Anton Pieck
February 4th, 2010
I’ve been a fan of Anton Pieck’s work for about two years now (and yes, he’s the guy who thought up the Efeling sprookjesbos), and in this time I’ve gathered some scanned prints of him. To make a long story short, here’s one of the best drawings I’ve seen:
Food Rules
January 31st, 2010
I just finished reading “Food Rules”, a book by Michael Pollan about how to eat healthily. He provides 64 simple rules that lead to a healthier diet, and through such a diet, to a healthier life. Most of these rules are common sense if you think about it, and taken all together they don’t really present a new perspective on food. They do, however, remind you of the common sense most of us leave behind as we shop for food. I suspect that that’s the main reason this book was published: it reminds you of something you already know, and reminds you to remind it when you go about shopping for food.
The basic idea behind this advice can be summarized like this:
What should I eat? – Food.
What kind of food should I eat? – Mostly plants.
How should I eat? – Not too much.
I’d like to share some rules with you, the ones that I find stick to the mind.
10-20mm
January 30th, 2010
I bought a second-hand 10-20mm Sigma lens the other weekend, and last Tuesday I got my first real opportunity to use it while visiting a friend who was dog-sitting a friend’s dog for a few weeks. We got outside to walk the dog, and I took some pictures of Leiden as we went along. It still amazes me how much red and yellow light ordinary lampposts give out. Humans apparently compensate for it, but on my EOS400D, the sensor picks it up mercilessly. There’s a lot of Photoshop going into making night photography around Leiden look good!
Looking at the pictures I took, I now realize it takes a lot to get to know a particular lens. I need to get to know this lens a lot. That’s cool, because it means taking lots of pictures with it 
. The first thing I noticed is that the fish-eye effect is much bigger than I anticipated. You can see this effect best around the edges of the first picture. It doesn’t show up as much in the second picture, but that is mostly because there are no vertical lines in it. The second is that Depth-Of-Field is weird in these picutres; I need to get used to the fact that around the edges, objects might be quite close!
The rest of this post has pictures of Goji, the dog my friend was dog-sitting. I took lots of pictures of it, but those of you that own a dog or any other pet know it is difficult to get action pictures where the object is actually sharp; animals keep moving! Nonetheless, I managed to get a few good pictures of this wonderfully happy dog!
Euler Problems
January 29th, 2010
A collegue showed me the Project Euler website, a site with interesting and challenging problems to solve using a programming language of your choice. The fun part in most of these problems is to find a smart way to solve it rather than brute-force your way to a solution.
Take this challenge: how many months in the 20th century began on a Sunday? Remember that the 20th century began on January 1st 1901, and ended on December 31st 2000.
There are a few ways of solving this. Given VB.Net you’d be tempted to iterate through all years and months of the 20th century and use the built-in methods to get the day-of-the-week for each month. Then simply keep track of how many Sundays you find. But that’s not very satisfactory smart-wise.
Let’s say you have a language that does not have this built-in support. All you have is the number of days in each month, a way to determine if a year is a leap-year, and a reference point: January 1st 1900 was a Monday.
Cronensteijn
January 24th, 2010
Hooglandse kerk
January 17th, 2010
Looking up to see the angels
Enter freely, and of your own free will
Restaurant no. 2
January 10th, 2010
I posted a picture of a restaurant near De Vliet not too long ago, and I came across this picture which may have been the source of the earlier one. I like this one much better than the overly-cropped first published picture. I can still see what I was trying to do (isolate the building on the right and show the darkness of the water), but the source material just doesn’t allow for it.
Vlietlanden
January 10th, 2010
Got me a part!
January 7th, 2010
I’ve auditioned at Imperium last Monday and Wednesday, for Eric Siebel’s play Sansevieria’s. I wasn’t a member of Imperium before, but since Marjolein told me it was a really friendly and young club and that there were semi-public auditions this week, I decided to take a look. Auditioning was very exciting, because I did not know any of the people there and I had no idea what to expect. So, trembling slightly with nerves and cold (nobody knew how to turn on the heater so it wasn’t until we were halfway through the evening that somebody else came round to do it for us). Everybody was very friendly and I was impressed by some of the things people showed on stage.
So I got a part in Sansevieria’s. Which means I am now also a member of Imperium! Rehearsals start next week, twice a week, and the premiere is somewhere in May. The cast consist of 11 people and the play is a comedy about burials.
Can’t wait! 
Bands I discovered in 2009
January 4th, 2010
- Assemblage 23 (thanks to Combichrist)
- Bat for Lashes (thanks to Remco)
- Combichrist (thanks to Rammstein)
- Dirty Projectors (thanks to top 10 album covers)
- Klaus Schultze
- La Roux (thanks to a Dutch article in the NRC)
- Ladyhawke (thanks to another article in the NRC)
- Little Boots (thanks to an article in the NRC)
- Lotterboys (thanks to Nico Dijkshoorn on Twitter)
- Oi Va Voi
- Paul Kalkbrenner
- Ulrich Schnauss
- Waltari (thanks to Kirsten)
My name is Marco Hokke. My blog is about the things that interest me and things I might forget if I would not blog them.