Week 13 of 2025, 24 March until 30 March Sunday, 30-Mar-25 21:24:34 CEST

Permanent fencing Sunday, 13-Apr-25 21:08:39 CEST

Sunday, 06-Apr-25 21:48:16 CEST

Preparations for the electrician

This week, we finished the preparations for the electrician to come back and finish tasks in the barn.

Monday 31 March

It's Monday, and I have a new opportunity to improve my blogging activities this week. We worked from home today. It was sunny but a little chilly. The wind is no longer as stiff.

DW had many meetings, as she usually has. I programmed as I usually do. We had lunch together, and while eating, we talked about our work. It was a lovely Monday.

At half past 5, I logged out of work. I went out to the garden and started watering the southeast field. The strong wind had dried up the field. It was sufficiently moist below the surface, but I did not want to take any risks. When I looked after the sprinkle, neighbors came by and asked if it was the right moment to bring back the earth auger. It was a nice moment.

Soon after, the neighbor came with the auger. The neighbor on the other side of the street also wanted a hole for a pole, so I went over and had a brief conversation. They told us that a third neighbor had their hens taken by a fox. Only one was left. You see, it is drama all over right now. It happened last week. It is not the hens that come to me. They are still alive, to the best of my knowledge.

I had a spare moment to install a beam in the barn's ceiling.

Then, I brought the garbage bin to the collection point. While doing all these things, I occasionally went to the field to adjust the sprinkler. It is not moving by itself.

In the evening, I blogged and worked on the lyrics editor.

Tuesday 1 April

The day started misty. We were early. We left for work at 7:15 AM. A neighbor came with us. I had to clear out the car of items left from the previous weekend's activities before the seats were fully available again. I created an app group to discuss the ride home when we were heading back.

As the day progressed, the weather became sunny. It looked nice from the inside. I had an idea about going out for a walk, but I was busy with a complex refactoring project, so I did not go for a walk. That was not that good.

DW, the neighbor, got synced up and returned home on time. It was still sunny when we drove home. At home, I put up another beam in the ceiling.

I decided to use Visual Studio Code for developing the lyrics editor. I found a page about the steps I need to take to make that work: https://dev.to/umeshtharukaofficial/using-vscode-for-web-development-html-css-and-javascript-1jpb. It is promising, but I spend time fiddling with VS Studio instead of moving the project forward.

In the evening, I listened to the Ukraine: The Latest podcast. It was episode 1133. In this episode, we were told that Putin is mobilizing 160k men. On 16 October 2024, I stated that World War III had begun after about 12 thousand North Koreans started assisting Russia with the war in Ukraine. I don't need to back down on that statement yet.

Wednesday 2 April

It was a beautiful morning. I hope it will rain soon, as we don't need a repeat of earlier years. For now, let's be happy; it's beautiful. I worked from home, and DW had a day off. She pottered around in the garden, removing manure from the sheep's winter area. Some weeds got eliminated as well.

I logged in at work and continued on my refactoring project. It is progressing fine. At noon, I logged out, and we had lunch. After lunch, we worked in the barn. DW insulated the attic's walls, and I mounted beams in the ceiling. I finished the workshop ceiling. Now, the ceiling in the restroom is the last item that still needs to be done. It's not that big, so that won't be too difficult.

Then, it was time to augment the grazing area of the sheep. The sheep have one and a half bales of hay left. It would be nice if we could avoid buying more hay. At least, this gives us room to postpone buying the hay; we let the rest of the grass grow.

Today, the PILs moved to the new apartment. It is a lot of things to get used to. There are many new people to shake hands with. They could give their preferences for food. Apparently, fish will not be on the menu. People will remind them to take their pills. It will take a while to get used to the new situation. BIL brought them to the new apartment and ensured they arrived adequately. Getting the phone and television service operational is still necessary, but that could happen tomorrow.

Apparently, today is the day when the US trade war starts.

Thursday 3 April

It was 8°C outside early in the morning, which is excellent news because the grass is growing. Already. The sheep has been eating well from the patch I made yesterday.

At 8:20 AM, I was pumping my bike tires. I pump the tires to four PSI, which is about two times the pressure of the car. When biking, I got caught up in the traffic of schoolchildren and their parents biking to the school near our house. I noticed a lot of new houses that had been built over the winter. Last summer, there was a field with crops. Now it is like 5 or 10 new buildings in a row. It will be an area for wealthy people, that's clear. And I'm living in an area of alternative people who are also wealthy. I have no idea where the poor people are supposed to live, but it's not here anyway.

Programming the lyrics editor is going fine. DS came by a few days ago and asked what I was doing. I told him I was programming jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. He then wondered if I was using an IDE. No, I wasn't. So, he suggested I use the IDE he used while working with web development. I've never heard of that IDE. Well, that got me thinking. I got busy. The VS Code is already been installed. It's from Microsoft. I had not bothered putting it to work for programming the lyrics editor.

It occurred to me that it would be more fun if it was easier to program the editor. Inspired by DS, I set up VS Code and am now working on an IDE. So I can set break points in the editor and inspect the values of variables. You can do that in Chrome by pressing F-12 and activating the tab sources. Here, it is integrated into the editor. It's slightly more convenient.

Yesterday evening, I worked on the "same as" functionality of the lyrics editor. If a chorus returns throughout the song, you can make a new section point to that chorus with a "same-as" dropdown menu. Obviously, when getting the final text of the song, you will get the lines filled in.

Now, I reached the bridge without a name. I'm starting to get warm. I took off my shawl and photographed a swan cruising the canal. This is really good, this is nice!

Well, getting back to the lyrics editor. The most logical thing when a section is the same as another section is to hide the word boxes. That looks good. It gives me a new challenge because the functionality to add and remove new sections is built around the word boxes. So, if I hide the word boxes, I need to add buttons to replace the functionality.

I want the lyrics editor to be one single-page application. So, I need to add functionality for file administration at the top of the page. Another option would be to have another page for file administration. In a way, that would make sense. I already figured out I have to save the song data in cookies. Well, in that case, it is just more to figure out. The good thing about having a file administration page is that it can also be a welcome page.

The cow field looks empty.

It is 6:00 PM, and I am biking home. I am biking into the wind, but it is sunny and not that cold. I am a slow speaker. I have problems with that. The algorithm in MS Word breaks sentences too quickly for me. I get a new sentence if I have just the slightest brain freeze. Sure enough, that's annoying me. I've been looking into whether I can change the settings in MS Word so that it waits longer before inserting a new sentence, but that's impossible.

I did not have much time to look into the news today when working because I was working really hard today. I did see some comments that the stock markets aren't doing well. Usually, I'm not that interested in stock markets. In a way, it is a complex concept. The markets are crashing. That is not going to be a good thing. Unless you're a crooked president, of course. Can you imagine? He is crashing the stock market and buying every stock you can imagine. Then he turns off all tariffs and says they are not working, and never mind. The stocks are back up, and Trump is one wealthy bastard. It would not be the first time one of my jokes came true.

The last time I biked along the canal. It was in the autumn of last year. That was the moment I decided to give up biking for that season. And why? Well, because there is a stretch between the city. And the area where I live was pitch dark. Right now, here and now, I realize that I did not consider building a light bar at the front of the bike with thousands of lumens. I might look into that before the following autumn.

Now, I passed the first bike bridge. On the bridge route. Next to me is a little butterfly flying. It likes me and flies next to me. Here's the next bridge. I stopped and counted birds. I can see 16 ducks.

I think it's just a blessing to bike through these parks on the way home. I'm biking into a stiff wind, and I'm still happy. What's wrong with me? After the bridges, the road is broader. On one side, there is a canal, and on the other, there is a garbage-filled hill. Sheep are grazing on the hill.

Tomorrow I have a day off. I will finish the beams in the restroom.

Everything has a price. You might not look for the price, but it should be there. I came across a Veritasium film about a brain teaser question from Google Employment. Suppose you get so small as a dime and put it in a blender. After 60 seconds, the blender is turned on. What do you do?

The correct answer was that you jump out. From a physical standpoint, you can do that when you are that small. Apparently, you could jump about 39 centimeters. The power in your muscles could make you jump so high. They talked to a physician who said, well, you're miniaturized. But your cells cannot be miniaturized. A cell is a cell. So, if you're miniaturized, it means you are made of fewer cells. He said you would not have the brain capacity, and the lungs would be too inefficient; you would die without realizing you should jump.

We love brain teasers like this, but what about the value of a toad surviving? Suppose a toad is walking over a road, and it is dying because it is run over by a car. What is the value for humanity that the toad is surviving? You would need an answer in euros or dollars. People can estimate the value emotionally and find that the toad's life is worth the effort to save it. That is good, but suppose we use the same deep analysis as Veritasium used on the Google brain teaser to figure out the consequences of toads surviving and, most of all, the economic value of each toad.

Suppose the ecosystem we use to grow crops collapses when the toads die out, and we cannot grow crops if they go extinct? In that scenario, money would be for a couple of toad tunnels. Think about that. I'm not going to calculate it. That is an exercise for the reader. I came home at 6:40 PM.

At home, I helped DS mount his cupboard.

Friday 4 April

Although it was my day off, the alarm clock went off the regular time. I made breakfast, and after the breakfast, I gave the sheep a new grazing area. It is just a tiny grazing area. Perhaps it is ¼ of the north-west field. Hannah was pleased about getting out of the winter area. She wanted to be groomed. I took away some hay stuff hanging in her fur. She liked a bit of attention.

Then, I started watering the grass, moving the sprinkler every 15 minutes. For the rest of the time, I will work on the ceiling in the restroom. I put a timer on for 15 minutes so I won't forget the watering sprinkler. I measured the moisture in the grass, and the first four centimeters were too dry. Below four centimeters, the soil is fine. I suppose that's why I'm watering, so we are dealing with that.

Yesterday evening, I sat and edited my written text while biking to work. It was tedious. I had really much to say. There was no time to program the lyrics editor. That is strange.

Now, I will start with the beams in the restroom ceiling. So I did some work I'm going to undo. I put up tiny beams to support the structure. Here, I will remove those and replace them with sturdier beams so I can do this properly.

I removed the beams I mounted yesterday because I wanted the beams to be more sturdy. It did not take long until I figured I wanted to listen to music or a podcast in the barn, but that would not be easy if I didn't have Internet access.

I stopped working on the beams and started working on the network cable lying in the case pipes. I thought it would be easy, but nothing is easy. I should know that by now.

I put UTP plugs on the cable and measured it to see if it worked. It was not working. So, I cut off a part of the new cable and put on a new UTP plug. This time, it did not work either. I was not sure if it was the cable or my measurement tool that was defective. I tried the measure tool on an existing cable, but that did not work either. I'm going to the hardware store to buy a new cable tester.

When I had my cable tools, I went to a Chocolate Factory. It is called Chocomelvin, and the owner himself is Melvin. He is the son of a former neighbor of ours. He was okay with me taking a photo of him. I think he liked it. I told him about my motto that if you eat chocolate, you had better eat good chocolate because it has to be worth it. Cheap chocolate is just filling the belly with useless fat. It is also nice to support someone making chocolate in his workshop. This is his daily work.

When I came back from the Chocolate Factory, it was lunchtime. DW and I had lunch. I continued with my cable project after lunch. I've got the cable working, which was a good feeling because dragging the cable across those case pipes was done correctly. Can you see me dig up the case pipes below the driveway? No, I don't think so either.

But I was in for a surprise when I launched the configuration tool of Ubiquity. It turned out that the configuration had been lost. Every time I open the configuration of Ubiquity, I'm offered a surprise. So I've had this before. It is a somewhat complex tool. I have a network here and a network at the cottage in Sweden. I have various different access points and a switch. It is complex, and I know it.

DW was on calls this afternoon, so I could not destroy the connection. The new access point had been used in Sweden, so it was set up for the network there. It was challenging to get it into the network in the Netherlands. I did not understand how things could be like this. It must be so that the configuration was not saved the last time I configured the network. The access points still worked, but I could not manage them.

When I decided to recreate the network I had created the last time and then get the access points into that new network, it started to behave appropriately. I could delete and recreate it since DS was not using the Internet. Then, I set the access points to be forgotten. Then, when the access points were reset, they could be adopted into the new network. It is so easy when you know what to do.

Having the barn in a separate network from the house is better because we have a tracking device on Merida that detects when it is inside the WIFI area. If that area involves three houses, we cannot find her.

With all this wifi network done, I went to the barn, worked on the ceiling, and listened to Swedish news. It talked about stock markets crashing. I finished the beams in the barn restroom.

Saturday 5 April

Today, we woke up at the same time as on weekdays. This was because DW was enrolling in a course on dyeing yarn. It's sunny today and not that windy, so DW could bike to the farm where the course is being held.

My first task today was to check on the sheep in the area I had given them on Thursday evening. That will not be good if they are allowed to grace too much. They are now done with that area and will start on the new one on Friday. That's an area on the West side of the house.

The next task for the day was to start digging out the trench for the water pipes. We need to take care of the water from the barn roof when it's raining. The water will be transported to the water storage. You can call it a pond if you like. It's not a regular pond; it's a hole connected to the groundwater. All our roofs are connected to pipes that lead to that pond. That means the water is transported to the pond when it's raining heavily. The groundwater takes up the added water. We must do this because it's part of our building permit requirements.

I used the tiller machine to make the soil more fluffy. The first layer around the house is sand, so that was easy. I don't like digging, though. After some time, it was time. For my second cup of coffee, I went inside. I brewed my coffee and sat down programming. The lyric editor.

I worked on detecting when to add a section or a new line. When there is one word, the function is not activated. With two or more words pressing enter, the first word creates a new line in front of the current line. Pressing enter in the last word creates a new line after the current line. Pressing Shift Enter creates a section in front or after the current section.

When I finished programming the lyrics editor and drinking my coffee, I discovered that the hands of the neighbors further away were picking seeds from the field I had just sewed in last week. There are such lovely animals, but now I want grass there. I don't want to feed the chickens from the neighbors further away. I put up the net; we have it against chickens.

Then, I continued digging until it was time for lunch.

After lunch, I started digging again. I wanted to start the tiller machine but broke the starter rope. That was not a great feeling. I had to dig by hand.

While working, I listened to podcasts about the world's situation. What Trump's Tariffs Will Actually Do. I liked that because I understood better how companies are seeing this situation. The uncertainty is the problem here. How long will this last? This was a podcast with Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade economics who has been a New York Times Opinion writer for 25 years. He got his Nobel price in 2008.

Sunday 6 April

In the morning, I worked on the lyrics editor. I abandoned the use of cookies. I will use the local storage feature. That seems to work.

Today, we started the day with a meeting with the road association. This time, it was an outdoor meeting. The chairman stood on top of a heap of gravel. The voting went smoothly and swiftly. It was sunny, but the wind was a little chilly. Good weather for an outdoor meeting.

After the meeting, we started working on the barn. DW applied insulation, and I continued to dig out the trenches for the water pipes of the roof water.

While digging, I listened to the Ezra Klein Show. This time with Gillian Tett. She is an anthropologist and columnist at the Financial Times. This was recorded a few weeks ago, so it did not include the latest. It was interesting to hear what she had to say.

I listened to a couple of other podcasts and shows as well, but I don't think any of them captured the situation we are in now.

I finished the trench for the water pipes. That is really good. I can invite Mr Radi to start working on the remaining barn projects. The electricity, the rainwater system, etc.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 3761 words this week. That is not bad at all. We finished to-do items before the electrician could come back. Beams are mounted in the ceiling. Insulation applied. The trench for the rainwater pipes is dug out.