Dylan Schiemann

On April 28th, I was in Amsterdam. After another wonderful brunch at the hotel and working on finishing the slides for my conference presentation, I spent my afternoon at the Van Gogh museum.

Not everyone is a Van Gogh fan, but I generally always have been because I was fascinated by the way his art form changed so drastically as did his sanity. One thing I learned was how to say his name properly rather than the American-ized “van-go”… instead it is van-gough, in a very Dutch cough-ish way.

I was very lucky in visiting the museum during this visit, because the visiting collection included much of the rest of his work including Starry Night. I was most fascinated by the fact that Van Gogh created mockups of most of his work, in the form of drawings and letters and journal entries. Why is this fascinating? Well, because it’s what web developers do today. Michaelangelo obviously did this with various sculpture drafts in working his way up to David, but it has never really occurred to me that painters did this as well with diagrams and drawings of what they were planning.

As is this case with most great museums, photography was not allowed so there’s not much for me to show.

For dinner, Peter, Nikolai and I had dinner with a local developer. The first place we met was not open, so we meandered around a bit until we found a surprisingly excellent Thai restaurant. We walked around for a while and found an interesting Belgian bar with eclectic American music, and then called it a night.