fub | Entries tagged with family

I usually avoid retrospectives at the end of the year. But maybe I’m getting sentimental as I get older, or maybe this year was an outlier. I sure hope that it is, because I don’t want to have a year like this ever again.

It’s been one thing after another: getting the terminal diagnosis for my father in January, seeing how he deteriorated and then ultimately his death at the end of March. But meanwhile we had the stress of buying the (new) house, which started in February and culminated at the end of March, the day before my father’s funeral. And then there was the stress of getting everything in order for the actual transfer in May. On top of those administrative tasks, I also had to support my mother with the administrative tasks surrounding the death of my father — something that is not completely handled yet, even today. And then we had to work hard to clear out the (old) house to make it presentable for sale, in September. It is both kind of depressing and exhausting to go through all of your possessions, take then in your hand, and then decide if you are going to keep it or not. We worked so hard to make the house “empty and white”, and then there was the stress of the actual selling, compounded by the stress and sadness of losing Mikan in August. Meanwhile there was the stress of kicking off the renovation project: what will happen, when, what will the end result be, how much will it cost? And then there was the stress of packing for the move, the actual move itself, and then unpacking and finding a spot for everything. And then there’s some stuff going on with my job since October, and…

I feel like the stress and exhaustion has seeped into my bones. When I have time to rest, the exhaustion seeps out again, through osmosis, and I am just… tired again. We’re very happy in the new house, but the happiness certainly has a thick layer of sadness surrounding it. I hope that 2025 will give us some time to recover and a reason to look forward, to allow the layer of sadness to be worn away by the passage of time.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: exhausted

With my colleagues, I created the tiniest precious metal smuggling ring.

In 2005, klik’s uncle died of throat cancer. We didn’t know him very well, he was a bit of black sheep in the family, but we had visited him in his apartment when he was already ill and had a lovely time with him. One of his interests was making jewelry: he had several tumblers to polish pebbles, lots of silver plates and silver wire and the tools to work with them.

When he died, his estranged daughters (a sad story in itself) refused the inheritance, so it befell to klik’s aunt (his eldest sister) to clear out his apartment. And of course she had to decide what to do with all of his stuff. She found the silver, and at the time klik was working with beads and stuff like that, so we got a box with all the tools and materials. And like with many of these things, it was stored in our spare bedroom. There it lingered and soon became part of the mountain of… stuff.

So when we cleared out the spare bedroom, we found this silver. It also included plates made by a company that buys up your old silver, purifies it and then makes plates out of it so you can use that to cut pieces from. We hadn’t done anything with it since we got it, but it is valuable: roughly 100 euros, if we weighed it correctly. We didn’t want to hold onto it, but selling it for money would not be according to the spirit through which we acquired it — it would feel like dishonoring the uncle’s memory to sell it for cash.

It turns out that one of my colleagues makes silver jewelry. I offered it to her, and she was interested, but she wanted to pay for it — which we didn’t want to do. But she thought we shouldn’t just give it away. So we agreed that we would give her the silver, she would make a brooch out of it for klik’s mother (it was her brother, after all) and keep the rest of the silver as ‘payment’.

That left the problem of getting the silver to her. She lives in the UK, I live in the Netherlands. We were supposed to meet with the team in July, but that fell through. And you can imagine that I did not fancy sticking the silver in an envelope and writing “jeweler’s silver” on the custom’s declaration of such a heavy packet. So ideally, we’d do the transfer by hand. She was going to my company’s annual user conference in the US this year, but we had our annual Texel vacation planned in that week, so that fell through as well.

But this past Tuesday, there was an event by my employer in Amsterdam. Of course I would attend, and my manager, who happens to live in the UK, would attend as well. He agreed to take the silver (I also gave him a small bag of chocolate kruidnoten as payment) and smuggle it into the UK. Two days later, the same event would be held in London, and both my manager and my jeweler colleague would attend that.

Apparently the bag was scrutinized closely, and while the silver must have shown up on a scanner and it had several sharp edges where pieces had been clipped off, nobody made a problem of the silver.

He called it “the tiniest precious metal smuggling ring” — and it worked. We’ll worry about getting the brooch back later, when it is finished.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: amused

My father worked for Philips almost his entire working life. Back then (in the 1970’s) Philips was a super-large company (in Dutch terms) with factories and offices around the country, but concentrated around Eindhoven. We lived in a village next to the city, and “everyone” worked at Philips. It was subtle, but the parents of my primary school friends treated each other according to their position in the Philips hierarchy.

My father had various jobs at Philips, always working hard — this was the time when life-time employment was still A Thing. When I was (very) young he traveled all over Europe to help save money on energy costs, saving Philips 250 million guilders (278 million euros in today’s money!). At one time they sent him to factories in Germany, and he lived part-time in an apartment in Germany. And then, early in the 1990’s, Philips started a big reorg, and he was laid off. There is a photo of him arriving at Eindhoven station with the last things from his (now former) apartment, having traveled by train because he also had to leave his lease car behind too. It deeply affected him: he felt discarded, which he basically was. At almost 50, he had to start a whole new career.

After that, he started his own management consultancy company. But he also managed to secure the rights to an experimental piece of PC equipment that never really got marketed by Philips: the Speye006 video digitiser.

Philips did a test production run of a video digitiser as part of a program on how people would work with computers and together — kind of visionary as they predicted video calling and remote meetings. They designed some hardware that would support that kind of thing, and after a test production run, the whole project was canned, leaving Philips with a whole stack of things they were never going to sell. My father got wind of this through a contact (if you work all over the place, you end up with a wide network!) and he acquired the rights to market and sell this thing. Later, he would buy their whole stock.

The Speye006 (kind of a joke name) had three composite video inputs and used the CPU to create images from the video feed in greyscale with 64 different hues. With a 386 CPU, you’d get about 20 fps. And they had also made a control to use the card with Visual Basic.

I started working for his company, building solutions in Visual Basic with the card. I paid my way through university with programming, especially when we got into contact with the Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst (“RVD”, the Netherlands Government Information Office).

The RVD provides spokespersons for the government and the royal family, but also provided generic government advice about things like insulating your house and “your car can go without you for a day”. (More of these here.) These subjects were usually accompanied by a pamphlet which you could get sent to you by writing to “Postbus 51” (P.O. Box 51). (Yes, there was a time when people did not have internet at home and you’d have to do these kinds of things through postal mail.)

The RVD ran the “winkel van postbus 51” (“the store of P.O. Box 51”) in The Hague, a few doors down from the royal palace. Being the spokespeople for the royal family, they also owned and managed an extensive collection of photographs of the royals. As they retained the copyright to these photos, they could control who got to use an official portrait in their publications, an important part of the royals’ public relations. And the fees for the publication rights were what kept the whole operation going.

But while the royals’ portraits were the main business, it was not the only business they had. They had gotten a collection of glass plate negatives from Willem van de Poll who had worked with the royal family for quite some time in the 1950’s. The thing with glass plate negatives is twofold: you can’t really handle them without the acid from your fingerprints ruining the silver emulsion on the plate; and it’s hard to see what a photo is about just by looking at the negative. With the legacy came some money to preserve the collection and to keep it intact — the publication fees would have to cover the rest. But that would only work if the RVD would be able to make the photos available for searching and inspection. So they needed a solution to show a positive of the negative, describe what was on the photo, and put that in a database for queries.

That’s what we built. I re-created the paper ‘description card’ that was used for describing photos with things like ‘geographical descriptions’ if the location was known, but also names of the people photographed (if any) and a free-text description of the photo. The negative was put on a light box with a video camera on a holder above it. That camera fed into the Speye006 and the (Windows 3.11) application showed the semi-live video feed. When the documentalist was satisfied with the position, they’d press a button, the feed would be frozen and the image turned positive (we used an external component for this). And then they’d go through the card (I got many detailed instructions on tab order so they didn’t have to switch from keyboard to mouse and back again!) and described the photo. At the end: press a button, and the image and the description would be saved on a removable harddisk. The Centrale Archief Selectiedienst (“CAS”, “Central Archive Selection Service”) did this work for the RVD.

When the harddisk was full, it was sent to my father’s office. He would process the images and put the data in an MS Access database — once I had found a way to make it possible to query a read-only database, we were able to give every CD-ROM it’s own query interface. The data also went into the large RVD photo archive database for queries, but that was managed by themselves.

My father had (one of) the first CD-ROM writers, a Plextor if I’m not mistaken. Single speed, SCSI interface (at a time when PCs all had IDE) and the discs themselves were expensive — especially because they needed to be ‘archive quality’. He’d defragment the disk, set everything ready, reboot, make sure that nothing else was running, start the process and basically leave the room — the thing didn’t have a buffer memory so if anything happened (bumping into the table on which the burner sat, for instance) the burning process would fail. We treated it as if it was some kind of unknowable religious instrument, and we were the priests that deferentially administered the rites. After 74 minutes we’d come back, and if the tray was open, the burning was a success! These discs were then mailed to the RVD and the harddisks were sent back to the CAS to be re-used for another batch.

I think this really kept him going. He felt busy and needed again, he was making deals and doing things that only he could. He was very proud of the result, and I think that pride was justified. Working with him was not always easy, but we managed well enough. And it was fun to play around with a video digitiser at a time when making a digital photo meant taking a photo on film, getting that processed and printed, and then finding a scanner and scanning it.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was decided that there would be an “event” to show to the world what the system was — and to make others aware that this photo collection was available! The event was held at the store of P.O. Box 51, and I recall someone remarking that they didn’t want it on a Friday — on Fridays there’s the council of ministers, and it would mean the event would have to be catered by the same caterer as attended to the cabinet ministers, to save money. Apparently, they were not a fan of that particular caterer, so it was held on a different day so they could select their own preferred caterer! June 9th 1995 was the day. We went there by car, because we had computers to take with us. We had to park behind the store, and I remember seeing a marechaussee (military police) standing guard at a gate at the end of the alley, because that gave access to the palace gardens.

We found these photos, going through my father’s papers:

These were different times: people in suits, wearing ties. I do not know who these people were: probably RVD people who were happy to have some time away from their desks?

That’s me, looking over my father’s shoulder while he is giving a demo of the system. Note the massive CRT monitor. You can also see the lightbox with the camera above it on the left. I can’t believe how much my outfit clashed with that of the others, and that my father let me get away with it (though at the time I didn’t own a suit, so there was no real alternative…)

In Dutch, you’d say you “baptise” something when you use it for the first time. For this event, they took it literally and poured champagne over a CD-ROM — we had enough failed ones to use for this anyway! This is the director of the RVD that commissioned the project, I think.

My father got to do the thing too. I love this photo of him: his smirk shows that he was really enjoying himself. All his work culminated into this public celebration of the result. He was wearing one of his ties with Heer Bommel embroidered on it — he was a big fan.

This must have been the reception afterwards. You see my father on the back. Different times: smoking indoors during an event was completely accepted.

Afterwards, there was a fancy dinner, I think my father arranged and paid for it. I remember him ordering a fancy wine and asking the owner to taste it — they agreed that the wine was good, but not as good as you’d expect from the wine and the price. He got a stiff discount on it.

This photo was taken when dessert was served. I think the people from the RVD arranged for a special ‘grand dessert’ to be served with a sparkler and a CD-ROM (again, so many failed discs…)

Here’s the letter the RVD sent to my father along with these photos. (Click on these to get full-size versions!)

And here is the letter and the press release they sent to these publications:

I think this might have been my father’s “finest hour”. Discarded by the employer he worked for almost all his life, but able to make a success of something all by himself, with the result (and him!) being celebrated.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: melancholy

My father died.

Last year, he lost a lot of weight — and he was overweight, so we thought that was good. His balance was bad, so he used two walking poles to get around and walking took him more and more effort — so we hoped that with a bit of reduced weight it would be easier for him to get around. But he also got a bit ‘confused’ (as he called it) now and then. It took my mother more and more effort to get him presentable and out of the house. He also didn’t want to eat a lot of different things anymore.

This Christmas, he seemed more withdrawn and less outgoing. There were some medical things, and at the start of January their general practitioner sent him to the hospital for an upper endoscopy. That gave a strong indication of esophagal cancer. A week later, a full torso scan was made, and halfway January we got the diagnosis: esophagal cancer that had spread to the liver. It was already too far advanced to be curable, especially given the bad physical condition of my father. So there was no chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The tumor had already severely restricted the esophagus, which explained why he had trouble eating certain foods.

At the start of February, my father got a stent in his esophagus to push the tumor aside and open up the esophagus so he could continue eating and drinking. This went well for a bit, but his situation steadily deteriorated. He discussed his options with his doctor, and he was adamant that he be brought into palliative sedation when he would not be able to eat anymore. At a certain point he could not climb the stairs anymore, nor even walk to the toilet — he sat in his chair or lied in bed. He was tired all the time, slept a lot, and at a certain point also didn’t want visitors anymore.

Last week Tuesday, he admitted to his doctor that he was just waiting to die. And Friday, he asked to be put into palliative sedation, because he was so tired. Of course we went to my parents when we got the news, and we could speak with him a bit. But he was ready to die. It was so hard to see him so confused: he wanted to ask for something but could not find the right word — but he still sounded like himself, using the interjections he always used. It was like he was still there, but in a sense already left.

And then, in a split moment of clarity, he said to my mother and sister: “I want to die.”

A few hours later, the doctor gave him the first injection to put him under (I think his last words were “bedankt” (“thank you”) to the doctor) and he slept his last few remaining hours. He died, asleep, on Saturday afternoon.

We are sad, of course, but also relieved. Relieved that he does not have to suffer anymore. He always said that he didn’t feel any pain — and he might have. But I wonder if he, like cats, didn’t suffer quietly for a long time before the diagnosis came. How long did he know that something was wrong? I guess we will never know now.

All that remains are the memories. And the photos.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: sad

My sister is in the country, and we thought it would be fun to hang out together for a day. We had tried to arrange for a workshop (woodturning was the favourite) but none of our options worked out. Admittedly, we started looking at options kinda late too, so… So the backup plan was to visit a museum. First option was to visit the glass museum, but that’s kinda far from our parents (where she is staying). So we opted for De Pont, where me and klik had been before.

One of the items on permanent display is a ‘tunnel’ off to the side, where large plates of wax are mounted to created a small, dead-end tunnel. It feels like you are creeping through the narrow passages of a monumental grave like the pyramids, but then smelling amazing!

(More info on the art here.)

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: content

Of course, with everything moving so quickly, we didn’t have time to make extended vacation plans. It’s only three weeks anyway before I start my new job, so it wasn’t worth it to go somewhere far away. But my sister, who lives near Copenhagen, had invited us over — and we hadn’t been there in years, so it would be fun to stay with them again. They now also have a vacation home, and the shed there has been converted into a glass art studio. After a few days in Copenhagen, we moved to the vacation home and my sister visited a few times to help us make a glass project!

I have been really interested in the glass ‘dots’: drops of glass that you stick to a transparent piece of glass. It’s what I used for the Estus flask. But instead of firing it very hot for a ‘full fuse’, where the dots melt completely and you get left with smooth glass, I wanted a cooler firing so that the dots remained domed. My sister gave me a circle of transparent glass: a reject from a commission she’s working on right now, but perfect for my purpose.

I did not have a pre-set plan and just went where the size and colours of the dots took me.

This was the result of an afternoon fiddling with tweezers and glue. The dots are glued with normal hobby glue — that will burn off in the oven, but at least prevents things from shifting around before then. I may have used too much glue in places, but it did not cause problems.

Of course, if the dots would not melt fully, then there would be space in between them. With stained glass windows in mind, I asked my sister what to do, and she suggested using black glass powder. With a small brush, I brushed that in between the dots. Because it is much finer (really glass dust), it would melt at much lower temperatures. I had to wear an industrial mask — you don’t want to breathe in glass particles. Trust me on that.

It takes about 24 hours for a firing to be complete, as the glass has to stay at certain temperatures for a certain times for proper annealing. And then it has to cool off slowly, otherwise the stresses in the material can cause the glass to shatter. And since the oven uses electricity (and a fair amount of it), it pays to wait until midnight to start heating up the oven — the computer has a ‘waiting stage’ in its program.

That evening, we had arrange to meet up with some of my former colleagues with whom I still play RPGs, and we were back very, very late. So the oven had cooled off enough to open! We were too tired to do anything else than to take out the fire-proof tray with our projects, put in another tray that had been prepared, and turn on the oven. I took a quick snap of my project as it came straight out of the oven.

This is the next morning. The dots act as tiny lenses and refract the light. I do think the black glass in between adds something important. It’s not as nicely spread as I would have wanted. I might have brushed too rigorously because I did not want to run the risk of some specks of black dust getting stuck on the dots themselves and diminish the luster.

You can see how in some places, the black glass did stick to the underside of the dots. But it all has melted while the dots retained their shape.

On this side view, you can see clearly how the dots remained ‘dot-shaped’.

It also works against a darker background. That really brings out the different colours.

This is what it looks like from the ‘back’ of the project. That has a whole different feel to it and shows the ‘stained glass’ effect a bit better.

The dots act as tiny lenses. Here I held it against the carpet in the ‘sun room’, and you can see it reflected/refracted in the dots.

My project used up a lot of dots, and my sister is working on a huge commission that also requires quite a few dots. So I felt a bit responsible and decided to help make more dots.

The cool thing about glass is that when it completely melts (at around 815 Celcius), the surface tension makes it want to become 6 millimeters thick. It will form drops of that thickness, and when it cools off again, those drops harden — that’s what the ‘dots’ are! And with glass being so hard, it is almost impossible to cut round shapes in it: you basically approximate a curve by chipping away smaller, straight pieces. Which means that if you need a lot of different-shaped pieces, you get left with lots of very small pieces.

So the trick of making dots is to collect those pieces and fire them at a high temperature. It takes a hot firing in the oven (and thus quite a bit of time) but it is a great way to recycle what would otherwise be waste material.

The plates that go into the oven are hard ceramic plates, sometimes with a ‘slurry’ on it as a releasing agent. You want to keep some space in between the pieces, so that they don’t melt together.

It is a nice little job to simply take the pieces that are available and arrange them. Very satisfying to see the area get filled up, and to find the best-fitting piece for a particular spot.

This is how the plate goes into the oven. The heating element is embedded in the (heavily isolated) lid. The little black bit on the right on the inside is the temperature sensor, and the box on the right of the oven is the firing computer. Close the lid, create the program, and then just wait until it’s all cooled off enough. With the heavy insulation, even cooling off takes a long, long time!

And this is what greeted us when we opened the oven! Some of the pieces turned out to be too close together so they melted together, making a multi-coloured dot. Some dots got weird shapes because of that too, but that is maybe also a charming effect.

Have some dot glamour shots! I put them all in a plastic, lidded container, so they can be poured out and sorted when needed.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: enthralled

My sister has been making glass art for a few years now. She has three ovens (one of which is in their vacation home) and has been making all kinds of things: sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, sometimes purely decorative but also things like trays and vases.

She was coming to the Netherlands for over the Easter break, and she brought the smallest oven and some of her supplies. We went there on the Monday to work on some projects!

The material to work with

She has worked out a technique to make ‘murini’, small rods of glass with a pattern. These can be used to make things like ‘millefiori’ (literally: thousand flowers), something that Murini, the glass-makers island of Venice is famous for.

I had thought long and hard on what to make, and I decided on making a little Estus flask, from Dark Souls. It’s the healing item, and it’s a flask filled with a yellow and red glowing liquid. My sister cut out a flask shape out of transparent glass, and I would put all kinds of dots and smaller pieces of glass on there. By baking it really hot, I’d get a ‘full fuse’ and get a single sheet of glass with all those colors in. Then on a second firing, the flask shape would be made round so that you could set it upright.

I’d pick up a dot and glue it in place with a tiny, tiny bit of hobby glue — that would burn off in the oven anyway, but the important thing was that it would keep in place when handling the unfired item.

Work in progress.

It requires a bit of concentration, but I got the routine down. We had some smaller pieces of glass left, and we made a few ‘dots plates’ and other items too.

Some of the other items we made that day.

It’s kinda weird to have a thing that gets to 800 degrees Celcius on your living room floor, but the oven is quite well insulated so it doesn’t get stupidly hot outside. Firing the glass takes about 24 hours.

My Estus flask after the first firing. Apparently there is a spot that got ‘devitrified’, and my sister didn’t have the tools with her to rectify that, so the item is now in Denmark for that. There will be a second firing to make it round, too.

I like how it looks, but I think I should have used a lot less green and blue. But maybe there will be a second one in the future…

One of the little ‘dots plates’ we made. I like how it’s a little colourful mosaic, but since it was fired on ‘full fuse’, it’s all smooth.