So, the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven facts:

1. I am a Dutch national, currently doing my MSc Advanced Computer Science in Britain, and taking intermediate-level French lessons on the side. The accent of (some of) my classmates drives me insane.
2. I got into Mozilla (and eventually its development) by writing scripts in VBScript for a fansite of an MMORPG (to calculate experience gained from using certain skills), and having the website owner tell me that the result “didn’t work in Mozilla”. Very badly written JavaScript versions were published later, and I vividly remember cursing the various differences I ran into when converting my code. Everything seemed much harder in JS. I’m afraid the damning evidence of all this is now lost, as the website was taken down some time ago.
3. I once taught first-year students in highschool (when I was a fourth-year, out of 6 years) how to make websites with Frontpage. I am hopeful none ever got published somewhere remotely important. I repented before the end of highschool.
4. I had the dubious honour of working for McDonalds once, for 6 months on a temporary contract. I declined staying afterward.
5. The pronunciation of my first name (and the difficulties people have with it) is a subject of hilarity among some of my international friends that I have by now resigned to. For those who don’t know how to deal with it still, I wrote about it some time ago. For something that even people who read that post might not know, it is short for “Gijsbert” which is equivalent to the name “Gilbert” in German, English, and French. Except nobody there actually calls their kids Gilbert.
6. I have 5th cousins who live in Alberta, Canada, who randomly found me through Facebook.
7. I was robbed in my own home (student flat) at knifepoint about 2.5 years ago. Fortunately, nobody got hurt. I still have the IRC log from that day and at the time its timestamps helped me, bizarrely enough, to identify precisely how long the robbery took to the police.

Seven people who shall also have to go through this harrowing experience:

1. Nadya Peek, because she always has something to say but never blogs.
2. Aaron Leventhal, who tends to have interesting stories about his history, and certainly has more of that than me.
3. Ben Millard, who doesn’t seem to have been tagged yet.
4. Okke Formsma, who is in the states at the moment and would presumably love to share childhood memories while far away.
5. “Schrati”, because she keeps blogging in different languages and I really wonder in which she would write this.
6. Daniel Glazman, because so much of his life is public knowledge by now that I wonder what we do not yet know.
7. Shawn Wilsher, because if I remember correctly he got into the Mozilla Project after me, is now definitely in much deeper than me, and still did not respond to the previous person who tagged him.

And finally, if you were wondering, the title of this post means “Seven freaky things”, not “Seven without linge cases” as Google would like you to believe.

We would separate bottles from all other rubbish, so we could recycle the empty bottles separately. So, we needed some way to label rubbish containers which were for bottles, and containers which were for other rubbish. While worrying about this, I was told that the company providing the containers had already “taken care” of labelling the containers so that some would be used for bottles and some for other rubbish. Curious as to what they had done, I went to look.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures, but basically what they had done was taking 2 A4 papers for each container, printed “PET” on them as big as possible, and stuck them on either side of the container with one piece of doublesided tape.

There are several things wrong with this. First, and most importantly, the target audience (young people from all over Europe and in some cases the rest of the world) will largely have no idea what “PET” even means. In fact, I would guess that some part of the people reading this blog don’t. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is a fairly common abbreviation used to indicate plastic (even if it’s not strictly speaking PET). 9,000 of the 25,000 people were Polish young people. Some of them don’t speak English very well. Even those who did would most likely have been baffled by the signs.

The other mistakes are smaller: the papers had been attached in such a way that some would be upside down on the other side if the container was opened, and in other cases they were only attached on one side, meaning people approaching from the other would have no idea they couldn’t put their rubbish there.

Finally, using one bit of double-sided tape to attach a bit of A4 paper when there are 25,000 young people coming is naive at best. The papers that we did not take off the containers ourselves had, by the end of the meeting, been taken by the young people, or fallen off.

Instead, our team improvised a different solution. We stuck signs with a big image of a bottle, and the phrase “Bottles only” in several languages on the containers, using large quantities of duct tape. We taped shut the bigger openings of the containers which had two, so only the small opening remained, through which people would have more trouble putting their normal rubbish. And finally, we taped actual empty bottles to the top and sides of the containers.

I guess the lesson I learned from all this is that it is surprisingly easy to make stupid mistakes when you don’t realize who will be using your “product”. For the Belgian rubbish collection company, “PET” was probably clear enough in the case of big expositions with reasonably well-educated Belgian people manning stands from where the rubbish would come… For large crowds of young people from diverse backgrounds, clearly it was not.

In other news, I will be away until January 2nd, I’m off to Taizé’s European Meeting in Geneva.

Catching up on bugmail and other boring things will happen this week. If there’s anything urgent you need me to look at, poke me using Mail/Google Talk/Skype.

Zondag 1 Juli a.s. neem ik om even voor 9 de Thalys naar Parijs, en vandaar om 14.38 de TGV naar Macon. Vandaar ga ik met een bus verder naar Taizé. Daar blijf ik hopelijk ongeveer zeven weken. Ik verwacht om 6 over 7 ’s avonds op zondag 19 Augustus weer in Amsterdam terug te komen, maar weet niet of dat daadwerkelijk gebeurt. Dat hangt af van wat er in Taizé gebeurt. Wees gerust, ik ben niet van plan daar de rest van mijn leven te blijven, maar het zou kunnen dat ik een (paar) weken korter of langer blijf, al naar gelang ik en/of de broeders dat nodig vinden.

Ik hoop veel van jullie daar te zien – de groep van de 3 ranken komt de 15e (Juli) aan, mijn ouders en een aantal oude vrienden uit Polen die ik al lang niet meer gezien heb komen een week later. Verder zal ik ongetwijfeld veel nieuwe mensen ontmoeten, en wie weet nog wat oude bekenden onverwachts terugzien.

Opschrijven wat me beweegt daar zo lang te blijven is moeilijk, vind ik. Daarnaar eerder gevraagd schreef ik een paar maanden terug:

Ik wil graag een keer langer blijven om rust te vinden, denk ik. Om een langere periode niet iedere dag met studie of werk geconfronteerd te worden, en meer tijd te hebben om na te denken over belangrijke(re?) dingen, zoals wat ik nu eigenlijk wil (of kan) met mijn/het geloof, en wat ik (daarmee) voor anderen kan betekenen. Om tijd door te brengen met andere jongeren die dat ook belangrijk vinden, en van hen hun mening over zulke onderwerpen te horen.

Wat betreft praktische zaken: hoewel er een kleine internetkiosk is op het terrein ben ik niet van plan daar naar binnen te gaan. Dit betekent dat ik ongeveer 7 weken mijn e-mail niet zal lezen. Ik neem geen mobiel mee. De gemeenschap heeft openbare telefoonnummers, maar bel deze alsjeblieft NIET tenzij het ontzettend dringend is. Als je gewoon wilt weten hoe het met me is, stuur dan een ouderwets postkaartje, ik zal proberen terug te schrijven

Als je me nu gedurende die periode dat ik weg ben mailt, en je hebt nog niks teruggehoord nadat ik al een maand of zo terug ben, laat het me dan alsjeblieft even weten – het kan zijn dat ik je mail gemist heb of dat deze in de spam terecht is gekomen. Die kijk ik normaal gesproken door, maar nu ik er zo lang niet ben zullen er dingen ongezien in de prullenbak verdwijnen. Ditzelfde geldt voor commentaar op dit weblog.

Ik wens jullie allemaal een fijne vakantie.

Sab – bat – i – cal
noun
any extended period of leave from one’s customary work, esp. for rest, to acquire new skills or training, etc.

Just before 9 am on the morning of Sunday July 1st, I’m taking the Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris. At 14.38, I will take the TGV to Macon, and from there I will take a bus to Taizé (Wikipedia Article). I will stay there for seven weeks. I hope to be back in Amsterdam at 7pm or so on Sunday August 19th, but I’m not completely sure this will happen. I may ask or be asked to stay for a longer or shorter period of time, which may delay or hasten my return.

I will meet up with some good friends of mine, notably a group from my church (site in Dutch), my parents, some Polish friends of mine who I know will be there – but probably also a whole bunch of others who I’ve met there the other times I’ve gone.

Putting the purpose of my “sabbatical” in writing is hard for me, but I suppose it involves learning more about (my) faith, the Bible, life in general. It also (especially, perhaps) means sharing and living with other young people who struggle with the same or similar issues.

On the practical side, there are several consequences. While there is a small internet kiosk on the community grounds, I have no intention whatsoever of using it. I will not check my email for 7 weeks. I’m not taking a mobile phone. If you very, very, very urgently need to contact me, the community has a landline phone which you could call. If you just want to know how I am doing, send me an old-fashioned postcard (there’s an address on that page) and I’ll try to write back.

If you happen to e-mail me during these 7 weeks, and even a month after I come back you haven’t heard back from me, chances are your e-mail ended in GMail’s spam filter – please bug me about it and we’ll see what happened. The same issue applies to comments to this weblog – AKismet is wonderful, but might just hurt your comments.

I hope everyone has a great holiday, and see you all on the other side.

At my university, I participated in an honours course about practical applications of Ethics. We covered a multitude of subjects, including (in random order) the use of marking DNA in criminal investigations (ie, putting out notices saying “based on the DNA found on this homicide victim, we think the perpetrator was black and had brown eyes), Food Ethics (what rights do animals have, should we do something about the bio-industry, and if so, what) and euthanasia: what is the right to die, do we even have it, and what are its limits.

We had guest lecturers for all these subjects. For euthanasia, our guest lecturer was Judge Eugene Sutorius, who used to be a lawyer defending doctors in assisted suicide cases back in the 20th century, and helped push the courts and the Dutch government to legislation. Currently, doctor-assisted suicide is legal in the Netherlands, if and only if:

• The patient repeatedly and explicitly expresses the desire to die.
• The patient’s decision is made well-informed, free and enduring.
• The patient is suffering from a severe physical or mental pain with no prospect of relief.
• All other options for care have been exhausted or refused by the patient.
• Euthanasia is carried out by a qualified physician, who must verify all the above.
• The physician consults one other physician, who must verify all the above.
• The physician informs the local coroner that euthanasia has occurred.

In class and small groups we discussed whether euthanasia should also be possible for people suffering from Altzheimer’s, for example – there are currently euthanasia declarations available, which some people sign, saying they want to be euthanized if they are so demented they don’t recognize their close relatives anymore. Whether or not this is reasonable is debatable, given that it’s questionable if people in such a state are even the same person they were before, and hence whether they had any right to condemn this ‘new person’ that they have become to death.

This question is certainly interesting, but not the reason I’m writing this. Sutorius explained that on one occurrence he and some others had been asked to come to the US where one state (looking at the BBC article, it was apparently Oregon) was approving legislation very similar (and in fact, partly based on) the legislation we have in the Netherlands. The writers of the bill wanted them to (honourarily or whatever) co-sign the legislation. Sutorius then explained he refused: due to the current American medical insurance system, a lot of people do not have medical insurance. He gave the following example: what if you’re a 70-year old male, you’re suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. You have 5 children and no medical insurance. Now, given the nature of MS, there is a reasonable case for severe physical as well as mental suffering, and while there is plenty of medication available, there is definitely no complete cure possible at this time. Given enough medication you can have a reasonable life for an extended period of time, but that’s about it. You “buy time”, as it were.

The problem, Sutorius describes, occurs when such a patient starts doing some maths. In a year or two, he will have used up his savings. In another five or so years, he will have used up his children’s savings. And then he will die. And suddenly, cheap euthanasia starts looking like a nice alternative. He’s had his share of life, and he’d be happier if he didn’t ‘kill’ (oh, irony) his children financially. So then, euthanasia becomes an equivalent alternative to available treatment, as opposed to a final call. This is wrong. People should not die because they can’t afford their medication.

I agree with Sutorius – and this is why I am wary of “Dr. Death”. Sure, good euthanasia legislation is necessary, and doctors shouldn’t be prosecuted if they did the right thing given their patient’s medical condition and wishes. But this should only occur given appropriate medical insurance for everyone, so euthanasia does NOT become an alternative to treatment, instead of a final call after all treatment has failed or proved useless.

In other news, I went to see Anna Ternheim in Lantaren-Venster yesterday. This was fun, though the dual concert approach wasn’t all that successful in my eyes – Vinicio Capossela simply makes a very different kind of music, so to me this didn’t better the experience much. I’m not sure if, in hindsight, I should have preferred missing his bit of the concert. Regardless, I liked the somewhat more intimate approach (about 200-300 people attended) than what you generally see on tv (this was the first ‘pop’ concert I ever attended – I’ve been to classical concerts before). I had a good time, though I unfortunately didn’t manage to get an autograph on the cd I bought, which is sort of a shame. Oh well.

Edit: You can listen to some of her music on MySpace. I wouldn’t normally link there, but this is the only place I can find where you can listen to “No Subtle Men”, which she sang last night and is absolutely great, if you ask me.

• Trying to find time to co-write a paper and to get it accepted for a student conference on AI in Utrecht.
• Trying to find time to modify a paper on Ethics (specifically, Moral Relativism) that I wrote some time ago and submit that to ’something’ Dutch / UvA.
• Doing regular coursework, which involves
  • reading about 200-300 pages every week
  • writing summaries and questions for speakers on the subjects for all of them
  • working on a project with students from Stanford University and a Fortune 500 company in the tech industry. Can’t say much more than that, though for once it doesn’t involve engineering.
  • writing language processing tools in Python.
  • trying to catch up with lost classes from last block about Statistics and Stochastics.
  • writing knowledge processing tools and representations using Prolog and OWL.
• Working on my Mozilla project. I meant to write about this earlier, but the Mozilla Foundation has sponsored me to work on making the ChatZilla IRC client accessible (as is clear from that link, it also needs a better website, we’re working on that on the sidelines). In fact, I have a conference call concerning that starting in 10 minutes, so I’d better finish this up.
• Working on other Mozilla-related issues
• Trying to get some work done on some other Firefox extensions of mine.
• Figuring out what university I’d like to attend for my MSc.
• Visiting junks drug and alcohol addicts. We need to stop calling people garbage – things are garbage (see also the post title) but people never should be. Also, Amsterdam is strange in the sense that I just went to a church service done by the Drug section of the pastoral care (not sure if that’s the right way of putting it in English) and atop of us (ie, in the room above us) some snobby people were having champagne, for the opening of some exhibition or whatever. Stark contrast…

That will do for now. Off to that conference call!

• The Hilton is not for me. I’m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? Breakfast is not included in the night’s stay, so how does paying for that work? Is it a buffet or do I just get stuff from the waiters? It’s all solvable, and fortunately everyone there is paid to help even though I’m ignorant, but it’s annoying at times.
• “Public transport” is not part of the standard Southern California vocabulary. Getting around without a car and without spending a ridiculous amount of money on cabs is hard.
• “How are you, sir?” is the standard substitute for “How may I help you?”. This is confusing.
• Obesity is a real problem. After having breakfast, the ‘why’ for that is readily apparent as the continental breakfast I took was considered “a base” by the waiter, who told me at least 2 or 3 times I could get more stuff if I wanted to. I did not finish this “base” alone, though that admittedly might have something to do with my jet-lagginess and generally confused stomach.
• Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands should start being real Chinese restaurants, instead of serving all this stuff we call “Chinese” which is actually Indonesian/Malay (Babi Pangang, Nasi Goreng, Bami, etc.)
• Some stereotypes are not stereotypes, they’re simply true.

That will do for now. I’m off to see the Queen Mary.

One more thing – it amazes me, as it has for some time now, that as one travels to different places across the globe, every place has its own “colour scheme”. The easiest examples close to my home are the fact that brick houses make up most of the (nothern/middle) Netherlands, and once you cross the border to Belgium and France, the omnipresent red brickwork is replaced with grey/white plasterwork, the colours and fonts used on roadsigns change, the wildlife/trees are different… For some reason this and the different plants/nature/cars around mean the atmosphere changes. Perhaps this is what other people think “feeling on holiday” is all about, I’m not sure. I just find myself thinking, at times “gosh, this place is ugly” and then remembering I should really be thinking “gosh, this place is different“.