As some of you may know (especially those that visited my room), room 210 at Avenue Pasteur, 102a was not really that big. It was a place to stay, and I did have a nice neighbor, but space-wise less then optimal. Hence, I asked for a bigger room.
I got one.
:) :)
Now I have some space for guests. So, who’s going to be the second non-luxembourgian resident to check out my new room?
PS: new address:
Hugo Jonker
Chambre 113
102a, Avenue Pasteur
L-2311 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
’nuff said.
The plan was to have some visitors over for the Ascencion Day holidays. Since I was in the Netherlands before that anyway, the plan was to all travel to .lu together. Well, there was a slight problem with getting the car we had rented, which through some convoluted but amazingly funny reasoning we managed to turn into a “let’s visit Walibi Flevo today”. So we did, and it was fun — as you can see on the picture :) (top to bottom: Marek (slightly relaxed), Ania (enjoying herself), me (pondering), Klaus (having a blast))
The reason for visiting Walibi was that they had a special discount and extended opening hours. Even though we left at 4 (pm), we managed to do all the roller coasters in the park and even check out the fireworks! Of course, by the time we got back to Eindhoven, it was a bit late to pack everything and continue to Luxembourg, so we went for a short sleep instead. (Incidentally, turns out that I was not the only one who didn’t sleep brilliantly that night. Can’t win ’em all :)
Next morning, redo from start. I.e. start with a nice meal — breakfast this time, not lunch — and then pack and go. Well, I was up early anyway, so I went to get some bread for breakfast. Got back, and then realised that we didn’t have all that much breakfasty stuff. So went back to the store again, and got some more supplies. Came back, we had a nice breakfast (the fresh bread was brilliant!) and then got round to packing. Realised I was missing batteries, which were sorely needed for use with the mp3-player.
Incidentally, if you have a TuneCast or iCast or whatever thingy that converts your mp3 player into a short distance radio station: from Eindhoven until a bit past Luik/Liege, FM 91.8 is available (with incidental hickups, but nothing substantial). After Liege you enter the range of some Luxembourgian station, I have yet to find out which channel works then, although I think somewhere near 107 FM there is something which lasts the rest of the way.
But to continue, I went back to the store for the third time that morning, got my batteries and we got going. Sjouke graciously lended us his apartment, which is very much appreciated since 4 people would be quite a squeeze in mine :)
We installed ourselves there, had a slight miscommunication then which led to us having pasta there (with fruit and boiled in milk, tastes quite different from your regular pasta, but nice), and then went for the dreaded registration and pasta party. Afterwards Ania felt like checking the route — an activity which had a profound distressing effect on my mood. Luckily, as Petr’s tile says,
There is no problem so big that chocolate cannot cure it.
So afterwards I o.d.’ed on chocolate, which lifted my spirits to a new height. So now I am looking forward to this thing again. Will let you know afterwards (eventually) how it went… For now, cross your fingers!
A lot of stuff has happened since my last update. In this post, a focus on the official side of things — the rest is pending pictures :)
As you may know, the Université du Luxembourg is a very young university. As happens with young and dynamic universities, stuff gets done, and then the results are celebrated. First up was the opening of my apartment building (which gives me a good reason to show off once again what a nice building it is!). The Minister of Education dropped by (to put it nicely, he and his secretary of statecame to my house just to shake my hand ;-). There were some talks in Luxembourgian. Turns out that I can follow Luxembourgian only if I sort of know what they are saying — so I understood all the pleasantries, but all the extrapolations for future projects went by. Then we had a tour of the building, and it had quite a bit of surprises for me! We even have an altar hidden in there, and a lecture hall. And of course a nice place for a drink, where they had the drinks.
The next uni.lu event was the first doctorate defense within the CSC research unit (roughly speaking: the CS subgroup of the department of technical sciences here). It was the second or third defense of the university, so there is no set way of how to arrange this. Of course, I am used to those defenses I have seen in the Netherlands, which are quite formal. So you can imagine that a much more informal approach was already quite strange to me. That coupled with the attempt to find a form for such an event really ment that my previous expectations of how a defense is conducted, and what happened here, are quite far apart :) Still, good to see how these things are evolving here.
Third uni.lu event was the opening of our office building, here on an old picture. There was some planning in advance, since a lot of journalists would be invited and this was the ideal chance for CSC to showcase itself to the Luxembourgian world. So, the various subparts of the CSC all prepared nice presentations and what-have-you-not. We participated, I patched up an old poster and took it from .nl with me to hang up. The event was kicked off by official talks by the dean of the department, who was followed by the rector. The rector had quite a long speech in French, talking about short-term work contracts and how it is better for academics to move on. He then wanted to recapture that in English, but somehow missed the mark at times. There were some funny remarks made, but the overall message was quite clear: fixed-term contracts will not be extended — if it is up to the rector. And it seems to be. This has of course been playing a bit longer, and there are varying views on the subject.
After the speeches, there was a round of drinks and a sighting of the building, after which we got back to work. The poster presentation was planned as the final part of the program, and of course the invitees were by then overflowing with information and looking to get home, so that part was skipped.
The final event was the first inaugural speech within CSC, by Leon van der Torre. He gave a nice overview of his planned research. The form was once again different from what I was used to, but by now I was slowly adjusting and expecting differences :)
Enough for now, more updates later!
Recent gaming: acquired a GBA Micro2Micro connection cable, trying it out with Sasa! Mario Kart Advance is the winner until now.
Recent cooking: couscous variants :)
Been kind of busy lately. After the bike tour on Saturday, Sjouke, Baptiste and me went for a hiking tour in Little Swiss (photos, route description+map+elevation chart). Baptiste had found this site detailing nice walks. We walked for about 6 hours :) Well, it was quite a challenging road at times. But it was a very nice day for a walk, and we did have a very nice picnic after a third of the way. Still, perhaps wine is not the best option if you’re still going to be marching some distance…
Tuesday, Baptiste & me went to attend Die Dreigroschenoper — hadn’t heard of it before myself either. Following a musical in a foreign language (German) is hard. It’s even harder if they switch sometimes to another foreign language (French) — in mid-dialog. Yes they do. They will be talking with four people, and three of them are German speakers, but if they talk to the fourth, out comes the French. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem attached to a specific role or person on stage — characters who were addressed in French previously, were suddenly speaking German…
But anyway, nice to see once, but not brilliant.
That’s it for now, talk to you all later.
Running: today: ouch. Gaming: not at all. Cooking: y’day: tomato soup; today: hutspot(?). Music: Clannad – I will find you.
Imagine this: you wake up in the morning (slowly), rouse yourself (without coffee! Ha!), get your laundry going, change into your sportsgear and just before heading out, your best friend calls. “Hi, you doing anything this afternoon?”
– “Not really, no”
“Okay, then we’re dropping by!”
How’s that for a cool start to your day??
Of course, I start running into phone trouble the moment I am relying on the damned thing :( — i.e. when expecting visitors. Apparently the damn sim-placeholder isn’t tight enough, and thus the sims can shift around a bit. What is worse, is that they do (shift around that is) — something the phone does not appreciate. Right now I am testing patch 0.01-beta (in normal words: a piece of paper stuck behind the simcard in order to fill up the holes). Since I am not 100% convinced this is the origin of the problem, and definitely less than 100% convinced that the current patch is sufficient remedy should this suspected leeway indeed be the origins of the crashes, expect me to be hard to reach phone-wise for the coming time.
That rant sort of interfered with me explaining how cool it is to have visitors. Well, trust me on this, it is :)
Last game played: Wario Ware: MicroGame$
But first one other thing: I finally managed to set up Ubuntu (more precisely: grub) such, that it defaults to Windows. Yihaa, I no longer get accidentally confronted by a broken desktop anymore!
Yes, we can start a nice flamewar on linux vs windows. Thing is: the moment I get into Ubuntu, it A) starts annoying me (with things being not how they should be) and B) distracts me from work (because I try to address these annoyances, and this is never fixed in a few minutes — even though the problem looks like it should be).
Anyway: dining! Saturday the SaToSS gang met up at the Auchan for some shopping. Somewhere along the line, the idea for a dinner on Sunday popped up, so suddenly we were shopping for a dinner together. Back at the office yes, still Saturday we ran into Sjouke still Saturday and invited him to dinner too. Then it sort of became non-earlish, but finally me and Sasa went back home again.
Incidentally, Sasa had borrowed my bike, which is hilarious, trust me! :) Well anyway, since it was late and we both could use something like food, we ended up having pasta (Italian style) at Sasa’s. Kind of funny, since the dinner of Sunday would be there as well.
For that one, planned without Sjouke’s advice, we had thought of doing something with couscous and some veggies. Since we all contributed some ideas, our ingredients were a mixed mesh without any real direction. And that’s why you invite the Big Boss to dinner ;-) Sjouke’s supervision proved superior, and with some extra items available in Sasa’s kitchen, we constructed a delicious couscous stew. For dessert we had yoghurt with some strawberries (strawberries are affordable, so we have an abundance of them ;-).
Well, the next day I realised that since we hadn’t executed the original plan for dessert on Sunday (fruit salad), Sasa had some ingredients which I could use. To thank Sasa for keeping the cottage cheese in the fridge, I made him a dinner — filled paprika, vegetarian style. Thanks to Sasa bringing cheese (quite essential ingredient, and planned), the dish turned out wonderful. Definitely worth having again.
Well, to top it off, after Saturday’s post-shop-closing-time invitation to Sjouke to join the Sunday dinner, Sjouke felt it would be nice to also invite us over once. In discussing what this would be, we finally settled for showcasing famous Dutch cuisine: hutspot!! :) Of course, Sjouke style dining and allowing me some free reign means appetizers (mozzerella, tomato and mint) and dessert (flensjes with icecream, whipped cream, strawberries told you we had plenty of ‘m and chocolate sauce). The hutspot was ok, of course, despite some improvising (no meshing kitchen tool). The unavoidable sausage turned out wonderful, and the appetizer was delicious. The dessert topped it all off — as if we weren’t full, having icecream, whipped cream (shaken, not from a can), pancakes and strawberries to ensure lack of hunger. For the next week probably ;-)
Anyway, it might seem to be all about dinner, but in reality it’s about having lots of nice evenings with my colleagues. The talks are much harder to capture in the blog, and some of it should be moderated, but we’re having much fun together :)
Now gaming: Wario Ware, Phoenix Wright
Since I keep running into this question myself, I’ve looked for some facts on the web on Luxembourg. I’ve used 2 sources: wiki pedia (nice, but how reliable / accurate is it?) and the cia (reliable – if they choose not to lie to you ;-). Well anyway, some details:
So, my brother accompanied me to Luxembourg last weekend. We went on Saturday (after his work) and could luckily enough tag along with Pieter – going by car is so much more pleasant :). Since we went after Rogier finished working, we still arrived quite late, so we had to bring something to eat. Well, after careful consideration that became bottles filled with pancake mix :) :)
It had been a long time since I had eaten pancakes, but after last week, I have definitely had my fill for the near future. Both Rogier and me brought a PET-bottle (i.e. 1.5 liter)… of course we didn’t finish that in one go, but still.
Rogier’s visit prompted me to check out Luxembourg a bit more, and guess what: there is actually life there! Saturday evening, after the pancakes, we biked to the area where Sasa, Baptiste, Pieter and me spotted people going out the previous time. As luck would have it, we found a nice place, ran into a couple of Flemish girls and had a nice evening. (Btw, later heard from Ann that her headache had lasted quite some time… poor girl).
Sunday, after breakfast with pancakes, we went to the Mudam museum. It is a museum for modern art, but the reason Rogier wanted to go there was to view the architecture – it was designed by the same architect as the glass pyramid at the Louvre, apparently. Well, the architecture was captivating – a lot more than the exposition, in my opinion.
In the evening we started to watch Pulp Fiction (note to Mark: it is the first movie I have watched on the DVD player since moving to Lux! :), when suddenly there was a knock on the door. Sjouke & family were there, so we stopped the movie and before you know it, we were bongoing all the way :) We’ve sort of bongoed every evening this week actually :) After Tessa & Daniel had to go to bed, Rogier & me finished Pulp Fiction. Weird movie, I had seen some scenes, but most was new to me.
Monday we slept late, then I went in for a quick 30 minutes of working (which became a slow 1 hr of working…) to finally finish the BFR. Well, we did! Woohoo! Another issue out of the way. On top of that I was also partly arranging the SaToSS kickoff event (which would be on Wednesday), so it wa a good thing to be in at work – for a short while at least. After that, we went to the Auchan and I spent a small fortune ;-) Well, there were some things that would be convenient in the house: speakers for my laptop, a quickloader for rechargeable batteries, table cloths, pillows, pillow covering, an extra set of wrenches, some hooks to be able to hang stuff, etc. This turned out magnificantly: That night, Rogier could actually use a pillow, we dined from a table with table cloths, and I now have a “coathanger” (some hooks in the wall, but it works wonders).
Tuesday Rogier was going to .nl again, so we got up a bit early, and walked to the city centre, checked stores there, walked onwards to the station and checked the stores there, got him his ticket, waved him off and then, on the way back, found a store which I think he would’ve appreciated (a combination of expo, blokker and xenos, with prices like in a dump store). Aah well, can’t win ’em all.
So, turns out I’ll be leaving Lux tomorrow again. How’s that for fast? Still, honestly, the visit was more than worth it. First of all, I got to experience the train ride. Secondly, I met again with all of my new colleagues, including Baptiste Alcalde, who started last Monday. I really feel that our little group (SaToSS – Safety and Security of Software Systems) is rounding out nicely. Speaking of which, 28th of February we will have a kick-off event!
In addition to seeing everyone, there was the wonderful visit on the 15th with Sasa to the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg. The tickets (free of charge, courtesy of the UdL cultural programme) said it was in the Grande Theatre, past which I bike every time on the way to work here. So I thought I knew where we should be… turns out there is a second building, about a 10 minute walk from there. Not so nice to discover if you have only 5 minutes until the start!
We made it, luckily enough, and were treated to a wonderful program:
What is mindboggling to me is how uni.lu students and staff can actually get free tickets. There is only a limited number available, but still. We got the full show for free. Incredible.
So today me & prof. Mauw went by car to work. Had a false start due to some car troubles, but in the end we arrived safely. I managed to finish the BFR finally (PHEW!), check the sportcenter (fitness is expensive, swimming affordable, not really much else there :( ), and in the evening went to check out “Grund” with Sasa, Pieter and Baptiste. Well, Grund is beautiful and boring (resembling the rest of the city), but up from Grund there’s actually a place with some life! We found a bar with people in it, loudish music, drinks, basically, a bar with LIFE!
I was really starting to get worried about that – the whole village seems to work or sleep around here. So I am really glad to have found that place. Anyway, tomorrow Pieter & me will be heading back to .nl, so I might run into you in the next couple of days.