These days winter finally arrived. Not only it’s incredibly cold, there is also a hard wind that blows the coldness in every crack of your clothing. Luckily we went for warm jackets early this year so we are prepared ;)
It even snows a little, so the coldness is not a problem. I just dislike wet coldness :)

Anyway: The dutch railway system can definitely not handle coldness. Every year in autumn there are delays because of leaves on the tracks, as soon as it gets cold there are delays because of ice on the railways and if by accident everything works fine you can expect something like a lightning striking the power supply of a central node of the railway system.
Ususally this happens at the station of Utrecht.
As for today, it was a combination of lightning and a crash of two trains that completely stopped the north-south traffic in the Netherlands. (I wonder why this always happens on fridays when Anna wants to come to Maastricht?)

Anna had just arrived at Amsterdam central station when it was announced that there is a problem in Utrecht and there won’t be any other trains to the south.
She managed to do a detour to Rotterdam (luckily :) ) and arrived here at eight; some unlucky people had to wait in the station of Utrecht until now (22:00h) and are getting free nights at hotels…

What I am always amazed about is the way “Deutsche Bahn” is handling these things. There is never a problem when there are leaves on the tracks.. probably the dutch trains are more sensitive or something like that ;)
And the thunderstorms apparently also don’t like the German train system, they seem to prefer dutch power lines. Oh well.. Murphy at his best.

Oooh.. Markting can be SO much fun :)

especially if you are allowed to throw 250000 rubber balls down a street in San Francisco.. WHEEE!!!!
look here for a video of the advertisement SONY has made recently:

Download high resolution vid here.
Truly like.no.other

*bows in respect*

today after work/university I went to the parking and startled: no car!

First I thought, I’d gotten into the same situation as Matt some weeks ago but it turned out that I have parked it on some “University parking” which for me was absolutely correct to to…

Well, the people from the towing service then told me that only employees of the university can park there, not students…

100,- Euros, the most expensive ticket I ever got.

And to end the story with a quote of Matt:

“That is a lot of money” :(

About the Sharp Notebook..

I am sorry but we can not sell our notebooks outside of the US.

How booooring these people are ;)

Be careful when saying “yes”, people tend to take it for granted and demand afterwards.

maybe I should say “maybe” more often… :P

It seems that I am not that indestructible after all.
My body tolerated everything that I did to it the last weeks but now that I had a relaxed weekend, I finally got sick. With a vengeance. My head hurts, my throat is sore and I can’t focus a single idea for more than 5 minutes.
Well, apart from the throat and the headache this is quite normal for me I’d say ;)

Seems I will spend another day lying in bed and drinking tea. I have the best company possible with me, Siepke. He basically does not care how I feel but I seem to make him feel comfortable lying next to him and radiating warmth :)

Besides, I just finished reading 1984 and my mood is partly rebellish, partly depressed. Have to think about that one deeply.

Edit: just has a nice conversation, the following seemed worth noting down:

Was hilft es, über das Meer zu setzen und den Wohnort zu wechseln? Wenn du dem, was dich drückt, entgehen willst, so musst du nicht an einem anderen Ort sein, sondern selbst ein anderer sein. Deine Reisen werden dir keine Erleichterung schaffen; denn du reisest mit deinen Leidenschaften, und deine Übel folgen dir nach.

-Seneca-