..you realize how little it is you know. I'm starting a Master in Software Technology at Utrecht University in about two weeks and I've done some surfing on their website to find out what I should expect and how (if at all possible) to prepare myself.

Good news first, the site says Master students get office space. :cool: That can mean a lot of things, but since that just became known to me today, I'll be hoping for something nice. Next, the group of ST students is small (5 people registered), so it won't be a huge group of people I don't know. Next, Master students work alongside/sometimes with PhD students, postdocs etc, so the learning environment should be inspiring. Furthermore, the subjects offered all seem very interesting.

Bad news? As I looked through the websites of current PhD students (to get an idea of what they accomplished and what it takes to be a "good" Master student), I was in awe. These people have written a thesis I couldn't even understand, but they have also published many reports, some publications, held lots of presentations, written complicated software, in short: not only done a lot of work, done a lot of difficult work. If I try to compare who I am to that, well the gap is astounding. Invincible, seemingly. The thought of me being expected to do that kind of work is (how shall I put it) grossly intimidating. A challenge I wanted and a challenge I'll be getting, but I don't walk into this without a care in the world.

Which is a nice parallell to what I felt when I first started college. Before that, in fact. I didn't know anything about computer science, I wanted to know as much as possible, I kept asking people who were doing it and never was satisfied with the answers, always wanting more details, more everything. Right now I face a similar problem, I realize I don't know much about what I'm getting myself into. What seems apparent, however, is that it will definitely change my life. And it will be difficult and I'm ready for it. Hopefully if I get through this, I will finally feel that I have accomplished something in academia.

For now, I know nothing, let the games begin.

Or simply: "a little" vs "a lot". It's amazing how the perception of magnitude changes from one instance to another. Half a cup of coffee is not a lot of coffee. To drink. But it's a lot of coffee to spill on your desk and speaker and computer. Good thing the case is metal and doesn't leak. Ugh, now I have a sticky desk. :lazy:

2006 total: 1 km
since 2004: 27.1 km

I talked about before how saving posts doesn't work, I had this one planned for Sunday (yesterday), but it didn't work out as usual. It was supposed to be a triumph, instead it marks the beginning of a new struggle. As a person with no will power, I did something daring last week, I went on a diet. I've tried this before once or twice and never could last longer than a day and a half, this time I went the whole week. Well except for Sunday, but that's only because I wanted one day off in between and I thought it would be practical to start again today. All the same, I'm very proud of myself for staying with it, there really was very little no prior evidence to suggest that I would could.

You see, about ~3 years ago I was in good physical shape, and about 73kg. Then I decided to move out and live in student housing for a while, just to see what it was like to not live at home. The very experience was nothing out of the ordinary, but being a lousy cook, I would cook too much food and then overeat like everyday. That's how I gained 5kg in 4 months. I lost track of when exactly I gained the rest, but for a while now I've been 84kg, which is clearly too much. Today I'm 82kg and even if I don't go back to my original weight, I'll be happy to lose whatever I can get the next week or two before I embark upon a voyage (more on that later).

Some mornings are different than others. This is a special kind of morning, the kind of morning when you wake up and think to yourself "this is the day".

If you're one of those people who wake up and immediately get up, then you're probably a rarity. I don't do that, I need a while to "decompress".. a few minutes, sometimes half an hour, depending on how tired I feel when I wake up. Those minutes are unique to the whole day because this is when I do something I never do otherwise. Plan my day. Ok, so today I need to get my shit together, get that overdue homework done, finish that book, do the laundry, go shopping and fix the bike. Well it's not really planning, it's more a laundry list, things to be done whenever just as long as they get done today. Or tomorrow. Those are the things that come to mind at the very beginning. These are the things I will most certainly end up not doing. Then with that out of the way, my thoughts flow to things that are fun, but not important. I spend a lot more time thinking about these. These are things I will end up doing today.