When I was an empoverished student I put my CV on a Dutch recruitment site, advertising my programming background. That was almost four years ago, and I never heard anything from anyone.
Yesterday I got an email, and pulled my CV from the site immediately (I’d forgotten it existed). This morning I had two phonecalls and [...]
A bunch of philosophy students are having a thesis review session. “Sorry, did you say it was about Taoism or Terrorism?”
My cycle route to work takes me through Spui, which hosts a second-hand book market every Friday. So I’ve started taking a half-hour on the way to browse. Last week turned up Grendel and a Mark Twain collected short stories, but this week I stumbled on something even better.
Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of [...]
Studying semantics doesn’t give you much to laugh at, most of the time. In fact, rather the reverse: being too aware of what words mean, you start to miss what people mean when they say them. Anyone confronted with “Oh, it’s funny because…” has probably just told a joke to a semanticist. But there are [...]
A couple of spams got past Gmail today. It seems they’re putting the spam pitch in an image, and padding out the message with random text. But the randomisation is getting cleverer, or else they’re scraping from some very strange sites… “When we last saw pesticide it wasn’t diebold. Then after messieurs or runt got [...]
Catching up on what’s been happening the last week, I find that tomorrow will apparently bring the Glamour Stiletto Run on PC Hooftstraat. Anyone feel like wandering along and laughing at the ankle injuries? [via bookofjoe]
The UvA is introducing a new system for tracking expense claims (travel, conference fees, &c.). Actually, they’ve already introduced it, a fancy web app which only runs under IE on Windows machines, and they’ve already decommissioned the old-fashioned paper system. If you send your paperwork to someone who can do anything about it, these days [...]
I just received not one but two invitations to present at an upcoming conference, or even to organise a special session, should I so desire. The catch? It’s the 2006 edition of the scam conference that accepted a randomly-generated paper in 2005.
So I guess maybe the personal opening and “We are emphasizing the area of [...]
The short version: to use the WC at Amersfoort Station, you call an 0900 number that charges you and opens the door. Confused? So was I.
I’m really not sure what to think about this. A List Apart has just redesigned their website, and it looks really nice. They’re now offering a bunch of merchandise, including this slightly bizarre t-shirt. The disturbing thing is that the blurb doesn’t even hint at the weirdness, and so I’m left wondering, did they just [...]