Sunday, 01-Jun-25 22:35:39 CEST

Tiles and OSB boards

We ordered tiles for the kitchen and the restroom.

Monday 26 May until Sunday 1 June

This week, my phoneme conversion project took over my spare time. At first, I happily worked on finding solutions to make the conversion process run smoothly. On Tuesday, I had reached 1400 words. The more I worked, the more I got stuck without realizing it. The conversion program ran sequentially from the beginning of the word to the end. When it could not proceed, I analyzed the issue and added or changed the conversion rules.

With more rules, they started to interfere with each other in unpredictable ways. I spent more and more time fixing the issues. I went forward in the file with words ever so slowly. At one point, the program could successfully analyze 100 words in one go, and if it became 200 words or more before I had to repair the algorithm, things would be okay. That did not happen. It always almost happened.

When I got things working above a thousand words, I checked if it still worked at the beginning of the file, and that was not the case. I had changed the rules so that previously worked cases were now broken.

At one point, I told myself it was fun to make a program like this. It is like a computer game! It did not convince me. It was not fun anymore. In this effort, I stopped blogging. I did the regular things; it was not getting lethal. It was only my spare time that was spoiled.

It rained this week, especially on Tuesday. It was a much-needed rain. This meant that I could not bike to work. The garden is progressing nicely. This week we planted the last vegetables we wanted for this season.

We worked in the barn on Wednesday, 29 May. DW insulated, and I put up OSB boards. It was great to work there while the chilly wind and rain filled the air outside. On Thursday, we had a mandatory day off. We worked in the barn again.

On Friday, 30 May, we went to a ceramic tile shop. DW has a sweet spot for mild green tiles. The only dealer in the Netherlands providing such tiles from the tile factory Mosa and a sales point in Huizen. We went there. It was a mixed experience. At first, it was Hurrah, and a salesperson was listening to us. When we placed the order, the customer was no longer king. The salesperson had better things to do than answer our questions because why do you answer questions of a customer buying things from you? Surely, these questions must have been stupid, but he could have brought the message a little less offensively. This is the Netherlands; here, you are lucky if you are mistreated as a customer. It can get much worse.

So, the tiles are ordered! I will pick them up when they are available. DW does not want to put her foot in the place again, so I have to do it alone.

We decided on a glossy mild Mosa tile for the kitchen and the workshop in the house. In the restroom in the barn, we will have a tile called Svenska with a pattern on it. We will paint the part of the wall without tiles a mild green color so you will believe the tile is green.

This adventure took up a large portion of Friday. It was exhausting, but we had the stuff ordered. Well done!

On Saturday the weather was great. It was time for a festival. We enjoyed music shows, a market, and a theatre play in the ruins of an unbuilt house. The owner had died. We don't know this person. It was interesting to see how others have struggled with finding a place here, and not all have succeeded. It was a bit emotional. The dead lady had a digger machine, which is more than I have. The digger had been stranded there for seven years. A singer sang songs in the ruins. I liked this act.

The festival had more joyful elements as well. There were activities for kids. We went to a concert by a couple of bands.

On Thursday, I contemplated the phoneme project. I decided to abandon the forward-looking parser approach. I had another idea. How would it be if the program reviewed the word in several passes? In the first pass, it looks for non-vowels only. In the second pass, it looks for vowels in the remaining unparsed slots. The third pass looks for silent letters and unparsed characters in the remaining slots, such as dashes and accents. Up until now, I had no solution for those types of letters. Finally, it looks for trailing silent letters.

I got a prototype of this method running on Sunday night. That is the reason I did not upload this blog on Sunday night. There are bugs to iron out, but it is all going in the right direction.

Here, I end this week's short blog. This week, we ordered tiles and finished the insulation of the barn, except for the wall behind the utility appliances. There is always a little exception. I applied OSB boards to the east and south walls. I was not good at blogging this week. I wrote 973 words. A few words below a thousand words. That is not good. It will be better next week!