JENS MALMGREN I create.

Started to empty the sea container

This week I finished installing the rain roof, and I started emptying the sea container.

Monday 4 August

It was a quiet, regular night. Merida slept on the chair outside our bedroom. In the morning, she acted as if she were hungry. She came to lie between DW and me, spinning loudly, as if to say "I am hungry". It could also be a sign of affection, but sometimes she is rather transactional in her love. Merida and I went downstairs, and the 11 grams of chunks I served yesterday were untouched. I gave her epilepsy medicine and a buffet of three different sorts of food. By the look of how she sniffed on the chunks, I tried to decipher what her taste was:

  • A. Purina One SterilCat Chicken chunks. That is what she has been eating since she was a kitten. She did not like these anymore.
  • B. Purina One SterilCat Beef. She ate one chunk.
  • C. Colored Whiskas tuna chunks, she sniffed once and then waved her tongue in disgust.

Usually, she eats her pill when I pack it in the EasyPill clay. Not now. She waved her tongue after sniffing the pill. I gave it to her in her mouth, which went well. For this, I put her upside down. Make her open her mouth, and then I drop the pill into her pharynx. It has to go straight down. If I drop it on one side, she will spit out the pill again.

She drank water, though, that was normal. She is fine, except she is not eating. She drinks, pees, and plays with toys. I even let her out, and she went on an excursion in the neighborhood. I decided she could have the worm pill. That was some time ago, so that was about the time.

DW went to work. I worked from home. I started the robot vacuum cleaner. For this to work well, I had to tidy up things standing on the floor. I moved the cat buffet to the stairs. The robot is not climbing up the stairs, unfortunately.

While working, I heard Merida eat from the chunks on the stairs. It was great to hear the sound of her eating again. To my surprise, she ate from the Whiskas chunks. She ate perhaps 5 grams, and I was relieved. In the afternoon, she ate almost the rest of the Whiskas. I talked to the veterinarian and promised that if the situation got worse, they would hear from me.

Tuesday 5 August

Good morning. It is a sunny morning, Tuesday, 5 August, and I'm biking to work, and I'm late. I'm not letting the time rush me; I'm going to enjoy this bike tour to work because it can be one of the few marvelous moments of this summer.

Yesterday, Merida ate a few chunks in the morning. In the afternoon, she had a few more chunks. In the evening, while I was programming the phoneme conversion project, she came to lie down beside me on her pillow, and she purred loudly. After a while, she switched to the comfy chair, specifically the top of the back support. She fell asleep again. After a while, she farted loudly, woke up, and fell off the chair. That was funny!

Merida is not the only one who has had a rough time lately. I'm also feeling a bit bloated. It looks like we are sailing out of this Merida crisis. It is not fun, but the world is not collapsing; we are resilient, and we learn to adapt.

I'm on my way home. It's been a productive day, but I have had pain in my belly the entire day. Can you imagine DW putting me in a human carrier to bring me to the doctor? Arriving there, I would make growling noises, and the doctor would put a thermometer in my butt. Luckily, I am a human and not a cat. I do wonder, though, if a human can take over stomach flu from a cat? Interesting question.

Halfway home, I discovered that I had lost the microphone's muffler. This is the second time I lost it.

I have the wind in the back. It is sunny and pleasant. It's funny, with the Dutch, they don't follow the rules. If someone were to make a concrete bike path, you should be able to use it even if there are signs saying it is still wet concrete. Who would not love to have the imprints of their stupidity forever engraved into the pavement?

When I came home, DW gave me paracetamol. Things calmed down in the belly. Merida even pooped this evening. That is great! Good girl.

In the evening, I worked on the phoneme conversion project. I reached 70k! That is over 50%.

Wednesday 6 August

I slept well, although I still had a bit of pain in my belly. Somehow, I had a productive half day working from home. I released a new version. Soon after release, I got a note that it had a significant bug, so I had to revert the release. I will look into that tomorrow.

It was lovely weather. After work, I dug out this week's delivery of potatoes to the food cooperative. I laid out the potatoes to dry in the sun. We had lunch.

After lunch, I delivered the potatoes by bike. The bike was ticking again. It is not ticking right after heavy rain. When I came home, I found a Dutch YouTube video about how to remove the cogwheel of a bike. Most notably, I now knew what the tools for this looked like and what it was called in Dutch. I went to the bike shop and bought the tools: a chain whip and a cassette remover.

I got the tools and took apart the bike. Essentially, the cassette is wiggling on the shaft; it has to be ticking – there is no other possibility. There is a bolt to hold the cogwheel in place, but it is not strong enough to prevent it from wiggling. I tried to put shims to reduce the wiggling, but it was not sufficient. I put it back together, but I need to ponder how to get rid of the wiggling.

Merida is still having an issue with her left front foot. She is eating a little more, but she is not back to regular eating habits. I sprayed her paw with calendula spray. Merida did not appreciate that. I can no longer give her medication with EasyPill; she despises it. I have to put the pill in her open mouth. It is a less smooth operation. I will have to educate DS on how to do this well on time so that we can go on holiday.

I concluded that the issues remain: the bike is ticking, Meridas' left paw has a wound, and I still have a faint pain in my belly. It is slowly getting better.

Thursday 7 August

Good morning. I'm biking to work on my ticking bike. It's easy to forget achievements if the end goal has not been reached yet. To summarize: I determined which tools to use, and I bought them. I learned how to use them. That is a huge step forward. But yes, I am disappointed. I found that the cogwheels (the cassette) slide onto something that looks like a pipe with flanges. Inside the pipe, you have the mechanism allowing for movement in one direction but not the other. In the other direction, it brings with it the wheel, bringing the pedal force to turn the wheel and move the bike forward. The cassette has corresponding flanges. The thing is, the cassette has a loose fit over the pipe. Now, if the cassette had a conical shape in one end and a corresponding conical shape in the other end, and the ring holding it together would also be conical, it would not have mattered how loose the fit was. The ring holding all this together has been worn out. There's plenty of material on the ring, so that's no problem. You can see that the cassette has been wiggling for seven years.

It is frustrating because the bearings are constructed in this conical way to allow for adjusting the pressure of the axis. The bearings they're all perfect. I could easily fill up the gap with expandable wood glue or something, but I would be the last time I take a cassette apart. I arrived at the office.

At 6 PM, I started biking home. When I arrived at the office this morning, I went searching for the microphone's muffler that I'm using for dictating the blog. I found the muffler! It would not be strange if you are wondering why I'm caring about a muffler, and I'm wondering this myself. The thing can be worth a couple of cents. I'm concerned about losing it because replacing only the muffler is more difficult than buying a new set of microphones. Well, now I lost it twice, found it back twice, and every time I was happy to find it again, it made me feel more wholesome. But if that's what I feel, then I should do something about it and make sure it's not getting lost so easily. Generally, recently, the feelings of losing things have become a theme in my life.

I'm thinking about that ticking of the bike and what possibilities I have to reduce the wiggling of the cogwheel.

  • Filling up the space with some form of expandable stuff is easy, but the drawback is that I'm never going to get the cassette off again. That is a no-go on that plan.
  • Another method would be shims from some material. I mean, I have a lot of garbage lying around, but it needs to be thin and stiff to fit in that space. I cannot figure out what it would be. A metal rod of some sort?
  • If I were a full-blown machinist like this old Tony, then I would make a conical ring. The thing is that I am not a full-fledged machinist.
  • The gap is too small to do something with the 3D printer. Besides, I have not used it since we moved to the new house.

I don't know the correct answer. What I do know about engineering is that this is a design error. That means that every bike with this construction has this ticking sound. Gazelle Chamonix.

In the evening, I worked on the phoneme conversion project. I reached 75k!

Friday 8 August

First things first: Collect the cucumbers and put them in a jar with salt. DW will pick up the task from there and pickle the cucumbers tomorrow morning.

I searched on YouTube and found a movie about bicycle noises from Jim Lanley. Can it be that when I took off the seat to fill up with oil, I spilled a little on the clamp holding the seat? This is so much easier to fix a noise from this area than removing a gap in the cassette. I will try Jim's advice, but first program a little on the phoneme project.

In the morning, I worked on the phoneme conversion project at line 75323 and the word "Marylebone". I sat on the couch, and Merida came to lie beside me, purring loudly. She is not hating me after forcing pills in her throat, spraying stinging calendula spray on her left paw. That is good.

The program had problems picking up the letter L. The letter L was in the middle of the sound IH B. The thing was that I had also defined a multisound for IH B, but for another letter combination. The fallback would then handle the individual letters for the sound IH, followed by B. Now that is working, except for one thing. There is a silent E between the sounds IH and B. The fallback routine is not handling silent letters. It can handle non-sound characters; perhaps adding silent letters is possible?

I made that possible. Now I am matching including silent letters, but I am not specifying that a silent letter was used for matching in the parse instance. That is not good. Somehow, I need to get the silent letters into the parse instance as well. This is the one moment when one starts to doubt whether I understands my own program anymore. I know from experience that usually I do, so I am not that worried. Just yet. This has to wait; I had enough bonding time with Merida.

It was time to remove the old rain roof. Before mounting the roof, I fastened the bolts one more time. The tarp is sandwiched between the plywood triangles and it is the bolts that hold the tarp to the triangles. The triangles are spreading the force along a greater area so that the tarp is not ripped at just a single point. That works when the bolts are tight, if they are loose then the tarp is ripped out of the triangles, but let us hope that will not happen this winter. I started to mount the rain roof on the scaffold. Before I could finish, it was time for lunch.

After lunch, I sat down to work on the phoneme project again, just let the rain roof hang half mounted for a while. I made the fallback routine injecting the silent characters that it found in the multisound fallback. Now they are listed as well, that is neat! I know there is a shortcoming possible here, there can be an apostrophe and a silent character but I cannot handle several level 4 phonemes, but I leave that to the future.

75323
          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
          m  a  r  y  l  e  b  o  n  e
          0   1   2   3   +4   5   +6
          M   AE1 R   IH0 +B   AH0 +N   

          m     at 0-0   in marylebone M    nasal
          a     at 1-1   in marylebone AE1  vowel
          r     at 2-2   in marylebone R    liquid
          yleb  at 3-6   in marylebone IH0  vowel e    silent B    stop
          on    at 7-8   in marylebone AH0  vowel N    nasal
          e     at 9-9   in marylebone e    silent

Nice!

 

I finished the rain roof. Then I replaced the fly traps, this time using gloves!

Then I continued on the phoneme. Line 78778 is Microsoft's. I reached 80k at 5 PM!

After that, I tried to fix the ticking problem of the bike. I tried Jim's trick of the saddle. I lubricated the saddle pipe holder. It did not work.

I fastened the cassette with a metal rod that I ground down into a wedge. I made two of these wedges that I used to make the cassette fasten much better to the holder. It did not work.

Then I lubricated the spokes of the wheels where they cross. It did not work.

Then I took off the saddle again and sprayed a considerable amount of WD40 into the pipe leading to the front pedal shaft. It may have worked. We will see.

And now, it was the perfect time to put sticky tape on the microphones so that the mufflers would stay on more firmly.

It was time for dinner, and after dinner. DW made baked potatoes, it was nice. After dinner, I was on the phoneme project again. When I reached line 86125, we went to bed.

Saturday 9 August

It feels like I went around like a tornado yesterday, fixing things. I was exhausted in the end—no energy for doing the dishes after dinner. I did the dishes this morning. Little flies welcomed me. I will get on top of things; it is a process. Just watch me.

Armed with tea and two laptops, I went to the bedroom to offer the tea as a gesture of gratitude for DW and all her efforts. She likes tea in the morning. She drinks green tea with jasmine flowers imported from China. I drink rooibos tea.

We sat there sipping tea. I worked on the phoneme project, and DW browsed through the latest news from Ravelry. That is a platform with millions upon millions of people like DW doing all things fibre. DW also has a blog, but she is not that active in updating it. Putting fibres together into valuable items, or just for the sake of art, or for any other reason, is why people go to Ravelry. Usually, the end goal is to attach one fibre to another at Ravelry. You find patterns and know how at that platform. It is a marvellous platform, but I am not on it. DW is.

I am similar in that I also put things together, but I am not working with fibres. I work with many other things. Right now, I am into phonemes. This came about because I wanted to make a lyrics editor. So I made one. Now I want to make it better, and for that, I need words, and I need to master phonemes.

Lately, I have posted exact numbers of where I am in my journey on the phonemes. That is great, you can see I am making progress. Or can you? Anyway, I was at word 86125 yesterday. Then this morning, I arrived at a word that went wrong because the sound "B" had been provided with the recognition pattern "bl", but right after came the sound "L", and that "l" was already consumed, so now the recognition pattern was broken. No "l" could be found if the "B" sound already consumed it, and indeed, it was missing. I do not remember where I introduced the "bl" to the sound "B," but I was optimistic it was somewhere after 70k. So why not fix things and go back to line 70k and find the bl issue, fix it, and life would be wonderful?

Not so quick. I tried, but I encountered a word that was previously not an issue, but now it is a new issue. So I introduced something to make something old break? At the word "lumex," the letter "M" could not be detected. It was there, the word was short. This should work; it should be easy and fun. What is going on here?

Well, I had several Irish and Scottish words and names, and they often feature "M AH K" sounds represented by mc or mcc. That is easy, I define a pattern for these, and we are good to go. Well, wait a moment.

I decided to ponder this, create breakfast, and start the day's activities.

The first thing DW did today was to pickle more cucumbers. This is the jar from Friday. We now have several jars of pickled cucumber in the kitchen.

It is like having a treasure in the cupboard.

After this, we went on a bike tour to the farmers' market. We arrived a little too late to buy bread, but we got much of what we needed.

The most important thing with the bike tour from my perspective was that my bike did not tick a single time. Not a single ticking sound. Nothing at all. Can you imagine? Amazing, outright amazing. It is the DW40 trick that did it, but do I know? No, I don't know. Am I happy about it? Yes, I am!

When we came home, we had lunch. After lunch, I started on the new massive project—emptying trash from the sea container. I did not get that far, though, but I moved things from the sea container to the barn. For this purpose, I had set up a shelf in the attic of the barn.

Sunday 10 August

It was the last day of the week, according to ISO 8601. I made a sober smoothie with only apples and red currant berries. The apple I collected from our tree. It was a slightly sour apple, and smoothy. This was compensated with a lovely morning!

Merida was lying on the porch outside the living room doors. She was fine. Her left paw is not entirely healed, but she is eating. The appetite for EasyPill clay is gone. That is unfortunate. This week, no more seizures, that's nice.

This was not a day for pottering around at home; this was a day for going to PIL's old house to take photos. It is a one-hour drive to get there. We took photos of art that will be evaluated by Sotheby's if they want to make it available for an auction. We did not find as much art as we had been hoping. There were still plenty of items to photograph. When the time is right, I will publish some of those photos on the blog. There were a couple of pieces that I would have liked to have on the wall, but the family has decided to sell them. In that case, it is sufficient to have them on the blog. I am humble. I made sure I took the photos with good light and white paper to allow for color balancing. That works like magic. I am using the same technique for my art when I photograph it. It is pretty simple. I include a white surface with the photo, and then I can calibrate the colors according to that white area. I select "Levels" and there is a color picker for white. I point to the white object in the photo, and the curves are then rearranged to produce white. That is magic. Then I need to adjust the black level according to my subjective idea of the photo of the painting. It works every time.

After the photoshoot, we had lunch together with BIL. We packed two more items from the house: A travel chest, from the times when that was a thing. We also packed a modern stretcher made with aluminium and plastic.

Then we went to the PILs together with BIL. They were in a good mood. FIL has difficulty talking since the last crisis. His wife sometimes forgets to give him the space required to say something. She has better hearing and is in good command of her talking. In a dull moment, I asked an easy question for him so that he could also talk a little. He grabbed the chance and said that it was challenging to communicate, and he does not like the food so much. It was essential to put him in the center like that. I can see that the life of this 96-year-old man is not entirely easy, although they are taken good care of at this home.

We looked after plants growing along the edge of the apartment of the PILs. I had brought with me an amaranth plant. It will not produce flowers but I liked the idea of bringing it anyway.

On the way home, we went to a place where you could buy cherries. It was a delicious fruit.

When we came home, we had a walk with the sheep. They are terrified of Tito, the white Labrador of the neighbours. I do think the dog is named after the dictator, or was it not a dictator? Anyway, the dog is a Labrador, and he thinks he can play with the sheep, but he only scares them away. He comes running at full speed to the fence, and the sheep are running home. "Oh, Tito, don't do that." Yeah, right. Another 500 square meters of grass cannot be grazed because of an utterly stupid dog that cannot understand that its behaviour is the scariest thing to the sheep. The owners don't understand it either. "Oh, Tito, don't do that", again and again. Keeping a dog is part of human rights in the Netherlands, so of course, people should have dogs. I suppose a dog named after a dictator can do whatever he likes, or was it a hero?

Before Tito spoiled everything, we had a nice moment with the sheep. It was a beautiful evening!

Here ends this week's blog. This week I bought tools for disassembling the cassette from my bike. That is a special milestone. I started working on emptying the sea container, which is another important milestone. I did not get that far on that, but it is a significant step forward. The rainroof is replaced. We are ready for the storms! I had a setback in the phoneme project this morning, but I will continue with that next week.

I wrote 4094 words. That is amazing. Welcome back next week!


I moved from Sweden to The Netherlands in 1995.

Here on this site, you find my creations because that is what I do. I create.