Arthur Lugtigheid

I have been the victim of some prick using my email address in a spam run, due to which I started receiving about 20 emails per minute from various spam filters and/or mail servers, saying:

• Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter,
• Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender,
• Delivery Notification: Delivery has failed, or
• Returned mail: see transcript for details.

I was forced to filter out all these messages with procmail, using quite a rigid filter (cheers Ruben). As a consequence, there is a possibility that all email not directly addressed to me is deleted without further notice. If you are in doubt, or if you've sent me an email lately and you haven't received a reply - please send me an email on my gmail account, for which my usename is my last name.

Originally sung by Sonny & Cher in 1967, then covered by Buddy Rich (you can only watch the video if you register, because Americans don't like 50's clips of women "fighting" in their underwear), whose version was then slightly remixed into the 1998 version I'm talking about: The All Seeing I, which was originally made for Britney Spears (is she actually singing "blah blah" at 0:31?). However, the album version of the All Seeing I still rocks - it's amazing how this song stood the test of time. And as a bonus: the video clip is very, very cool as well!

And, well.. There's other versions of this as well. There's a clip of a band called the Screamers, performing it live, their "singer" screaming the song (I'm guessing that's where they got their name from). If anyone knows another version, please let me know. I'd be very interested to hear it.

Still one of my favorite songs: (And) the beat goes on - The All Seeing I.

The PhD is going well, I think - First experiment should be up and running before I leave for Christmas the 22nd. And I've been working on some new designs again, expect to see this website change soon. Again.

In case you missed it, today is "international talk like a pirate day":

• http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf
• http://www.pyrats.net/watch-movie.html

And in other news: Today will be t' day that you will forever remember as t' day that I finished me Master o' biological and cognitive psychology! And… Only 12 days port until I start in Birmin'ham!

There's a new series coming this fall; Pushing Daisies. Now here's one to look out for - produced by the same team as "Big Fish", this series has it all; a very nice plot, snappy dialogues and a general Timburtonesque mystical style.

Plot, taken from Wikipedia:

Pushing Daisies is a "forensic fairy tale" that focuses on Ned, a pie maker with a mysterious ability to make the dead briefly live again. The gift is not without its complications, as if he touches this being once again, they'll be dead permanently. If he doesn't touch them at all within sixty seconds, they continue, but someone other than the deceased will die. It's a gift that he puts in good use to help a private investigator friend, Emerson Cod and his childhood spirit, the once dead Charlotte "Chuck" Charles.

First episode on TV: October 3rd, 2007. Leaked pilot now available from the interweb.

(And thanks to Bob for the tip)

Today, I'm publishing a small toolbox for Matlab which enables you to run simple adaptive staircase procedures. Its theoretical basics can be found in Levitt's 1971 influential article titled "Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics". Its code flow is inspired on code previously written by Dirk Beer.

More information about the toolbox itself can be found on the project page.