Received a very nice Christmas present from Chess today by mail.

Today it's precisely 30 years ago that there was somebody on the moon.

Yesterday we've made bread, I never did that before. It was easy and the result is very delicious.

Today I went to see Ralf Lämmel at the CWI and we had a very useful meeting. We looked into the Haskell design method I found a few days ago and discussed the paper in general.

I took some pictures when going to the CWI (click on 'Read More').

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	The CWI is located almost outside Amsterdam.
	Art.
	When I came into the library and said that I'm coming to pick up a book, the response was: "Oh, then you must be Mr. Bosman".
	Christmas-party invitation -- mathematician's style.
	'For reasons of hygiene this toilet is monitored by videos'.

See economists in action... (Flash). There are a lot of other funny Flash things on the website of the creator.


Link sent by Tibi.

Today I've been experimenting a lot. It doesn't feel very productive but sometimes it is necessary.

In the morning I installed Haskell (so I can used it as a second method to research). The installation went smooth and there's plenty of documentation available but the paper I read lacks a lot of details. The homepage of the project isn't very extensive either so the implementation of this ForSyDe development method as they call it might be a bit difficult.


The afternoon I've been working with some hardware (on the second desk on the picture). It's a programmable chip (FPGA) together with some memory and a processor on a single board. The software that comes with allows for graphical designing of hardware, pretty neat.

It's been horribly cold the last few days, winter is definately not my season.

However, for all those people who do like skating things look pretty nice. Even the Spaarne is starting to get frozen.

While I was walking to work I took 2 pictures.

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Yesterday at 19:00 o'clock I saw a boat passing and the Spaarne was completely open. Now there is a layer of ice on the whole river.

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This is the Nieuwe Gracht, the canal in front of the Chess building. It would be cool when the ice will be strong enough... then we could go to our lunchplace without having to walk around to take the bridge.

Two days ago a canalboat didn't care about the ice and made this track you can see here.

Today I bought "de Strijd om de Macht" (the Power Struggle) by Jacques Monasch.

He was one of the spindoctors of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) that suffered a huge defeat at the last elections and wrote a book about his experiences this summer. It's gonna be a while before I'll start with it because I still have a lot to read.

Every once in a while I feel the need to update the layout of the website a bit. Made some small changes, I hope you like it.


The old layout is still available of course, in 'my account'.

There's a Chess meeting in Utrecht this evening.

I hope the trains back to Haarlem will go; yesterday evening when I came back from Ettie it was pretty bad. There were hardly any trains at all leaving from Centraal Station and I had to wait there 45 minutes.

This time I'm fully prepared: I'm bringing enough to read for about 2 or 3 hours and a walkman.