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It's September already. Summer is coming to an end (theoretically speaking, in practice summer ended somewhere in May), and various people have reminded me of the existence of this website and the fact that I should write something now and then. So here we go.

First of all the reason why I forgot (deliberately or not) to post an update earlier. There are two reasons actually. As some of you know I've decided to switch studies, that is, I chose a slightly different direction for my Masters. Instead of Artificial Intelligence, which was my former plan, I've moved to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Still at Maastricht University, but nevertheless this change has consumed quite a bit of my time and thoughts recently. The other reason is of a more personal nature ;)

Second, let me tell a bit about my holiday. When looking back, I can still conclude it was perfect! The weather was quite good, we saw a lot of beautiful things and places and besides that it was all very relaxing. I won't go into much detail, but I have a couple of pictures (as promised) that I would like to show. You can view them here.

That's it for now, but I'll try to be more active from now on. Have faith!

Yeah, bags are packed, everything's ready, tomorrow morning we're heading for France! First goal will be Normandy, maybe just for one night, maybe more, we'll see. No schedule whatsoever. Perfect! After that we will continue to Brittany, again we will just see where we will go and how long we will stay. The freedom of traveling by car from campsite to campsite is great!

I'll be back in a little over two weeks, hopefully with loads of pictures! Bye!

Suddenly a whole month has passed. Almost in the blink of an eye...and so much has happened! I've managed to finish last year's leftovers, passed my thesis and got my first "important" diploma. Of course with the necessary amount of partying to do justice to this great happening... Shortly visited Cologne at the beginning of this week, nice town, very nice people :) And now just a short break before I go on holiday next week! Target: France, and Belgium afterwards. Driving around a bit, from campsite to campsite. I'm looking forward to it, just to be away for a while... I hope to shoot some nice pictures along the way, if so I'll show them here of course!

That's it for now, I'm terribly sorry that I don't tell anything more exciting at this point...let's hope some exciting stories can be told when I return. At least the ingredients are there: no planning, old car, just a small tent, no degree in French... It'll be fun, I'm sure :)

Yes, I'm still alive, but also quite busy at the moment finishing off some small leftovers from the past year like a thesis and some practical assignment thingy. So that's why not much has been happening here lately. To entertain you in the meanwhile and prevent your interest from fading away here's some Radiohead song that has been playing in my head all day...

Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out

This machine will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again

Cracked eggs, dead birds
Scream as they fight for life
I can feel death, can see it's beady eyes
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out again

Immerse your soul in love
Immerse your soul in love.

What is life? You live, that's for sure I guess. But what does it mean to be living? People tend to strive for a good and meaningful life. Well that's nice! A good and meaningful life... There's just one small difficulty involved here. It's tiny, seems irrelevant, so why would anybody bother... What's life? Yeah, 42, but that doesn't work for me. Nobody knows exactly what life is. Nobody can know, because we all live life and nothing else. How can you see the bigger picture then? It's like buying some strange device at a fair without knowing what is is or does, it just looks nice. There's no manual to fall back on, no warrantee you can claim. You've never seen any commercial advertising it, you don't know which company sells it, you don't know who originally invented it. But it's there, right in front of your nose! Looking nice and all. At first you will try to work with it, see what it can do. Maybe you can accomplish something with it. More and more functions will reveal themselves, and others that seem trivial won't work. You will go on messing around with it for a while, and then, probably, you'll just put it away. Maybe you will find out what it is later. It also looks quite nice on your bookshelf. Interesting in a way. You're kind of proud to have such a beautiful, rare thing. Then it becomes part of your environment, slightly becoming less special. You get used to it. You don't care anymore what it really is. Doesn't cause you any trouble, so why should you? It still looks nice. Slowly it starts to decay, as every respectable device would do. Suddenly, at some point, you notice that it's almost gone. Then you start wondering again...what was it? Why did you have it? How many useful, but undiscovered functions did it have that could have been valuable to you? Have you used it's full capabilities? It's all a matter of not loosing you're interest. Keep on experimenting, keep looking for new options, new experiences, new ideas. It's the only hope you have in finding the true meaning of it.

I wanted to do something different last friday. Something relaxing. Away from normal life. I decided to go to The Hague, just for a day. Walk around a bit in the city, go to the beach, feel the fresh breeze from the sea... So that's basically what I did. There's not much more to say about it.

Since I haven't done much with photography lately I also decided to take my camera with me. For those of you who are interested, you can find some results here. Maybe you like them. Or not. Feel free to comment.

Three days of music, rain, sun, fast food and fun! As promised a review, but it's a bit lengthy so I won't put it here. But not to worry, you just need to click once... Ready? Click!

Just for the record, at the right you can see our campsite. And yes, it was crowded. There was about 10cm of free space between us and our neighbours. Not to mention the struggle to find your way through a maze of braces and tent pegs at night. But we survived!

Pinkpop starts tomorrow. And I'll be there :-) What to expect? First of all rain. And more rain. And some showers. Or a thunderstorm. But besides that, loads of good music of course! And hopefully a very good experience. And nice people. Oh and did I mention rain?

But it's late already (23:00..) and I'll ve to get up around 06:30, so I leave it to this. A review will follow as soon as I'm alive again next week!

In earlier days, when you reached the age of 21, you were officially a "grown up", you would get all kinds of nice rights and privileges. Today, already when you're 18 you can do virtually anything (at least, for the Netherlands that is). So is there still anything special about 21 then? I don't really know, but it feels good for some reason. Maybe some part of the old spirit has still survived in the number...

By the way, the reason I'm writing this is because I turned 21 last Sunday. For those who didn't know.

Oh, and for the people who were so kind as to give me presents...do you ALL think I'm an alcoholic? ;-) Ah well. At least I don't have to buy any liquor for the rest of this year...

It's Queensday again tomorrow. Long live the Queen! Festivals everywhere and people wearing strange orange hats and things like that. And the town that has the luck to be visited by the Queen will of course organize all kinds of weird folklore-like activities which haven't been seen in decades, but hey, the Queen is coming, so who gives a damn? But don't think I have anything against it! It's nice to have such a day in which everybody unites in celebration, I guess it has a good effect on society. And you get an extra day off, which is of course great!

For students it's well known that there are days when you do all you can to avoid studying. Maybe your room suddenly needs to be cleaned, or your kitchen, or you need to do some grocery shopping...everything can be used as an excuse. In Dutch this is avoiding behaviour is called "Studie Ontwijkend Gedrag" or in short SOG. Of course I am also quite good at it. Even posting this message here is actually just an excuse not to work on my thesis for a while...and surely it is at this moment more important because otherwise my site would loose interest of regular visitors. But what if I'm done with this? Yesterday I already vacuum cleaned my room...and the hallway...no groceries need to be done...no important emails to write anymore...as you can see this can be very difficult. It appears that there's nothing left for me to do then actually work on my thesis. The life of a student can be hard...

It has been a while, I'm very sorry for that, please accept my humble apologies...

So what happened? Don't know, it appears that having more free time is not beneficial for my willingness to spent time and energy on my website. Therefore I am now forcing myself to write something. Nice of me, isn't it?

The sun has been shining quite a bit lately. I like sunshine, it gives the world nicer colors, everything looks friendly, people are more relaxed in general. What's there not to like?

Summertime and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
Oh your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’
So hush little baby, don’t you cry
One of these mornings
You’re goin’ to rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take the sky
But till that morning
There’s a nothin’ can harm you
With daddy and mammy standin’ by

Doesn't the actual existence of Creationism prove that Darwin might be wrong?

They say that power corrupts. Is that why the most powerful nation creates the biggest mess?

Don't try to look intelligent. If you really are people will just say you're bragging about it, if you aren't people will say you're a fool.

People are on average not intelligent.

Two facts about pandas:
1. They only eat bamboo, which is very poor in nutrients.
2. They are almost extinct.
For some reason I'm not that surprised about the second fact.

...for they "get the better" even of their blunders (Nietzsche).

Sometimes it would seem great, just to be able to forget. No more worries, no more doubts...ignorance is bliss. Start again with a clean sheet. But then again, everything you do shapes a small bit of your personality, both the good and the bad things. What does it really mean then, to "forget"? It means you loose a part of yourself...

Change your heart
Look around you
Change your heart
It will astound you

Just some thoughts late at night after watching "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind". I can recommend it.

I wonder what the title means. Was Miles Davis kind of blue when he recorded these songs, should I be kind of blue while listening or does listening automatically result in a kind of blue feeling? I'm not sure yet.

It's strange how certain music can influence your feelings and thoughts. Maybe it doesn't even invoke any specific thoughts, but more of a general feeling which in turn can guide your mind in a certain direction. "Kind of blue" is a well chosen title.

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

1. So What
2. Freddie Freeloader
3. Blue In Green
4. All Blues
5. Flamenco Sketches
6. Flamenco Sketches (Alternate Take)

Fuzzy Logic deals with matters like "about 3 * about 2 = about 6", in which case "about 6" is fuzzier than "about 3" or "about 2". Fuzzy logic is ideal for describing human behaviour after consuming a number of beers. The "about" part always applies since people tend to spill some beer now and then, and the "fuzziness" part deals with the fact that you behave more strange after ten beers than you would do after five. I guess this is what they mean with "putting theory into practice"...

Guess you're kind of surprised right? You didn't expect that my new site would ever come online? I don't blame you, for a while a thought the same. But apparently miracles do happen! You might say "but I don't see much difference?". True, not much has visibly changed. Little bit difference in design and less content. But this will be filled in, I promise! The most important thing is that this is really a new start, where the "intermediate" website you saw the last few months was just a "work in progress" message.

But it's not all done yet and I will still be playing around a little with design and a little more with content. So please don't be angry or disappointed if you return tomorrow and find something completely different here... Instead, be happy that at least something is happening!

Let me conclude for now with thanking you for your patience. I hope your stay here will be a pleasant one!

Daan

Best wishes for 2007!!

Another month has passed. And basically that's all that happened, no progress. I'm very sorry. I'll make it a good prospect for 2007.

In case you're really bored, I've added 4 pictures to my gallery. Check it out!

It has been one and a half week now, so you might be wondering if anything will be going to happen at all. Good question. Let's just say that my intentions are still the same. My old website has now moved to some sort of archive folder, which means that I can really start from scratch. A minor result of this is that my weblog does not work anymore, and since I'm building a new website anyway I won't fix it. Not that anyone will miss it, since the last post was somewhere in february...

At the moment my first goal is to design some structure for my website in which it will be more easy to change things. This is actually not that hard but I want to do things right from the start so it might take some time. But it is worth some effort since this will make the website more flexible in the end.

Enough talking, back to business!