Chestita Baba Marta!

Today is a special day in Bulgaria. On March 1st Marteniza (see the picture) are given to friends and family to wish them health and happiness. The red and white colors symbolize the end of winter and the coming of spring.

These decorations are worn until you see a sign of spring, such as birds migrating or trees blooming.

Read more about it here or here.

Today we had a game-demo in Alkmaar, in a shop "Boekers en Strippers".

It was a very easy day, not in the least because we started at 12:00 o'clock. To our surprise Jaap and Mieke also came by; they wanted to learn Carcassonne.

The first half hour we learned 'Piramides van de Jaguar', a simple but nice game for two players. Later we explained it quite often; many people liked it. Together with 2 customers I learned Magellaen, I liked it. The last new game was 'Zeus and Hera', not bad but not very exciting.

After another busy week for both of us it's nice to have weekend again. Tried the grill-pan for the first time: it makes wonderful hamburgers.

We played Lost Cities. Sasha didn't know it yet but she won.

A strange story today on MSNBC: clocks in Venezuela are ticking slower than in other parts of the world.

This is because many (simple) clocks take the power-line AC frequency to calculate the current time. Due to the power-crises in Venezuela the power suppliers are not able to garantuee a perfect 60 Hz frequency anymore...

Although we already knew from the tournament agenda today the dates of the Spellenspektakel 2003 were officially announced: October 31st and November 1st and 2nd. So reserve days off from work now :)

Too bad the weekend is 'broken' between October and November this year: it just doesn't sound as nice as "1, 2 and 3 November" like last year.

(Thank you Mirjam).

About an hour ago I went home briefly. When I was almost there I heard screaming: "Turn around! On your knees!".

Fortunately it wasn't meant for me but for the guy that had some sort of an axe and was breaking the windows of the police station. I guess he was really angry, when I walked back to Chess I saw that at least 8 windows had been broken...

While looking for a nice picture of the police station I came across this (slightly sarcastic) article about the renovation of the Nieuwe Gracht, where Chess (my employer) is located. Translated: "It's always nice if big companies like Chess are able to see how people were living in the Middle Ages and how they transported their stuff over sandroads, with holes in the road. That must have given those smart guys a lot of inspiration".

The renovation this website talks about finished about a year ago but did indeed take much longer than expected.

Always nice, a little bit of Photoshop. From David Rietveld.nl.

Today and yesterday I've been working on Chapter 4, where some Computational Models are introduced. I incorporated more examples now, to make them more understandable and the text more readable.

I spent more time on the homework assignment than I first estimated so I have to catch up now with the proofreading of my supervisors. I'm working at home -- it's quiet and all my papers are here. In these months I've collected almost 1,5 meter of papers! This afternoon I went to Chess to print a new version a the paper, but also to sign my contract. I had to fill in some forms too. I still know my social-security number (sofi) by hard because of the umpteen times we had to fill it in when working on the farm.

It has been a while but I've put a new version of my paper online. I changed the layout!

After various comments on the double line-spacing I hope to satisfy the readers now :) An unfortunately side-effect is of course that the paper has less pages again... 41.

The first assignment of the course I started took more time than I thought it would. The good news is that it's also a lot more useful than I thought it would be.

I've been working on the first assignment from around 12:00 o'clock till now. Sasha has also been writing a paper so we spent the day quite useful.

It will be another hour or two: two small Java programs and some documentation and then I'm done.