Andy going to the movies
When I went to catch Andy from
the weekend care (where he stays once every four weeks),
I heard that they went to see the movie
K3 En Het IJsprinsesje in a movie theater. This
might have been the first time for him going to a
movie theater.
Chinese Wooden Puzzle
I took the puzzle, that I wrote about on
July 29, to my office,
and I have been playing with it in the past weeks.
I also started to write down the solutions, and
today, I created a page with the solutions I found so far. By
the end of the day, it contained 24 solutions. It
now takes me about one minute to find an alternative
solution. I have been thinking about a program that
could find solutions, but so far, I do not have any
idea of how to approach the problem.
(follow-up)
I created a Hyves profile.
This evening, we watched the episode of "Blueprint for disaster"
about the firework disaster in Enschede on Discovery Channel.
The documentary did not contain much new information, and I
also found the presentation some what confusing at certain
points. They often used a split screen of an animation with
real footage. And some subjects, as to why the fireworks
detonated, were not touched upon at all. On the otherhand,
a lot of attention was paid to who or what might have started
the initial fire. I thought that this series was the conditions
that allowed a disaster to happen, and not about crime investigation.
Playing Go
This evening, Annabel, Kelly (a school
friend of Annabel) and I, went to the University to attend the
weekly Go playing session in the "theatercafe"
of the Vrijhof. There were quite a lot of people, including some
new. I played a 13x13 game against Martijn, because he wanted to
play with Edze. But when Edze arrived, he wanted to play with someone
else. I watched Martijn playing against Willem, a new guy, who
I already played against in Apeldoorn on Sunday, May 21. Annabel and Kelly only played three games on
a 13x13 board, and then ran around.
YouTube: Moonlight sonate
Data loss
Last Friday, I decided to do something about
ester,
because Annabel had been compaining that she could not
install the lastest version of MSN. It indeed I have had lots
of problems with it, due to fact that the primary partition,
the C-drive, is only 1 Gbyte big. Next to the C-drive, there
are two half Gbyte partitions (drives E and F), a 9 GByte
partition (drive G) and a 20 Gbyte partition (drive H). Drive
D is assigned to a separate hard drive, a seagate ST51270A
that came from annabel.
My idea was to shrink some partitions, after having move the
data to the H drive, and then enlarge the primary partition.
First I moved the data from the D drive, and only afterwards,
I realized that it was of no use, because it was on a different
hard disk. Next I moved the data from drives E and F to drive H.
I downloaded the Partition Resizer
and installed it on drive G. I used it to shrink partitions for
drives E and F to 256 Mbyte (the minimum possible) and next, I
increased the size of the primary partition (for drive C). Everything
went smooth, and Windows 98 SE started without problems.
Next I got the idea to move the partitions for drives E and F to
the end of the drive, wrongly assuming that the would still be
assigned to the same drive. I first needed to defragment drive
H, which took quite a long time. I thought that shrinking the
partition for drive H would be only an administrative matter.
But I was wrong, when I discovered that the surface checking
took much longer than expected. The surface checking went without
problems. It was already getting late, and I decided to go to bed.
On Saturday, when I switched on the monitor, I discovered the
program had encountered IO-errors on the disk. Then I realized
that there were some serious problems. Instead of restarting
the partion resized and giving it a second try to finish its
job, I started up Windows. Windows was having some serious problems
with drive H. It did recover some part of the directories, and
I thought it could still access most of the data.
I decided to leave drive H as it was, and to create a single
large partition of the other partitions. I copied all the data
from drive G to my Freecom mobile
drive, which took about one and half hour, mainly because the
computer only supports USB 1.0. I use Fdisk to remove all, but the
last secondary partitions and Partition Resizer (copied on a floppy)
to extend the primary partition. And finally, I copy all the data
from the mobile drive to the C drive. Next, I have a look at drive
H (which is on drive E), only to discover that at most 2 of
the 15 Gbyte data that were on the drive have been recovered. I
feel that I have been very stupid. I should have backed up the
data from drive H before I made the modifications. This is the
worst data loss that I have encountered so far. There is not
really any important data on the drive, because I already had
moved all important data to lixia, our newest computer. But in a way, I felt
quite nervous not knowing which data I had lost. The rest of the
day, I spend looking at tools for recovering data from a corrupted
drive. I did not discover any free tools.
Today, I spend some time looking at the computer again. I did
copy some of the accesible files to the primary drive. Going
through all the short-cuts, I concluded that I installed many
programs on drive H and that a large part of the data should
have been installed programs, including some Myst games. Again,
I looked from some freeware recovery tools, but did not find
any good ones. This was not a very happy weekend for me.
(follow-up)
Special apple
This morning, I got a small apple that grew on a tree in the
garden of a colleague of mine. He has two apple trees in his
garden. One had about five apples and the other about fifteen.
Although that the apple was small, it tasted quite nice. I was
happy that he shared it with me.
This evening, Li-Xia had fried some curly kail for dinner.
One week ago, they were already selling curly kail at the
open air market in the city. Quite remarkable that it is
available so early. Maybe it has something to do with the
weather.
This evening, I downloaded PC Inspector smart recovery and ran it on drive D of
ester (which
is mapped to the second hard drive in that computer), to see
if I could recover some of the lost data.
(In the mean time, I also found some
Freeware recovery tools, some of which look interesting.)
The program required more than 2 hours to scan the whole hard
disk, and finally found 150 images (jpg) files, some of which
were broken.
Next I tried "PC Inspector File Recovery". It ran much faster, but took
a long time dealing with the bad sectors at the end of the disk.
But it did find a lot of files and directories. I also saved
all of those. It took a long time, also because the mobile drive
is kind of slow. I have to wait till tomorrow
for the results.
During the time that I had to wait, I looked through the
book "Maastricht 148", a book with 148 photos made by Kim Zwarts
from around the city of Maastricht. (I bought this book on
October 2, 2004. The pictures are taken
from locations he marked on a map of Maastricht. I used Google
Earth to discover the locations where the pictures were taken
from. (Just today, the resolution for most of the Netherlands
was improved.)
(follow-up)
Data recovery (Part 2)
This morning, "PC Inspector File Recovery" had recovered 2605
files in 215 directories with a total size of 108 Mbytes.
It is clearly that some of the files are junk, and that it is
less what I remembered was on the drive. I am afraid that it
will take me a long time to analyse all these files and to
see what I really want to keep.
This evening, I downloaded
Restoration.
This program runs rather fast, but it is clearly less advance.
It finds a lot of files, but it also seems that there is
a lot of junk between them. I also analysed the data on the
former H drive. Looking at the files that could be covered,
I concluded that it looks like that I did not lose any of
the data that I was afraid to have lost.
Sharia law in the Netherlands
Yesterday, our Minister of Justice, Mr. Donner, made a statement,
that if two thirds of the Dutch population would want to install
Sharia law in the Netherlands, that this should be possible.
This statement was greated with many responses from all kinds of
people. Some understood him to support Sharia law. Today, he
explictly that he did not support Sharia law and that he was
aware that it was inconsitent with our constitution. Yes, indeed
the introduction of Sharia law in the Netherlands would imply
the abolishment of the constitution and a total reform of our
state. It would even mean the abolishment of the monarchy. There
is indeed a rule that states that the constitution can be changed
if there is twice a majority of two thirds in both chambers. He
said that this was the ultimate consequence of democracy. But is
it really true that two thirds of the population is sufficient to
abolish democracy and the separation of political powers as we
know it?
This evening, Annabel and I went to
the university to play Go. When we arrived
there was nobody and because we had brought a set with us, we
started to play. Soon others arrived, including a boy from a
small village, who had come by train. He was in one of his
final years of highschool and only had started playing Go
about four months ago. He had only played through internet, but
it appeared he had already become much stronger than me. I see
this more often, people who first learn to play Go through the
internet, and then soon become relatively strong. He won from Ton.
After our game was finished, I played against Rob, who is about as
strong as Ton. He gave me six stones ahead, and at the end of
the game I won with 66 against 61 points. Annabel played against
Araldo with nine stones ahead and lost with 24 points. If said that
if she would have spend one extra stone to a corner group, she
would have won.
Maastricht 148
Yesterday, I continued my investigation on the locations where
the pictures in the book Maastricht 148
were taken, which I started last Monday.
First I made a 1200 dpi scan of the map in the front of the book. This
resulted in a grey schale gif file of about 55 Mbyte. I did smooth the
image a bit, to remove the printing raster. With the help of that image,
I started to search for more locations. During the afternoon, I also
started drawing the border. I looked up the Keyhole Markup Language and created a KML file based on some
examples. I also discovered the possibility of a ground overlay and used
this to project the map (based on the scan) in Google Earth. It took
some experimenting to adjust the border. A perfect match seemed not
to be possible. This helped a lot with finding more locations.
Today, I continued my research. I also discovered that the first
page in the book (after the title page) contained information on
when the pictures were taken. I entered this data in a small program
to generate parts of the page about the book. This is the
Google Earth folder with the locations
found.
This afternoon, I fed Andy small pieces from
a peanut butter sandwich. He almost finished a whole slice of bread.
This is quite an achievement for him, and I was very proud of him.
It looks like he is finally starting to chew is food. Several times
he started to have a gag reflex, but did not vomit.
Dietary supplements
Today, we received a letter from our health insurance company that
they are no longer going to compensate for the dietary supplements
that Andy needs. I hope that this is
just due to an administrative problem, because otherwise we have
a serious problem. At the moment he uses Tentrini Energy Multi Fibre,
which cost € 73.44 per box of eight 500ml packs. At the
moment he uses (at least) 800 ml per day, which is almost 15 Euro
per day. The fact that there is a Dutch non-profit organisation for people
having problems with applying for compenstation for dietary supplements
(called SPVD) shows that we are not
the only one having this kind of problem. We have been trying hard
in the past years with the help of specialists and the teachers of
Andy's school to normalize his eating pattern, but we have made one
some progress at doing this.
The whole evening, I worked on a complaint letter based on an
example document that I found on the website of SPVD. When I
wanted to print it out, I realized that we are still out of ink,
so I had to resort to using manual printing, e.g., writing the
letter by hand. Luckily, I have a good handwriting, but still it
took some considerable amouth of time.
We still have about 14 packs of 500 ml, which means we have sufient
food for another week. But next week, we will have to pay for ourselves.
It will be refunded if the health insurance company decides to grand
the compensation.
Dietary supplement (Part 2)
This morning, shortly after eight, I phoned with the secretary of
our GP, and she told me that we should bring the letter that we
received to them. It looks like they did not send in an application,
but that the application was send directly for our drug-store which normally supplies us with the dietary supplement for
Andy. But than it is still strange
that our insurance company did not contact our GP or send us a
letter explaining that we should ask our GP to send an application
meeting the proper requirements. For some years our government has
been pushing the health insurance companies to become more competative
with the idea that that would result in a cost reduction. I am afraid
that the quick denial of our insurance company has been one of the
consequences of this push.
Li-Xia visited the office of our GP and was told that on Thursday
we can collect a letter that we can give to our health insurance
company. Next she went to the office of our health insurance company
and delivered the letter that I wrote yesterday under the condition
that she would get a receipt.
(follow-up)
Playing Go
This evening, Annabel and I went to
the university to Go. We had brought our
own set with us, but when we arrived, there were already five
persons waiting for us, including Rudi with three sets. They
jokedly remarked that we were late. They were watching at
a picture about a sports day for employees. The caption
says that the two man in the picture are spending their time
in between soccer games. They are playing Go on a small 9x9 board.
The funny thing is that no one recognizes these two men and that
the position at the board looks quite interesting, as if they
know very well what they are doing.
After some more people arrive, I played a game against Willem.
I started with black. He won with 74 against 58 points (without
Komi). Annabel played against Marcel (who at the same time
also played with Taco). She got 9 stones and 50 points ahead,
but lost with nine points.
North pole slowly disappearing
Scientist are shocked by an Artic summer ice anomany.
It seems that now almost possible to travel by ship to
the North pole, because the usual four meter thick permanent
ice sheet as broken up. The cracks are clearly visible on
satellite images acquired from 23 to 25 August.
This morning, I went to the office of our GP (as agreed
on Tuesday) to collect a letter. Instead
I was being told that they tried to contact me yesterday
to ask my health insurance company which form they needed
to fill in. I went back home and Li-Xia and I went to the office of our health insurance.
There we talked with Mrs. T. Kelderman, who after we had
explained everything, gave us the form to be filled in by
our GP. I filled in those parts of the form that I could
fill in, wrote a small note, and gave everything to Li-Xia
for her to bring it to our GP.
At the end of the day our GP phoned to tell us that he feels
that Andy's pediatrician should fill in the form. This means
I have to catch another form tomorrow and bring it to the
hospital and ask them to let our pediatrician fill it in.
(follow-up)
This morning, I found an image on a website with some
African man on it. (The name of the file seems to
suggest he is an ambassador, which is strengthned by
the fact that there is a flag in the background.) The man
has quite an interstingly shaped head. It is not that I
want to make fun of him, because to me he seems quite
intelligent, its just that I am little facinated by the
shape of his head.
This evening, I went into the city and did have a look
at Beeld en Aambeeld
to look at the latest exhibition of painting by
Billy Foley. There where twenty
paintings on paper of him. He is using far more colours than
in the previous years, still I find the paintings more
interesting than I had thought at first. Each painting costs
€ 1050. My favourites are: "19.11.05 no3", "22.03.05",
and "12.10.05 no2".
Dietary supplement (Part 4)
This morning, I went to collect the form that Li-Xia to our GP yesterday. Then we
went to the hospital where we arrived around half past eight
and went to the pediatric department. We talked with one of
the secretaries and gave her the form to be filled in by
Andy's pediatrician. Looking in his file,
we discovered that on September 7 a request had been sent by
him for the continuation of the dietary supplement, describing
the reasons why he needed. It looks like the did not receive a
reply from our insurance company. It seems that the insurance
company has rejected the request, because not one of the required
terms was used. The pediatrician gave as a reason that Andy has
a poor motor development in his mouth. Apparently, the insurance
company is expecting one of the select terms to be used. I think
that the expression "serious swallowing disorder" (Dutch:
"ernstige slikstoornis") best fits Andy's condition. But yes,
to what extend it can be called serious, because he can swallow
something. I am afraid that I have been too honest in my letter
of last Monday, and that the request will be
rejected after all on formal grounds. I did check his weight in
his file and discovered that it was 20.1 Kg the last time we where
in the doctors office. This means that he did not gain weight, but
even dropped half a kilo. He did grow about 1 cm. Luckily, yesteray
evening, Li-Xia discovered another box with 8 packs of Tentrini
Energy Multi Fibre, and it seems we also still have some cups of
Clinutren 1.5. Which means we do not have to buy anything ourselves
yet.
I found
some document which states that term "serious swallowing disorder"
does include mental causes, in case there is a serious chance for malnutrician.
(RZA 2002, 1 CVZ 22-11-2001).
(follow-up)
Yesterday evening, my boss was one Dutch television in the quiz show
Met het mes op tafel
("With the knife on the table"). All candidates get 750 Euro at the start
of the quiz and they have to play some kind of poker game with the
correct answers to the trivial pursuit like questions being asked.
But what makes this quiz show unique is its format and the presentation
by Joost Prinsen, a well known Dutch actor, who played in many children
programs. It is played inside a bar, with a female bar tender
and a piano player, who also join in with some of the musical questions.
Joost Prinsen presents the show in a very relaxed manner very unlike
most other quiz shows.
My boss lost the game with the last question, which was: "What is 840
divided by 7 divided by 3?" The other player very quickly responded
with 40. My colleagues decorated the room of my boss with post-it notes
with the number 40 on it.
Dietary supplement (Part 5)
Today, we received a letter from our insurance company stating
that they received my letter (from last Tuesday)
and that they will respond to my compaint as soon as possible
with at least within six weeks.
Li-Xia bought some Brinta and some whole milk, which we are trying to give to
Andy tomorrow.
(follow-up)
Brinta
This morning we made some pap from the Brinta and the milk (which Li-Xia
bought yesterday) for Andy.
At first he resisted, but he finished about half of it. Later on, he
wanted to have some more, and Li-Xia gave him some more.
Today, I got a question how to implement a LISP interpreter in
Fortran. An interesting question. Long ago, I made some attempts
to implement a LISP interpreter in Fortran, but I never got very
far. Actually, it is not very difficult. Firstly, you need to implement
a representation for S-expressions. Secondly, you need to implement
the interpreter, which consist of simply hardcoding the interpreter given in the
LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual.
(follow-up)
Dietary supplement (Part 6)
This afternoon, Li-Xia went to the
office of Andy's pediatrician to
get the form, and she brought it to the office of our health
insurance company. There she asked for a copy of the form.
When I read it this evening, I discovered that our pediatrician
used almost the same description as he did in his application of
September 7 earlier this month, which immediately gave me the
feeling that this application will be rejected again on the
same grounds. In the evening, I wrote a letter to him, explaining
about this. I also send an email to SPVD (a Dutch non-profit organisation for people having
problems with applying for compenstation for dietary supplements)
to ask them for advice. Today, Andy again did eat a slice of
bread at school and he also finished a plate with Brinta pap.
Tomorrow, I am also going to contact Andy's dietician.
Dietary supplement (Part 7)
This morning, Andy finished a plate with
Brinta pap, just like he did yesterday evening. I contacted the
dieticians at the hospital and around noon I was phoned by one
of the dieticians and we talked about the
situation. I informed her about the actions that I already had
taken. She was happy with the improvements that Andy has made
so far, but she agrees that Andy will still need some extra liquid
formulea, and she will contact Andy's pediatrician and try to
convince our health insurance company that Andy does need this.
She also told me that the Clinutren 1.5 is much cheaper and more
appropriate than the Tentrini Energy Multi Fibre, now that he
starts to eat more and more other foods as well, and think that
it should be no problem to convince the health insurance company
that he needs Clinutren 1.5 (or one of the alternatives).
Around a quarter to two, I was phoned by the pediatrician of
Andy to talk about the letter that he wrote. He did not remember
exactly which form he had filled in (yes, doctors have to sign
many forms every day of many different patients). He affirmed
that Andy does have a serious swallowing disorder and that
the dietary supplement should be paid for. He explained that
what he wrote was to describe that Andy does have a serious
swallowing disorder. (I understood this, but was afraid that
someone at the insurance company, using a list of terms, would
not arrive at the same conclusion.) We concluded it was best
to wait until the formal response of the insurance company,
and that we would take further action next. (The dietician had
not contacted him.) He is willing to do what ever is needed to
get the necessary dietary supplements for Andy.
In the afternoon, Li-Xia bought
one pack of eight packs for € 73.44 from your drug
store.
(follow-up)
PhD defense
This afternoon, I went to the PhD defense of
Cornelise Vreman-de Olde, the wife of Bert, and a good friend
of us. I was suprised to meet some old friends that I knew when
I studied at the university.
(Pictures of the event.)
This evening, Annabel and I went to the
university to play Go. When we arrived, only Martijn was
there and I invited him for a game, which was possible because
I had brought a set with me. I started with nine stones ahead, and
I lost with seven stones. Afterwards he told me that he tried to
let the game end in a break-even, but that he failed, because I
made some serious mistakes in one corner, losing too many stones
at once. Annabel played against Rudi, while he was playing against
Marcel. She got nine stones ahead and lost with many points.
Step up
This evening, Annabel went to see
the movie Step Up
with seven girls from her class. She saw the movie at
Cinestar. She went there by
bus, but could drive home with the parents of one of her friends.
Dietary supplement (Part 8)
This morning, we received a letter from our insurance company
stating that our request for dietary supplements has been granted
from a period of one year starting at September 6, 2006
under number 9985624360. It seems to have been an administrative
matter after all. I think we should still continue in our
efforts to give Andy more and
more normal food.
(follow-up)
This afternoon, Li-Xia, Annabel, and I went into the city. We first went to Camel
for lunch. We sat outside and ordered the usual. After July, also
September is going to the hottest in recorded history (about 300 years).
Next we went to bookshop De Slegte,
where I (at 14:24:04) bought the student edition of the "van Dale" dictonary,
thirteenth edition, copyright of 2004. ISBN 90-6648-029-7. The
"van Dale, GROOT WOORDENBOEK DER NEDERLANDSE TAAL"
dictionary is considered to be the standard dictionary
for the Dutch language. Usually, it sells in three volumes. This
one volume "student" edition is printed on thin paper, has XXVI plus 4295
numbered pages, and weighs about 2.5 Kg. At home I found the first
printing error on the "first" page, the inside of the cover, in
the section explaining the fonetic symbols. In the example (the word "gal")
the fonetic character for the long a-sound is used, while the fonetic
character for the short a-sound sound have been used.
We also went to photo gallery Objektief and looked at the exhibition
"K750i Down To Earth" with pictures taken by Tjabele Heier
placed on stones on the floor. K750i refers to the Sony Ericsson
mobile phone with a 2 mega-pixel camera with which he has taken
the pictures. All the pictures are from objects found on the
ground.
Next we went to Beeld en Aambeeld to look at the latest exhibition of
painting by Billy Foley. (I already
saw the painting at September 21.)
Six paintings have been sold so far. My favourite paintings
are still available.
Last Wednesday, I received an email from some asking me if
he could pose me a question with respect to sociology and
systems engineering. I sent him a reply that it was okay,
and waited anxiously for the question. Yesterday evening,
I emailed him again to ask if something went wrong. This
morning, he replied that he needed some more time to state
the question.
This months interesting links
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Maastricht 148
Interestingly shaped head