Yesterday Christel and me undertook the adventurous journey from Utrecht to Boxtel… by bycicle! Our original plan was to go through Tiel, and then to take the ferries across the Waal and Maas. Unfortunately, we found out the hard way that the strike that struck the Dutch public transport system some time ago, now had also spread to the ferries. Because of the sparse distribution of bridges in this part of the country we were forced to make a pretty detour in order to get home. If you like, download this Google Earth-track for a precise record of our route. We expected to ride about 70 km, but ended up doing over 120 km! If only the Dutch soccer team had shown the same amount of effort that night

A.F.Th. van der Heijden won the AKO Literatuurprijs tonight… Gefeliciteerd!!!

Yes, you’ve read well, I too have fallen victim to Pottermania. Unfortunately, it happened after the first four books of the series had been published, and, not knowing any better, I bought the paperback editions. It wasn’t until the date for the fifth installment to come out was approaching, that I found that the books come out in hardback-only editions first, with the paperbacks trailing them about a year. All for commercial reasons, of course. However, I chose patience over ruining the line-up in my bookcase, so I waited… and waited. I have the paperbacks of the HP5 and HP6, and don’t regret having had to wait a little before being able to read them. Although… due to the popularity of Harry, it is a popular object of reference in quite a few other manifestations of modern culture that I like, such as The Simpsons, for example. It was an episode of The Simpsons that gave away who was going to die in the sixth book; it was already common knowledge that one of the main characters was going to die, I just didn’t know yet who.

So, when the seventh and last book came out on July 21 (why not on July 7, I wonder; that would make the date 07-07-07, but OK), I decided not to wait and buy the hardback, to avoid being disappointed by finding out the plot some way or other. A wise decision, I think, ’cause the book’s only been out for little over a week and already I’ve had to turn my eyes away from news articles a couple of times to avoid reading anything that spoil the surprise. I just hope we don’t have people here at the university like the British school teacher who, unannounced, starting reading the final page of HP7 to her students. Really, who would do such a thing…?!

I’m about three quarters through the book, so not much more to go. I wonder, what will be next? Is there life after Harry? Of course there is; they’re not such great books, to be honest, altough they make quite an enjoyable read. And if I do start missing Harry, I can always try and obtain a copy of such obscure little pearls as Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon. Really, what a joke! For those who cannot wait till they come across it in their local Chinatown bookstore, turn here for an excerpt. What a blast!

I promise; in the not-so-distant future I will tell you something interesting… really. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied with this wonderful, slightly paraphrased, quote.

Statistics are what a lamp-post is to a drunken man: for leaning on, rather than for illumination.

Regarding the Agent Contest 2007: we did not win . However, we are quite content with our performance. We ended up on the 5th place out of 8, and after the contest we even discovered a minor bug that might have prevented us from ranking even higher. All in all, we’ve learned a lot and will be happy to compete next year!

Another interesting competition was this year’s Ice Hockey World Championship. Up till Wednesday both the Czechs and the Slovaks were still in the running, but both lost, to home team Russia and the Swedes, respectively. Thanks to Peter Novák, one of the AC2007 organizers, I found some Czech and Slovak internet radio stations that allowed me to follow the games live. Too bad they lost, but again, I learned something.

Tonight, though, I hope NOT to learn a lesson, but to just win instead! The Dudes are competing for another prize, and this time it’s the League Cup (or whatever you want to call it ). Afterwards; that is, after winning the cup, I’ll be heading home to pack up my hiking gear, ’cause tomorrow we’re leaving for France! We (some of The Dudes from Utrecht and girls from Nijmegen) are going to visit a friend of ours, Susan, and the plan is to go hiking for 4/5 days in the Parc National des Cévennes. We hope to walk the GR68, Le Tour du Mont Lozère. I’ll keep you posted!

As I wrote earlier, last Friday we had the chance to win the UZVB Champions Cup. Our opponents, however, outplayed us with ease, which really was no surprise since they are the 1st division champions, and we are merely the champions of the 2nd division. Besides, they had one or two guys one their teams who play on a semi-professional level, while we are just The Dudes . But it was fun, so we’re not complaining. Friday May 11 we’ll have the chance to win our last championship of this season, which is the League Cup. I’ll keep you posted!

A team that did become champions this weekend was PSV Eindhoven… congratulations! It was an absolutely crazy conclusion of a strange season. It was a PSV’s own fault that things became so exciting, because it was in their own hands to become champions long before the end of the season. Anyway, it’s admirable that they got their act together so well for the last match, and I guess it’s a nice gesture of them to give their opponents a chance to win the league for a change.

This afternoon, the 2007 Agent Programming Contest, organized by the TU Clausthal in association with ProMAS/AAMAS 2007, will take off. We are participating with our 2APL team, and of course we have good hopes of winning!

Last Friday we, The Dudes, became 2nd division champions with our futsal (indoor soccer) team! Paul sent me a picture and I thought it would be nice to put it on the web. We’re doing quite well this season, seeing that we’ve won all our matches up to now. However, next year will be playing in the 1st division, which should be quite a bit harder… In two weeks we’ll get a taste of what we can expect, because then we’ll be playing the champions of the first and second period from the 1st division for the Champions Cup. We’re also in the running for the regular cup (something like the UEFA Cup ). I’ll keep you posted!

Good news! I collected the new scanner, which was sent as a replacement for the broken one I received earlier, today from the post office, hooked it up, and was very glad to observe that it does what it’s supposed to do: make nice scans! The quality is really good and everything seems to be working quite reasonably. One small minus was that the automatic loader didn’t agree with my black and white Ilford film, but I guess that figures since it was curled quite a lot, and the manual says you can only use straight films for automatic loading. Putting it in the holder worked very, though, so I can start cancelling all my social appointments now, and free up a couple of months to scan all my negatives & positives .

To give an impression of the optics of the Epson V350, I scanned a slide from the trip Christel and I made to South America in 2005. It’s a shot of the Cuernos del Paine in Torres del Paine national park in Chile. The first picture shows a panoramic view of the Cuernos from a distance. It has been downscaled quite a bit, so the original scan has significantly more detail. This scan was made using Epson’s iscan under Linux, with a resolution of 2,400 DPI (the maximum the Linux front-end supports).

The second picture is a detail from the first one, taken from the initial high-resolution scan. I was really impressed by the detail and colors! I did hardly any tweaking, only increasing the brightness and contrast a little bit. Epson’s Windows software does some pretty nifty stuff like backlight correction and color restoration, which at first sight seems to do its work quite well. Guess I’ll be working more often in Windows from now on…

The mailman delivered the scanner this afternoon!

That about sums up the positive part of the story. It arrived in a damaged box, and first inspection revealed that the software and USB-cable were missing. No worries, I knew I was buying it from a factory outlet, so I expected some minor problems. To my unpleasant surprise, though, the scanner’s only response after turning it on were some screeching sounds and a flashing red light. Second inspection revealed that not only the box was damaged, but some heavy object also pounced through the bottom plate, probably wrecking the mechanical internals that drive the scanner head. That sure wiped the smile off my face…

I called the store (I won’t be mentioning any names here) right away, and fortunately they were pretty OK about it. They had another one lying around, only without the adapter, so they’ve wrapped it up and shipped it right away. It should be here either tomorrow, or early next week, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. To be continued…

Yesterday I dug up an old tape of The Cult’s 1994 nameless album. I can’t believe I didn’t miss them for all this time! How could I have forgotten Ian Astbury’s voice?! Just beautiful. Songs like Real Grrrl, Sacred Life, and Universal You… wow. Browsing the net, I read about The Doors of the 21st Century, a revival of The Doors with original members Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek, and Astbury as replacement for Jim Morrison. Hopefully they’re still performing and will come to The Netherlands some day!

I’m working at home right now, trying to come up with a semi-formal specification of my research. I think I’ve made quite some progress, although I’ll have to wait for the Day of the Proms (coming Tuesday) for feedback. One thing I’m quite happy with, is my personal mindswitch from mental state abduction to mental state inference. Thinking only in terms of (logical) abduction felt rather limiting, since other processes can be used as well (deduction, induction, default reasoning). The way I’m describing it now just feels better, let’s hope the proms think the same.

A final point of interest is that I’m currently awaiting the arrival of an Epson Perfection V350 flatbed scanner. It’s got rather nice specifications (4,800 DPI optical resolution, to name one thing), and the scan quality is approaching professional work, from what I’ve read. A nice feature is that it has an automatic film loader, capable of processing of 2 to 6 positives or negatives. I’m still using my analog Canon EOS 30V, and don’t have plans to go digital yet. Digital SLR still is too expensive for me… given the stuff I’d like to buy (like an EOS 5D with 24-105 F4.0L IS USM ). But seeing all those beautiful images on the web, I must say I was kind of jealous of all them digicam owners. Hopefully the V350 will prove a satisfactory solution: cheap and reliable 35mm slide/B&W photography with a relatively easy way to also have good quality digital images. See here and here for reviews of the scanner.