JENS MALMGREN I create.

Emptying the sea container

This week I went twice to the recycling center with the small trailer. It looks much better in the sea container.

Monday 11 August

We are already at 35% of this month. Another heatwave is rolling in over the Netherlands. It was lovely weather today, but tomorrow it is going to be a lot warmer. In the morning, I harvested a couple of zucchinis. The number of zucchinis is not that great anymore.

Both DW and I worked from home today. She had meetings, and I worked on my employer's programming as usual. It was a productive day!

After work, I harvested potatoes. Perhaps I got a little carried away. I just barely got this stored in the fridge.

DW pickled the next pot of cucumber in the evening.

Tuesday 12 August

Hey, good morning! The time is 9:00 AM, and I'm darn late. I'm biking to work, and so far I haven't heard any ticking sound.

It was fun to write last week's blog!

Something less enjoyable about last week was that the phoneme conversion project crashed into a stone wall. In short, it has to do with overlapping multiple sound patterns. We can have a multi-sound pattern that is not yielding anything, but overlapping with it, it's another multi-sound pattern that does indeed yield something. Currently, that's not supported. From the very beginning, combining single sound and multi-sound patterns has been like mixing oil with water; it has failed. Currently, the program detects multiple sound patterns, and if I find one, I remove the single sounds it replaces. It is a destructive process with no fallback.

I was thinking: how about not removing the sounds the multi-sound pattern covers? What happens then? Well, at least if the multisound pattern did not yield anything, I can go on and search for other sounds. In other words, the program does not jump forward to the next step, but continues where you left off. On the other hand, if the multisound pattern yields a result, then we have to make sure to jump forward the number of sounds necessary. This method merges multiple sound patterns with single sound patterns, which makes a beautiful emulsion between oil and water.

Now that I've explained the idea to myself and you, I need to develop a program based on it.

I'm almost at work now. Arrived at 9:40 AM.

I'm on my way home. Before going home, I changed into shorts. When dressed for the warm weather, it doesn't feel that bad. I had a little break, drinking from my carbonated chilled water in a park. I can see that the battery of my phone is running out fast.

I decided to take a road through the forest. It is going to be a bumpy ride. It is much cooler in the forest. At a T junction, I took the left. I got back on the road with asphalt. This means I have more roads to investigate in that forest. I will do that another time.

I had a break at the cabbage field. Perhaps you remember this spring, 1 May, I stood here at the side of the field. I was thinking back then, it would be nice to take a photo when the stuff is full-grown.

I passed a man sitting on a traffic sign, enjoying the sun with a large beer in his hand. It looked like a German beer, the type that you can flip open the cap. The bottle was big, almost like a champagne bottle.

Wednesday 13 August

I worked from home in the morning.

In the afternoon, I delivered potatoes to the food cooperative, and then I continued to the grocery store.

I was standing at the grocery store and wondered how much carbon is emitted to move one kilogram of apples from Chile to the Netherlands. Here is what Google told me: Air freight of 1 kg from Chile to the Netherlands produces approximately 5.17 kg of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). This is calculated by dividing the total estimated emissions for the route by the total cargo capacity. Fluent Cargo calculates this estimate based on fuel burn and the typical aircraft used for this route. I decided to buy apples from Nijmegen. To transport 1 kg by truck from Nijmegen to Almere, approximately 0.021 kg of CO2 is emitted, assuming a standard road freight calculation. That is 246 times less. I got more apples. They were cheaper, but they were not "Bio". I did not care that the Nijmegen apples were cheaper, nor that they were packed in a plastic bag. I was just 246 times happier.

I moved the sheep to a new field. The sheep will now graze on our southeast field. They get there via the corridor along the north and west sides of the property inside the dyke. I cut the grass in the old field between the neighbors on the north and east sides of the property. The rubber piece holding the hatch was broken when I started mowing. I replaced it with a metal rod, but it broke as well. From this, I learned that I must cut near fences from the left side of the tractor, with nothing sticking out.

Then we started the preparations for the party. DD and her friend came in the evening. DW prepared food: potato salad, tomato basilicum mozzarella salad, sweet corn, runner beans. For dessert, we had ice cream with chocolate sauce and cherries from last weekend.

We talked about the plans for September. Initially, the idea was that the four of us would go to our cottage in Sweden and work on the roof of the woodshed. Those plans were now scrapped. The roof project will come another time. In September, DW and I will go to the cottage on our own to celebrate a regular holiday.

Today, Merida started accepting the medication wrapped in the EasyPill clay. This is much better than putting her upside down and dropping it into her throat.

Thursday 14 August

Good morning, it is Thursday, 14 July, and I'm driving to work. It was a warm day, about 31 degrees Celsius. The airco was on, but it was set to a bearable level. It was a regular day at the office. In the afternoon, we rearranged things. Moved some cupboards. I had brought with me a place with wheels.

In the evening, I worked on the phoneme conversion project. I got the new non-destructive handling of multi-sound patterns to work. When the word "lumex" came out correctly parsed, I was happy, and we went to bed.

Friday 15 August

Good morning, I have a day off. I made a smoothie for breakfast, no surprise there. It was a marvellous morning. The sun shone, and it was not so windy. I picked a couple of cucumbers in the garden, and DW picked raspberries for the smoothie. We talked about what to sell to the food cooperative next week. I suggested we include runner beans in our offering. That is what we will do! DW worked from home in he home office. She had fewer meetings today and had plenty of time to catch up on loose ends projects.

I am more often struck by how computers are doing terrible things, while we humans are in awe of the new impressive things that computers are doing. It is like the awe is crashing into the yuck feelings. I opened Word on my laptop, and it displayed recently edited files. There was a file from 6 minutes ago, yesterday, last Tuesday, 2023, 2022, and 2020. I have no idea what your definition of recent is, but I guess that a random file from five years ago does not fit into your definition. At the same time, Word can describe the content of an image. I never needed that feature because if I enter an image, I can most often describe what is in the image myself.

Similar yuck feelings about Word for Android. I have to tap and scroll on seven or eight different places before I can start dictating text into a document. It is ridiculous.

Today it was a little on the warm side. It was 27 degrees Celsius.

I filled up the small trailer with things from the sea container in the morning. After lunch, I took the trailer to the waste recycling station. Until now, we have been going to the upcycling center, but it closed earlier this month. The place will be torn down and replaced with another recycling center, and it will be given a proper dull Dutch name. The work conditions were not top-notch at the upcycling center, so the building had to be recycled. I suppose the people working there were laid off. It will take two years to replace the upcycling center. I went to another recycling station with the trailer.

DW made French fries and grilled corn for dinner. I think I burned my mouth on the corn. The funny thing is that I did not notice it while eating.

In the evening, I worked on the phoneme conversion project. I had hoped it would feel all glorious and that the program would run without hiccups. That was not the case; almost every word had an issue. At first, I had made the multi-sound patterns adhere to the level number. I have given every sound a level indicator. The program first runs through the level-one sounds, then level two, and so on until level four. The first level is the most concise sound. The expression describing the sound is short. Often these are simple consonants. For each successive level, the complexity and ambiguity of the expression increase. The third level is most often vocals. The fourth level is the silent characters. I changed the program so that the multi-sound patterns are always included in the level one run. This helped a little, but I still had issues.

Saturday 16 August

This morning, I got the phoneme project to run from 72k to 76k. That was feeling great! At 74039 I found my surname! Malmgren M AE1 L M G R EH0 N. I noticed that I felt I burned my mouth. I was surprised.

DW cut my hair! I look fresh again.

I unloaded another shipment of goods from the sea container. It was mainly snippets of wood. It was 20 degrees Selcius today. A perfect temperature for work.

I also discarded the first electricity generator. We bought it before the house was delivered. This property was a field of grass and weeds. On Friday, 19 June 2020, we got the generator. It was way too cheap and too weak, but we didn't want to buy a more expensive generator because we knew we had all the expenses ahead, so it was better to be economical.

Already on 16 July, the generator started to break down. We got it working again, but it was an easy machine. On 30 July, the engine backfired when DW started it. She got chest pain from this incident that lasted for a couple of weeks. On 3 September, the machine failed again, and this was also the week that thieves stole all our scaffold feet. It was the worst week of that year. I told DW about the chest pain incident, and she had forgotten about it.

On 20 September, the generator started after a very long fight. On 26 September, the generator died for good. The week after, we ordered a new generator, and on 5 November, the electricity was installed. Then we gave away the new generator to friends. So that was the complete generator story. Why do I have it in the sea container for five full years before discarding it?

Today, DW did garden maintenance. She knitted and did other wool activities. Lovely!

While clearing out the sea container, I found the Swedish flag. I bought it on 9 August 2020. It is standing on the table we bought at the same time.

In the evening, I continued on the phoneme conversion project, and at line 80847, broke the flattening of the Cartesian product result. Unfortunately, it broke, but it is fantastic that I am back above 80k! I reached 80k last time on Friday, 8 August. It already started to feel like it was three weeks ago. The good thing about the blog is that I can go back and see when things happened. Instead of fixing the algorithm, we went to bed.

Sunday 17 August

We had tea in bed. I fixed the flattening algorithm, but it still did not work. I had an M missing from Monsignor M AA0 N S IY1 N Y ER0 at line 80847. I discovered I had defined a multi-sound pattern for the abbreviation at line 81809: msgr M AA0 N S IY1 N Y ER0. This must have been last week. Carnegie Mellon University is not making it easy to match sounds to letters. The reason it missed the M was that I reintroduced an old error: "There is a multi-sound pattern, so I don't need to check the single pattern". No, a multi-sound pattern might not yield anything, so I still have to check the single sound pattern on that location.

I started the conversion and went for a shower. When I came back, it had stopped at line 87134! That must be the longest consecutive run. That was a good moment to stop programming and do other things.

More zucchinis could be harvested this morning! We had breakfast, and then we cleaned up and tidied up the house.

We had a walk with the sheep to show them a part of the field they had not yet discovered. I stood there and discovered a beautiful chicory flower. It must have been the most beautiful flower I discovered in our garden this summer!

In the afternoon, SIL and BIL came for a visit. BIL wanted to see the lawn mower tractor in real life.

With a little bit of the afternoon left, I decided to extract seathorn berries from their branches. DW put them in the freezer to make it easier to pick the berries, but she did it last year. Perhaps she did it already the previous year. Now that we have had such a good harvest of berries this year, I need to create space for the grapevine berries. I need to process the seathorn berries so that their bucket will be available for the grapevine. It was a tedious process. I am also not convinced that the seathorn berries were picked at the ideal moment. Well, now I sat down to process them regardless of whether they are good or not. I need them out of the way.

I went to my friends to bring them a package of potatoes, runner beans, zucchini, and corn. They really liked it!

Here ends this week's blog. This week, the emptying of the sea container progressed significantly. I feel confident that we will get rid of the container before winter. There is more work to be done, but it feels great. I am also happy about the progress of the phoneme project. I wrote 2542 words this week. 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.