dailylife

It was a busy week at work; nice that it's weekend. Sasha traveled to Durham so we left for the airport early on Thursday, and she came back home yesterday evening late. By coincidence one of her professors from the Netherlands was in Durham Thursday also so they met up.

I'm working on a project for 'the other website' that involves scanning a lot of old documents into PDF files. It's pretty cool that Adobe Acrobat Reader has built-in OCR, and that OCR works so well these days. I haven't tried OCR in a long time; the previous time must have been when I lived with my parents some 15 years ago. OCR means Optical Character Recognition: the conversion of scanned images into text. The algorithms and technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, it's really a solved problem now.

No big plans for this weekend, perhaps we'll visit Rutgers, a local university in Somerset, which has a big cultural event today. Someone we know is participating and it would be fun to say hello.

Jaap is stuck in Scotland. He was supposed to travel back home today but because of the volcano he won't make it.

A co-worker was planning to leave back to Europe yesterday, but he'll have to stay here the weekend.

A strange event, a volcano eruption.

The weather here is just outstanding. Sunny, very warm -- it's summer. Not spring, summer.

A few weeks ago I bought an extra electrical burner and I finally got to use it. The burner allows me to cook on our small balcony. It's great!

I made an Dutch Indonesian meal with krupuk and telor ketjap (stir fried boiled eggs) -- wonderful dishes but very smelly. I cooked it all outdoors and it worked perfectly. The meal was well received.

It was beautiful weather in Somerset yesterday, but when I arrived in North Carolina it was as if summer has started. Bright sun, temperature in the low 80's (28 degrees Celsius) -- you can't beat the weather in the South!

It's great to be back home; I'm staying here for two weekends.

Yesterday we left for the airport at 5.00 am, and even when I drove back there was hardly any traffic. I was in the office around 6.20 am and had plenty of time to go through my e-mail and work on a presentation.

Meetings started at 9.00 am, and really didn't stop until 6.00 pm -- one of those days! Still, it's a lot of fun and the projects are going well.