Some days ago, I wrote about ‘Bird,’ Brancusi’s artwork, which I stumbled upon in Bucharest’s National Gallery. Steichen bought it and paid a premium to import it into the US. Yesterday, I watched a video about Simon Starling, a conceptual artist and photographer from the UK. Starling created a work in 2004 with the exuberant name Two Birds, No Birds — A Mirrored Displacement (Proposal for an Inter-Institutional Exchange). This work is a diptych of two photographs of ‘Bird’ in a particular exhibition space. A nice loop. (Omitting pun re bird named starling)
Unrelated, I found Autoxylopyrocycloboros is an interesting conceptual work by Starling about a wooden steamboat that eats its own tail, being fueled by its own hull.
I bought a new pair of shoes for our three-month New Zealand and Japan trip in 2023. My requirements for these were:
Comfortable for long days of walking
Suitable for the warm February in New Zealand
Suitable for the colder March and April months in Japan
Nice-to-have: low shoes, not too expensive.
In January 2023, I did some research and eventually bought these Meindl Laredo’s. They were quite expensive, but considering their durability, they were actually quite affordable.
Further benefits:
Great, comfortable fit.
Very durable.
Main drawback:
Ugly. Which, of course, is subjective.
I walked about 2 million steps on these shoes in February, March, and April. Flawless. The only problem was that a crack in the rubber between the sole and the shoe began to appear in one of them. I returned to Bever to get this fixed, but they replaced the boots for free.
With the new pair, I walked another 3 million steps during the rest of the year and a few months in 2024 until the Vibram sole wore out. Unfortunately, the sole can not be replaced in this model, so I had to trash the pair.
Dit is een zeer handig systeem. Goedkoop, efficiënt en makkelijk te gebruiken.
De juiste trein vinden is eenvoudig dankzij de grote kaarten aan de muren van de stations.
Je kunt losse kaartjes kopen of kaartjes voor een bepaalde periode. De metro is relatief goedkoop. De tarieven vind je hier. Je kunt een kaartje kopen bij kaartjesautomaten op alle stations. De automaten zijn eenvoudig te gebruiken, hebben een engelstalige interface en accepteren veel kaarten en contactloze betaalmethoden, zoals Apple Pay.
Wij kochten een weekkaart voor 30 RON (6 euro) per persoon.
Het kaartje is een dikke papieren kaart met een magneetstrip. Je gebruikt de kaart om door de poortjes te gaan. Je schuift de strip erin, wacht een paar seconden op de validatie, en de automaat spuugt de kaart weer uit en opent het poortje.
Wanneer je op je bestemming aankomt, kun je door de poortjes gaan zonder je kaartje te tonen. De poortjes gaan automatisch open.
PS. In een eerdere post heb ik vermeld dat Bolt een uitstekende taxiservice biedt in Boekarest.
Waarom de Boekarest metro gebruiken?
De metro in Boekarest is de beste manier om door de stad te reizen:
I read a lot on my Kindle and like to make highlights and notes while reading. You can read your annotations at https://read.amazon.com. However, Amazon only synchronizes the annotations for the books you have purchased through Amazon. I am unsure whether that is because of copyright issues or because Amazon does not want to help you with books purchased elsewhere. Both are equally probable. But annoying it is. (Even more so because I think Amazon is an unsympathetic company, and I prefer to use their offerings as little as possible. For stories about Amazon practices, read Cory Doctorow’s story, but a quick search on the internet will surface many more typical monopolist practices.)
Fortunately, the annotations are stored locally on the Kindle in a file called My Clippings.txt. When you connect the Kindle to your computer, you can browse the file structure on the Kindle and find this file.
I created a small Python program to read this file’s somewhat cryptic format and convert it to a human-readable format. You can find it in a Gitlab repository here. The program currently requires some computer and Python literacy. When time allows, I will make it more user-friendly.
