Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The IND (the Dutch immigration folk) have a spiffy website. They have an 0900 number with friendly and cheerful staff. They have all the documents you need as pdf downloads, usually in both Dutch and English. And so I am regularly, consistently, and enormously surprised at the regular, consistent, and enormous gap between what I [...]
I’m going to teach Prolog next semester! To Dutch students starting out in Artificial Intelligence! It’s going to be great fun, shaping their innocent beginning-programmer minds. The course is about half Prolog and half AI-as-search; and I’m completely In Charge. (There will be assistents for the lab sessions, we expect about 30-40 students so it’s [...]
For last month’s trip to Brussels I stayed at an incompetent hostel. Since I didn’t have enough cash on me when I arrived (and apparently nowhere in Belgium has heard of pin/eftpos/debit cards), they took my Dutch residence permit as bond. And lost it. They were awfully apologetic when I went to check out, and [...]
Saturday, October 14, 2006
I received excellent news today: I’m to pay a fine of €20. I’m not kidding, this is excellent news. I’d expected to have to fork out much more.
My new passport arrived today. I’ve been putting off blogging about this, because announcing to the world that a brand-new passport is arriving in the mail didn’t seem so very smart. Now that it’s here and I don’t have to keep quiet any more, I feel I must give some advice to anyone in my [...]
It must be karmic retribution for all the times I’ve gotten off without paying fines for cycling without lights. Last night I was fined 20 euros for cycling in the cycle lane. That’s not a typo.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Today I received my sofinummer (Social-Financial number: taxes, for the paying of). Which means that next month I’ll receive a full salary — until now I’ve been paying over 50% tax, which I now have to claim back. All I have to regularise now is my living situation, and I’ll be in the clear (officially [...]
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Last week I thought that by next month my residence would be settled, and I could start drawing full pay. I should know by now not to be so optimistic. I’m putting the rest of this entry below the fold, because it’s basically just an extended gripe. The short version is, for even stupider reasons [...]
I’m having some delays in the process of becoming a PhD student. It’s almost a catch 22 situation, but not quite. The original catch 22 was “You can only have this if you ask for it … but if you ask for it, you can’t have it any more.” (Know the phrase but don’t know [...]
Sheesh, this is terrifying. From the British Telegraph: Ministers are particularly concerned about exam results this year, having failed to achieve their 2004 target of 75 per cent of 14-year-olds reaching the level expected in English. Just 71 per cent reached the standard, despite a multi-million pound Government strategy aimed at improving lessons in secondary [...]