* 25-3-1947      † 8-6-2008

In the video at 3:50 he talks about Impact Bias:
“Winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have.”
I think that’s pretty interesting. I think that once you realize this it can help to put things into perspective when you feel really bad about something. And perhaps the “it’s all gonna be alright”-argument isn’t so lame after all.

Another thing he said around 17:25 about the students who can either change or not change their picture:
“People who have no choice and can never change their mind, like it a lot.”
I’m no psychologist so I might be completely wrong here, but I’m wondering if that’s why people are divorcing now more than they used to. Because they know they have a choice and then they’ll start doubting and will become unhappy. Maybe it also works the other way around: if you tell yourself that you had no choice in a certain situation then you’ll be happy with it, whatever it was.
Now I wouldn’t be a computer scientist if I wouldn’t consider the boundaries of this: So, what if you make all your decisions by throwing dice? Whatever the random outcome would be, you’d have to stick with it and you can’t change it. Now would this make you permanently happy about all your decisions?
Probably not, but either way, it’s an interesting talk =)

This enormous building with 90 km of books has a computer science section. The computer science section is highlighted in red:

Yes, that’s a whopping 2 bookcases. And most of the books are about things like Algol60 (a programming language dating from 1960), Fortran and cutting edge computer graphics… from 1991. Completely useless. There were hardly any books on recent topics, let alone books that were really up to date. I guess it’s hard for a library to keep up with new techniques, but this is ridiculous. At least I know I won’t ever have to go back there again.

I just noticed something weird with SSH and Firefox. I was running Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox) on a remote computer over SSH with X forwarding. Then when I started Firefox on my local machine, instead of starting my own Firefox it started a new instance of Iceweasel for some reason. Even explicitly starting /usr/bin/firefox on my local machine gave me Iceweasel (which isn’t even installed on my local machine). Only after I closed all instances of Iceweasel could I run my own Firefox again. I’m not sure if this behavior was intended but apparently the browser shares state even with remote and different versions.

I’ve always associated certain music with certain periods in my life so it’s cool that I can actually remember things by looking at the music. Back in 2005 I used to listen a lot to the Ministry of Sound because it just keeps going and works very motivating for me. Then in the summer I listened to Arsenal a lot when I was reading outside on my balcony in the sun. I went to America in August where I got a new computer and for a while the only music I had was The Postal Service, Norah Jones, Train, Sister Hazel and John Mayer (thanks to Karin). I went to a concert of John Mayer with Karin and since I had never even heard of John Mayer before, I had to listen to him a lot. A roommate in Madison introduced me to Guster around Halloween. I never really liked Guster that much but it still reminds me of that time. I spent more and more time with Iya and she hooked me up with K’s Choice and I picked up the Iya song (De-Phazz). Dan Brown in December was of course The Da Vinci Code as audiobook. It got very cold around that time in Madison. Royksopp reminds me of long nights on Skype and to explain the sudden big Acda en De Munnik spike… perhaps I did miss The Netherlands a bit during that time. For some reason Jack Johnson reminds me of Pablo, a roommate in America from Argentina. After I got back from America, Iya and I spent the summer together and didn’t listen to a lot of MP3’s. You can even see from the spike of Frou Frou when she left. In September 2006 I decided to finish The Da Vinci Code right before it’s release on DVD. I moved on to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld after that. Oh and those two cool KT Tunstall songs during my Software Engingeering class. I also started listening to Hooverphonic during that time and I think that will be one of the waves that will keep coming back, like Air. After I got back from winterbreak in America in January 2007 I listened to a lot of Air and Sia to try and stay relaxed, but Wir Sind Helden crept up, which is too bad cause they’re actually pretty good. Fortunately Jorrit gave me OutKast. Around March everything became really messy and my music seems to show that as well. It slowly got less chaotic after that and in the summer it finally got smoothed out again. In another graph you can even see the trip from Texas to North Carolina.
So for me this picture is like looking at a photoalbum.

I just spent 2 hours trying to fix this weird problem with Wordpress. I had just moved a Wordpress blog from my local server to a real hosting company. After some editing everything seemed to work except the admin part. I didn’t get any real errors, just an empty page and a broken connection so it was tricky to trace where it came from. It also didn’t help that I don’t have access to any logs of the webhost. Eventually it turned out to be some PHP setting from the host that caused the script to fail.

So for anybody else who gets random broken connections try adding this to your .htaccess file:

php_value memory_limit 32M

When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn’t seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he’d drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word “Billionaire” printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.

Perhaps I just need to make my plans/dreams more public so there will be more pressure to actually make them come true.

Oh and then I ran into this robot company which seems really cool and makes me wonder why I left Artificial Intelligence andandand! Wait, I’m getting distracted again.