Today sees the close of my first week of fulltime work at Buzzcapture. We (yes we) are a small social media monitoring and analysis company, based in Amsterdam. Despite a PhD in philosophy of language (or something very like it), I’ve joined the team as a programmer. The biggest challenge of the first week has [...]
If any of our friends read here but not on BookFace, you should congratulate Olga: her first interview for teaching (mathematics in an international school) and she got the job. Μπράβο αγάπη μου!
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 [...]
I turned 25 a couple of days ago (quarter century! woo!). This would hardly merit blogging, except that there’s a nice numerological coincidence with my father’s birthday, which is today. (And his father’s is the same day as mine… it’s almost like they planned it.) He’s turning 50, which makes this cool for a couple [...]
It seems to be my week for playing with LT. I just read a book so awful that I wanted to write a review slamming it (especially given the injustice of this publicity BS turning up first in Google — that’s a nofollow link) but I don’t want it on my LT profile. So I [...]
I just booked tickets for my trip home. Wheeee! I’ll be travelling on December 30th and 31st, arriving in Auckland. The plan is to spend a week or ten days making my way down the North Island, calling on friends and relations along the way, and get home to Golden Bay in early January. Two [...]
Last week I broke down and made an Amazon order. Two Perl books (it’s a programming language, Mum) padded out for shipping with a recent science fiction novel. It seems that they’re doing some customer profiling. I just got this in my email: Valentine’s Day can be a minefield of disappointment, so why not hedge [...]
Saturday, December 24, 2005
I just sent feedback to a complete stranger, about their recent website redesign. (In my defence, they asked for it, and they needed it.) Then I realised that it’s Christmas Eve. Oops. Merry Christmas all!
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 [...]
Monday, December 12, 2005
I spent most of today travelling back and forward between Zaandam (where I’m currently officially living) and Zaandijk (where the city hall is) and Koog-aan-Zijn (the nearest train station), picking up my residence permit. Every few minutes now I take it out of my pocket and look at it, just reassuring myself that it hasn’t [...]