2012-01-25 14:28:00
Recently I restored my schoolwork Wiki and since then I've been leafing through many of my old reports and term papers. While I loved just about all of the classes I took, one of the most interesting ones was Student Care ("zorg verbreding"). This class taught us about students who would require special care, be it for physical or mental disabilities.
At the time I chose to do a report on two related, mental disabilities: anxiety disorders and mood disorders.
I find it funny that at the time I never put 1+1 together to discover that I myself suffer from an anxiety disorder ^_^ It's now glaringly obvious, but that the time the penny never dropped. In my report I even refered to and quoted a comic and blogpost by Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade. Reading that article now it seems so bloody familiar! The snow ball of small, worrying thoughts is exactly what I have as well.
So after that it's definitely worth it to go over some of my other schoolwork. Who else what I might dig up! :D
kilala.nl tags: school, anxiety,
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2012-01-22 17:53:00
Wow! After all those years I got my school work Wiki back online again!
Back in 2007/2008 I started this Wiki, to keep my class notes in an easily readible and searchable format. Back then I hadn't heard of Evernote yet! :) The bonus of putting all my schoolwork on a public Wiki was twofold: on the one hand I'm sharing my knowledge with my current and future classmates and on the other hand I'm getting my name out there. Search the web for some key terms from the Hogeschool Utrecht tweedegraads wiskunde docent education and you'll find my site.
Somewhere around 2009 the Wiki broke though and I never did figure out what was wrong with it. Then today, while working on another nasty problem, it suddenly dawned on me! I'd fscked up and taken the execute permissions off of all the subdirs! Meaning that directory traversal had become impossible and thus the Wiki was illegible! A quick fix and an upgrade of Mediawiki later and it's back up!
Now, it wont' do me much good anymore besides enjoying my old class notes. But maybe, just maybe some passing student will benefit from it.
kilala.nl tags: school, geeky, awesome,
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2012-01-21 22:04:00
I don't know why, but today's class was a rather small group! Ton-sensei and Kris-fukushou led the training. Hugo and two newbies were doing basics and there were six of us in full armor: Tiamat, Aaron, Sander, Houdaifa, Charl and me. I guess we owe it to the smaller group that our rhythm.
0900-0930 was filled with kata as usual. Warming up included the stretching and the usual suburi, but then we switched to pairs to do contact haya-suburi. No running or footwork this time, we immediately got into armor. We practice kirikaeshi, men-uchi and kote-men as a group and then split up. Don't know what the armor-less folks were doing, but Kris took us through many interesting techniques, including suriage waza (parry on kote, then hit men) and maki waza (spiral the opponent's shinai to open a strike).
For fun and learning, the kendoka in bogu then all lined up for shiai with Charl (our only 1-dan student) who beat every single one of them. Class was then closed with uchikomi geiko, where all students had passes at Ton-sensei, Kris and Charl. During our debriefing Kris did impress upon us that he wasn't very pleased with the progress we're making... or actually, the lack thereof. All of us really need to step up to the challenge and push ourselves harder if we want to reach the next level as a group!
Notable flaws in my work today:
In closing, let me just say that I enjoy the hell out of participating in full! I'm so glad that I finally get to do real fights! I'm so grateful to Martijn, for lending me his helmet! _/-o_
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
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2012-01-21 21:54:00
I was pretty happy when I got my hands on iTunes Match. Still am by the way. But Marli? Not so much! You see, when at least one of the people using the account actually care about things like play counts and star ratings, you need to take a really good approach in switching to Match. Case in point, the rather pissed off voice mail left during kendo practice this morning ^_^;
What'd happened? Thursday I'd immediately set my Mac to syncing with iCloud and yesterday morning it was done. It all works swimmingly and I was playing music from the cloud all day at the office. Great stuff! So in the afternoon I told Marli to enable it on her Macbook as well. Clickety-click and you're done. Until this morning when she was rather unpleasantly surprised to find that all of her playlists and her meticulously kept database had been fscked up. Because my Macbook was the first to sync, iCloud assumed that it was also -my- ratings and playcounts that mattered most. She also had now gone from a library listing of ~3300 songs, to ~9000 songs. And she really doesn't want to see all my music :D
So! Here's my tips when sharing an iTunes Match account between two people, hoping that one of them (like me) does not care about play count and star ratings.
The main library of the caring user will still show -all- of the music in iCloud, but at least the ratings and such will be retained.
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2012-01-20 23:04:00
Tonight I spent an hour or two at MTG Legends Almere, wagering another peek into the world of Magic the Gathering. It's been at least twelve years since I've played a game, but I never stopped liking the idea of TCGs. Hence why I enjoy playing Shadow Era on iOS/Mac and why I'm looking forward to the physical cards I've preordered.
The website of MTG Legends looks a bit... iffy... But it belies the size of the group! I was expecting maybe ten or fifteen people, but I encountered a lively group of twentyfive. And I'm told that this was a quiet night, because they usually draw thirty to forty people. Nice! I'm told they gather every friday, switching every week between free play and tournaments. Aside from the tables filled with playing people, they've also set aside a small section with the "commons pile": boxes of cards, sold at 2c each. A euro gets you fifty cards! o_O
I didn't really have much more time to stick around than 'til 2245, but next time I might try and put something together :)
I'm also told that my old cards are still usable in their group! During free play nights they don't restrict anyone, so I can happily use my stuff from Revised, 4th and Ice Age.
kilala.nl tags: geeky, gaming,
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2012-01-20 07:46:00
When we moved into our Almere house we made a plan for the rollout of our home's IT infra. Since then we've realized most of the plan, axed a few parts and are now only left with the media center setup. It's a given that, once our CRT TV dies on us (it's been with us since 2003) it'll be replaced with a modest LCD TV. But when it comes to playing media in the living room I've always been a bit conflicted. It's a typical #firstworldproblems:
The bottom line was that we'd be "stuck" running a Mac Mini next to our TV if we wanted to access all of our media from one central location. The downside being that it's a waste of energy to keep a Mini running all day and it's also an expensive workaround.
Boo. Hoo. Hoo.
Anyway. With the advent of iTunes Match in the Netherlands our music "problem" is instantly solved! For the princely sum of 25 euros a year, iTunes Match will store all of your music 'in the cloud', making it accessible to all your devices 24x7. For our Macs the music can still be stored locally, but our iPad, iPhones and the future ATV will all be able to access all of our music through the Internet.
Did I mention that the Match fee also allows you to redownload the music in your library from Apple in high quality? Say that you once "stole" an album at a low bitrate years ago. Add it to Match, delete locally and download again. Presto, instant upgrade!
The final "issue", playback of ripped movies, is easily solved using aTV Flash. By jailbreaking the aTV and installing Flash (not the Adobe/Macromedia product) one adds a whole wad of new capabilities to a device which didn't have too many alluring features to begin with.
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2012-01-19 17:58:00
I love putting design on clothes in vinyl or print. I've made festival shirts for Dana, anime/japan shirts for my sister and Arrow Emblem clothing for myself. Recently I asked permission from Heeren-sensei, the founder of Renshinjuku kendo dojo, to use the Renshinjuku logo on some sports gear. I am very grateful that he allows me to do so.
The group of people at our Almere dojo has been very welcoming and friendly to newbies. They're very supporting and I'm very proud to have become part of this team! I'd love to have a sweater or jacket with our dojo logo on it, to wear when I'm out running. That way I'll be reminded of my classmates and their support. I'll remember exactly why I'm trying to build more stamina :)
The picture above shows a few mockups I've put together at SpreadShirt.nl. I've always been very pleased with the quality of their work; their vinyl prints are very sharp!
EDIT:
Right, already I'm on the second revision. Dropped the big surname off the shirt and am just using Almere on it. The jacket and sweater will still have a surname on it (so I don't "lose" it), but much smaller on the front. Here is v1.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, creative,
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2012-01-15 13:02:00
Dana loves the giant "Leon the Dragon" puzzle she got as a christmas present. Thanks again Ann and Davy! (^_^)
It's made by Djeco. I'd link to the product page on their website, but it's 100% flash (=_= ).
Personally I adore the detail that's gone into the dragon! It's not simply a matter of throwing a bunch of scales onto a green dragon. No, instead it's a work of art, making a quilt of flowers, swirls and patterns in dozens of colors. It's great to look at!
kilala.nl tags: baby, awesome,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
