Productive holiday week Sunday, 16-Aug-26 20:55:31 CEST

Sunday, 23-Aug-26 20:57:39 CEST

Spooky issue with my phone

This week my blogging was hindered by a spooky issue with my phone.

Monday 17 August

It started raining at 3 AM last night, and it still rained this morning. We both worked from home today.

I tried my new curtains for the first time, but it was not a success. The curtain I had behind my screens was too thin and white. It became too bright a background on one hand, but I could not look outside. I could switch this curtain for a thicker curtain mounted so that I could look outside as well.

Merida, our cat, was sleeping on the platform above the laptop. In her sleep, she had an epileptic seizure. I could move her to the floor, where I let her shake and chew. Usually after a while she pees, and this time she did too. It was not an especially long seizure, about three minutes. Then she wakes up, starts cleaning herself, and we clean up the pee on the floor. Sadly, she gets these seizures. For some time I had hoped that the frequency was getting slower and slower, but I am not sure about that anymore.

During lunch we picked two carrots. We found a couple that had twisted around each other forming a carrot heart. True love carrots. They could be separated, so it was two separate carrots.

Tuesday 18 August

Before going to work, I discovered that overnight the grass had sprouted where I have been watering with my homemade irrigation system. Yesterday I could not see any grass. It really happened overnight.

It is real grass! Last week, I hoped it would work, and this week it confirmed surprisingly quickly! Last year, we tilled the southeast field on 15 March 2025, and it was not until the end of July that the sheep could graze it. This time, we got it working much more quickly, and the homemade irrigation system was just perfect.

It is raining again this morning, so I drove to work. On the way, I tried to transcribe on my phone, but it didn't work. The dictation function acted up. I was frustrated about this. What’s going on? It appears as if my phone is completely confused.

The business development manager was happy with the features I finished before my holiday! He got a happy look on his face when he told me this feature is really useful and versatile.

Wednesday 19 August

We woke up really early this morning because DW had to go to the office really early. She planned to bike to the bus stop about 7 kilometers away, but it was raining heavily. I drove her to the bus stop. It is annoying that I had to bring her, but it is great in the rain. We cannot get too much rain just yet.

I worked from home. After work, I had a look at the watch face. I made the text larger; I found that it was too small when testing the watch face at the office yesterday.

Thursday 20 August

Before breakfast, I got a message from Google Play that my developer account was ready. I'll check if I have time to look into my first upload tonight.

I tried to blog on my way to work, but the transcribe acted up again. I arrived at the office frustrated about that. This week, my phone has spooked me with spontaneous keyboard presses and on-screen keyboards that emerge and disappear. I got a foldable Bluetooth keyboard that lives in a little bag I bring with me. I had forgotten to turn it off before I put it in my bag. The keyboard kept connecting and disconnecting from my phone, especially while driving. While driving, I often dictate, and this did not work when the on-screen keyboard acted up.

It has been frustrating with the spooky keyboard. Normally I’m babbling into my phone continuously, but this feed of words was interrupted. The ghostwriting came from the foldable keyboard accidentally pressing a key. I kept the bag in the atelier, so at that point it was either not connected or lying still. It was especially in the car that things were ghostwriting and acting up. I’m glad I found it. I uttered an enormous sigh of relief, so much so that two of my colleagues asked me if I was, uh, feeling well.

The sun is shining, it’s 20°C, and it's marvelous weather. It has been raining quite heavily today, but my understanding of the forecast was that I would not be able to bike at home this afternoon, but the way it looks now, I could have been biking.

I am immensely happy with the growth of the grass in the area watered by my homemade irrigation system.

I picked cucumbers when I came home from work.

The moon was visible this early evening. I concluded that this is what it looks like when it is at 54 percent full. I took this image with my phone. I could have used my DSLR, but it was not near at hand. I am getting lazy about using the DSLR. It has better optical zoom, though, and this photo is not bad either.

Friday 20 August

DW had a day off, and I worked from home. It rained from time to time.

After work I continued on the watch face project. I made the progress bars larger. Each progress indicator now has a progress bar covering the entire area behind the metric. The bars are edge to edge. I discovered that I can make a progress bar with a gradient color, and that worked well for the season progress.

DW picked apples. She picked the Alkmene apples. They started falling from the tree, and the wasps showed interest in them, so it was better to pick them. We planted these apples in 2020. The farmer we got them from died earlier this year, and his wife has developed dementia. Back then, they were busy at their farm, both healthy and active. It is so surprising how fast these things can happen. The farmer's kids have no interest in continuing the business, so the gates stay closed while the apples fall from the trees, lie on the ground, and rot.

Then I started uploading the watch face to Google Play. It is a really tedious process. In the evening, I had the choice between staying up late and going to bed on time. I needed to get a good night's sleep because we have an appointment at the optician tomorrow. The measurement at the optician is working better after a good night's rest.

It rained heavily during the night. I wondered if there was hail as well but decided not to find out and to continue sleeping.

Saturday 21 August

I got 80 points for my sleep last night, so that was good. It was a beautiful morning when the freshly sprouted grass in the southeast field looked like the grass in a Teletubbies episode.

We arrived at our appointment at the optician well on time. For me, it feels like ages since I last had my eyeglasses made. This time, both DW and I had appointments back-to-back.

The bench in the waiting room was fashionable, but I could not sit on it. After some time, I could switch to another chair, but somehow it wasn't made for sitting either. It appears things here are rather made to look nice rather than function properly. If that philosophy applies only to the furniture and not to the eyeglasses themselves, then it does not matter.

Last time I went here, I had a strange experience regarding selecting an eyeglass frame. The salesperson tried to sell frames that I did not like at all. I should have ended the situation early, but I continued with that person. I'm disappointed with how I handled the situation.

The frames in this shop are all locked in, and you had to have a key to unlock and try them. At one point, my old eyeglasses were locked in a cupboard. It was a surreal, tragicomic situation. I selected frames I really wanted, but it was not a situation I liked. If I sense this is going to happen again, I will react differently. I have not held a grudge against the shop because I would not come back to it.

DW's eyes were tested first, then I switched to an uncomfortable chair at a table. I had a little stand for my phone and my Bluetooth keyboard that spooked me.

When DW finished her test, it was my turn. The test is done in two passes. There is an eye-testing robot displaying a road with a balloon on the horizon. The machine can determine the exact shape of the eyes. At one point during the investigation, it sends a slight puff of air into the eyes, which is not comfortable.

It is funny, though, because the test result is not automatically transferred to the shop system used in the rest of the shop. The optician has to manually enter the numbers from the eye-robot into a new system. That looks like an omission for a software developer like me.

Then comes the next phase, where the optician manually tests the eye robot's findings. In my case, the robot's result was the same as the optician's in the manual test. Not only that, he had two surprising things to say about the results. The first was that the result matched my current glasses exactly. The second was something I was not aware of. He said I had above-average eyesight. My left eye was 110%, my right eye was 140%, and together they were 150%. I had absolutely no idea about this.

Yet still I don't understand it. It does not feel like my eyeglasses are optimal. How strange is that? We decided not to do any eyeglasses for me. DW had changes in her eyes, so she got new eyeglasses. I assisted her in selecting new frames. We went through the procedure of unlocking frames, trying them on, and putting them back. It was a tedious process. A couple of hours later, we left the shop. I was happy we did not buy new glasses for both of us because then we would have been in the shop the rest of the day. I wonder why it is taking so much time.

When we came home, we started preparing for a visit from one of DW's cousins. We met her and her brothers and sisters during the funeral of DW's father. We had some tidying up to do before she arrived. When she arrived, we had a walk around the area. The weather was fantastic. Then DW cooked dinner for us while we continued socializing. It was interesting to follow the stories from the grandparents' lives in a castle-like building in the heart of Amsterdam. On the cousins' side, there were stories of World War II when the cousin's mother from the Dutch East Indies had survived harsh conditions in Japanese prisoner of war camps. What stood out to me was that the women were strong and admirable, yet they did not receive much credit for holding their families together. It felt like I had the urge to start drawing a family tree to follow along with all the stories.

In the evening, we were tired.

Sunday 22 August

Today we had the explicit goal of being lazy. So lazy as possible. DW spun yarn and sowed the seeds of the new ten-kilogram package we ordered on 24 July.

I went along the road and cut down branches that were too close to it. We got shrubs with needles growing along the road. The rosehip is especially annoying. It has needles with hooks. I dare to say I hate the rosehip bush. I drove past it a couple of times with the lawnmower and got caught. It is not letting loose just like that.

We also got sea buckthorn, and I can confirm that those thorns are lethal. The Wikipedia article has 88 references to the word thorn, but there is not much said about thorns themselves. They can be as long as two or three inches. When you get it through your skin, the outer tip is often broken off. You easily get the thorn out and think that's all there is to it, but then the process of removing the broken-off part begins. DW is patient and waits for the body to dispose of the alien buckthorn tip all by itself, but I am more of the kind who gets the thing out with a needle or a knife. It hurts; I can tell you that.

I continued working on the watch face. I set up much of the product on Google Play, but now, to continue, I need to run a 14-day test with 20 people. I don't know 20 people with a smartwatch. I don't know anyone who would like to test my watch face. It sounds like a steep, demotivating hurdle to get past. Perhaps this effort ends here? I will try to get past this hurdle next week.

Today Merida was playing with Hunter. Well, kind of. Hunter wanted to play with Merida, but she was not really pleased with that. They circled each other. Merida called it off and went home.

 

This week passed by quickly. The weather has been less warm, and that has been great, and it has been raining more. I am not going around telling myself that the weather is just a natural fluctuation, because it is not. It is a system: we know how much energy the Earth receives and how much leaves it, and there is an imbalance.

New reports suggest that the current El Niño could become the strongest ever. This was discussed on the YouTube channel Just have a think. If the El Niño prediction is correct, we are about to witness something that modern climate science has never observed. During a normal year, persistent trade winds blow from east to west across the tropical Pacific, from Peru to Australia. The ocean is warm in the west and cold in the east. When those tradewinds are weakened or reversed, warm water flows from west to east to South America. Once the balance is distorted, a feedback loop makes the process larger and stronger: the Bjerknes feedback loop. A strong El Niño can wreak havoc across the planet. The previous record El Niño events occurred on a substantially colder planet.

I end the week thinking about the health of the planet. Welcome back next week!