If James Bond movies had less shooting and explosions, we could hear the music they play in dramatic scenes much better and everyone would be happier.

Yep, that's the new show on CBS. At least it should be. I came up with a great new idea for a show today, a reality show. The premise is simple: "Life at the post office". There is not a group of slower moving, less enthusiastic, barely among the living group of people than the bunch working at the post office. And if I worked there, I would be like that too, cause how else could you possibly survive a job like that?

The show would present their daily lives, their work day as it is with no embelishment. Packages delivered, mail sorted, customers standing in line for 30 minutes.. And people would watch it and love it, because people are idiots and will watch anything that's on tv that they haven't seen before.

..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.

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.

I signed up for an account on developer.berlios.de back in June sometime, kinda because I always wanted to be a developer, think of myself as one. It's taken until now to actually have a project that could go up there and the other day I opened an account for galleryforge.berlios.de. When I logged into my account a few days ago to do this, there was a survey for members to take. Well, a short one. When I saw the question, I stared at it for about 2 minutes and finally decided that I couldn't decide between "yes" and "no". The other question was trivial. So I left that page, did something else, I come back to it and I stare at it again. In the space of 2 days I did this about 4-5 times. By now I had registered my project, had it approved by Berlios and been given an account for it. Knowing that this question would haunt me if I didn't get it over with, I reluctantly decided to say "yes". *click Submit*

The question was "Are you a professional software engineer?" Well, barring any unforeseen event, I will have a diploma to prove that within a couple of weeks. But what about "professional", what does that mean? That's a bit strong, isn't it? I don't have any proper professional experience yet, I'm just out of school. I've done some minor projects on the side, but that doesn't count as "professional". It's like asking if Doug Murphy is a doctor.. fair enough, he's not an amateur, he's not in his pyjamas operating on his stuffed bear, but is he a professional?