Koop Daniels (1948-2016)

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

I was attending an awards ceremony on Thursday when I got a text from my wife, telling me my father-in-law had just had an hemorrhagic stroke.

A strong and healthy man, about to turn 68 years old, he’d been sawing baseboards and working in the garden before simply falling off his chair, to never get up again. He was quickly brought to the hospital, where he was in a coma for a couple of days, before passing away on Sunday afternoon. We are all extremely sad, of course, but when death happens so quickly there’s also a sense of utter bewilderment. It’ll take a while to catch up with reality.

It feels weird to share weeknotes at a time like this, but I still will, if only for the fact that my father-in-law was a ‘lists guy’ too. So before last week was cut short by more important matters, I…

• Wrote a new column for KIJK about the passing of time, appropriately.

• Chatted with Teun Dubbelman about stopping my HKU teaching activities. I told him I’d been getting too busy with my other projects, and that my general writing classes (aimed at improving the students’ research papers) are too far removed from my prime interests. Teun was very sympathetic to my considerations, which I appreciate.

• Went to Two Tribes, working on some marketing stuff and trying to get back into RIVE’s storyline, which I really should start finishing right around now.

• Got together with Sytze Schalk, talking about the plans he has for his fictional world, especially about appropriate storytelling formats. I’ll be mentoring Sytze on the literary side of things, and this was our first official session.

• Visited writer Nelleke Noordervliet, showing her the Geometry Girl app prototype. It was interesting to hear how important reader autonomy is to Nelleke: she wouldn’t hear of unlocking a book chapter by chapter, for example. If the reader wants to skip to the ending, she should be able to, like with paper books.

• Worked with Maurice at Codeglue, who just started a new round of programming on the app prototype. We began with some smaller issues.

• Continued writing and editing my elaborate blog post on scrolling and scrolling alternatives, which I’d hoped to finish, but couldn’t.

• #hobbydevved with Hessel, tinkering with my puzzle shooter prototype. There’s one big bug left after the previous week’s refactoring, but I narrowed things down a lot.

• Tweaked my TEDxDelft talk, and made slides.

• Attended the Kinder Media Awards event, as I’d helped judge the Gekko and Kameleon awards for apps based on childrens’ books. There were some interesting speakers… and then I got that text message.

Average step count per day: 9.300
Average staircase count per day: 12
Average sleep per night: 7:02
Average weight: 85,7 kg