A tag, how exciting *mixed feelings after a long day*. Anywho, this one's for Ash.

Four jobs that I've had

1. Paper boy. Not so much delivering papers as it was selling them. On Sundays. Mornings. Ah, fun. It was the first job I ever had, I got sucked into it through my classmates, cause a lot of people did that back then. So they recruited us to sell Dagbladet, I think we got about 20% of the price of the paper to ourselves, that was 2kr on 10kr. I sold about 30 of them every Sunday, in the same neighborhood, to the same people. I heard others sold in the 60s-70s. I've never pursued a salesman job after that. Did that for about 6 months, including one winter. That was fun, walking in 40cm of snow.
2. Painting the daylight lab at the university. Got that one through *cough* contacts. So basically there was this room that was all white, they wanted it black. I bought the paint, got a ladder, got to work on it. Took me quite a while to cover the walls and ceiling (obviously I dripped lots of paint on the floor though I wasn't supposed to). I believe it took a full weekend and then some.
3. Scanning photos & making web pages. Summer job this one, lasted me about 2 weeks I think. Got to work on scanning pictures mostly, that was an incredibly bore (well duh), but I did have some relaxed days in my office doing that, no pressure on efficiency.
4. My only "real" job to date. Just left that one a few weeks ago, I worked for the High Performance Computing group at the university. Real jobs are no fun to talk about.

Four movies I could watch have seen over and over
No matter what the movie, I get sick of it.

1. Bad Boys - looooooved the movie score
2. Ocean's Eleven
3. Independence Day - it was cool at the time
4. Con Air

Four places that I have lived

1. Łódź
2. Mysen
3. Oslo
4. Trondheim

In that order.
Four TV shows that I watch
Well I don't actually watch anything that's on tv these days. But here's some picks for ya.

1. Seinfeld (number one needless to say)
2. Scrubs
3. Frasier
4. First Wave - an old classic

Four places I've vacationed

1. Paris
2. Amsterdam
3. London
4. Barce Valencia

Four of my favourite dishes

1. Fruit salad
2. my spaghetti torinese is famous in a few obscure places
3. Coffee flavor ice cream
4. I'm out

Four sites I visit daily:

1. http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en
2. http://www.cs.uu.nl/
3. http://reddit.com/
4. http://rss.slashdot.org/ - not religious about it though

Four places I would rather be [than a computer lab]:

1. Netherlands Antilles - looks like a really cool place
2. Coffee Heaven
3. at home
4. on a soccer pitch

No more walking, count me in alongside the priviliged upper class who ram into pedestrians.

See, I never made that announcement, I didn't walk around the city with a megaphone, I didn't take out an ad in the paper, I didn't spam people with that message, I didn't put it on my website, I have never uttered those words ever. Yet it seems that the world is under the impression that I did. Several times everyday people are talking Dutch at me. In just under three weeks in this country, people have asked me for directions on three separate occasions. Sometimes even after I start a conversation in English, a person will attempt to continue it in Dutch. At times the opening statement is so long that I have to interrupt it to interject "sorry, I don't speak Dutch". It happened to me in the computer lab the other day, some poor sap couldn't figure out how to ssh to a linux box (prolly a bachelor student), so he launched this tirade of Dutch words at me. I ended up helping him do it.

Thus it seems clear that as people look at me, they think "this guy is obviously Dutch". It may be because people in NL are so assimilated that there is no stereotype for how Dutchmen look. Or it may be that there is a stereotype and I somehow qualify for it. In any event, it's obvious that I fit in here without making the slightest effort. If I happen to learn Dutch some day, I could actually keep it up all the way through. I don't suppose I could pull that off in say Italy, somehow Italians always know that I'm not one. Not that it bothers me, I'm Dutch afterall.

For those who've missed the cheerful, inspiring, fulfilling and encouraging rants of this blog, there really are two reasons for my recent absence. One is a lack of internet connection at my house, that should get fixed around Easter hopefully. :party: :lazy: :wallbang: The second is, as people often have encouraged me to pursue, I got myself a life. Since I started school on Tuesday, it's been busy times and a stressful schedule. Exciting though. I did in fact have several blog ideas on the stack last week, some not fully developed, but after doing nothing but studying for four days, I've flushed those out of my mind.

In light of this foreign and funny land, I've decided to open a new category - dutchness, for all Dutch things big and small.

With the formalities out of the way, to the meat of the issue. I open today with an excercise. Get up from the chair, walk to the back of the room and read the following text out loud:

9 - 21

Two numbers and a dash, right? Good. This means you are qualified to go shopping in Norway. You see, in Norway, and many other normal countries, stores plaster their opening hours on the neon board next to the store name and you can see it all from 2 blocks away, day and night. Not so in NL. Over here I suppose they saw that and said "where's the fun in that?". And they decide it to make it 'more interesting'. "Maybe if we make our customers come closer to the store, they will more likely enter it?" So they made charts. That's right, charts. This is how you check the opening hours in NL:

..etc

If you think it sounds silly, I can assure you that it is. The printing is very small, so you have to go right up to the door to read it. A simple 9-21 will just not suffice if you want the semantics to declare opening hours on an hourly basis. You could even fill it in to read (9-12, 14-15, 16-20) just by coloring the boxes.

The Expatriate

Achtung! You are 23% brainwashworthy, 22% antitolerant, and 14% blindly patriotic
Congratulations! You are not susceptible to brainwashing, your values and cares extend beyond the borders of your own country, and your Blind Patriotism does not reach unhealthy levels. If you had been German in the 30s, you would've left the country.

One bad scenario -- as I hypothetically project you back in time -- is that you just wouldn't have cared one way or the other about Nazism. Maybe politics don't interest you enough. But the fact that you took this test means they probably do. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt.

Did you know that many of the smartest Germans departed prior to the beginning of World War II, because they knew some evil shit was brewing? Brain Drain. Many of them were scientists. It is very possible you could have been one of them.

Conclusion: born and raised in Germany in the early 1930's, you would not have been a Nazi.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 12% on brainwashworthy

You scored higher than 24% on antitolerant

You scored higher than 8% on patriotic

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=17675020579094199926