The big M&M test

M&M's are the ideal counting-candy, because they do not only come in different colours, they also contain chocolate! And to make this test more extensive then the previous tests, I counted both the regular version (brown bag) and the peanut version (yellow bag).

[ in total I had half a kilo of M&M's to count... ]

With and without peanuts mixed...

The results had some surprising elements:

Regular version: 280 pieces

Brown: 42
Blue: 46
Yellow: 26
Green: 36
Red: 83
Orange: 47

Peanut version: 111 pieces

Brown: 36
Blue: 27
Yellow: 16
Green: 15
Red: 17
Orange: 0

In both the peanut as in the peanutless bag, the colours were not equally distributed. In the regular version of the M&M's, the colour Red had a very dominant presence in the sample. This colour was almost in there twice as much as any other colour (which were approximatelly equally distributed).

[ with yellow being the least popular of all colours... ]



For the M&M's with a peanut, you can conclude that the Brown and Blue colour was in there twice as much as the Yellow, Red or Green sweets. And the most shocking thing of all: there are no peanut M&M's in the colour orange!!!

No orange M&M's visable on the peanut package...

After some research on the internet, I found the American M&M website to fully understand my counting-obsession. For both the regular M&M's as for the peanut version they have listed the to be expected colours in a bag in percentages.



Besides the surprsing confession that some colours are more popular than other, I see something far more disterbing on their site: Orange M&M's with peanut!

[ I really should write an angry letter to the Dutch M&M makers... ]





Oh, something else, M&M's used to have a slogan: "Melts in your mouth, not in your hand". Well, I needed to test this, and I have to admit, it is pretty true. After holding some M&M's in a closed hand for a full minute, they were still intact.

[ only the blue M&M left a visable print on my hand... ]

But when I extended the test period to about five minutes, the chocolate inside the brighly coloured shell of the sweet started melting. This caused the sweet to 'cave-in' and break-up completely...

You need to be patient, but they do melt...

Queensday

One of the nicest things about Queensday can be found on the street on the day before Queensday. Many people are trying to sell stuff on the market during Queensday and the better the spot on the street, the more potential customers that will walk by your booth carpet. That's why people claim areas of the sidewalk by marking them with tape or crayons and writing the word 'Bezet' (occupied) in big letter.

[ and every year you find people that have trouble with the letter 'Z'... ]

I hope they did better in selling than they've done in writing...

Royal ribbon

Today, the day before Queensday, royal decorations (ribbons) are given to those who have serve their country well. My father has been working for the city council for many years (he recently stopped) and today he was given a royal 'thank you' for all his work.



He may now call himself 'Member of the Order of Orange-Nassau' and wear a brightly coloured ribbon...

[ or even a real medal on official occassions... ]

Congratulations dad!

The royal 'mark' of Orange-Nassau...

Goodbye dinner

Although most people are convinced I will be back to work on the Scopus project, my last day (a couple of weeks ago) was considered good enough an excuse to organize a dinner. And so I was sitting at a dinner table this night with all Amsterdams UCD employees.



Joy was so hospitable to invite us all to a home cooked dinner. After a remarkable start (see last part of this post), a delicious meal was prepared.

[ I still need to be told how much garlic there was in the garlic-orange soup... ]

During the dessert (homemade orange icecream) I was presented with almost 960 minutes of 'Muppets' and 'The Office' DVD's...

And not to forget: my very own Scopus poster!

I would like to thank everyone present for the lovely evening and the gifts. I would like to thank Joy and Clement in particular for their hospitability and the wonderful meal.



As I mentioned above, the evening started of in a very strange manner. The hostess had wounded herself in a spectacular way while preparing the dinner. [Exaggeration mode] With a huge, very sharpe knife she almost succeeded in separating the tip of her left thumb from the rest of her body... [/Exaggeration mode]



Luckily a very professional adminstered piece of band-aid could avert complete disaster.

How are things now Joy..?

Feeding time

Breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, Luncheon, afternoon tea, 4 o'clock sandwich, dinner and Supper... During the course of evolution, man has found a separate word for almost every eating moment. If you just keep your eye on the clock, you'd always find an excuse to eat something. You always do, just like I did last night.

[ and I was right on cue... ]

It's just after 0:00, time for a midnight snack

Happy box

The last couple of days a lot of books were delivered at our office. Most books were ordered online and were brought to our doorstep by a mailman or some delivery service person.



The sight (and smell) of books always make me happy, but the packaging of the latest shipment of books was responsible for some extra happiness...

Amazon.com, delivery with a smile

Candy count (2)

I have discovered a new hobby: counting candy. This time I choose dropstaafjes (color coated licorice pills). My assumption was that each color should have (about) the same amount of sweets in a bag.

[ or is one color more popular than another..? ]

The results of the count...

The results were a surprise to me:

79 black
51 red
46 yellow
45 blue
43 orange
37 white
29 green

In total the bag contained 330 dropstaafjes, but black was the most common color.

[ unlike my previous black-white experiment... ]



I really need to repeat this experiment. I refuse to believe that the differences between the color is as great as this in every bag. Luckily I do like these sweets, so eating lots of them is no problem.

Oh, just to be completely complete, I counted the below white siamese 'twin-sweet' as two separate sweets...

Looks more like a piece of chewing gum than a dropstaafje...

Couch potato

To finish a project I had to complete some work over the weekend. I was asked to come up with a proposal to organize and display information in a special way on a website. I had already spend some time behind the computer, trying to get it right, but I couldn't figure out how to group all the available information.



That was when I decided to go for an old low-tech solution. All the pieces of information that needed to be presented on the website were written down on small pieces of paper. I sat down on my couch and shuffled the pieces of paper around until I was satisfied.

Paper information architecture...

[ and I then quickly moved back behind the computer to work on it further... ]

Lost in translation

I just posted something in my Dutch blog, which is pretty hard to translate. I wrote about something that was funny in Dutch, because it rhymed, but in English, it does not rhyme if translated literaly.



I've been breaking my head over how to try and translate this for my English blog...

Dutch: Het groene boekje en het gele doekje

The best I could manage was: "The book is green, the cloth is to clean".



But this is not nearly as funny in English as it was in Dutch.

[ sorry about this... ]

Candy count

I was eating some candy a couple of days ago. The bag of candy contained white and black colored sweets. I had the feeling that the white candies were forming a majority, but how to check this? Well, very simple: you find out!



I bought a new bag of zwart witjes. Opened it at home and counted the individual sweets.

All the sweets from the bag...

In total there were exactly 150 pieces of candy in the bag. There were 123 white sweets and only 27 black ones.

[ that is approximately a 5:1 ratio... ]

To be more accurate, I really should run this experimenrt a couple of more times, but to be honest, I do not realy like this kind of candy...

[ fortunately there is more candy in this world that can be counted... ]

Goodbye cakes

From the responses to my previous post(er) I realized that me leaving the project yesterdag was somewhat of a surprise to many. Since I'm not a big fan of leaving, I'd rather go very quietly. Maybe this time I did it a little bit too quiet.



I did bring a whole shipment of deliciously small cakes, but wasn't in the mood to go round the office to hand these out. You then have to tell everyone that it's not your birthday, but that this time you are really leaving...

They are especially nice with the tea from the machine...

Today I am thinking about sneaking in the office on a friday afternoon and persay some people to get out of the office and have some drinks...

Thank you Scopus

As a contracter, you always know the day is coming when your time is up and you have to move on to new adventures projects. Well, today this day has come for me to say goodbye to my favourite project: Scopus.

[ again... ]



Several piles of paper on 'my' desk will be the last reminders of the work I've done in the last months.

Piles of paper UI specs

[ that and of course the cute little orange RSS button... ]



I hereby want to thank everyone from the Scopus team in Amsterdam and in Dayton for being able to be part of the team. This time I again had a great time and will miss you all.

The very best of luck with Scopus, and maybe until next time...


Ps. please make sure the UCD cookie jar never runs empty, and if you ever need a poster again, you can always call me do it yourself now..!

Timeless

Now I realize how often I look at my watch to tell the time. This morning I discovered that the battery of my time piece had stopped making the hands move.



[ my clock keeps insisting it's 01:16... ]

Frozen in time..?

I must get a new battery tomorrow, or I'd go crazy...

Secret message

A few weeks ago, someone hung up a brightly colored poster in our coffee corner. They had just launched a new product, and that was something everybody needed to know.

"NOW LIVE" the notice reminds us, with big bold letters, everyone is invited to check it out themselves...



That poster will never be the same for me. Today a colleague pointed a possible hidden message in that text.

A prediction to the outcome of Armageddon..?!

[ Thanks Clive Evil-C for spotting this... ]