Bye bye love

Bye bye happiness
Hello loneliness
I think I'm gonna cry




Two weeks ago I found out that my '84 beetle would not make it through its yearly MOT. Basically the whole bottom is rotting away, quite common for Mexican beetles in the rainy Dutch climate. I can tell you, it hurt to have to let go such a wonderful car. I had bought this beauty two years ago, when I was going through some difficult period in my life, and it just cheered me up so much. It's such a joy to drive it: the look and feel of it (very comfy chairs!), the sound of the engine, the smell of it...it was just therapeutic to drive it. Whenever I was feeling a bit down, I would just go out and drive it for a bit and it would make me feel so much better. Of course the yellow strengthens this, but apart from that there is also the cheerful shape of a beetle, the relaxing lack of useless things on the dashboard and again, the most beautiful sound in the world, that of an air-cooled engine. But I don't have that anymore. Not for a while at least. Fixing it would have cost a fortune, and the same problem would come up again next year because it wouldn't cease to rust. So for now I've got nice memories and loads of pics of my beetle (and me) and someday I will drive a beetle again.

Trouble with usb-stick

So you are working on a conference poster on an ordinary Tuesday evening on your little brother and sister's Windows computer. Accidentally you forgot that you had locked your usb-stick (it has one of these little switches that floppies also used to have), so when you press Ctrl+S to save your work, Windows crashes, and an evening's work is gone.

On Wednesday you come home to your iMac. You plug in your usb-stick to redo the work you've done Tuesday evening. When you want to save your work on the usb-stick to take it to work the next day, it starts to shout that there's not enough disk space, because when you delete stuff via Mac it does not erase it, it just makes it invisible or something like that. So then you want to format the disk, and in Mac OS X you cannot format it in such a way a Windows computer can still read it. Fine, you decide to format it in UNIX style to plug it into your Linux machine at work. Then, believe it or not, Linux says: Bad media types ee/f8, probably non-MSDOS disk !!!

Whose idea was it to have different filesystems????

Grrr

So two weeks ago the battery of my laptop just died, my favourite pair of jeans are completely worn out and I can't run the new Tomb Raider game on any of the computers in my parents house because their videocards can't handle it. I usually play games on my laptop because it has a very nice configuration, but that's impossible now, and at home I have a mac, because that just works best for me. Although I have waiting for games to be ported to OS X...grrr...

Although it's finally sunny and really spring in the Netherlands, that does cheer me up a little :)

Opening new exhibition

Today the new exhibition "Conversations" was opened in Naturalis, the Dutch National Museum of Natural History. This exhibition is an unusual cooperation between the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Natralis, since museums do not often develop things together. This exhibition is quite experimental in the sense that artists have been invited to give their interpretation of the collection at the museum in the form of a piece of art, a very interesting approach, although I'm not sure yet what I think of the objects themselves. I think I need to get used to them a little bit, and lucky as I am, I can go there any day as I work there :)

The State Secretary of Art and Culture came to ritually bury an art object. So in front of the museum a 12 ft deep hole was dug, which of course had filled itself with water, and she had to throw in a big plaster head, for a splashy opening of the exhibition.

Oh and I forgot to take my camera, so no pics here, but if you're interested a visit to Naturalis is definitely worthwile..

Mmmmm

Yesterday I managed to fry a steak perfectly, without even consulting the "10 steps to a perfect steak" recipe. Wow!

New Toy!!!

Oh! Isn't it gorgeous! Now I just need to get used to the metal strings (hey! I couldn't help it that my previous guitar came with nylon strings!).

Census?

When I was visiting my boyfriend in Ireland last weekend the Central Statistics Office was distributing the forms for the 2006 Census. My BF's family was amazed that I had never heard of it, so after browsing the web for a bit I found out that the Dutch Statistics Office performed a virtual census in 2001 instead of a paper procedure. I wonder how reliable this virtual procedure is, but then again, if half the population inserts Jedi Master as religion the paper version will also not work, so I'm not sure how useful the results of these things are..

Killer prawns and oliebollen

Food can be dangerous, when I tried to crack the shell of a dead Irish prawn it cut me!!! But I'll survive, it's a merpel thing anyway, I always get hurt on some way while I'm on holiday.

Yesterday I made "oliebollen" here (Ireland!!), a traditional Dutch new year's eve snack, which we turned into a "night before Easter snack". I also found out that chocolate in oliebollen doesn't work (it wasn't my idea, some silly Irish person suggested it), so next time we'll just stick to the batter with raisins.

Now I'm going to look for some Easter eggs, byeeee!

Last blogpost for now

At 17:00 the conference will end, and already at four they will shut down the internet room. Tomorrow I will hopefully be in Venice, so no internet connection there, and on Sunday I'll be in Verona and travelling back to the Netherlands in the evening. And of course I'll be eating loads of ice cream :)

Ciao!

Conference Dinner

So you're in Italy and you expect some nice Italian food at the conference dinner. Guess what you get: meat, meat, meat and meat. Of course we're in Southern Tirol here, but please people, what's wrong with pasta?! I actually felt sorry for not being able to finish my plate but it was just too much, too fatty and too heavy.



Luckily we found a nice cocktail bar after the dinner. Where we had some very nice "Caipipesce Caipirosso" (basically a strawberry Caipirinha), "Sex on the Beach" (I wonder who came up with this name, when, and how) and "Long Island Ice Tea" (need I say more?). Actually, it's quite hard to find a pub that's open after 22:00 in Trento, the town is just deserted in the evenings. It's very strange...The cocktail bar was open until 02:00, which is reasonable ;)

Still alive...

...but too busy to post any interesting stories.

Iew!

Mmmmmm (2)

Well, actually this should be Mmmmmm (3) because it's already the third time I had hot chocolate here..This time Adam (left) and Davide (right) tried out the pure chocolate variant, while I stuck with the white hot chocolate...

Invited speaker: Kevin Knight

After the official opening of EACL 2006, invited speaker Kevin Knight entertained us with a very interested and well presented talk on the need to include linguistic structure in machine translation.


Not everyone is fond of the American style of presenting (I'm calling it American here because I've mainly seen Americans present like this, not that non-Americans don't present like this but I've mostly seen Americans look upon presentations as theatrical performances (or so it seems), perhaps it's because of Hollywood...). Anyway, not all the speaker's jokes are funny and everything, but it's better than a monotonically speaking person, who doesn't move his hands, doesn't walk around etc.

And instead of long boring formulae or full mathematical proofs ending in QED there was eye-candy, and eye-candy is good!

Tuesday evening

Yesterday evening we first attended the reception at the Castello del Buenconsiglio where we had lots of great snacks (I can particularly recommend the panna cotta, a desert with whipped cream and fruit compote).



After we had drunk all the wine at the castle we continued partying at a cafe not too far away from the castle :)

Day 2 of the workshops at EACL

Today I attended part of the ATEM (Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining) workshop where Caroline presented one of our MITCH papers (unfortunately I missed her presentation because it wasn't in the time slot I had expected it to be) and the rest of the day I attended the New Text workshop on Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources. I had no idea what to expect from it and it turned out to be very interesting. Although I'm too tired now to really tell you what it was all about, and most of you don't really care anyway...no offence..

I've also very much enjoyed listening to people's accents. Some accents are very hard to understand, and more interesting (and puzzling) than fun. But I also thoroughly enjoyed the absolutely fantastic pronunciation and word use of some British speakers, oh it's just so good!

Monday evening

MMMMMM

I can't upload any photos yet, but I just had the best hot chocolate for lunch (sorry Dublin). Lovely, thick melted white chocolate, just about the same substance as chocolate pudding mmmmmmmm....

I'm going there again tomorrow!

Update April 4: see the pic of the delicious cup full of cioccolata bianca!

Oh yeah...

And after walking around for quite a while here in the building I found out that the room where the workshop I want to attend is held is not in this building, but somewhere in town...

Italian women are moody..

At least the three I've met so far.

Yesterday evening I arrived at my hostel in Trento at 22:55. Check-in closes at 23:00 (I found out at the hostel, this valuable piece of information was not on the internet), but to the staff this means they want it to be closed and done at 23:00, so the door to the hostel was already closed. Luckily, I met someone who had called the hostel and got a code to open the door. So a very annoyed lady gave us some keys and sheets and we were off to our dorms. In my dorm I found the light switched on, and then a very annoyed middle-aged Italian lady in a green night gown. No matter how often I addressed her in English and explained that I had no idea what she was talking about, she kept telling me how annoying I was (at least, I think that's what she was saying). Fine. So then I brushed my teeth, put on my PJs and hopped in to bed and pretty soon the lady below me started snoring.
Around 1 a few Italians girls came in, pretty quietly so that was OK. What wasn't OK (according to the lady in the green night gown) was that they got up again at quarter to seven, so then I witnessed the Italian people being annoyed. You know that people are going to bed and getting up at different times in a dorm, damnit!! Ah well.

This morning I wanted to check in, pay my bill, you know. On the internet it said that they accepted credit cards. The lady behind the counter certainly didn't, and proceeded to be very annoyed that I didn't have the cash on me!!
At least the people at the conference are nice. And they have very nice pastries at the coffee breaks so I'll survive :)

Oh, back to the talks! Byeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

17:49 Update

The sun started shining two hours ago and all of a sudden everyone seemed a lot nicer. So now I've been able to pay the hostel bill and I got the codes to the door so I will be able to get in after 23:00, YAY!!!

I also find it great to see the streets fill up with people as soon as there are a few rays of sunlight visible...there are also queues at the Gelaterias right away...:-)