it has been 8 years…. but now they are back:

the yellow Dr. Martens boots! *yay!* :D

I just love them. And I associate lots of nice memories with them.

well, it’s nice to mix confessions a bit.. like living with an orthodox Bulgarian woman gives you the chance to celebrate easter twice :D

therefore:
XPUCTOC BOCKPECE!

We spent the whole week renovating our appartement in Amsterdam.
There is new paint on the walls, the holes are filled, finally we have lights in almost all rooms, the balcony has wodden tiles with a new finish, the list is loooong and we are happy looking at our work.

Anna was catching the spirit of “home improvement” quite fast and now thinks that we can construct our new bed ourselves instead of buying one.
Somehow this woman keeps suprising me :)
I wonder if I should introduce her to Tim Taylor one day :P

For me it’s back to Aachen after one week in Amsterdam. Now I really know I want to live here. Although the landscape is kinda dull.. here some impressions of our view to the north and the west taken while we were exploring the neighbouring villages of Amsterdam.

that’s flat, isn’t it? ;)
In Friesland they say you can see on friday already who’s gonna come over for coffee on sunday.

now, as we went out on easter monday to make a nice, long walk through the parks and green places of our new home, we didn’t realize something freaky that we should have realized… we were walking through the city and it was not more busy than usually, no hordes of walkers and people having a good time. Not overflooded with families that went out together to make a easter-stroll once they are all together.

I mean, imagine: The highest celebration day of the christian people. And noone goes for a walk? Are the Dutch that lazy?

Later we saw it in the news: The Dutch actually profited from the tolerant opening regulations of the stores in the Netherlands and went shopping massively. Crowding the shopping centra and furniture stores. (especially IKEA)

Well, good for us, we had lots of space to walk. Bad for the easter-traditions, soon they will only remember the easterbunny but not the actual meaning of this day.

Don’t know if this is good or bad..

Thank you Alex for this great picture. :)

Now, someone told me, Aachen was the only city in Germany that featured 3 Semesters of chemistry. Anorganic, Organic and Physical Chemistry.

I am not in the third semester and I am sooooo fed up with it ;)
At the moment, I am sitting in the preparations room – 1 hour too early- so I prepare my stuff once again. A nice contrast to last time, when I was 1 hour late and the assistant sent me home for missing the introduction and stuff. *grrrr*

This time he gave me free for April 20th – the day after our anniversary – and gave me tips on how to pass the oral examination before the exercises.
(if you fail them, they send you home again)

It gave me hope that these people not only exist to make my life miserable but indeed intend to help us :)

The room is filling up, I better pretend to do some work now, these computers are for academic work only. :P

Friday I had my last test. Good, because I couldn’t write another one. I am so done with :P

the good thing is that spring has finally come, everything and everybody seems to be inhaling deeply and preparing to burst into new life. Fresh green sprouting everywhere and (most important) SUN!!! :)

the bad thing is: I gained around 5 kilos while doing these exams and on monday the next semester begins. somehow while reforming the study they forgot to include the vacation. :(
I mean, I am totally wasted, how am I supposed to just continue studying right now?

Well.. there is not much choice so I guess I will just do as everyone else and go on. *shrug*

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam and relaxed a great deal, doing a long walk with Anna through the city after having been at a pizza place where we devoured pizza and lots of red wine :)
On saturday we did the same thing but we substituted Pizza with ice cream from Häagen-Dazs :P

I just cought myself thinking “well, actually it IS cold and I could turn the heating on a bit more.. but on the other hand: The cpu dissipates heat through the keyboard where my fingers are, the power converter and the harddrive produce heat where my wrists rest… it really could be worse.” ;)

Passively cooled laptops do have a lot of advantages. Especially in winter! :P

I am still studying for my exams, so far I have done four and two more are to come. This time I really fell into the rhythm, it seems. I get up at seven, start studying or working at eight and try to read as much as possible to pass the exams. I hope I can carry this motivation into the next semester and do a bit more before the exams next time, preventing another study-marathon next time.

On the other side, this permanent stress makes me unbalanced and even more chaotic as I phase out more and more “not so relevant” things to concentrate better on studying. This involves not paying bills, not talking to Anna, not keeping appointments (which in turn creates yet more bills – Anna was quite mad at me after paying 20 Euro for not appearing at the dentist and 36 Euro for not paying the tax for my motorcycle again)

At least I am making progress and I finally believe in what I am doing.

As Andrew Tanenbaum told us at the IEEE Conference of Pervasive Computing, it is possible to use RFID-chips to infect the underlying databases…

Read the full article on the website of the University of Amsterdam:

[…]the prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected.[…]

Here is the full paper.

If I imagine Siepke infected with a computer virus, this cat gets only more precious ;)

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Frank Herbert, DUNE 1965

I am so busy with Biochemistry that I can’t even think of some words for here.. I miss the days when I was writing for hours!