out of bed, he only calmed down after we had put him in front of his favourite video, and he had watched it for at least five minutes.

In a sense it felt strange having reached the year 2000. Some kind of feeling of We finally made it. In the past week I often thought back about the past decades. But on the other hand it also feel just the same as before.

Tuesday, January 4, 2000

The Millennium Bug

Today on the news, it was concluded that the Millennium Bug did not occur, and that all efforts that were spend might have been spoilt. First of all, this is not a logical conclusion. You can also conclude that it money was well spend, because it did not occur. But what matters more, I think, that this statement so clearly shows that the media does not understand what this bug is. Of course, they are wrong to call it the millennium bug, as it would be proper to call it the Y2K bug. The media talks about it in the sigular form, as if there is only one bug, just like in case of a disaster: there is one disaster with many victims. I almost got the impression that the Dutch television set-up some cameras in an academical hospital to see the bug, as if it could suddenly jump out of one of the machines.

Misconceptions about when the 3^rd millennium starts

It looks like the western world is divided in those who believe the 3^rd millennium already has started, and those who know it will start on January 1, 2001.

Sites that support the fact that the next millennium only starts next year are:

The White House Millennium Counsel (Broken!)
UNSO Millennium Program (Broken!)
Millennium organisation (Broken!)
Webster's Dictionary
Millennium Brain Bug Syndrome

If you believe that the 3^rd millennium has started on January 1, 2000, please consider the following things:

You believe that our current Julian calendar should be taken as the starting point for determining the start of a millenium. This means that all arguments based on a birth day of Jesus Christ, can be done away with from the start, as He was not born anything close to the first of January of the year 1.
The expression "The year 1995", for example, is a short hand for "The 1995^th year of to the Julian calendar". Year 1, was thus the first year of our Julian calendar.
Only at the end of the first year, one year had passed.
Only at the end of the 100^th year, the first century had passed.
Only at the end of the 1000^th year, the first millenium had passed.
Only at the end of the year 2000, the second millenium has passed.

(About February 29)

Thursday, January 20, 2000

SACT 2000

Today, I attended the first day of the symposium Software Architectures and Component Technology. There is much to say about, but I am only given some phrases that I found worthy noting down. Some of these are just new slang, I think.

I want to make sure that we are on the same page
a breed of printers
small grain reuse did not work
commonality
if fuel for
to mitigate the risk
architecture-based design is more than a design method
UP does not deal with architecture design considerations
give you a four thousand feet view
out in front of you
Oh boy, that is a nice question
ROSE is not appropriate
Use the best and make the rest
The good news is UML, and the bas new is UML
After you have become a filthy rich CEO, you can still become a software architect
If it ain't broken, don't fix it
You used up your slides
I have a dead-line next week. What does architecture bring me?
I will take a step here
What is better trail-and-error or using a design methodology?

Does this make sense? No, of course not.

Friday, January 21, 2000

SACT 2000

Today was the second day of the symposium. Maybe even more interesting than the first day. It is strange, but often when I attend conferences like this one, I get the strange feeling that computer science has not evolved much in the past decades.

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Self-glorification

Lately, I often ask myself whether these web pages are not a form of self glorification, or in other words a way to show-off, seeking admiration from others. It's it simply a search for recognition and love.

Maybe it has to do with my age that I am contemplating what I have achieved so far in my life. I noticed that lately I have been thinking a lot about what I did in the past. For example, about the trips I made. Because of this, I am also paging through my old diaries, which brings back memories from the past.

However, seeking recognition is a dead-end road. As a Christian we should not seek to glorify ourselves. Jesus made some pretty confronting statements.

If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.

Luke 9:23,24. according to NASB

Friday, January 28, 2000

Painting by Billy Foley

I made a bitmap of the jpeg-image of a painting by Billy Foley, and I made some of the background white, as it is white and not coloured as in some parts of the image.

(follow-up)

I was wondering if there would exist a technique to get an image with a higher resolution than the one I was having. Of course, you cannot make the image contain more information than it already has. Information is the opposite of entropy (which is the measure of chaos). So it seems that any operation applied to an image can only reduce the information in the image. This is true if you do not have any additional knowledge about the original thing the image was taken from. But if you do know some properties of it, than it is possible to improve the image.

Sunday, January 30, 2000

Teacups

Today, I for the first time drank some tea from two cute teacups we bought yesterday for one guilder each.

Monday, January 31, 2000

L₁ to K

The coming two weaks I will be attending a XRF course organized by Philips Analytical, the company I am working with. In the course material there was a nice small map with the title How to get to Almelo. Today, there was a lecture about the physics of X-rays and fluoresense. Somebody noted that in some table (in the book Quantitative X-ray Spectrometery) the drop of electrons from the L₁ orbital to the K orbital was missing, and asked if they could make this drop or not. The physics of electrons is really a strange and abstract subject. Everytime it amazes me that we as humans know these kind of things. Yet I remember that some Nobel-price winner said that he still not really understands how it works. We know the tricks of how to calculate things, but have no clue about the why it works like this.

(other courses)