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Thick fog
When we went outside to watch the fireworks in the
street, we discovered that there was a thick fog
outside. It was impossible to see the otherside of
the street. The smoke from the fireworks did only
make the visibility worse. Because of the thick fog
you could not see much of the fireworks. All you
could do is listen to the noises. This kind of thick
fog is very rare, and I cannot remember having it
seen before on new years night. Later on the news
there were some stories of accidents and people
who needed someone to walk in front of the car as
a guide. We did shaked hands with some of our
neighbours, and I talked a little with our neighbour
who had just become a father. I looked through the
window at his wife holding their son.
Cleaning
I took some extra days off after the new year for
the purpose of cleaning up things in our home.
Last Sunday we already cleaned up our stair cupboard.
Then we spend some days cleaning the attic. Wednesday
we sorted out many things and brought them downstairs
to the livingroom. Yesterday, one of my sisters came
and she took all the things she thinks she can still
sell and took them with her. This morning,
Li-Xia and brought the remaning
things, including two broken computer monitors
(the 7156E and
the Highscreen MS 1460 P),
to a recycling goods shop. There is still a lot of
cleaning left, but I am very happy that we have made
a start. Also in the light of Li-Xia having
Alzheimer's
Disease it is important that we have a well organized
home.
Instability
One of our computers, named
ester, the one Andy often uses to search for pictures, is having
serious instability problems. Lately, it started to
experience lock-ups and spontaneous reboots more and
more often. Yesterday, it became worse. I ran chkdsk
and defrag, which took several hours and ran without
problems. But this afternoon, it started to reboot or
lock-up almost ten seconds after it had started. Also
in safe-mode it displayed this behaviour. In DOS mode
it still seems to work okay.
Etanercept
Today, I read about
Study Reports Reversal of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes.
This refers to the article Rapid cognitive improvement in Alzheimer's disease following perispinal
etanercept administration by Edward L. Tobinick and Hyman Gross.
This article also contains a link to
a "small" video clip in which the wife and son of a patient with
Alzheimer's Disease describing the remarkable effect of
etanercept
(Enbrel) being injected in
the spine.
Waterworks in patio
Last Wednesday, I attended the presentation (picture) of some water works designs
at the school of Annabel. In the past
months they worked on the design of some water works for a patio in
the Scholingsboulevard school building in Enschede, which is
being constructed at the moment. The design of this building
was made by IAA Architecten.
The patio measures 10 by 35 meter and sit in the middle of the
building between two cone shaped towers. One of the constraints is that
the water works should operate on precipitation. Many designes of the
students contained a collection tank, but I got the idea that most did
not understand why it was needed. It made me think about all kinds
of designs myself. I came up with a design of a device which could
throw water in the air, and which is powered by water itself. If
I would have had to made a design, I probably would have used some
water wheels that would pump the water from a resevoir under the patio
and that are powered by wind and sunlight. The water which would be
pumped up to about three meters above ground level, would flow down
through all kind of devices and set these into motion.
Fixing "ester"
This weeking, I spend most of my time in an attempt to fix
our computer ester,
which became instable earlier this week.
On Friday, I got the "Ultimate Boot CD 4.11" from the system
administrator of our company after I told him what I was going
to do during the weekend. This proofed to be very helpful.
On Friday evening, I first ran "Memtest86+ v1.70", "Memtest-86 v3.3",
and "Windows Memory Diagnostic" to affirm that there were not
problems with the memory of the computer. Then I used "SeaTools
for DOS v1.09" (for Seagate and Maxtor) to check if the harddrive
was okay. No problems were found. I did launch "DOS Navigator v6.4.0"
but that did not help me. I tried "Windows 98 Start
Here" CD, but that did not work, as it seems to require that windows
is running. Next I tried Windows 98 installation CD, but that
reported that there was already an operating system installed.
Next I focused on partition tools and I
used: "Ranish Partition Manager v2.40", "PTDD Super Fdisk v1.0"
(not usefull, reported all kinds of errors), "SPFDISK 2000-03t",
"Vivard Ver 0.4", "Active Partition Recovery v2.1.1",
"The Partition Resizer v. 1.3.4 (c) Zeleps 1994-2000" (which
complained about the first partition having invalid CHS values),
"Salvation HDD Scan & Repair v3.0" (not applicable),
"TestDisk v6.6" (no use), "XFDISK v0.9.3 beta", and "FIPS v2.0".
On Saturday, I continued. I again used the Windows 98SE install
CD, which started to execute ScanDisk because the first partition
was marked as needing checking. ScanDisk also performed a surface
check, but after almost two hours this was aborted with many
errors. I guess these errors were not real errors, but due to
the CHS values not matching the LBA values. I used "MBRTool V2.3.100"
to look at the master boot record. Quite a nice tool, which allows
you to view the bare contents of the partition table. I did learn
a lot about how it works. The first two entries of the partition
table contain:
80 01 01 00 0B FE FF FF 3F 00 00 00 E3 B9 22 01
00 00 C1 FF 0F FE FF FF 22 BA 22 01 76 16 71 02
I also tried "MBRWork v1.07b". Again I tried to install Windows 98SE
again, and again ScanDisk was giving me problems. I searched the
internet for more information, but I could not find anything
usefull.
Finally, I decided to install Windows 98SE on the second, almost empty,
Seagate ST51270A drive. In order to do this I had to swap the drives, which
involved taking out the drives, changing jumper settings, reinstalling,
and switching cables. Installation went fine. I decided to remove
the latest installed program, the Grisoft AVG 7.5, from the main (now
second) drive. I swapped the drives again (same procedure as above)
and when I booted the first drive, it did not give any problems
anymore with locking-up or rebooting spontaneously.
Old power lines
This morning, I received an email from Jochem Veenstra, with two files for Google Earth containing information about
no longer existing power lines
and parts of power lines that went
underground. He also maintains a web site about (old) railroads in the Netherlands that contains
some files for Google Earth. Some weeks ago, I send him some corrections
with respect to some railroads around Enschede that had disappeared.
He found out about power line investigations.
I told him that I would always be happy to receive additional information.
The files he send me are based on a details maps from 1960. I might
incorporate the information of these two files in my own file, giving
him credits of course.
The Notebook
Last weekend, I watched the movie The Notebook.
I looked at the user comments on Amazon. Most of them being very
positive about this very romantic movie. It was only one page 13
that I came across
this review with the title Unrealistic Portrayal of Alzheimer's Disease,
that expressed so very clearly my own hesitations about this
movie. These kind of movies can give you the impression that
Alzheimer's Disease is not too bad after all.
Today, the Grand Mufti of Syria, Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun, visited
the European Parlement. During his visit he stated that if the
release of anti-Muslim movie of Geert Wilders would lead to voilence
that he it would be his own fault. Furthermore, he stated that if
Wilders would burn or tear the Qu'ran, it would encourage war and
bloodshed. And that it is the responsibility of the Dutch people to
stop him doing so. The Grand Mufti does not believe in the right
to insult. "He who insults the Qu'ran or the prophet Mohammed, also
insults the European values to respect the faith of others."
(Based on this Dutch nieuwnieuws.nl article.)
Sheik Ahmad Bader Hassoun
Yesterday, Sheik Ahmad Bader Hassoun gave a speech to the European
parlement, where he pleaded for peace. According to
this European Jewish
Press article he made the following statements:
Do not use religion for killing, religion is for peace.
There can be no such thing as a holy war. Only peace can be holy.
There is one single culture.
We are all building one culture, so I do not believe in the conflict
of culture.
If a clash did exist, this was a conflict with ignorance, terrorism
and backwardness.
Does civilization have a religion?
There is no Islamic, Christian or Jewish civilization. Religion does
give culture its moral values but it is we who build civilization.
Religion is from God, culture is from humankind.
It truely seems that this man is a peace seeking person, however,
if one reads the following quotes from
an euobserver.com article
one gets a different impression:
Speaking directly to journalists, the sheik accused the media of being
responsible for unleashing a conflict over Danish cartoons depicting
Mohammed two years ago. He said he disapproved of the drawings and
condemned what he called disrespect for any sacred personality,
"be it the Prophet Mohammed or Buddha".
"We have to respect the various cultures and not abuse the freedom
of expression," the cleric said.
What is an open and free society, if certain people state that if
you offend their religious views, you should not be surprised to
be answered with physical violence? One cannot come to any other
conclusion than that Sheik Ahmad Bader Hassoun places (his) religion
above culture and civilization, because culture should always honour
religious views.
This evening, Annabel and I went to
the university to play Go. When we arrived,
Araldo was just getting himself some coffee, because he was the
first. He told us that Edze would come to say goodbye. Araldo and
I decided to play a game where I got seven stones ahead. He had a
cup with him for Edze. Edze also arrived and sat opposite to
Annabel. He asked if there was another board, but there was none,
because we had only brought one set. Then he just got a stone
and put it on the table. Annabel followed his example, and the
started playing on an imaginary board. I took
a picture. When Rudi
arrived, Edze and Annabel played some games on a 13x13 board.
Edze gave the book 38 Basic Joseki by Kiyoshi Kosugi and
James Davies from the Elementary Go Series, Vol. 2, to Annabel.
Later, she gave it to me. Suddenly, Edze was gone, and had forgotten
to take the cup with him. We discussed whether this was
accidential or on purpose, as it is a rather ugly cup, that
Edze and Araldo won last year as being part of the team from
Enschede.
Rudi watched the game as it was progressing between Araldo and
me. When we counted, we discovered that I won with ten points.
This is the first game I won in a long time. When we left,
Araldo and Rudi started a game.
Racing horse game
Some days ago, I found a
racing horse game in the conference room of our offices. I
guess we got it as some kind of present. I immediately regarded
it as a stupid (because it uses a dice) and unfair (because it
had unequal tracks) game. When I studied the rules, it appeared
that they were incomplete. It stated that the goal of the game
was to get all your horses across the finish, while there are
whole in the track through which you can lose a horse. Elsewhere,
I read that you win when you are the first to reach the finish
line or if your opponent has no horses left. If you throw six
you are allowed to insert another horse at the start of your
track. That makes the game more interesting, because it allows
more than one horse to be in the race and thus gives you a choice
which of the horses to move forward. When I thought about it last
night how to calculate which is the best choice, I suddenly realized
that you also need to take the behaviour of your opponent into
account, because their is a choice between speed and safety.
Cold
Here in the Netherlands the temperatures are
above average, but in Siberia they are measuring record low temperatures.
Also in Urumqi, where the family of
Li-Xia lives, the temperatures
are very low, around -35 degrees during the night.
The Deventer murder case
Yesterday, I heard about some new developments within the
Deventer murder case. It concerns the advice
(full text in Dutch) of the Advocate General to the request
to reopen the case. In his advice mr. Machielse concludes says
that he sees no reason to reopen the case. It is now up to the
supreme court to take a decision. Mr. Machielse argues that the
statements made a witness is unreliable. This witness claims
that a man, who was closely related with the victim, informed him
that the victim was murdered the day before her body was found,
clearly indicating that this man had inside knowledge of the
murder. Although the witness is making very bold claims, mr. Machielse
claims that they must be wrong because they do not match with
a police statement about a hearing of the witness about four
weeks after the murder took place. The witness claims that the
two police men seemed not very interesting in his statement,
also because the witness could not, from their point of view,
give a clear identification of the man involved. The witness
himself never had any doubt about the identity of the man, as he
knew him in relationship with the victim.
(follow-up)
Acinetobacter Baumannii
In the past week, two patients in the IC unit of
Medisch Spectrum Twente,
the hospital in Enschede, have been found to have a multiresistant
Acinetobacter Baumannii infection, also know as MDRAB.
Because of this, the military installed a temporary IC unit
and operation room outside the hospital on the parking place.
This months interesting links
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