I’m on the train going back to Breda. I feel very cheerful, so I suppose that isn’t such a good sign. Looking back it has been exciting. Trying to get a the sort of life I like to lead in Amsterdam. But a metropolis is very different from a provincial town like Breda. The pace of it make me nervous and sucks you in. I did find some nice rounds to walk (and the do have some trees), I just had to reconcile myself with the fact that it wasn’t as peaceful as it is at home.
It think what I liked most was a sense of remoteness to the city centre and the amazing speed at which you can get there by ferry. Travelling on the ferry was one of the nicest things anyway. But the best times I had were in the heart of Amsterdam. Shopping and art with Cecile, talk and work (and use the Internet) at Anja’s nice studio.
What I disliked was the cramped feeling I had. The houses were tiny and especially the Noordgevoel house was full off stuff. Even the bathroom was packed with stuff so brushing your teeth became a challenge. Of course the constant measuring and solving problems with the gear was also trying. I very much missed a decent place to work and Internet of course. I sort of felt I had to work despite everything. That’s not a nice feeling.
And there was a LOT of work. I had to write two programs to sort the data. One for the Suunto watch and one for the GPS data. It will take some time before everything is sorted out.
Aart, the manager had a nice suggestion for a presentation just before I left. They could project the work on the wall of the reception so people can watch it when they’re having their breakfast. I will have to record the work on video, so you will lose the interactivity but it still gives a nice impression of the piece. I’ll have to discuss it.
Lost my tracks
Yesterday I discovered something very disturbing. The XML file with the GPS track was missing 40 tracks in the log for the fourth. Not at the beginning or end but just, somewhere…?! This file has thousands of nodes and is almost 1 Mb big. A node looks likes this:
<trkpt lat=”52.387110000″ lon=”4.909017000″>
<ele>48,5</ele>
<time>2009-01-05T07:46:35Z</time>
</trkpt>
That’s very easy for a computer to read but not for a human.
I had to come up with a way to pinpoint the gaps. So I started to write a program called compare_times. I wanted a way to compare the times logged by the Suunto watch to the times stored by the GPS logger. Usually I don’t need the time node of a GPS track but now I could use it to see if the times weren’t matching at places. I output the times side by side to a file so I could compare them. And yes indeed, at some point they were not matching anymore.
So now I had to enhance my program so that it would point out to me exactly where things were going wrong. It’s impossible for a human to see for example two tracks missing at say 17:48:13 and 17:48:23 on a whole day. I decided that I would count the tracks in every minute. If there weren’t six tracks (logs) in one minute something was wrong. It sounds easy but it wasn’t all that easy to program. But I worked it out and ended up with a clean list of attention points so I knew where to look.
Mending the data was more work then writing the program. This was especially true for the log of the fifth. There 200 tracks were missing! Sometimes six minutes of data were just not there. Now I’ve got the day data of day 1 to 4. I hope the other days won’t be as bad.
It works!
I’ve made myself very happy tonight. I decided to write the code that invents the data from the Suunto watch, that was lost yesterday. I wanted the date and times to be right but the beats per minute would just be 10 everywhere. The strangest thing happened when I was programming. I didn’t understand quite what I was doing I just followed the logic without actually using my brain the way I usually do. Step by step I worked through the hour, minute, second and day numbers. They of course have to be incremented with 1, 1, 10 and 1 when they’ve reached a certain value. So when the minutes and seconds are at 59 and 59 a new hour must start and their values must be reset to 09 and 00. I typed it out and it worked the first time! The I only had to add the leading zero for minutes and seconds. And now I’ve got myself 4158 lines of fake data from my Suunto watch 🙂 I can use this to prepare the big data file which holds all the data for that day.
yesterday
I’m being challenged at the moment. Yesterday (and a little earlier) I noticed that my heart-rate belt was having problems. So I reckoned it was a good idea to replace the battery. After I’d replaced it the watch couldn’t find the belt anymore. So I couldn’t do any measuring of the heart-rate. So today, as soon as the shop opened (which unluckily was not until 13.00 hours) I went to a Runnersworld shop to see if they could help me. The guy was very patient and tried out all kinds of things in a methodical way. But in the end we had to concluded that the belt was broken. I had to buy a new one. It’s my third belt in seven months! That’s really bad considering the watch and belt cost me 400+ euros… But of course I feared most for my project so I spend another 80 euros on a new belt but at least now the project is running again.
Which, I must say, is becoming a bit of a burden. I moved to another house. It’s so noisy! I woke up from the neighbours walking around at 5 am. Everything they do makes a hell of a noise. It’s almost as if they’re in my house. In the new house there were no plates, no knives and no matches. It’s difficult to cook when there’s no fire… The evening shop was open so I could buy matches and I got the knives and plates from the other houses. But it’s a draggggggggggg… It seems that everything that can go wrong goes wrong.
And I just miss Internet so much. I’m here at a friends studio to post to my blog (by the way the last time I worked on that blog my IP address was blocked by the server so I couldn’t work on any of my sites) and now there is a ‘limited connection’ == no connection. And that’s another of the many things that go wrong with this project. I hope this isn’t a foreboding of the new year because then this year will be hell.
I’ve also discovered I’m not too keen on Amsterdam. Or maybe I just don’t like big cities. I wanted to go for a walk last night but I just couldn’t go anywhere. It’s all bricks and concrete. Or it to scary to walk alone at night. I did go out because for a second I thought I was going crazy. I bought myself a beer on way back.
The new house I’m staying in is designed like a little museum. It has all kind of stuff from the ‘Northeners’. It’s cute and it’s more luxurious then the nature theme house I was earlier but it’s very present. It takes up a lot of space and attention and that’s hard when there’s so much work to do.
Well, that’s about it, hopefully next post will be more cheerful.
I shall overcome
My first day in Amsterdam was quite an adventure. The houses are very close to the central station. I have to take a ferry to get to the north, that enhances the north feeling 🙂
I’ve been assigned a very cute though basic house for the first 3 days. The house I was originally planned in has been led to the former minister of housing Ella Vogelaar. I can understand that I had to make room for her. I’ll be going to another house on Sunday. The house I’m in now has a nature theme, all is green from the artificial grass. And there are birdhouses in my bedroom. It’s very inspiring to be here.
The main drawbacks are: no Internet connection and a flat tire just after I arrived. This gave me a chance to get to know the locals a little, I must say they’re very kind and helpful. Also there is no table so I had to work on the tree trunks that serve as chairs and tables. I worked next door for a bit but it’s more convenient to work where all my stuff is. Now I’ve got a table to work on and I’ve repaired my tire. This afternoon I’ll be going to Anja’s studio to work and use the Internet. I don’t know how people can live without it…
The measuring went well. I only missed a few photo’s and last night I measured till 7 am. The sleeping didn’t go that well. But the bed is fine, I just have to get used to all the new noises and lights.
Amsterdam here I come
I’m on the train going to Amsterdam for the second part of my project. I must say I wasn’t really looking forward to it. Not so much going to Amsterdam but doing all the measuring for a whole week. It’s pretty intense somehow, it cages you… I’ve also discovered that it’s a hell of a lot of work to get the data right. So most of the week I’ll be struggling with data. I’m still behind with my Breda data 🙁 It’s all just going so slooooooooooooow. But I’ll try and be more organized this time. I’ll try to sort the data as soon as I’ve collected it and put it on my computer. This is especially handy for the GPS data. I’ll have to stick with the days for that one because the files are so long it takes ages to select say, half a day.
Yesterday as I was packing my things I had the bright idea to install the Suunto software on my laptop to see if it would work. Well… it didn’t. It was 7 pm and the most important piece of software wasn’t working. I tried everything. Even installing service pack 3. That resolved one problem but now I just get an ‘Abnormal program termination’ error. Meaning that the software just didn’t start. I wrecked my brain and finally decided to try and install the software on my old Sony laptop. It worked! But I do have to drag two laptops to Amsterdam. My bags were so heavy! But now I’m on the train, doing my measuring and I feel more relaxed. It will be fine this week.
Power cut
As I was collecting the data this morning (it’s Christmas) there was a power cut. It was in a large part of the estate and may be a large part of town. I rang the alarm number and they said the cut would last till 1 pm… Luckily the batteries of my laptop were charged so I could upload the pictures and GPS log. Cool stuff, batteries 🙂
Last night was the first night to try out the electrode gel. It worked like a charm! The belt felt very solid around my chest so I didn’t use the medical tape. That was very nice for my skin. The gel itself is neutral and doesn’t give me any skin problems. So for the first time I recorded a whole night.
Eureka!
Right, I’ve just discovered how the gaps in the picture series appear. When there’s not enough light to take a picture the camera makes a long low beep. I thought that was just a warning but now I’ve discovered that it just fails to take a picture. So for yesterday I managed to complete the series without gaps. The only problem there was yesterday was the Suunto watch. It didn’t find the heart-rate belt because the batteries were low. I tried to replace them but couldn’t. I had to go back to the shop to have it fixed. So I only could start measuring at 10 o’clock. That was a bit of a shame.
From the user group I got a reply for my questions on how to continue measuring the heart-rate during the night. I have to use electrode gel. I ordered it Monday and it arrived today. It looks funny. Unfortunately it’s only for two nights in Breda. I hope it works. Tonight I only measured till 0.30… It will be for Amsterdam as well when it works. A problem is that I will have different durations in measurement time. I hadn’t thought about that. I will have to find a programmatic solution for that. As I want to compare the rates at the same time in different places.
Picture drama
I just downloaded about 400 images from my camera ALL of which are corrupt! What a mess. So for this morning there will be a lot of pictures ‘not available’… They look kind of cool, if they weren’t ruining my project I would actually like them. Glitches are a form of art in some circles.
I think it has to do with the numbering of the pictures. The internal counter had reached the number 999 and then it probably does not know what to do next. In the future I will delete the images in the camera and this way reset the counter. Then it will never reach 999 and hopefully this problem will be over.
No picture available
Yesterday I inspected my harvest of the first day of measuring. It was a little disturbing. I found out I had way to little pictures from my cam. Somehow I missed a couple of hours worth of material… I filled some holes with copies. But I spent hours doing so. Also calculating where the camera missed out cost a lot of time. It was quite depressing. I can’t go around for a whole week faking the life I already lived! So I decided that where there are holes in the picture series I’ll just show a prepared picture. This decision has given me a lot of peace. I will have to program this of course.
Thankfully yesterday the picture taking went very well. I only have to fill the gaps for the two second delay in the time lapse which is a lot less work. What didn’t go well was the GPS device. I sort of forgot about it and then it was almost dead. It’s still recharging now. It kept on logging though, even though it was almost out of power. Good stuff.