Auteur: Wim

Kunnen schorpioenvliegen steken?

In tegenstelling tot wat Nature Today hier beweert, kunnen schorpioenvliegen wel degelijk steken. Niet met die vervaarlijke stekel op hun achterlijf inderdaad, maar na een weekje veldwerk in het zweet des aanschijns kan ik stellen dat ze mij behoorlijk prikken en vervelende jeukende bulten bezorgen. Net hun snuit dus, net als dazen eigenlijk, doen daar qua gedrag ook wel wat aan denken. Ik ben benieuwd of iemand mij iets soortgelijks kan posten, want tot nu toe lees ik dat het onschuldige beestjes zijn, maar ik heb het idee dat iedereen gewoon elkaar zit na te praten en nooit eens even goed zijn nek of hoofd of achterbeen heeft uitgestoken naar deze beesten.

Ecuador

Octobre 2019 Pien and I went for a full month of sightseeing in Ecuador! First spent two days Quito, which we found

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of little interest: Just an endless ocean of houses with barely any centre. After a day we descended to the Amazone bassin. A six hours busride took as halfway, were we made a two days stop at San Isidro Lodge after which we then dived into Napo river area of the Amazone bassin. Already at arrival at Ecuador there was an upcoming protest against a new government restriction to the subsidizing of petrol. Returning to Coca the situation was aggravated, with roadblocks everywhere, “poor peasant” riots (orchestrated and financed by the transport sector), and crowds with litteraly spears and sticks in hand riotting the streets of the main cities, but also Coca. Of course we as tourists tended to stay away from riots, but roadblocks could put a stop to our travelling plans through the Andes. We figured we’d better switch destination and visit Peru first, also Andes after all. So we visited Lima and Cuzco and then the Inca site of Machu Picchu. We had some lovely days up North from Lima near Huaraz and could still make a tour around the Galapagos archipel as well. We spent beautiful time together and for me the biggest discovery was how kind all the Ecuadorian and Peruvian people have been to us.

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Made my own wine


2017 I did a second round of harvesting and bottling. The endresult is a bit uncertain: I may have add too much sugar to make it ripe towards a great wine. Received mixed comments ranging from “nice!” to “where’s the sink? “. Lot of bottles though, 38, twice as much as in 2016…

2016 was a splendid autumn for grapes in Holland! Read how I processed 16 bottles from two city gardens.

  

Idea to capture identification keys

I was walking on the banks of the Allier river in the Auvergne, France, when I heard a whirring sound in the reed just next to me.
In spite of all my education and time spent in identifying animals, I had to admit i could not even tell whether this species was a kind of toad or a kind of cricket… Then it popped in my mind that it should by now, I’m talking 1998, very well possible to just grab my microphone, record the sound, and within an instance let the speaker from the laptop in my backpack tell me the right name of that creature! All in between steps are already developed in this IT era, it was just a matter of connecting it all together. An idea was born.

In the years from then on I scoped to the topic of converting from dichotomous keys to multi-acces keys, and devoted time to learn developing dynamic web pages with Oracle Apex. I realized the idea forms a nice crossroad between all my time spent in biology and all my time spent in computers. And the use of Apex confined to elements I was already familiar with: setting up data models, working with Visual Basic and Oracle PlSql programming.

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