There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming a lens through which things become overly mysterious.

The Guardian writes (archive link) about a new Stephen Hawking biography, in which for the first time also the diaries of his father, and letters and journals from his mother were available as source. The article contains an image of his father’s diary entries for early January 1963. The image caption reads:

"Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked."

Secret code? Ooh, mysterious and intriguing! And the biographer cracked it! Roll over, Bletchley Park!
Let’s see if I can ‘crack’ it too.

Extract of a diary page by Frank Hawking of 3 January 1963, taken from the full page published by The Guardian in the link above.

Actually it’s easy. The snippet above is from Thursday 3 January 1963 and reads

St(ephen) wants a tape recorder for his 21st. They seem to be expensive (35GBP) and not very useful but as things are I would refuse him nothing. Later I went into London

Hawking’s 21st was a week later, was already ill, and soon after his diagnosis was that he would not live for more than 2 years (this is the ‘as things are’), and hence the ‘refuse him nothing’.

The code is no code of course, it is Greek script, used to transliterate regular English. Anyone could spot that it is Greek script, and anyone who had a year of ancient Greek at school knows how to do this. Pretending it is code to crack just tells me you’ve never bothered to register that there are other scripts and what they look like.

Writing your diaries this way is an easy way to increase the likelihood that someone finding it will not immediately be able to easily read it. It’s a small instrument to maintain some privacy and shield the people you name. Or to feel a little bit more protected so as to not self censor. So that for instance the first line of the day’s entry, which precedes the one above "This morning at five AM we made love. Later I went to Mill Yard (?) in Hobbe’s car." felt safe to write.

The article further down actually quotes Hawking senior, explaining it is Greek script used this way. So then the caption is perhaps not ignorance but only sensationalist. Still. A main Dutch news site repeated the Guardian while removing context, and at the same time promoting the image caption that Hawking senior wrote in code and the author had cracked it to a full paragraph at the end, so the ignorance propagates because its sensationalist implication is sticky.

I used transliteration myself this same way a lot in my twenties, and still do regularly. Whenever I am writing something private in public on paper I use Greek script (although I’m sure E and Y would tell you my handwriting is bad enough to serve as privacy shield all by itself). In primary school I taught myself cyrilic and used that, but that doesn’t map all that well onto Latin script, so many varieties of s related sounds in cyrillic. (I also tried to learn stenography on my own in primary school but couldn’t get to grips with it). Greek script, which I was taught in secondary school, maps much better, except it doesn’t have a v or w (Hawking sr. writes the w unchanged, and replaces the v with a reclining F as is common, which I use for the w actually as I write the v as I would an f, using φ) nor an h (which is solved by a diacritic sign on the next vowel that ancient Greek already uses.). I also have Greek and cyrillic enabled on my laptop’s keyboard, both because I need it sometimes, if rarely, for work purposes, and because sometimes I use them to make private notes on my laptop too when I am in public.

Not secret but private. No ‘code’, no ‘cracking’ other than learning to read someone’s handwriting, just transliteration.

The caption should have been "Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code using transliterated Greek script, that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked could easily read after getting used to Hawking’s handwriting.

This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited the Depot of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. The museum itself is closed a decade or longer for renovations to their 19th century building. Next door a new depot was built, which is a unique feat of architecture: a large mirrored bowl reflecting the full Rotterdam skyline, with a tree park on the roof. The depot is open to the public, with temporary expositions, and guided tours of the actual storage spaces for a dozen or so people at a time. Pixel Pioneers was the title of the temporary exhibition, featuring early digital game designs, digital art, and a special focus on the works of Geert Mul. Het already started exploring media art before the web, treating collections of images as databases and working with the patterns across them. We previously saw some of his work at Dutch Design Week I think. The Depot’s rooftop park is a thing worth seeing in itself, and we had drinks and a snack there.

The Depot building reflecting the Rotterdam skyline.

By then Peter and Lisa had reached Rotterdam too, and we met up at café Heilige Boontjes for a drink, and exchanging small gifts, before finding a place to eat in the Witte de Withstraat. We were early for dinner, it was a school night for Y after all, so had no trouble finding a spot. It was great to see Y talk with Peter in and play a game of hangman with Lisa, both in English. She had practiced her English before our trip to Portugal earlier this month, because she wanted to be able to converse with our hosts Bev and Etienne, and made good use of the experience she gained now.

Continuing our conversations we walked back to Rotterdam central station where Peter and Lisa fetched their luggage and we took a train home.

It is a bit surreal to meet friends from across the Atlantic for just a few hours. By definition that seems too short to due justice to the scarcity of such meetings and the geographic distance involved. At the same time it is also somewhat miraculous that such connections and meetings even exist at all, a triumph for blogging as Wouter characterized his own lunch last week with Peter and Lisa. Indeed every in-person meeting since Peter and I first met in 2005 was carried by all our blogging in between that preserves shared context. Within that 20+ years of shared context it makes perfect sense to meet even if only briefly, whenever the opportunity arises.

We spent a week and a half in Portugal this spring. Traveling together is something we do well with the three of us, and something I find healing. Although I found it hard at times to be in the moment, and to not let myself get irritated over small things.

It was Y’s first ever flight. Coincidentally my first flight was to Portugal too, albeit to Porto, and when I was 19, not 9 as Y is. It was as uneventful as it should be. After picking up our rental car we drove north to Caldas da Rainha for the first leg of our trip. My sister and her husband moved there for retirement after the pandemic, and this was the first time we visited them in their new habitat. I had planned to do so already a long time ago, but I never got around to planning a trip in time. This time we used Y’s two weeks of spring vacation, and actually planned ahead. We stayed in a nice AirBnB just outside Caldas, in the green hills, where we had a full floor of a much larger residence to ourselves, including the use of both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool. The weather wasn’t very warm so Y enjoyed the indoor pool. We enjoyed the company of my sister and brother in law, explored the coast, visited Obidos and enjoyed several restaurants and coffee places in Caldas.

Obidos castle

We drove south again for a long weekend in Lisbon after three nights. It was the May 1st weekend, so a busy weekend in the city, and on May 1st itself public venues were all closed.
Lisbon was fun to visit, despite the barely tolerable Novotel, with a day spent in and around the São Jorge castle, in Belem and the earth quake museum, plus a morning at LX Factory. We also spent a day in Sintra, going there by train taking into account the parking issues when we visited the area in 2010 during an extended stay due to the Eyjafjallajökull ash clouds preventing our scheduled flight home.

A nice lunch with a view from S. Jorge Castle across Lisbon and the Tagus

We drove over the red 25 de abril bridge across the Tagus river (no shots were fired this time) further south to Sesimbra. Sesimbra is a fisher village and a popular seaside spot for Lisbon’s population, facing due south on the Atlantic coast. There we spent a few relaxed days with Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, enjoying walks at the beach, the gorgeous view from their home across the Atlantic, and shared meals. Y and I played chess on the terrace, and Y used the English she practiced at home beforehand very well conversing with Bev and Etienne. We finished with an awesome dolphin watching tour from Setubal, where Y could almost touch them (and was splashed by them) laying on a net off the bow of a catamaran. We spent 30 minutes surrounded by a large group (over 15) of dolphins and their beauty and gracefulness overwhelmed me. Thinking back to a similar dolphin trip last year with my company team during the long goodbye of Frank I shed a few tears.

Up and close encounter with dolphins.

After a very nice goodbye dinner with Bev and Etienne at the cosy O Zagaia restaurant in Sesimbra, we drove back to the airport the next morning. This time we crossed the Tagus over the 17km long Vasco da Gama bridge, before returning the rental car at the airport.

Unplanned we did quite a bit more than we thought. My sister provided a filled programme. In a hotel like in Lisbon there’s mostly no other choice than to keep moving. Staying with our friends in Sesimbra provided the relaxed environment I realise I actually crave more of.

Chilling in Sesimbra at the home of friends ]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/portugal-in-spring/feed/ 2 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/a-short-walk/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/a-short-walk/#respond Thu, 14 May 2026 17:53:04 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26411 As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day.

We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at the provincial border. The polder is old. The Laak river was canalised as early as 1200 and in the mid fourteenth century dykes were put up further north to keep out the Zuyderzee (now IJsselmeer, as it was dammed in the early 1930s after the last flood and dyke breach in 1916). Between the Laak and the dyke land was made dry (the Laak runs up to a meter above the polder). Breaches over time created pockets of wetlands behind the dyke. Close to our neighbourhood some of those wetlands that earlier disappeared due to land consolidation were reconstructed recently. Prime bird territory. A few weeks ago as we cycled through the area godwits swooped around us with their distinct cries.

The Laak river is the boundary between the city and a greener area that further north becomes the protected nature preserve Arkemheen

To get me out of the house more, E gifted me binoculars for my birthday this week. As the weather was nice, sunny but with cold winds, we took a short walk this afternoon to the polder edge where a shielded observation point has been built. It was beautiful out there as the silenes were colouring the wetlands purple. Lapwings were present, various types of ducks and geese, a black headed gull was doing some cool moves in the strong wind before dive bombing into the water to catch something.

Purple swaths of silenes in the wetlands

It is now two years ago that during a day trip E and I had a conversation about my wellbeing in which I broke down in tears and we came to the conclusion there and then that I was burnt out. A good moment to take stock of where I am at.

What came before
In the spring of 2024 I sought out the help of a psychologist, which was very useful to see what I can do myself to rebalance. In parallel it became clear what the root cause was, and that it was external. My friend and business partner Frank fell ill, and in hindsight I had been carrying a lot of weight to fill his gap for a long time already, since mid 2022. His condition required most of my and my team’s attention and only after his passing last September did I get around to working on my own recovery.

Nominally I stopped working last September, or at least that was what I and my company communicated. That meant I needed to hand over internal tasks, which took a long time. When we started the company in 2011, and there was just the four founders, I took on some agreed internal tasks. Finance and taxes, IT, suppliers. Gradually that workload grew as our team grew. What you end up with is de facto processes for all those tasks, that only exist in my head and where all the parameters that feed into a decision also only existed in my head. And mostly as tacit knowledge. It needed time to make that work explicit so it could be delegated. And for some things we needed to bump into constraints after that delegation to figure out what exactly it was I did for some tasks. Only around Christmas I had the feeling that delegation of tasks was mostly done. Meaning that only early this year I thought I could properly let myself rest. I also felt I started slowly improving.

Where I am now
That’s not completely true though in practice. Responsibilities keep on having weight even after they’re delegated, and I find I don’t have the energy or bandwidth to show up for them. Also because if I’m needed to show up, it is for anomalies, and that’s the type of thing I have no resilience for yet at all. My voluntary board roles I can’t properly fulfil either, but there’s also no real way to delegate parts of it. So I have announced to some of them I will step down this year.
Yes, I’m slowly getting better in the sense that my mood at home is mostly ok, the grumpiness mostly gone. But as soon as I’m exposed to outside expectations or things get out of the ordinary (like having the kitchen renovated) that quickly is too much for me. As a result I felt like curling up under the covers for most of last month for instance.
I did keep working on client projects all that time since last September. My main client engagement has been a place of relative quiet in the past few years, where I could focus on the content, and where the colleagues let me my space and time. Having clients like that has been amazing and important for our company last year. Lately however I found myself struggling to be fully involved. I felt increasingly disconnected and somewhat lost. That may not be problematic to the client (yet) at this time, but it does feel awful to myself. Similarly I feel I’m losing connection to my company and team, but at the same time I don’t have the energy for it, and when I do connect I immediately feel what an emotional drain it is.

All in all there’s no novel stress, but there is a lack of joy, and the regular work means I don’t create proper time to rest and relax either, and any type of anomaly throws me off the rails immediately. I still get disproportionally mad at myself about simple things like forgetting to bring something from the supermarket twice in a row, or like when recently I went for ice cream with Y and had forgotten to bring my wallet.

Where next
It’s been a long walk, these past two years. And the walk will still be a good stretch longer I know. We made a trip to Portugal, visiting family and friends, and exploring Lisbon the past two weeks. That took me away from things, most of the time. Now that we returned our new kitchen will finally be ready, allowing hopefully a more normal rhythm at home again too.

I’ll keep seeking to reduce my tasks and responsibilities. I still haven’t learned to stop at times, step away from the laptop, go for a walk. The long walk of the past years has seen way too few walks I know. The shape of my days hasn’t changed one bit the past two years I must admit. Although the stress has been removed, and some of its content has been switched out to allow for more exploration, overall it feels like Groundhog day usually. Going through work like motions that aren’t effective in any way when I should really stop. Most of all I need to learn what it is to sit still and far niente, dolce or not. I’ve realised I really don’t know how to do nothing for more than a minute.

Returning from Portugal I noticed the soles of my walking shoes have worn through. So I need to replace them. The long walk is far from over.

This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ is something I have returned to a lot in the past months. One of my recent little LLM experiments focuses on it (it’s called WittgenstAIn III), and it routes a question through several philosophical schools of thought as lenses, to hold a question not just longer but also differently.

I started asking myself: how good of a philosopher is this guy? If I were shut in a room thinking about the future, is he somebody I want with me? That’s the test now. Anyone can execute. Fewer people can sit with a hard question long enough to find a better one.

Paolo Valdemarin

In the past week I’ve started three personal experiments that use AI (in this case Claude Code). For each, the experiment lies in automating steps in my cognitive work that are useful or necessary but not the actual cognitive work itself. They’re helper activities, supporting the main task. For two of the three that is the clear focus, the third is slightly different.

The three experiments are:

• Filtering on interests in my feed reader, let’s call it ‘Weak-tAIs’.
• ‘Slopsidian’, lifting concepts and argumentation from papers into Obsidian notes, and linking them iteratively.
• Explore questions with pre-existing ‘recipes’ that take a specific philosophical perspective. Perhaps I should dub this type of language game ‘WittgenstAIn III’.

It started from an automation task, which I mentioned here: manipulating non-fiction e-books. I have a script that I can point to an e-book in my Calibre collection, and then will populate a note with elements from the book: foreword, index and literature list, content overview, all if present, and for each chapter of the book the first and last few paragraphs. This is what I look at and skim whenever I want to gain a first impression and understanding what a book is about, and what questions it addresses or what it proposes. All very Mortimer Adler. From it I can then decide which parts of a book to read more closely, which parts likely contain things I am already familiar with or fall outside my current interest in the book. From those skims I jot down things in my note for the book. This quickly turned out to be useful to me, because it removed the wall between the e-book and my notes by bringing parts of the e-book into my notes temporarily where I could more quickly go through them in preparation for ‘proper’ reading (although in fact it is part of reading).

It got me thinking what other helper activities in reading and filtering I could identify.
Helper activities are tasks that support a main task by making it easier or providing guard rails. Checklists are an example, they ensure that you don’t skip important steps. In most cases nothing will immediately go wrong if you don’t do the helper activity but if you do them the main task gets a little easier to do well. A lot of helper tasks can be regularly automated, like the e-book excerpt script above. Others less so because they contain elements of processing actual texts, like the three experiments I describe here. There perhaps using a model like Claude Code can be of value (and hopefully soon, through local model deployment).

A brief description of the three experiments:

Weak tAIs
I order my RSS feeds by social distance for reading. Part of the reasoning is that I want to be well informed about what close ties write, but I am aware that interesting information likely comes from a wider social distance. This practice has been in place for some two decades and enormously valuable all that time. The most interesting stuff usually comes from the third layer, a folder named ‘c150’, in my feedreader: close enough to know who the author is, and engage in interaction if I want, disconnected enough for them to encounter things I am less likely to have already seen myself. That is the The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) as Granovetter called it.

I also keep a list of current interests, a bit like Feynman’s dozen or so currently favourite problems. For each interest I have formulated a few aspects:

• what is conceptually interesting to me in a topic (e.g. my interest in EU digital and data policy conceptually is that it forms a geopolitical proposition externally, while being a quality improvement instrument internally that takes rights and societal values as yardstick),
• am I theoretically interested or more practically,
• do I have a knowledge fundament for the topic or am I a newbie,
• is there a link with any long term goals,
• can it be put into a specific context or tied to a specific issue/question,
• can I shape or create an enduring practice around it,
• can I build a bridge to outputs, like blogposts, presentations, or client proposals

My feedreader tracks just under five hundred people writing on the open web. That can easily amount to two thousand postings in a week. I can have several intentions to start reading, one of them is to find and read material relevant to my list of current interests. A reading intention does not do away with items, it’s not a filter to remove material. It’s essentially just a view on the entire set of incoming items in the feed reader that I usually construct in my mind. What if I can construct those views on my screen too?
The ‘c150’ social layer, the weak ties, what do they write about that connects to the fields of interest from my list? Such filtering does not lend itself to text based search based on fixed terms. I usually skim titles for first impressions, and click opportunistically through the postings. What if I can have a model weigh the postings and compare them to my list of current interests, to mark them for my attention? In aid of that one specific reading intention.

That’s what the first experiment does: label postings that seem to fit my interests, and express why. So that I can skim the folder of weak ties by interest, and read those items first if my intention is to explore those interests. I limited it to the c150 folder as feeding all rss feeds into the model is consuming a lot of time and tokens, so I started with the part most likely to bring useful results.
The labeling works now as part of my feedreader. I am not yet convinced of the quality of it though. The motivation for the labels usually is along the lines of "it fits interest X but not in the way you’re looking for", which to me means it actually doesn’t really fit.

Slopsidian
This week I read an article about AI documenting its own actions and output in a wiki, and saw one or two similar efforts described. I applied that to a different helper task, which is the preparation of reading a paper and helping me to decide to dig deeper. This is similar to skimming a non-fiction book, but more involved. Can AI reliably pull from a paper the concepts used and introduced, and the line of argumentation? Saving them both in a single note for the resource, and in separate notes for each of the concepts? Additionally can it logically link concepts from different resources? This is what an ‘ingestion skill’ now does for me. I let it store the output it generates in a folder that I can also open as an Obsidian vault, hence the name Slopsidian. The papers come from my Zotero collection, meaning I previously saved them. That original step of curation also means I have a line or two about why I thought them interesting at the time. Feeding that curating decision and the paper into the ingestion skill allows a second order look at a paper. What are the concepts discussed, and, reading the output, do I think some of those are of interest to me? If so, I can look at the paper more closely and do my own note making and paraphrasing and placement in my actual Obsidian collection. Lifting out concepts works rather well, the linking is less useful in the first experiences (too obvious, not sparse enough) and can seem forced when you look at why some concepts get linked.

WittgenstAIn III
The third experiment is a bit more on the edge I think. Here the probabilistic language games that LLMs are have more of a free rein. Part of the university courses on philosophy of science I did 25 years ago was using different philosophical schools of thought as lenses to approach a question. Not to answer the question, that is hardly ever the point after all, but to holding it, and holding it differently. Plato’s essentialism, Kant’s transcendence, dialectics (Hegel), phenomenology (Husserl), Wittgenstein II’s analytical method, hermeneutics (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), and Rorty’s pragmatism. For each of these, for over 2 decades, I’ve had a recipe in my notes to apply to a question.
I put together a ‘language game’ in which I pose a question, which a ‘router’ prompt tries to match to one or more of the 8 recipes, or to a combination of recipes chained together (e.g. first look at a question from an analytical perspective and then feed the results in to a deconstruction exercise.)
My existing multi-step recipes are followed, and output is generated for each of those steps, into a resulting note.
I read those resulting notes, lift out what catches my eye or what resonates and I use it to flesh it out more, for me to hold the question still longer. Models are language games of a sort, so hence the name WittgenstAIn III, a third iteration, extending the second Wittgenstein’s language games to and with AI.
The output here makes me more uncomfortable than the other two. Reasoning is being mimicked, with the usual overconfident wrongness we’ve come to expect from generative AI, and that works out in odd ways sometimes. Still there is utility that can be lifted from the output. It is a good kickstart for exploring questions to quickly see if a recipe might yield something or not, judging by my first attempts in this experiment. It does certainly lower the threshold, as helper task, to engage with the recipes. I’ve used it more in the past days than in the past months. Part of that is the novelty of the experiment, and that may wear off quickly, but perhaps it carries the kernel of more habitual use.

The German translations are available as epubs through Kobo, and there’s the paper editions in the local bookstore. Not sure yet if I’ll read the German ebook version, as I don’t know if Taylor’s subtle ironic style translates well into German. More likely I’ll visit the local bookstore.

I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI tools, like Automator on Mac did before, allow the creation of workflows around a piece of software. Matt mentions the Obsidian CLI, and I’ve been using that to manipulate Tasks in Obsidian without going to the Obsidian UI. For about a decade I’ve treated application UIs as just views on my data, with functionality geared towards the viewing, and interfaces as different queries on that data. Going headless means removing the viewer, and using the output of queries directly programmatically. Combined with how I see the arch of generative AI bending significantly towards deterministic code, I look forward to the type of things people come up with. Not their tools, but what they come up with. Because the path to scale of these things imo is not adopting or buying what someone else made, but adopting what someone else came up with conceptually and creating your own local version. Like we do socially too, contagion spreading through effective behaviour, and culturally, the contextual and local sum of all time greatest hits of our group behaviour. The invisible hand of networks rather than markets. It would be highly ironic if unethical corporate extractive AI not only creates the incentive but also actually paves the way for the masses to Walkaway.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. […] ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Matt Webb

It may have been the same bull he took a train trip with.

The farm had a locally famous bull, named Adolf (this was the 1920s, so no stigma attached to that name yet). There was a cattle fair in The Hague, on the other side of the country. My grandfather walked the bull to the station, and joined it inside a cattle car, hired for the purpose, for the train ride to The Hague. When he arrived he sent a postcard to the farm, saying ‘gakz’, meaning ‘goed aangekomen, Klaas Zijlstra‘, arrived well. Postage was based on the number of words. This kept it to half a cent. Then he spent three days at the cattle fair on the Malieveld (the largest field in The Hague, used for fairs and demonstrations for some 400 years), where he shared straw with the bull to sleep on in the open air. The bull won first prize. He walked back to the station boarded a cattle car again with the bull for the trip home, and showed up on foot with the bull and a victory cup at the farm.

In the story, the station was sometimes Haaksbergen (the nearest, about an hour’s walk from the farm) sometimes Hengelo station (a 3 hour walk). Although Haaksbergen connected to Hengelo, it was a different station from the one on the line towards The Hague, so it may have been easier to go to Hengelo as they’d otherwise had needed two cattle cars, one for each line. Still, as the railroad company for the Haaksbergen-Hengelo connection was founded and owned by the same textile barons, to connect the factories, it may well have been Haaksbergen, or the also nearby Boekelo on the same line.

As a child I heard the story repeatedly but never really knew when that happened. Thanks to digitised archives I now have more details.

Earlier this week I came across a version of this story online, written by the farm owner’s daughter, and she placed it in 1929. Having a year I then searched the digitised news paper archives for cattle fairs in The Hague, and found it was actually 1928.
In 1928 the Netherlands hosted the Olympics in Amsterdam, from 28 July to 12 August. It was the first edition to be called ‘the summer olympics’. The national cattle fair and exhibition took place just before, from 23 to 25 July, and was dubbed the ‘Olympic cattle fair’ in the press. It was a big event (I found 230 paper articles across the country about it for that week). Opened by two government ministers giving speeches, visited by members of the royal family on each day, the queen mother and the prince consort, though not the queen herself. Prizes were awarded for many different categories of cows, horses, pigs and goats. A special mention in the press talks about a new ‘contraption to measure the pulling strength of a horse’ being demonstrated. Amidst all that was my grandfather, two months before his 23rd birthday, with bull Adolf on a leash. And won first prize.

Which fact ended up in the papers with a photo:

Klaas Zijlstra and the bull, Malieveld 25 July 1928, published in the Utrecht Daily on 27 July 1928, photographer and copyright unknown.

Look at that enormous and muscled beast, coming to shoulder height of my grandfather. And then imagine traveling and sleeping next to it for 5 days!

Tegen radio-gerucht
Raad van Amersfoort neemt maatregelen
De Gemeenteraad van Amersfoort heeft een verordening aangenomen, waarbij verboden wordt radio-luidsprekers in werking te hebben met geopende deuren of vensters.

Is dit waarom je bij rampen ramen en deuren gesloten moet houden alvorens de regionale radio aan te zetten voor verdere instructies? Tegen geluidsoverlast?

De krant waar het in stond had trouwens wel een probleem met focus en branding: het heette Het Ochtendblad van de Avondpost.

Earlier this week I started reading an ebook and was a bit irritated because the book did not show me a table of contents. This seems to be a regular thing in ebooks. Already earlier I have complained here about why ebooks, or perhaps mostly e-readers, make so little use of the affordances of digital files.

ePUB files are really XML in zipped archives. Since I left Amazon and the Kindle reader behind, all my ebooks are ePUB files. XML means that the files are machine readable and highly structured. That opens up possibilities to manipulate them.

I used Claude Code to ask a few questions about ePUB files and how they are treated by e-readers. E-readers deal differently with the information in an ePUB file. They may load a table of content into a local database, and use that to allow navigation, or ignore various pieces of information in the XML altogether.
For fun, I asked Claude Code to check the XML file of the ebook I was reading earlier this week, to see if it actually contained a table of contents that was just not shown to me in my reader. Turns out it did.

I also asked it, if it would take a lot to extract a table of contents from an ebook. It doesn’t, so I now have a first script that finds the table of contents if present, or builds one from the headers in the ePUB’s XML if not. The php script saves it to a markdown file that I can then use in my book notes, to group my thoughts and annotations.

In my Kobo reader, and in my Calibre reader the ToC information that the ePUB file provides outside the regular content of the book (NCX or xhtml), is accessible through the reader’s interface, but not part of the reading experience itself. I generally like my ToC to also be presented in the book, like it is in a paper one, and I actually prefer it not at the start as is usual but at the end, near notes, references, and literature lists, to have all the book’s metadata together to glance at. For that a ToC must be not separate from the book’s content, but within it. It would need to be in the ‘spine‘, the part that is presented for reading by readers.

If I annotate or highlight in a book, those are kept by an ereader separate from the book and refer to specific points inside the XML (through canonical fragment identifiers, CFI). You can alter an e-book, it’s XML after all, but that would shift the position of content fragments, and existing pointers from annotations and highlights would then point to the wrong lines in a book.
So if I add a ToC, grabbed from the existing metadata or constructed, inside an e-book, my preference to having it at the end is actually useful. Because if I add it to the end, it will not shift anything I may have annotated or highlighted already, messing up the pointers in the annotation file.

Next to extracting a ToC I’m also thinking about extracting other meta-information (like indexes, references, lists of images or tables) but a first glimpse into some ebooks suggests that those are not usually listed in the Manifest of an ebook, so would have to be constructed from clues inside the book.
However it will help me read non-fiction non-linearly if I could extract such things, e.g. the figures and tables present. It seems to me a number of such steps should be straightforward from the structure of an ePUB file, others need a parser to extract the right information and shape in a useful form, but still can be done with regular scripts (e.g. show me the first and last two paragraphs of a chapter to get a notion what it talks about), yet others do need a (local) LLM, e.g. to summarise each section of a book separately. I’ll see how far I can get, and learn about the ePUB format along the way, with deterministic code first to extend my personal and local toolkit on my computer.

Update 12-04-2026: I now have a script, that I run in my browser, which allows me to select an ebook from my Calibre library, and then explores it w.r.t. the table of contents, reference and literature sections, and images, and also pulls in the first and last few paragraphs of a chapter (which let’s me explore what a chapter is about, Adler style). All that gets turned into a markdown file that is then put in the corresponding book note in my Obsidian vault using the right template.

Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF?

In these days of needing to assume anything you encounter is machine generated unless proven to be human made, we continuously have to apply a Reverse Turing test: do I have enough indications to assume something was created by a human.

When I first wrote a Reverse Turing page I mentioned much the same things as Terence Eden does about vouching for other people to be human authors.

Not sure if having a machine readable file makes the right point here though, ironic as it is. Blogrolls, webrings come to mind too, because Long Live the Author.

One element I think we’d need to contemplate is to not just list, but also provide URI’s to some supporting evidence. Expose the depth of a connection. Only met at a vouching party countersigning your credentials, or two decades of in person and online encounters and proof thereof are different in depth and quality, and may well impact how the Reverse Turing test turns out for others perusing your human.json file.

An excellent post by Michael Taggart on how it felt to him to make a much needed bit of code with the help of Claude Code. The results worked, but he hated how it made him feel. He explores those opposing outcomes without trying to resolve the tension. Much in here that I recognise from my own experiences, as well as what I see others do and how they talk about it. Towards the end he talks about ‘the real monster’ here, and I think that is the right frame: we have created a technology monster once more, and Smits’ monster theory (2003) is a tool to bring to bear again. Where will we adapt the monster to our tastes? Where will we shift our cultural understanding of ourselves and the world to make room for the monster? Once we’re done embracing it until the bubble bursts, or rejecting it outright no matter what.

I hated writing software this way. Forget the output for a moment; the process was excruciating. Most of my time was spent reading proposed code changes and pressing the 1 key to accept the changes, which I almost always did. I was basically Homer’s drinking bird.

Michael Taggart

Good blogpost on how ‘speeding up’ code production (x lines committed this week, yay!) by using AI, will likely cause more trouble in an organisation. Because the theory-of-constraints bottleneck in an organisation will never be the speed and volume of writing code.

For non-coders making personal tools, this is I think different.

When you optimise a step that is not the bottleneck, you don’t get a faster system. You get a more broken one.

Andrew Murphy

My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems.

Since 2007 the Royal Library has been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My blog, even though it is one of the oldest still maintained in the Netherlands, never was part of that effort. Mostly because it’s not very visible as a Dutch blog, as it is mostly written in English and resides on a .org domain (when I registered zylstra.org, private persons could not yet register .nl domains, only companies could). At an Internet Archive event organised by the Royal Library last year September I asked about archiving and they told me how to suggest my website for archiving.

Late last January I received a message that my website would be included in their archives from now on.

What followed were several test-runs with their harvester Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive. I wondered about how some of my website’s peculiarities would be dealt with by the harvester. Not every posting is listed on my site for instance, although each does have a direct URL. The years’ worth of weekly notes for instance are not listed in this site. Also many postings are never shown on the front page, and if you page through postings on the front page you will never encounter them. This is true for categories of posts like books, photos, and day to day topics. I discussed this with the web-archivist, who ran some tests. My week notes seemed to be included, but the pagination of the category of day to day stalled out at 180 pages, although there were more still.

To my surprise they also ran into volume limits. Apparently because of ‘bycatch’, things they archive from other sites because I reference them or embed them. In the past few years I have stopped embedding things, like photos, except for my slides, which are hosted on a separate domain I have registered. While it was normal that a site’s additional catch is larger than the site itself, for my site it was very different from what they were used to.
First they limited bycatch to 20GB in a test, and they ran out of space, then they set it at 40GB in a test, and still ran out of space. Raising the limits further did not help. In the end they decided to harvest just what is on my zylstra.org domain and not include any bycatch at all. Which is completely fine by me, precisely because I’ve made the effort to bring all kinds of external content ‘home’ to this domain.

Nevertheless it did surprise me that bycatch turned out to be a problem, as they are using a tool the Internet Archive itself uses too. I asked for some examples of the bycatch. They told me it wasn’t even possible to dump a URL list from the bycatch into a spreadsheet as it hit the maximum number of rows (around 65k iirc). I did get some of the URLs that contributed bigger volumes of bycatch. To my surprise I did not even recognise the links, except one.

One was obvious, 2800 attempts to harvest a page on live.staticflickr.com, as I link a lot to my Flickr hosted images, although I no longer embed them but have local versions on this domain.
Others were not obvious to me at all, theguardian.tv, vp.nyt.com and various content delivery networks. I link to none of them in this site. I do link to The Guardian, about 100 times, and to the NYT about 40 times, and I suppose if the harvester follows those links it will find additional material there that explains the bycatch more fully, if it harvests all the targets I link to too.

If that is the case, that it harvests everything I’ve linked to, then it is the long history of this blog that is the issue and makes the harvester hit its limits.

There are some 20.000 external links in this blog’s articles, as far as I can quickly estimate based on a full content export I made this week.
It basically means that if the harvester attempts to harvest all those links and what resources they include, it adds a number of pages to the archive, roughly equivalent to the current archive itself.

A weblog embraces what the world wide web is, a bunch of links to other websites. The name weblog says it. A web-log is a curation hub for web readers, pointing out other interesting stuff, and not trying to keep you here too long. Over 23 years of blogging yielded some 20.000 links to other websites. In terms of linking a blog becomes the web itself as much as it becomes its author’s avatar in terms of its content given enough time.

From now on my site will be updated in the Royal Library’s archives every year on March 5th.

The facade of the Royal Library in The Hague, photo by Ferdi de Gier, license CC-BY-SA ]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/on-harvesting-for-the-royal-library-or-how-a-blog-breaks-the-archive/feed/ 2 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/a-rising-new-era-of-personal-tools/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/a-rising-new-era-of-personal-tools/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:45:34 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26288

At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them.

While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as a group, in this case by creating your own tools to get there.
The power of finding new agency was felt and expressed by quite a few, and played a role in a good number of sessions too.

When I first encountered computers, in the early 1980s, creating your own stuff was the norm. It was almost the only option. Making the machine work for myself. Like software to keep my ham radio logs and print QSL cards.
These days I run a good many smaller and larger personal pieces of tooling on my laptop. Things like making it easy to search by date in my photos on Flickr, or posting to my website from my internal notes, or from within my feedreader.
Things that reduce friction, speed things up, reduce dependency on external systems.

Vibecoding, and especially the Claude Code style of vibe coding, is bringing people to create their own tools, who weren’t able to do so before. A pool of latent needs they can now tap into on their own.

Some I know are really now learning how a computer works under the hood through their vibe coding. Testing the limits of their machines, finding out how fast local stuff can be. Discovering the power of APIs, the utility of cron jobs, and learning how to run their own VPS or local servers.
Others are creating little tools that work the way they want. An app to present books from their collection in that one specific way just so. A mobile app for public transport built on your own existing commute patterns and nothing else. Apps pulling in data from several sources and presenting them in one interface that likely only makes sense to themselves.

Tools built by people realising they are pretty predictable to themselves, and that such highly localised and specifically contextualised predictability now lends itself to automation by the intended user themself.
Tools, in short, where, access to and control over data lies fully with the user, where applications are views on that data (and multiple apps use the same data), and interfaces queries on the data. Along the lines of Ruben Verborgh’s 2017 article “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralised Web“ but then way more personal. The decoupling that is possible between data, applications and interfaces is even more powerful when you can do them all three for yourself. And then mash them up in any which way you want.

Vibecoding is allowing people to jump the barriers to entry to that. And judging by the stories they share, it feels like pole vaulting over them, not just clearing the barriers. That energy then propels them on to do more.

Over the past months I’ve also heard regularly how people are cancelling paid subscriptions to various online services, and switching to their personal tools that fit their use case much more precisely.

There are many ethical, political, and societal issues with much of the gen AI world, and how models come about, and how corporate vendors exploit and leverage their power.
Yet, where these things are not just consumed but used locally as a leg-up to a different level of self-reliance, it looks quite different. Something is brewing it feels like.
A shift, and I’d love to see more people explore and extend their own agency with such tools.

A simple ‘zine folded from an A4 paper provides six small pages, including the front and back. That forces you to be to the point.

I thought of a posting I wrote a little over a year ago, about how personal knowledge management is personal in three ways, and that generally you should always take the P in PKM even more personal than you’re already doing.
Three points to bring across sounded short enough to lend itself for a message in a zine.

The P in PKM is 3 fold personal. (jouw = yours in Dutch)

First, it’s your personal system. You take it with you. It enables and anchors your personal autonomy, and allows you to own your own learning path

Second, it’s your personal knowledge, building on your own curiosity and interests, with your associations, in your language. Your personal network of meaning.

Third, it’s your personal system. Your emergent structures, following your logic, stemming from your personal methods and workflows.

Personal KM is way more personal than you think. And still more.

I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.

One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.

Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.

Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.

Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.

In the past few weeks I’ve been diving into the online genealogical open data that is available, triggered by a conversation with Y about some of her schoolwork that deals with ancestry and namesakes.
In parallel E did her own deep dive, with some vibe coding assistance, working her way to transform her WordPress site into a static website. This included new workflows to be able to post directly from her notes and note taking apps across multiple devices.

The contrast between the two efforts stands out to me. That contrast is the direction of the arrow of time.

It is fascinating to see the patterns from historic traces my ancestors have left behind, and the stories that emerge from them. I’ve seen wealth, poverty, crime, war, disease, entire careers in the stories spread out over 275 years and more. It is easy to loose oneself in some more data, to find if I can add one more generation further back in time to the overview. The challenge increases as you progress: every generation there’s by definition double the number of people to find (unless you stick to one particular paternal or maternal line and don’t branch out to siblings at all). Finding previously undiscovered connections gives a little kick, similar to weaving a new connection in the now. Yet it yields nothing in terms of the now. No new agency, no new perception of identity, no new capabilities moving forward, no new (creative) artefacts for others to build upon or enjoy. Despite the fascinating stories I uncovered and the more nuanced sense of my family’s history I acquired.

E’s effort, of similar duration and intensity, is way more forward looking. She reduced dependencies on dynamic tools, increased the speed of her website, and learned a lot along the way, such as using git, and automating workflows that involve her devices, her VPS and remote services. She acquired new capabilities and understanding when it comes to creating one’s own digital autonomy. Something she was already helping others with, and now has put a more solid understanding underneath. She made it easier for herself to express herself on her website, reducing the friction in getting her own stories and writings out. New confidence in executing on ideas she already had for a long time. Her side interest is forward looking, constructive, activist.

My father after his (early) retirement mostly spend time on things that were looking into the past. Genealogy in the 1990s, collecting educational resources and material from the early 1900s, the local historic society of the village he was born.

E and I have often remarked how important it is to us to have friends and connections across different age groups, not be stuck in our own cohort and/or older. I have a sense that the side interests you spend time on and their direction of perspective, their arrow of time, help determine if that is easier or harder to do.

The framing is important here too. You can look at internet technology and say you want to go ‘back’ to the way some of those tools were in the 1990s and the zeroes. Or you can say, how can I use the key affordances and principles of what worked before to create something that allows new agency, that can help construct what comes next?

I think I prefer my side interests, and have for most of my life, with the arrow of time pointing forward.

It turns out that in my previous search for my oldest findable namesake I was barking up literally the wrong tree. I am named after my maternal grandfather (born 1903), and his paternal line has several men named Anton (my first name) in a side branch, originating from his great uncle in 1803 (and his namesake was his godfather it seems). That line however is not also the source of my (and my grandfather’s) second name Arnold.

Trying to extend the ancestral wheel for Y, at first I could not get beyond my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandparents and there were no Anton’s to be found there. His mother’s father was named Johannes (born 1835), and his mother’s maternal grandfather was named Cornelis (born 1796). Not having names of parents in turn makes it hard to find siblings. When I then found the names of Johannes’ parents, Hermanus (born 1794) and Johanna, at first that did not bring an Anton to light either.

Dutch family names have been introduced in the early 1810s under Napoleonic rule. Some families came up with something that connected to their profession, locality, or how they wanted to be adressed (I’ll call myself King, ha! Baker! ‘From Smallville’!) Some thought it would be temporary and done away with after the French rule ended, hence family names like Bornnaked. Some already had a form of family name, e.g. based on the farm they lived at.

The Hermanus born 1794 would have been too young to register a family name, and it would have been his father who did. But his father would have been born around 1750-1775, and if there was a pre-existing family name then the spelling could be fluid over several decades, especially if a family moved around between different municipalities. There also can be differences in spelling between church records and civic records. Indeed it turned out that what settled as the family name Meere, was also written down as Meré, Merée, Marré and Marre describing the same people, dates and events. I also came across Meeze several times, which is more likely a transcription error when records were digitised. That way I found both the 1794 Hermanus’ grandfather also named Hermanus, born around 1740, and a son named Anthonie Arnoldus for both of them. With the spelling of those first names, I could then search out more people with the same name.

Now I do have a clear timeline for my namesake, where previously I thought I did if a tenuous one.

Hermanus Meere (b. ca. 1740) had a son Anthonie Arnoldus (1764-1832). He named one of his sons Anthonie Arnoldus (1799-1865) His other son Hermanus (1794-1845) named one son Johannes (1835-1911), and another Anthonie Arnoldus (1837-1870). Johannes’ daughter Theodora (1864-1950) named her son Anton Arnold (1903-1969, my direct namesake), after her uncle, great uncle, and great grandfather. The spelling of the names changed here, losing their religious connotations. There is a story my mother told me that I connected to her parents, but perhaps is connected to her father’s parents given the change in spelling of names: that the couple came from different religious denominations, and that when both reverend and pastor after the wedding came asking about whether their future children would be registered as part of their flock, they decided it would be neither.

An overview of the Anthonie Arnoldus and one Anthonia Arnolda I could find:

]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/not-that-anton-the-other-arnold/feed/ 0 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/ys-ancestral-wheel/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/ys-ancestral-wheel/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:50:19 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26244 The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the initials and dates of those who carried the same name. Y is not just named after her maternal grandmother, but she was too, and her maternal grandmother was too. The line stretches back 6 generations to 1817 that way. Y and I followed the trail in the open online archives, and found out that the line actually stretches to one more maternal grandmother as namesake, which gets us to 8 generations and the mid 1700s.
The question where my first name came from brought us to my maternal grandfather, his great uncle, and his godfather.

By then I had quite a bit of information jotted down, and wondered about storing and structuring, or visualising it in some way. As could be expected there is a machine readable data format for genealogical data, GEDCOM. It was created in the 1980s by the Mormon church, for whom tracking genealogy is connected to some of their core beliefs. As such the data format is heavily centered on nuclear families as opposed to individuals and their lineage. GEDCOM is flat text which promises that it can be read by self created parsers. Searching for a genealogical software tool to make data entry easy, there’s no shortage of paid-for online services, and there’s of course the Mormon run FamilySearch. Local software all looks and feels as if it is 20 years or more old. There isn’t much that is FOSS and can run on a present day Mac. I settled on using GRAMPS, a FOSS project originating in 2001, but with the latest release November last year, and available for Mac too. It’s written in Python, uses a database, and exports in GEDCOM and XML, and it seems to have an API too.

I entered the information I already collected, and then started adding from the open online archives. My father in the early 1990s researched mostly paternal lines. Pre-digitally that was somewhat logical and easier. Historic documents are mostly focused on men, and branching families meant having to visit multiple church and civic archives adding quite a lot to the workload. Online archives offer search over transcribed archive documents, and cover the entire country.

It still costs time, but over the course of a few days I’ve been able to identify all of Y’s ancestors 6 generations deep (early 1800s, 64 ancestors in the 6th generation), and partly up to 9 generations deep (512 ancestors). This allows looking back some 300 years to the early 1700s, and in a few rare cases to the 1650s.

The GRAMPS software provided this visualisation of Y’s ancestors as a wheel around her. Y is at the center, each ring reaches another generation back. The light blue ring is the last fully complete one, beyond that I haven’t searched for everything yet, and not everything is available online either. First names of living persons removed.

Last week I wrote about the search where my first name Anton came from, beyond being named after my maternal grandfather Anton Arnold Bast (1903-1969). I concluded it came from my grandfather’s great uncle, Anton Link who lived from 1803 to 1881.
I also mentioned that finding anything further away than the early 1800s was likely impossible, because, as my father was told when he searched in the 1980s/1990s, the relevant archives in Germany were destroyed during WWII.

The various Basts from 1800-1850 I found in public archives and my namesake Anton Link were born, lived, married, and died in the German village Ransbach, although they also lived, married and died in the Netherlands during those same years.
Ransbach is a small village, between 1000 and 2000 people in 1800-1850, in the old County Nassau in current Germany. It has a Wikipedia page, mostly on account of being old (at least mid 14th century), and having a history of producing ceramics. The Wikipedia page is unremarkable, but one line caught my eye. A single reference under ‘Literature’ to Horst Theisen: Ortsfamilienbuch Ransbach-Baumbach 1550-1930. 2. Bände. Weißenthurm: Cardamina 2019; ISBN 978-3-86424-469-8. Ortsfamilienbuch, means book of family names in the village, and the title suggests it goes back to 1550? Would it have more information on my maternal ancestry? A content overview online even stated that it included people who had moved from Ransbach to the Netherlands.

The publisher has a website, with an online shop with books of local names for many German communities. So I ordered the book, almost 1400 pages in two A4 sized tomes, and took delivery of it yesterday.

A long list of names from a small village.

It is based on local church records (mostly the catholic church), from the mid 17th century onwards, the civic register from 1818 onwards, and builds on tax records and court records for the period 1550-1723. The latter come from the state and federal archives in Koblenz and Wiesbaden (not Cologne where my father inquired). The information for people who moved between Ransbach and Netherlands, or settled there, is based on the same online public archives I already consulted myself, making it easy for me to find the right ancestors in this book of local family names.

For my grandfather’s ancestors the book adds more details, such as exact dates of birth, marriage and death that the Dutch archives didn’t have. It also provides details on one more generation back in time. Born around 1750 they were the ones who came to settle in Ransbach, so the book doesn’t provide further details than that.

And then there is the information of my original namesake Anton Link. His parents, Hermann Link (1771-1844) and Anna Maria Bleyer (no dates) are listed as ‘wandering around Ransbach’ so apparently living rough, despite having 6 kids. His paternal grandfather and further paternal and maternal ancestors however are traceable much further into time, and seemed to have been wealthy enough to leave documented traces. All the way back to 1575, with fascinating glimpses of their lives from tax and court documents. Mentions of building and selling homes, a fistfight at a wedding, being listed as having 2 horses, a fine for grazing their cows on a field without permission of the land owner, renting a kiln to bake pottery, lending and claiming back sums of money or owing them.
No further Antons though, just this single one in the Link ancestry.

So there’s me, named after my grandfather who was born in 1903, in turn named after his great uncle born a century before him in 1803. And no Antons before or in between.

The church records in the Ransbach book provide the key. As mentioned Ransbach was predominantly catholic, and the church not just registered parents but also godparents. Anton Link’s godmother Anna Elisabeth Bleyer probably is his mother’s sister. And his godfather, who seems to be her fiancee at that moment is named Anton Hirtenjohann, born in Heinsberg around 1775. Curiously if I look for Anton Link’s godfather and godmother, despite not finding immediate evidence, I do come across a mention of both first and last names in the right decade as a married couple, where Anton Hirtenjohann is seemingly listed as Anton Arnold Hirtenjohann. Previously I concluded that my and my grandfather’s second name Arnold comes from somewhere unknown (no other Arnolds I came across at all, and Anton Link was named only Anton), yet here Anton and Arnold are again used together. If Anton Link’s godfather is the source of both my first names, I wonder what stories carried those two names forward in the Bast family for well over a century?

More exploration is perhaps in order around my second name, with uncertain outcomes. But I find it amazing already that all of this was traceable from home.

Wouter talks about the weak ties across the years that in hindsight turn out to be key in making a next step, changing course or enter new fields. Never burn bridges he concludes.

I never applied for any of my jobs or roles. At one point I have written some application letters but that never yielded anything, and I learned not to bother with them. Most of the roles I have had didn’t exist before I filled them. My first job I got because my employer saw my volunteer work on a side interest of mine in a different context and asked if he could pay me to do that elsewhere. Then one of their clients hired me to continue some other work inside their own organisation. Another company made a cold sales call to me in that role, but ended up hiring me instead. When I quit my last job, some clients left with me although that wasn’t my doing. I also brought that former employer along to a new client of mine where they then stayed on when I was done. The past two decades of being self employed and then later also an employer myself have been similar. I’ve done high trust complex change projects for people I already knew for years before and had never approached commercially until they reached out. I’ve come to trust that side interests, side activities, conversations and going to fringe events to see who I might meet and what gets discussed there, over time will yield interesting work.

A few years ago I was asked to talk about my ‘career path’ at my old university. Often such talks by others present a linear path created out of clear ambition and goals. Instead I shared that I probably have had half a dozen of conversations in my life that in hindsight turned out to be pivotal in my work. Such as an off-hand remark in a conversation over coffee in Austria that has turned into what is now well over 15 years of work in open data, digital ethics, and data governance. I titled that talk What is it you do again?, as the question pops up regularly. I think the answer has been and is ‘interesting things that happen to cross my path’, and ‘going various places so that more things might cross my path’. Burning bridges is indeed not part of that approach.

Never blow up your bridges. If you manage to build a couple, you can always cross them—and if needed, retrace your steps.

Wouter Groeneveld

In the past weeks I frequently don’t get any results when searching for someone I met inside LinkedIn (the website, or the mobile app). Yet, when I search for them online generally, I get the link to their LinkedIn profile as the very first result.

Another notch against the utility of LinkedIn.