Preparing for upcoming garden season Wednesday, 23-Apr-25 21:13:39 CEST

Sunday, 27-Apr-25 21:16:38 CEST

Finished the new garden beds

This week, we finished the garden beds. I planted potatoes and corn.

Monday 21 April

Today, we had a compulsory day off. That was great because we did not go anywhere, so we did not have to stand in any queue as you usually do when the entire population has a day off on the same day. The CEO of the multinational catholic corporation died today. Many people liked him, so they were sad. Do not worry; there will be a new CEO.

Tuesday 22 April

Morning. I'm on my way to work by bike. The time is 8:40 AM, a little on the late side. DW is working from home today.

Last week, I was totally lousy at blogging. Yeah. As a matter of fact, this Tuesday morning. I still haven't written last week's blog. I do hope to make a short version tonight. It would not be nice to stop blogging just like that. So, what is the reason I am not blogging? I have used every spare moment to program the lyrics editor. It has been great fun, most of the time.

On Friday, I gave a version to my son. He is also a software developer like I am. However, he has not had his software development career going just yet. He was interested in how I made the application, and we looked into that. It was a great time, quality time. I could have more of that, to be honest.

DS even made me a QA report. So, over the weekend, I worked on that report. Usually, the desktop version is very similar to the version running on mobiles. But there are differences, and they are hard to find. I had issues saving the song on my mobile. This brought me on a long detour of irrelevant fixes.

I thought I had reached the storage quota of my phone. I read about it on the Internet, and the claim was that you got 5 megabytes in total. So you are sharing that storage with all applications using local storage on a mobile? So, in reality, you get some unknown percentage of those 5 megabytes. So, what should you do when someone exceeds their quota? For that, I implemented an export functionality so that you can get the song out and store it somewhere else. This feature makes working on a song on a different computer possible, which is also lovely.

It was not enough; the save function still had glitches. I implemented compression. So, the storage was used much more efficiently. It did not help. Here, somewhere, my frustration was very high. I implemented a feature to check that what I stored was actually stored. And it was. This is not the first time I had the Schrödingers storage functionality in my software development career.

So what was the problem? Tapping the save button is sometimes not working. You think you correctly tapped the save button, which saved the song, but you did not press the button well enough. Also, the location of the button is essential here. I made the top bar sticky, and that helped make the button less glitchy.

You need to be firmer on a mobile when pressing a button. I lost two days of development on that. I made a simple solution: showing a dialog box saying the save is finished. Then I added the notice in the help text that you must press more thoroughly if you don't get that confirmation message.

There are still no cows in the cows' field.

Trying to convince Microsoft Word to say things. It fails, and it fails, and in the end, I say. Never mind. It answers. Thank you.

Now, I reached work at 9:15 AM. At 6:35 PM, I biked home. It is sunny.

It was busy at work today. A colleague tried my lyrics editor. She got an iPhone, but it did not work. It was as if she got her shift held while typing, which was odd. To my surprise, the return produced a new section. So I'm puzzled. I need a little more access to an iPhone to try it more. Reading about new line and return buttons in Android versus iPhone makes it sound like a complete mess. Unless you have some library you must download and use, I don't want to use extra libraries, except for jQuery.

Handling the return key is trivial until it is proven that I'm wrong.

I could take a new road home today. What roads should I take home? Lately, I have been taking the road with the little bridges. It's nice with those bridges, but what should I do this time? I am trying a parallel road. It's more like farmers' roads. I've never tried that before, so it can be bad, but it turned out to be really good. There are not many bumps, and there is asphalt or concrete.

In the evening, I have not published a blog since last week. I worked on it a little. I also created a song about lingonberries.

[Verse]
Sweet bitter jam from lingonberry
A big spoon in the morning dairy
All my breakfasts they all may wary
But lingonberry tops the cherry

[Chorus]
Sing along with my simple song
Lingonberry lingonberry
Rubies from the forest alley
Lingonberry lingonberry

[Verse]
As a child I picked these in the forest
This made me into a good allegorist
Mosquitos as bumble bees well nourished
The itching thought, was this berry my dearest?

[Verse]
Sing along with my simple song
Lingonberry lingonberry
Rubies from the forest alley
Lingonberry lingonberry

[Bridge]
Times has changed in the berry industry
No families picking berries skillfully
Kids skips the forest deliberately
Season labor pick berries miserably

[Verse]
Sing along with my simple song
Lingonberry lingonberry
Rubies from the forest alley
Lingonberry lingonberry

I have not mastered the song and publish it. Perhaps I will not do that. We will see.

Wednesday 23 April

Today, I worked from home, and DW went to the office. She had switched her day off with the coming Friday. In the afternoon, I gave the sheep a new area in which to graze. They can now graze between the birch trees. It is a little exciting to see how this goes. They can put the trees down and start eating from them if they like. We protected the trunks, but will it work?

The birches are standing too close to each other. As they grow older, we will thin them out. In the end, there can be two or three birches left. For now, it is a young forest, and we do not want them to be eaten by sheep. They could use the technique of walking over the tree so that the tree bends over. Then they eat the tree's crown, and when the tree bends back, it is just a stick. Either that or it is cracked. We know they can eat this forest in a day. By giving each tree a plastic sock, we hope they don't realize how close they are to the goodies. If they had the tree-eating technique, the process would have been quick. We will see.

Thursday 24 April

Good morning. It is raining heavily; I'm on my way to work by car. DW is working from home today.

Yesterday, I finished last week's blog and uploaded it. That did not go flawlessly, I must say. I had inserted the link to the lyrics editor, but the blog system choked on that link. I did not fix that. Just uploaded the blog as it was. The text says that the link is here, but it is not there. I will look into that another time. For now, the link is LyricsEditor dot html after the domain name.

I started working on the rhyme system of the lyrics editor. I added a button at the administration section at the top of the page, saying: Rhymes. It opens a dialogue window where you can configure the rhyme patterns. You can have a specific rhyme pattern for each section type of the song. So, the verses can have one rhyme pattern and the chorus something else. The rhyme patterns are written with uppercase letters. One letter represents a rhyme, and another letter represents another rhyme. You can have, for example, AB AB, where the 1st and the third rhyme with each other, and the 2nd and the 4th rhyme with each other. We are talking about the end-of-line rhyme. I'm not doing anything to support internal rhymes right now.

I want to specify these things to simplify the user interface. When you have a line, I want the button that knows what word you want to rhyme with. This makes the user interface more convenient. Not. That is what I want. Now I arrived at work.

It is 6:15 PM, and I'm on my way home. I worked very well today. I was more concentrated than yesterday. I could test my lyrics editor on a colleague's iPhone during lunch. I figured out there is a feature for auto-capitalization of words on iPhone. When that is turned on, you get a shift key entered when you press the return. This setting can be turned off. That solves a lot of problems, but only half of this issue. Returns would then produce new lines instead of new sections. But then, when I pressed shift return, I wouldn't get a new section. I have to figure out what that is. Perhaps I can get help from a developer I know who works with an iPhone.

In the evening, I continued with the rhymes. I got the fetch from the rhymebrain.com database by Steve Hanov. I am trying it for now. I also want to get synonyms in the editor at some point. In that case, I might switch to the datamuse API.

I could fetch words from the rhyme brain and present the words in a selection window. It got late before I got to bed. It was so much fun to make it work.

Friday 25 April

Today, both DW and I had a day off. The weather was excellent for working in the garden. DW weeded her part of the garden, and I moved manure from the sheep's winter place. I could use a good part of the manure, but there is more.

When the manure was distributed over the soil, I used the tiller machine to mix it and break it into smaller pieces. When that was done, I dug paths forming beds. I got a path through the garden; the south side is completely finished. The north side next to the house was tilled, but the paths still had to be dug out.

I was so tired in the evening that I did not blog or program the lyrics editor or anything.

Saturday 26 November

In the morning, DW cut my hair! This was long overdue. I am not fond of the "actually, I need a haircut" look.

With a new, fresh hair look and a lightly itchy t-shirt due to the snippets of haircuts, I started to dig out the paths in the north part of my vegetable garden. Then, I started the next ginormous task of moving in wood chips. I moved barrel after barrel. Before putting the chips on the ground, I placed cardboard. That will make the weed die out. At least, that is the theory; I am not sure if it works 100%.

Sunday 27 April

This morning I took photos of the garden as it looks now. It is almost unreal how much this changed since the end of the last growing season. We have permanent fencing, and the southeast field is resawn. We got sturdier, higher fencing to the garden so the sheep would not eat from the berry bushes. We got wood chips! Last year, we could not have wood chips delivered to us. We have a branch fence that shields the garden from wind.

	The raised bed needs to be weeded.

I sowed potatoes in the first two rows of the garden. Then I sowed in corn in one of the shorter beds. I made the corn bed dense, like 20 by 20 centimeters between the seeds. This formed the grid with three rows. Corn is coming up like grass. It is really challenging to weed corn when it's coming up initially. So because of that, I first put sticks in the bed. Then I sowed next to the sticks.

Then, it was time to bring DW to the train station. She had a day out with her girlfriends. They were going to the beach. Jens, why aren't you doing anything with your friends? I do not have friends like that, suggesting we go to the beach for a walk and eat lunch in a restaurant. Perhaps I'm not such a social person, after all. Although there will be enough things for me to do today. If there is one social thing I would like to do, it would be to see if the software developer I know could help me figure out the return key issue on the iPhone for the lyrics editor; that would be a bit social.

I went to a hardware store on the way back from the train station. I bought PU foam. I will use this to reduce the smells coming from below our house. Mice are living there, and they are smelly. The last time the electrician came, we worked on making an opening for electric cables. That opened up for smelly air to escape. We can do without that smell.

Today, I put summer tires on the car. In the evening, DW and I filled out the tax form for last year. The tax authorities in the Netherlands have the slogan," We cannot make the tax funnier, but we can make it simpler," to which I always reply, "Please do that then." This year, the application crashed a couple of times. That was not nice. That is new to us.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2409 words this week. That is much better than last week. The top achievement this week must be the new garden beds. I almost have to pinch my skin to understand they are real. But then I feel the pain in my back, and then I know they are real.

See you next week!