A nice sunny morning

Ah... A lightblue sky, a bleak winter sun, and some birds flying over.
I don't often take the time to look outside, but I decided to take just that little rest. I realised yesterday night while tossing and turning in my bed, that I needed some slack time after the last stressful days. Even though I have a notebook in which I write down the things I need to remember (such as "buy X" or "take Y along from home"), my usual gears-in-overdrive state of mind is fully active almost continuously. Combine that with discovering more ickiness in the house every once in a while and my poor little head goes poof.
For example, coming to the conclusion that the previous owners can't have cleaned in the 7 years they lived in the house. Or the sloppy state in which some walls or corners were left finished (or rather, unfinished). Or the hole in the bathroom floor that was covered with a hardboard plate. Silly me thought that the plate was just lying around there and had not thought of the possibility that someone would leave a 20x50 cm hole in the floor of his bathroom.
So, at this place my special thanks go to my girlfriend for being able to calm me down over and over again. Purrrrr...

Once again I'm grateful

... to those who help with all things that need to be done in our new home.
For example, today, while we were shopping for floor covering and curtains, the remaining wallpaper in the bedroom was stripped. Hurray for mothers, hurray for study friends.

T + 2 days

Two days of DIY'ing later, I'm very glad to have people around me who will gladly help out with the work. Amongst us, we've:

• almost stripped the wallpaper off of one room


• cleaned the kitchen (boy was it filthy and greasy)


• removed the unnecessary wall-mounted stuff in the bathroom


• and chiseled off a layer of tiles only to find one more underneath

Tomorrow: the final chiseling and stripping of wallpaper. Next week: shopping.

The keys!

The contracts have been signed, hands have been shaken, and the keys are now mine. As of today I'm the proud owner of my new apartment in The Hague. The rest of this year will be spent packing my stuff, cleaning, buying furniture and whatever else we need, and redecorating the new home... *bounce* :)

Panic promotes once again

Yesterday, Panic 1 played four games with a very tough defense and some nice offensive actions as well. The result? Three wins, one draw, and promotion to the third division based on score difference. I'll post a link to the longer match report when it's available and when I remember to ;)

Devoxx: not only hardcore developing

So, last Wednesday to Friday I've been in Antwerp for the Devoxx Java developers conference. Although I am a developer, my side interests in project and information structuring have grown over the years, and so I was quite happy to see some interesting talks on that subject on the programme.

The first talk I went to apart from the keynote, was one about software estimation. The speaker discussed how you can make proper estimates about the amount of time a certain task will take, and how to take various environmental variables into account. He stressed that estimates cannot be argued about, because when you do that, you are in fact debating the premises for the estimates.

The subject of the next interesting talk was so-called behaviour driven development, a way to make sure you write tests for your program that actually test the intended behaviour instead of the actual implementation. For example, assuring that the increase function does indeed add 1 to its input is very nice, but when the behaviour of the program should be to decrease instead, that outcome says nothing.

On Thursday, I visited a talk titled "Be smart!". The very enthousiastic speaker (Ivar Jacobson, who was a key designer for various of the currently used business engineering and modelling processes) described how you can avoid the common pitfalls with agile development by simply... being smart. That is to say, recognising a problem when you see one.

Next to these three talks, I've been to various more technical topics (some brought very well, others were extremely boring), had my fair share of alcohol, and of course great fun. Over the next few weeks I will try to combine all those experiences together with those from the book I just finished reading (Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists) in some form. At the very least I should be able to make a nice set of notes.

Off to Devoxx

(yawn) Time to leave for Antwerp already...

One last week

Ahh... A full weekend off. Almost ashamed of sleeping late and only getting up at 11, but this is a rare opportunity and I'm taking full advantage of it. So, nothing much has happened the past days, apart from confirming plans and making a few new ones. Furthermore I've picked up playing WoW again with some new characters. Oh, and of course I have been counting days :)

Next week is going to be busy again though. Me and a bunch of colleagues will be in Antwerp for Devoxx, a developers conference. For me that means that I'll be at work for my last two days of this year there, then give practice on Tuesday evening, leave early Wednesday morning to be in Antwerp before 9, and arrive back home on Friday just in time for another packed weekend.

Sinterklaasje kom maar binnen met je knecht...

... and other Sinterklaas songs were on the program yesterday as we celebrated this Dutch festive evening with Panic. First, everyone got a turn at Sinterklaas's lap and was spoken to by the bishop and his servant. Those of us who were known for a small vice (for example, often being late) got a stern remark, others were just thanked for something they did for Panic.
For the second part of the evening, everybody had had to bring three presents for about 5 euros in total, which were then distributed among the group in a game. What exactly had to be done (swap presents, rotate all clockwise, ...) was determined by dice rolls. Of course, when all presents were unwrapped, everyone went swapping once again to get those presents he/she liked best, with strange mercantile deals being made.
I came back with - amongst others - a 3D variety of noughts and crosses called Trimula, published in the 90s, although the picture on the box makes it look like it's at least two decades older.