DIY in Leiden

Well, actually my dad was doing most of the DIY, but mum and I helped. Although I've been living here for over half a year now, I still didn't have any bookshelves, and so my books were also still in Etten-Leur. But my dad fixed that now. Well, I still have to move most of my books but at least there are some extremely nice shelves to put them on :)

Thanks dad!

PS today I also moved my surfboard to Katwijk, I nearly broke the key to the container but my board is in so soon I hope to surf some Dutch waves and the sweet people from the Apple Store emailed me that my MacBook should arrive on or before June 6!

Holiday!

Yesterday was another exciting but tiring day. At ten to eight in the morning I caught the train to Eindhoven to attend a lecture on Process Mining in a machine learning course. Exactly at 10 I arrived and fortunately it was a nice lecture (worthy getting up for), not too many really new things, but rather things I could link up to things I already knew. During my lunch break there was a short visit to the Apple Store to play with the new Macbook (they have some interesting effects in photobooth ;)). Luckily that morning exactly one had arrived at the store and it had been set up just half an hour before I was there (great timing!) and it's gorgeous! I'll tell more about it when mine arrives.

Then back to Tilburg to have a chat with the Master's student MITCH is supervising. Then back on the train to Leiden for my dance class (which was splendid as well). Right after that I caught the train back to Etten-Leur because I was going to join my brother today to go to the cinema, only he decided yesterday evening he'd rather go shopping in Amsterdam. Everything went fine until Roosendaal (10kms from home): I missed my connection, so I had to wait for half an hour, the next train however waited for the train from Brussels to arrive, so it was delayed for 15 minutes, resulting in me getting home at half past eleven. But I guess that's life.

Only two more days until sunny Formentera...and now I'm off to dinner :)

Salt and vinegar crisps

Yay!!! I found a so-called expat shop in Leiden that sells all kinds of typically British things, most of which I'm not interested in, but they have Salt and Vinegar crisps! It's not cheap, but flying out to the UK just for crisps would be more expensive so this means I will have unlimited access to crisps. And the shop is just around the corner even! I love Leiden!

More nice things today: I had a lovely walk through Leiden and I received a postcard from San Francisco :)

MacBook Hurry up!

Pff...why is it taking so long for my new MacBook to ship? The estimated delivery date is June 12...

Ah well, another thing to look forward to :)

Knackered

I know it's been a while since I updated my blog. But I've been pretty busy, at least the last few days. The beginning of last week wasn't too interesting to report on, just working, watching a film in the evening, chatting away a bit etc etc. On Friday we (the MITCH team) organised the first CATCH meeting at Naturalis. Hell, I didn't know that organising a symposium was so much work! But thankfully it all went well, we had managed to get two excellent speakers to talk about their fields of research, Dr. Eduard Hovy from the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California to talk about computational linguistics and Dr. Malcolm Scoble from the London Natural History Museum to explain to a bunch of computer scientists the difficulties of updating and making accessible taxonomic data. After the talks there were tours of the museum or the collection tower. The collection tower is usually not accessible because it contains all the vulnerable specimens that wouldn't survive displaying in the museum but that are so vital to taxonomic research. Even though the programme ran a bit late the tour guides still made sure they could tell everyone what they wanted to tell (which resulted in some groups returning from the tour half an hour later than scheduled, but everyone seemed happy). I'm happy that all went well.

On Sunday I went climbing with Mandy, Katie and Alerk. I borrowed my brother Frank's climbing harness, which is a very nice one and we climbed until we were really exhausted. I should definitely learn how to use my legs more, because I only feel it in my arms and shoulders right now. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because I got where I wanted to go (to the top ;) ) and upper body strength is good, but I think I might get ever further if I use more different muscles. Oh and if I get some stickies, because my feet were moving too much inside my trainers...

Anyway, I could do with doing nothing for a while, luckily I'm going on holiday next week. Leaving the wet, grey weather behind for a bit to go to sunny Formentera, woohoo!

Sunny Sundays

Today I really wanted to relax. But relaxing can also mean getting fun things done, and I happened to get a lot of things done:

- I slept until late
- I called my boyfriend (he got glasses and they look sooo sexy on him!)
- I uploaded some photos
- I booked my flights to San Francisco and upgraded my travel insurance
- I went to the beach and joined the surfclub (now I still need to get my board there)
- I completed level 3 of TR7
- I updated my blog!

Now I still need to do the dishes (yesterday's dishes, meaning every plate and piece of cutlery I own!), ah well, let's have some fresh pineapple first..

Housewarming Saturday

Yesterday I threw a tiny housewarming party because I've been living in Leiden for half a year now One advice, don't do these things when you're tired. I woke up way too early, had to do all my shoppings, managed to get a haircut, and my room looked like a bomb had exploded. Fortunately I managed to make it look more or less OK (they know me, so they were actually amazed at the tidyness). And we had fun with the Pole fitness DVD they gave me (along with another toilet brush, how many does one need! I already had two and only one toilet, a Sesame Street cdrom (that doesn't work on my Mac) 90 ft of orange banners and an embroidery kit (for when I get bored)), and the playstation dance mat and eyetoy (I think soon we'll have a playstation game at someone else's place because someone got very interested). It was a good day :)

Benelearn Ghent

I needed a few days to recover from this event, but here's a little account of my adventures :)

On Wednesday one of my co-workers and I arrived in Ghent awfully late because someone still had to pack his toilet bag (hint: I use my toilet bag to store stuff in I never use, so it wasn't me). So around ten (!) we met up in Ghent with Sander, also from Tilburg University, to have dinner. Fortunately the McDonald's wasn't the only place that still served food so I had some very nice Salmon in a restaurant that I forgot the name of, but it had a sign saying "Kitchen open". Afterwards we found a nice jazzcafe quite close the hotel (which was a monastery until a few years ago so I slept in the room of Sancta Felicitas, a female martyr, with a portrait of Jesus who's just to be crucified above my bed, very stylish).


Thursday was pretty OK, apart from the room where the conference was held being very, very cold, and dark. I'm not sure why they switched off the lights during presentations, maybe to not see the nervousness on the presenter's face? The lunch made up for it though (sandwiches with shrimps, woohoo! And also the lovely weather outside, so I even got sunburnt over lunch). Between the talks and the conference dinner I wanted to typeset my presentation (I'm using LaTeX and I had made a few changes to it) and I found out that it didn't work on Toine's laptop because he was missing a font or something, uhoh! But food was waiting for us, so I decided to postpone solving this until after the dinner. Which was very good, a very nice restaurant (a pity I nearly fell off the stairs when I came in, they could have put up warning signs), so unlike the previous conference dinner! After the dinner Ricardo (at least I think that's his name) dragged us to a salsa bar of which he knew the owner. The place was deserted, but 20 machine learning conference go-ers soon changed that :) So after some dancing with the Cuban guy and an Indian guy (at least I think he said he was Indian) I went back to the hotel via the Erpelsteeg ("Erpel-alley"). I decided not to spend time on finding out what was missing in that LaTeX install and downloaded a new version. Thank god that worked! So I could get to sleep at 03:30 :)



Friday I woke up around 7 because other people the hotel started to wake up. At 11:30 I gave my presentation, half asleep (the dark room didn't really help), so it wasn't my best presentation ever, and I felt a bit of an outcast in the only more or less applied machine learning session of the whole conference, but people seemed to be paying attention and I got a few good questions so that was nice. I also had a poster at the conference, but there wasn't a real poster session, my poster has just been up there for two days and during each break people could look at posters and ask questions. Usually I have my posters printed on A0, simply because I can, and then I have the biggest poster. This time I decided to be more modest and have it printed on A1, and now everyone had an A0 poster! AARRRGGG ! ! ! Ah well, people looked at it, found the Easter egg, said they liked it and proceeded to drink some more coffee. I wanted to be home a bit on time Friday evening so I took the 17:31 train from Ghent to Leiden (http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifvia Antwerp). I should have been home at 20:30, but we stood in a field 5 miles before Dordrecht for an hour because the train in front of us broke down. So I arrived in Leiden at 21:14, raced through the supermarket (thank God for supermarkets that are open until 10) and got home in time to watch LOST, exhausted, but I enjoyed a few good days in Ghent (and I'm certainly going back this summer, there's an exhibition by Wouter Deruytter until June 18 I'd love to see).



Lessons learnt:
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
- Don't trust other people's laptops (no offence)
- Finish presentation on your own computer before you go
- or get your own laptop (when are they going to release those new macbooks!!!)

P.S. More pics on flickr

May 7 (yes, late post)

But I just wanted to let everyone know I had a great day :)

Ghent

Lovely town, great food and a very nice jazzcafe...but some sleep now :)

Yay for more or less bank holidays!

Today it's Liberation Day in the Netherlands, so we celebrate our freedom (at least the people who at government institutions, others have to work and only get a day off once every five years). As it happened the weather was extremely good, better than Monday when it was pissing it down from 10:00 until 20:00. So I went to The Hague (got a new pair of Levi's jeans) and Scheveningen (beach!!). The beach was very, very crowded (even people swimming and the water is still freaking cold!) and besides sand castles built by children there were some marvelous professional sand sculptures. Oh yeah, and there were also American army vehicles and a pirate :)

Yay! New RAM!

In February I ordered an extra RAM module for my beloved 3 1/2 year-old iMac. The first module they sent me turned out to be broke, but these things happen with RAM. So I sent it back and this weekend I received a brand new module, and it's so good!! It's like having a brand new computer (that came with all your files and prefs!).

Instant Tea

Yes, tea is pretty much instant most of the time, just drop some tealeaves or a teabag in some boiling water, wait a while and tadaa!! By instant tea I mean these little bags with powder, like instant coffee powder. So today I found this new tea-stuff (mind you, I expected the box to be filled with real tea bags! although I should have known better since tea-pads have sprung into existence). Anyway, Indian Chai tea, manufactured by a Dutch tea-company. It smells funny (vanilla, I hate the smell of vanilla!), contains some powder milk, and spices like cinnamon and of course black tea. I'm not quite sure of the taste yet, the first sip is good, but a whole cup seems to much of this sweet stuff. Ah well, the free teacup I got with it is nice...