“Nederland schreeuwt om cultuur”. Tomorrow, November 20th, people will come together in 65 Dutch cities and towns to raise their voice for arts and culture. The budget cuts proposed by government are vindictive, uncivilized and out of proportion.

We get out of balance.

You can join the protest online by inserting a line of code, provided by V2_, in your website: http://code.v2.nl/nederland/schreeuwt-om-cultuur.js

(Update 22/11: Originally the code provided a new background for a website and made the content appeared slanted).

5 minutes after I posted my entry on moving, I receive a comment from which I gather that a spamblog has hijacked/copied my post on an apparently totally new WordPress-spamblog of which I am not going to give the URL to prevent further idiocies…

Why? To install spyware? Have me click? Speaking of total wastes of times that make the world a worse place to live this sort of stuff must be in the top 10.

I was actually going to write that it’s not so bad with the Digitenne single tuner as I thought. I can turn on the timer of the videorecorder and turn off the tevee and still have it record. I just have to make sure the tuner is on & tuned to the right channel. Phhiewww. I’m not as stupid as I thought I was.

I hate it. I hate it. Not even because of moving the actual stuff. I hate it because one has to move one’s connections, or getting new ones. And that is not so easy. Transferring the telephone and adsl of F. turns out to be a big deal. First one simply tells KPN to move the telephone + adsl to the new house. She did that on the 6th of january. There is a physical phone-line in the new house. So it should be easy enough. But according to the administration of the cables that line is taken by an old adsl-connection. (The formers tenants have canceled that months ago, but nevertheless it’s still in the administration). Because KPN does not have a monopol they are not allowed to put their signal on that line. Result: they have to physically make a new line. (Dutch: “bijlassen”). Okay, fair enough, although it shows how much extra useless work is created by this system. But, the KPN ‘lost’/forgot that an adsl signal should be put on the line too, because there was a problem and then xs4all and KPN were waiting for each other (or something along that line). I made a fair amount of calls about it today – and surprisingly I was helped quite well, although the result was mostly finding out that something had gone wrong in the process. Yesterday the extra line was made (physically). The analog thelephone signal was put on it. It works fine. But no adsl. Turns out that the whole administrative process of moving the adsl starts only from today. And that process takes 3 weeks. Sigh.

Second: there is no cable TV in this building. Well, there’s a coax cable somewhere in the cellar but that’s no use (this appartment is on the 5th floor). So I decide to go for Digitenne. I cannot live without cycling on tv. Digitenne has at least both Belgian channels. But here I make a mistake. I get the ‘single tuner’ and what I did not know (nor read about anywhere) is that it is impossible to programme one’s videorecorder to record a programme using a single tuner. Huh? It seems total nonsense to me – I mean, as far as I’m concerned one could put the videorecorder in between the tuner and the television. But that doesn’t seem to work with this system. So much for progression. Sigh.

For the rest it’s all plug’n’play. But well, I’d rather have a bit less plug’n’play and a bit more of simplicity. One doesn’t have a fight with technology – struggling to make it work – but with the (instutionalized) packaging of the technology. Grrr.

Am here at the Jan van Eyck, writing. But it feels as if I have already left this place, as if the year is over. (Well, some days left en a few thousand words to write & edit).

2007 has started already. In the sense that 2007-activities have already started.

If this mood continues I think I will not go for any last goodbye-bike-rides. If this mood continues then, it will mean that I will not go for a bike-ride once in December.

To be honest, I can not imagine that will become true.

As I write this, I begin to feel the desire to go for a ride. (But it’s dark and it’s misty now).

I bought an ipod-nano — for all the train travelling I’ll have to do next year. I must say, it’s such a stylish & fashionable thing that I feel very tempted to cover it in ugly stickers.

A typewritten letter by Thomas Pynchon, scanned, at the British Telegraph, concerning some plagiarism-allegations against Ian McEwan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/12/05/nwriter06big.gif.

So after the crazy schedule of last week — with a (2 day) workshop Social Software in Arnhem, a full Ubiscribe-day in Maastricht and a public lecture in Groningen — involving lots of travelling and intensive working hours… I collapsed. Flu? Virus? Just worn out? Spent friday till monday in bed, not being able to do anything. Only on monday I did a bit of reading and watching googlevideo-BBC-documentaries.

So sorry I was not here & sorry the comments were kept ‘on hold’ so long.

Now it’ll be only writing. (Five days less than I had hoped).

Last days in Maastricht, before I return to Amsterdam.

Picture showing me at the Mediamatic RFID-workshop, having a headache. Rob calls it “Arie hit by the implications of it all”.

Zondagavond: Maastricht – Amsterdam, halverwege tot de ontdekking komen dat je fietssleutels in je winterjas zitten die je niet aan hebt vanwege de uitzonderlijk hoge temperaturen. Geen zin in de tram na 2-en-een-half uur trein, 50 minuten wandelen naar huis. Maandagochtend: 7.15 – 8.05 lopen van huis naar het station. 8.17 trein naar Arnhem, die is te laat, waarmee je eigenlijk al weet dat je te laat op het werk (gastles) zult zijn. Trein is vol, je staat maar gelukkig kom je een kennis tegen (Paul van de Rock Supplies, wat de reis veraangenaamt en verkort). 9.45 aankomst (20 minuten te laat) op Arnhem. 10.00 stoptrein naar Presikhaaf. 10.15 voor de klas. 15.58 stoptrein Nijmegen. Stoptrein Roermond. Stoptrein Maastricht. Aankomst 18.45. Lopen naar de Jan van Eyck. 19.10 Aankomst.

Donderdagavond. Terug naar Maastricht. In de afgelopen 4×24 uur zo’n beetje 24 uur reistijd (rekenend van zondagavond 19.00 tot vanavond 19.00). Dinsdagavond: Maastricht – Amsterdam. Woensdagochtend Amsterdam – Groningen. Woensdagavond Groningen – Amsterdam. Donderdagochtend: Amsterdam – Arnhem Presikhaaf. Donderdagmiddag Arnhem Presikhaaf – Maastricht (Kanne). En bijna elke trein reed met (kleine) vertraging.

Just a quick ‘reminder’: the web has been around for 15 years now… since August 6th 1991.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm.

And in a sense it is still so crude… Things that people 15 years ago thought would be easy to do in 15 years time, is still impossible or difficult. We have MySpace where we’d hoped (well I certainly did) to have good and usable authoring tools to deal with the richness of texts, images, music on the web. But what do we do, we copy them and throw them into separate folders into folders.

Look at Sophie, a software project of the Institute for Future of the Book to understand what I’m getting at: http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/SophieIntro.pdf. I’m afraid I have to say that I don’t think Sophie will succeed (I mean: become successful = widely used), but the complaints voiced in it are spot on.

(I try to use VoodooPad, I tried DevonThink, I am blogging, but still everything is a mess until I write / have to write a text for a magazine, or do a presentation or lecture). (Hence my interest in Knowledge Management ;-)

(Browsed around a bit on MySpace; it is easy to understand why it’s so successful: it’s all about identity-construction, music plays an important role in that for teenagers, apart from the ‘profile’, the ‘friends’-thing, there’s the possibility to have music playing &c. &c. But I find it equally easy to imagine that in 2 years time MySpace will be abandoned, when a new gulf of teenagers starts to use some other service. It will survive, of course, just like so many other profile-sites for chatting & dating survive. (I might be wrong — I’m mostly wrong when I predict something). But it won’t be deemed as important as it is now. I don’t think people generally feel a commitment to a service like this).

This comes as a real shock. Last week the young Dutch poet/blogger/thinker — I don’t know what I should call him — Jeroen Mettes ‘stepped out of this life, voluntarily’: http://n30.nl/2006/09/blog-post.html. I missed that it had happened, not having visited his blog, or one of the other Dutch blogs on poetry for a week and a half. I never met Jeroen Mettes, never e-mailed him, never left comments on his blog — yet I always read what he wrote with more than great interest. I knew him by his written words only. He was an ‘original voice’, a voice, that made me long for the future of literature, a future that his words, his poetics, I imagined, might shape.