Ian bugged me about it for a month. “Do your paper Brian, do your paper. I’m not going to play squash with you unless you do your paper.” Well, I did it. It took all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I had to cross-check references with Google Scholar many times. I had to wrack my …
Category Archive: Europe
Mar
06
Mar
06
“Give Us Back New York”
Thanks to my friend Bill Achauer for providing this link. For anyone who has spent any time in the Netherlands and has been to New York at least once, you’ll understand. Strange people the Dutch. But not without a sense of humor. After all, look at how they dress.
Feb
16
Trip to Bangkok
Photo set on Flickr There is a progression that you go to when you travel to a new city that is fairly standard: airport, car or train ride into the city, hotel, then finally experiencing the city itself at the street level. I flew into Bangkok last Sunday at about 4 in the afternoon. The …
Jan
08
(Another) Night at the Casino
So since I moved to the Hague I have been about fifteen minutes from the Holland Casino in Scheveningen. When I lived in Dordrecht I rarely made the journey out to the casino in Rotterdam as I simply couldn’t be bothered. So far I have been to the one in the Hague three times. Three …
Dec
15
Springer Christmas Party
Photoset on Flickr Let’s face it. Most of the time, office parties blow. You stand around, the CEO or some bigwig who you never see gets up and makes a speech. People always look like they have that nervous “the HR Gestapo could be watching me” smile on. Everyone stands around in groups talking to …
Dec
15
Tree Trimming 2006
Photoset on Flickr Christmas is always a unique time of year. In years past I would always use Christmas as one of those benchmarks to compare the current year to years and times past. Sometimes I would remark on things like a distinct lack of Christmas spirit one year versus previous years (yes, it’s always …
Dec
12
Welcome to Life Luca Julius Kerlin
YAY! My friend Michael Kerlin and his wife Ellen just had a beautiful baby boy named Luca Julius. Here is a picture of the cute little tyke. Judging from the lack to hospital decoration, I am guessing they followed the Dutch tradition of giving birth at home (and probably without any kind of medication). Now …
Dec
12
Dutch vs. Klingon
While we were at lunch the other day with some native Dutch speakers, it emerged from our discussion that there was actually quite a similarity between the Dutch language, and Klingon. I could not find any immediate proof for this relationship on the Klingon Imperial Dimplomatic Corps‘ website, but I did donate $20 via PayPal …
Dec
12
Heard While Driving
I bought a car a little over a year ago. It was a crappy, old, automatic. I had to look around quite a bit for an automatic as I can’t drive stick and 98.5% of the cars in this country are manual. I had the car for less than six months when it started having …
Dec
07
401k
Today I did the twice-yearly task of evaluating my 401k and rebalancing it. I love the fact that I can push money around from one fund to another, analyze the relative performance of my investments against each other and against other funds, and generally feel like the master of my own destiny. I have a …