I just received my confirmation as member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. The IEEE is an international engineering association, with an emphasis of computer science and engineering. It's useful to be a member, and it comes with a interesting magazine.

The Chess tuning yesterday was nice. We had a meeting in a room above Praag, a bar near the Grote Markt.

After the official part we went downstairs and we had drinks and dinner. We stayed long and around midnight we went to Steels for a while. Had a really fun evening.

Last week it was hard to get used to the working rythm again. I started late: around 9:30 o'clock, and I didn't really like that.

I promised myself to start work early these days, and today it worked quite well. I suppose that the one hour wintertime adjustment makes it somewhat easier.

Today I spent a lot of time on my thesis, which is completely finished now. I wrote an abstract and printed 25 copies. This afternoon I brought them to a bindery shop, where they put a plastic front foil, solid back and a coil bind. It really looks nice!

The final, complete version of my thesis is also online (in PDF): A Survey of Co-Design Ideas and Methodologies.

I'm still at work. There's a small website we have been working on that has to be finished tomorrow, so I'm staying a bit longer.

I gave a demonstration today of the software I've been working on. A potential customer was interested in the technology we've used, so a group of people came to Chess.

It's a foreign company, so we tried to translate the frontpage of the website into their own language. We had used various translation websites for this, because none of us knew the language. They smiled when they saw it -- they appreciated the effort but the translation was pretty bad they told us ;)

Hah. I just submitted my thesis to my supervisor, who will send it to the 2nd reader.

Ready!

Mr. Lämmel, my supervisor from the VU, sent me a copy of my paper with a lot of feedback. This weekend I'll incorporate his remarks into my thesis, which is really getting ready now.

It's a warm day again but not as hot as the last days. Here at Chess it's nice: the new aircondition was installed right on time for this heatwave.

These days I'm working on something new. A company asked us to make a proposal for a new project they have. I'm estimating the costs that will be involved in it and writing a document that describes our proposed solution.

It's quite interesting to see this part of the job: it not only involves technological decisions but also commercial ones. Part of the job is to describe various options in our solution: a basic variant will costs you X, and possible extensions are A, B or C, each with different prices.

This morning my laptop didn't start up anymore. I had some problems with the harddisk the last weeks, and now it just gave up. I had backups of everything, but I had to re-install a few programs.

Went to a customer this morning, to talk about a potential project. Interesting.