Interdependent Thoughts

Walking in the city center of ‘s-Hertogenbosch this afternoon, I saw this person fixing their bike. In the midst of shoppers, tools were spread out and focused but unhurried a little chore was taken care of.

Een literaire memoire van Connie Palmen‘s wording. N.a.v. wat Palmen er in een interview in de Volkskrant over zei had ik heel veel zin in dit boek. Wellicht omdat ik op zoek was naar wat haar werk 30 jaren geleden voor me deed maar geen enkel boek van haar daarna (al kocht en las ik ze allemaal). Nooit eerder annoteerde ik een roman zo heftig met potlood als De Vriendschap. Johnnie Walker las lekker weg in één zitting gisteren aan het eind van de dag, stevige zinnen, interessante schetsen.…

Service announcement: I have updated my NOW page. A Now page contains the general activities I’m spending time on these days. It contains the things I’d mention if you would ask me in a conversation what I’m doing currently, after we haven’t spoken for a while. (I am announcing the update of my NOW page, following the example of Frank Meeuwsen, so that my RSS readership can know about it) This is a RSS only posting for regular readers. Not secret, just unlisted. Comments / webmention / pingback…

This week it’s been a year since my long time friend and business partner Frank died. And it’s been two years and three months since I realised I was very burned out. And it’s been four years since that process of taking on too much and not resting started, only realising much later that it was in part because Frank was already ill. This week I am starting to consider myself working normally again. This week, now that summer has ended, and school restarted, I am starting to participate again in…

Today school started again, and Y is now going to the final year of primary school, group 8. For each of the school years we took a photo of her leaving for school on the first day. This is thus the final one. Last year she skipped a year mid-way through, so the photo for group 7 is just half a year ago. Y leaving for school, on the first day of group 8. Going to school the first day in early 2026 (group 7), 2025 (group 6), 2024 (group 5), 2023 (group 4), 2022 (group 3), 2021 (group 2), 2020…

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know how to search for. Material that is invisible from your own viewing position. Because that invisibility is easily accepted as proof of absence of such material, rather than proof of limitations on your…

Favorited Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter by Wouter Groeneveld (Brainbaking) This type of thing is always highly fascinating to me. Using artefacts, here 17th century letters that survived to present day by happenstance and thus not having been delivered, to say something about life in those times, habits, language, and rituals. Now try and imagine AI slop being unearthed from a salvaged disk drive when they dig up some mysterious building that apparently was called a ‘datacenter’…

Looking at the websites of some AI events and their programmes. Hundreds of sessions over several days. You’d think that they’d expect you to have your AI tools grab the program and e.g. match it to a local list of interests or people, given the amount of info they dump on you on the site. Seems however that the sites aren’t ‘AI ready’, despite it being a topic on the programme. Claude says ‘can’t read the websites because it’s all javascript’. So now it’s extracting json from a print-to-pdf…

I today replaced the last handful of embedded Flickr images with self hosted copies, that merely link back to the source at Flickr. This way I am certain that no tracking by Flickr is possible when you visit this site. Five years ago, I stopped embedding Flickr images for new posts. I also started to replace existing embeds with self hosted copies. I did most of them within months, but a few dozen remained. Some because they held many images, others because they used images others had made…

Gespot in Maastricht afgelopen weekend. Is zoervleisj een soort rendang? Enquiring minds want to know. Wel zoervleisj gegeten vrijdagavond, maar geheel niet aan rendang gedacht tijdens de maaltijd. Misschien vandaag dan maar rendang? machine translation into English

Yesterday we saw the sun set at the beach near Zandvoort. We were there because of the 89% or so solar eclipse that peaked around eight in the evening. Well in time we walked onto the beach to set up our lightweight chairs and through our eclipse ‘glasses’ looked due west where the sun was beginning to set. The view over the sea was fantastic. At the peak of this eclipse I did feel the reduced sun power, and the chill it brought. It gives a sense of the tremendous power of the sun that even…

The past few days I read two titles by Kurt Vonnegut, because they were mentioned in Among Others by Jo Walton that I read last month. The protagonist in Walton’s book, set in 1979/1980, is an avid reader, also of science fiction and fantasy and her reading includes Vonnegut’s work. Based on those mentions I bought Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963). Both were Hugo award nominees (1960, 1964 respectively). I thought I hadn’t read them before, but I realised that I have read Sirens…

One hand was raised when I asked "Who has read or looked at the actual EU Inc legal proposal itself?" in a session where we discussed the EU Inc proposal and how after adoption it will come to significantly impact the day to day operations of the group of participants. That single hand was already a pleasant surprise, I usually can expect none. Hardly anyone does read EU legal proposals, even when they already are in force and apply to them. We mostly go by whatever framing by others we’ve come…

I came across a recommendation by Cory Doctorow of Jo Walton‘s work, on July 1st. I bought a range of her works then, and in the past month read what I bought. Among them the Thessaly trilogy which I read in the last 2 weeks, consisting of three books, The Just City, The Philosopher Kings and Necessity. What a joyous read! Weaving together the history and attitudes of different places and ages, in bringing a variety of people with a deep interest in Plato together (but not Sokrates himself)…

It’s summer, hot and dry, and we spent the week in London, not quite the right place to cool down. A week of dunking ourselves from the almost too cold air conditioned hotel room near Finsbury Park into the stuffy, iron smell of the underground where the tunnels were hazy with a dark fog of dust and rust, and back. It was Y’s first visit, seeing things like red double deckers she only knows from watching screens. I remember my first London visit (in February 2000) when like my first NYC visit…

A 19th century warren next to Regent’s Canal. Back in 2018 I walked through here along the canal from King’s Cross to Regent’s Park with friends remembering a friend we lost. This time the three of us explored the archways of the railroad and the alleyways between them, where originally goods were transferred between canal, rail and road. Grime but no fringe experience, only tourism and trinkets. As we were ourselves of course, tourists. There was a punk asking money for photos on the bridge to…

The past week in London we also visited the British Library for a bit, reading and writing while enjoying coffee. Many people used the publicly accessible parts, I suspect to be able to read or work in a place that had more comfortable temperatures than their homes elsewhere in the stuffy city. People using all available seating E and Y descending the stairs overlooking the main hall Strolling around afterwards, I happened on a display showing how to make Zines, and encouraging everyone to DIY…

A year ago we were in Paris to visit a very large exhibition of the work of David Hockney. It was amazing, and we spent much more time there than anticipated. Hockney had an active role in this exhibition and also created new work for it. It turned out to be his last as well, as he died last June. This week saw the smallest David Hockney exhibit I ever visited. A single stained glass window in Westminster Abbey, installed there in 2018. Because of renovation works and scaffolding on the other…

I think the last time E and I met Ivo Gormley was in 2012, when we had a pleasant dinner together on Great Queen Street talking about what it was like as a Londoner to have the Olympics take place in your own living environment. I knew Ivo from open data work, and his 2009 film ‘Us Now’ on how online tools were allowing new models of social organisation. We came to talk about Good Gym then, which he started as a non-profit after ‘Us Now’, along the lines of what he explored in that film. The…

In reply to The three cornered container by Chris Corrigan What stands out to me reading this, is that I feel I have an intrinsic preference for the emergent area of the triad. And can quickly loose interest towards the design corner, and specifically the built parts. While I see others flock to those other types of containers exclusively because it provides them with something to hold on to, to declare something must be just so. When blogs went from emerging conversations across previous…

In reply to Learning How to be Idle on Vacation by Peter Rukavina Your post resonates a lot, Peter. In my journey of the last years overcoming burn-out my inability to rest, other than sleep, stands out. There’s always things to do, work, at home. Simultaneously so much time ticks by procrastinating as well, the pretence of activity. Not a rest, but then used to tell myself that I already took time off. There’s also the echo of the deep past where if I did nothing it was not the dolce far…

This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from…

A lovely novella and the 2022 debut by francophone Swiss author Fanny Desarzens (1993). I read the German translation, titled Berghütte (mountain cabin), Galel (the name of one of the characters) is the French title. Three men, with few words between them, share a deep friendship which unfolds every summer against the backdrop of the mountains. Their winter lives in the valleys down below are not worth a mention, even though they know where the others live and work during these months. Only up…

It’s been a while since my last post in the Books category early February, 32 fiction books further by my count. Recently Cory Doctorow pointed to the work of Welsh / Canadian author Jo Walton on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel Everybody’s Perfect, and I read some of her work these past two weeks. Among Others (2012) turned out to be a beautiful and moving coming of age story, about living with trauma and grief. The escape that reading offers, and the many pointers to pre…

Over the past month or two, after our return from Portugal I’ve been slowly improving and overcoming my burn-out. I’m at a point where I am eager to do certain things again, notice E and Y and my love for them much more again, can get energised from facilitating a workshop with a client, started to do more around the house again. I’ve certainly not put the burnout fully behind me but it definitely feels different. Different from not just the past two years, but also from the burnout build-up in…

Favorited Ikigai Collective by David Orban Yes, this type of exploration is important. Without a set purpose as goal, but certainly not without purpose as an experience and source of meaning. I don’t think I have the bandwidth at the moment, and I certainly do not fit the criteria to increase the little group’s diversity, but I definitely get the tinkering angle. Also because we have to take away these tools from those who gatekeep them, and bring them down to individual and group level, make…

European Data Protection makes it illegal to transfer person identifiable data to outside the EU. Unless there is equivalence in data protection, or an agreement with guarantees and oversight deemed adequate. For the USA this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF). This framework depends on the existence of the independent oversight body FTC, and the Data Protection Review Court (DPRC) which serves as redress mechanism. The arrangement is in place since 2023. Earlier agreements, the Safe…

In a session today there was some discussion about agentic skills. A skill is mostly a markdown text file often named, yes, skill.md with a natural language text plus some front matter, describing some specific workflow or bit of knowledge or capability. Somebody external opined that such skills were a good way of codifying organisational knowledge, which might be useful ‘because of the ageing demographics’ on the work floor and people retiring. Would agentic skills succeed where process…

In a session earlier today the deployment of a tool was discussed in an organisation’s information environment that is otherwise fully dominated by Microsoft products. After a presentation a director asked “if we add this tool to our (Microsoft) mix, aren’t we working in opposition to our wish for more digital autonomy and digital sovereignty”? The answer was “well you are already using Microsoft tools everywhere so sourcing this one tool from someplace else won’t change your autonomy in any…

Bij de Open State Foundation (waar ik voorzitter ben) zoeken we een nieuwe directeur! Herken jij je in het profiel (PDF), en ben je net zo bevlogen als ons team om digitale transparantie bij de overheid te bevorderen en onze democratie te versterken? Dan horen we heel graag van je! Nadrukkelijk ook als je vindt dat je niet alle ‘vinkjes’ zet. Open State Foundation is geregeld een waakhond die aanslaat, die laat zien dat het anders moet en kán, en even goed een betrouwbare partner van overheden…