June 11, 2026

The date part of the ISO date today is 06-11. In a staggering coincidence, this was also the Dutch emergency telephone number between 1990 and 1997, before it changed to the European-wide 112. Just seven years, and I still remember it.

In 2016, I worked for the ING offices in the South-East of Amsterdam, which for me was a 16 km bike ride (32 km both ways) that I did four times a week. Consequently, I consumed quite a lot of podcasts in those days, such as the “You are not so smart Podcast” by David McGraney.

my daily route to work

It was a good thing that adjacent to the bike parking in the office basement, there were showers. This allowed me to change into office clothing in the morning and change back to my cycling outfit at the end of the day. ING also had a tax-free bicycle benefit, which allowed me to get a very nice bike, one with the not over simplistic name “Gazelle Orange T27 2016 Heren 57 cm - Romantic Orange Grace Silver”, in which “Heren” is Dutch for “Gentlemen”.

The T27 specs are as follows:

• Gears: Shimano Deore 27
• Type of lock: Trelock Ring lock with mortise option
• Lighting: Via Hub Dynamo
• Brake Type: Hydraulic rim brake
• Pedals: Shimano XT T-8000 SPD MTB Pedals
• Saddle: Brooks England B396HA07202 Men's Flyer Leather Saddle

The ride of a gentleman

The pedals and saddle (not in the picture) are my own additions. The pedals allow for normal shoes at one side as well as my Shimano SH-RT82 SPD Shoes at their flip side.

The T27 is so nice that, since I own it, I use it to get to any destination in or around Amsterdam. I prefer cycling over any other mode of transportation. No traffic jams, no delays, just the rain and the wind, but those never double your travel time. With some music, a podcast, or just the sounds around me, it is a healthy and, outside of downtown Amsterdam, fast way of moving aroud.

Cycling through downtown Amsterdam, though, with, for example, your ten-year-old son on his own bike at your right, on your way to his weekly bassoon lessons, will obviously mean that you not only obey any and all traffic laws, but also that you behave like a true gentleman, because he must be taught the ways of the bike path, and what better way to teach than to show, even if you have to make a mandatory stop for a zebra crossing while going uphill. That’s what gears are for.

Crossing a canal bridge with a popular zebra crossing

Amsterdam, while world renowned as a cycle haven, in reality, is a jungle when experienced from a bike, just like any other city centre in the Netherlands. Bikes in many forms, shapes and methods of propulsion, come from all directions, applying laws and regulations wherever convenient or when the opponent is a tram, and all are in haste. Trying to keep your son, not to mention a very expensive musical instrument, on top of his bike is challenging on any day.

Still, there is a Zen quality to it all. When mastering the bike path, one can navigate even the most intense of traffic situations on a bike, not by applying rules, but by making contact, leaving room for others or asking for it, sending an apologetic or forgiving smile, like you would when on foot. Communicating like this tends to come natural when confronted with humans, instead of cars.

I seem to have digressed for the entirety of this post. I was going to write about how I maintain my bicycle, how that feels and what it means. I suppose all that will have to wait for another post then.

June 08, 2026

Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, original cover

“Siehst du wohl, daß man einen Hut aufhaben soll! Es ist mir natürlich aufgefallen, daß ihr keinen tragt hier oben. Man soll aber einen aufsetzen, damit man ihn abnehmen kann (Do you see that one should wear a hat! Of course, I noticed that you don’t wear one up here. But you should put one on so that you can take it off)”

-- Hans Castorp

In my newspaper, NRC, I read a column where someone wondered who still reads a great bildungsroman these days, such as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). Der Zauberberg, a rather hefty pair of volumes, is about Hans Castorp, a young naval engineer from Hamburg who visits his cousin Joachim Ziemszen in a Swiss sanatorium high in the mountains. Castorp doesn’t like it at all, the mountain is too high for his sea legs, but when the residential medical director, Behrens, tells him that he can get better here too, he stays there. Apparently he is ill.

Much about nothing

In a podcast by De Groene Amsterdammer, inspired by their double-thick summer issue of 2025 about doing nothing, Der Zauberberg passed me by again. It was explained that the sanatoriums, where the story takes place, emerged in the late 19th century to expose tuberculosis patients from their unhealthy cities to nothing but sunlight and clean air, and furthermore to as little as possible. Antibiotics didn’t emerge before the 1930s and only became widely available after the war. It was also not known that the disease was caused by bacteria. The Liegekuhr (the laying treatment) was seen as an answer, but that was not scientifically substantiated. Because the sanatoriums were profitable businesses, people whose symptoms seemed to have disappeared were fired and obviously incurable patients were not even admitted. The luxury was great and those who sat there had to pay a lot for it.

The book from 1924, NRC promised me, was about polarization. Polarization from the perspective of a tolerant German intellectual in the interwar period. I was sold. On Kobo, the Dutch translated version was almost €20, the original German version only €2. I’ve enjoyed Hans Fallada and Erich Maria Remarque when in school, so I figured, if my vocabulary has declined too much since, I’ve only thrown away €2.

Gun duel

The most important secondary characters are femme fatale Clawdia Chauchat, who acts as a catalyst for Castorp’s feelings about love and sexuality, and the gentlemen Settembrini (enlightened optimist) and Naphta (reactionary mystic). The first volume ends with a fantastic dialogue in which Castorp finally declares his love to Chauchat. Sadly, the entire dialogue, which lasts many pages, is in French. Je ne parle pas Français is the only French sentence I know. Fortunately, I found a German translation online.

Settembrini’s and Naphta’s dialogues are about reason versus mysticism and liberalism versus authoritanism. Settembrini argues normatively and morally. Naphta uses dialectical tricks and paradoxes to disrupt Settembrini’s statements. These dialogues are great. The problem is that to even get to these pages, you already read hundreds of pages about nothing but the day-to-day affairs of a sanatorium that aims to be and do nothing. At the end of the second volume, Settembrini and Naphta finally decide to solve their differences in a gun duel.

Her grave has already been dug

The first volume also contains a complete virus theory, but I prefer the one in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach, which is my favorite book ever. One thing that stuck with me was a scene in which Castorp takes Ziemszen on a quest to give the dying patients some attention. It bothers him that people suddenly disappear while he saw them in the Liegekuhr the day before. Dying is kept away from life by the sanatorium. Together they visit a number of patients who are almost dead, including a young girl. Another woman seems to be doing so well that they take her into the village and to parties and performances. When they accidentally end up with her in the cemetery of the sanatorium, they are horrified to see that her grave has already been dug, stone and all.

I didn’t seem to be the only one who had recently been inspired to read Der Zauberberg. Especially in NRC and De Groene Amsterdammer, while I read it, the book and its author passed by with some regularity, and not often positively. Author Thomas Mann and his wife behaved ungratefully towards a friend who secured Mann’s work in Germany. Mann, after fleeing to the U.S., is said to have said of German writers who stayed behind that all their work had been corrupted by the Nazis and should be pulped. It is not good to slowly start thinking more negatively about its author while reading a long book.

According to my e-reader, I spend 85,7 hours on Der Zauberberg.

June 04, 2026

I’ve recently rediscovered Thunderbird, but it has developed a bug, apparently because of recent XDG changes which added a new type of projects directory. The bug means that any time I start Thunderbird, it creates a directory ~/thunderbird.

I suppose I should be glad it’s in lowercase

The directory is useless. It remains empty, and Thunderbird already uses an old-style ~/.thunderbird for configuration and data, instead of respectively under the standard ~/.config/ and ~/.local/share/.

I don’t have the time to build the knowledge to fix this bug. I am, however, on record for finding applications that make directories in my home, intended or not, impolite and inconsiderate, so this will not stand.

In the rest of this post I will use the fish(1) shell as well as systemd(1), so if you use different tools, adjust as needed.

~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish:

#!/usr/bin/fish
inotifywait -m -e create ~/. | while read FILE
  echo $FILE
  if test -d 'thunderbird';
    rmdir 'thunderbird';
  end
end

The above will watch my home directory. Whenever a directory called “thunderbird“ is created, it is immediately removed. But I don’t want to run it by hand and have an open terminal all the time, so I create a systemd user service:

~/.config/systemd/user/watch-thunderbird-dir.service:

[Unit]
Description=Watch and remove thunderbird directory
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/me/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish
Restart=always
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Systemd user services need absolute paths, so adjust “me” with your username and start and enable the service:

$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish
$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable --now watch-thunderbird-dir.service

If we don’t forget to remove all this once Thunderbird have found time to solve the actual bug, the hack described here will do nicely.