When no one wants to listen…
We tried acid, pumping, a plumber and even Turkish curses, but our bathroom sink remained stubbornly blocked for days. But then came along our own Mr Muscle and part-time flatmate, Laurent, saving the day by going where no plumber has gone before and fishing the “Thing”.
And here is the picture of a proud Laurent with his catch. We’ll never know what it was… Not that we wanted to…
My first major trip after taking up the job is for The Hague, a lovely medium sized town in Holland, best known for the international tribunal (the one where Miloseviczwas tried). I am not sure how long I’ll stay here, but it looks likely it could be till the end of October.
When I am overseas I am still entitled to a fly back to London during the weekends. But really, that is exchangeable for anything else, as long as it is cheaper than the flight to London. And that’s what I did yesterday. I took the train to Paris to see my friend Kais and enjoy the Parisian night life. Intensive impromptu travelling is not as much of a pain as I thought it would be, technology (email, roaming mobiles, internet banking…) is constantly making it easier to not miss out too much on your everyday life, although it is also likely to render traveling obsolete: why travel when you can teleconference, or use a VPN? The technology is there, but the mentality isn’t.
Anyway, I am now off to the Cabaret…
The job market that is. Amazingly, for the second time running, I managed to find a job while I was still in University. I’ve just accepted an offer at an American firm: Charles River Development. Essentially, they sell IT solutions to fund managers (my old job), and they took me on board as a “Business Support Specialist”.
I’ve just finished my last exams (successfully I hope) of my MSc. I still have to give back a research project but it looks like it will be either postponed or done on a part-time basis. I am still waiting to hear from my course director on the exact details, but mine isn’t an unusual situation.
I’ll be starting work in a couple of weeks. Now its time for my deserved holidays, where I’ll be in Tunisia getting fed and pampered.
The party was absolutely EPIC. More than 60 people turned up to celebrate what is probably the first ever ten thousand’s day party in human history. Our crowd completely took over the VIP section of the “Freedom Bar”, and even overflowed it at one point. Mixing and mingling was at its best. The night’s favourite pick up line was “so, how do you know Emir?”
The Turkish delegation, led by Funda, was the first to reclaim the dance floor. The rest of us followed and the fans soon requested me on the pole. Screaming ladies, paparazzi shots… I thought I left that life behind.
Like predicted, the pole was thoroughly abused, and not only by me. Honourable mentions go to Kais and Elvan (when she wasn’t bossing the deejay), for longest time spent strutting their stuff on the pole. If you missed it, you can still console yourself with the photographic evidence.
Meanwhile the “biggest contributor to my hangover award” has to go to Bjorn, who didn’t even bother waiting for me to start a drink before popping out with a new one. Eyewitness accounts report of me “being funny when I am drunk”… Meanwhile we can’t really call my white suit “white” anymore.
If you haven’t yet make sure you check out the rest of the pictures!
Many thanks for everyone that turned up and made this party the success it was. See you at my 15,000th day!
Just did a revealing little test. Apparently I am a 100% modernist, which is defined as:
“Modernism represents the thought that science and reason are all we need to carry on. Religion is unnecessary and any sort of spirituality halts progress. You believe everything has a rational explanation”
Anyone surprised? 
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Oh… and who’s surprised about my romanticism and idealism score? Funny how amusing it is to confirm what you already know about yourself…
Try it yourself at What is Your World View?
A combination of sudden poverty and being restricted to overcrowded and overpriced school holidays resulted in this being one of those rare seasons I won’t go skiing. As a form of consolation I dug up a clip of a couple of years ago of which I am particularly proud of, and just edited it.
So tadaaa: my first home-made skiing video! Ok, it’s not very long… but It took about 6 or 7 takes and quite a bit of fiddling to keep the camera in place (thanks Laurent!).
Anyway, the effect was totally worth it…
Download the video here (Quicktime format)
As a good number of you know by now, I will soon be reaching the venerable age of ten thousand days. But more importantly I’ll probably be the first human ever to throw a party for the occasion!!! Invitations have been sent, and from the responses I received, it is looking to be a promising party!
The idea came to me a few years ago, in my early 8,000 days. I calculated the day and entered it on my PIM (I think it was M$ Schedule+). Yes, I’ve had a PIM since that long! Actually, even longer: At the age of 13 (years…) I received as a gift a Casio 32KB Databank organiser. Since then my contacts and appointments never touched paper. Anyway, that entry survived all my software and hardware upgrades and reminded me of my 10K day in time, fully vindicating my inherent geekiness.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out your own 10K day, my friend Paul put his programming skills to good use and created an online 10K day calculator.
nuff said…
One of the untold benefits to going back to university is being provided with an excuse to buy a new laptop. In a drive of eccentricity, and thanks to Elvan who lent me hers for a couple of weeks, I opted for a Tablet Pc. The great thing about these laptops is that you can use pen to input directly on the screen, though because of their price premium, they never sold much. The first generations were basically only a big PDAs (and never sold much), however the one I have is a “convertible” meaning that through a swivel mechanism you can easily transform it into a normal laptop with classical keyboard input.
From an academic point of view, it’s great to be able to take notes electronically on lectures, especially on top of slides. I’ve never had my notes so neatly organised, ever. It is starting to make me feel like a nerd.
Other advantages are that for applications that require little text input, such as browsing, the pen is on par with the mouse in terms of ergonomics, and that’s a blessing on a laptop. Besides, its use is unobtrusive and more discreet as you can lay it on the table just as an expensive chunky piece of paper.
I am now well into my second week of university life. Clearly it is less of a shock than my first time over 10 years ago across the Atlantic. The City University campus is conveniently located across the street from where I live.
It is great to be actually able to learn stuff from university. It may sound like an obvious function of a university to the rest of you, but for me, having previously only studied management, I never grew familiar with the feeling.
There are advantages to postgraduate studies. The tutors are top-notch, classes are smaller and the students motivated. The big drawback, however, is that there is little typical student fun to be had: no initiations, no crazy parties, no food fights… Never imagined poostgrads would be such a bore.
Meanwhile, some things are still the same. I still made plans to keep ahead with my readings from the start, and I am still not doing it as I should. Oh well, we all know that we are WAY more productive in cramming mode the last two days before exams
Now back debugging my f*&^*ing 12 lines of Java assignement…
