I moved to Utrecht in January this year. At the time it was cold, I was wearing a thick Norwegian made winter coat (so you could survive in Antarctica with that basically). After a few weeks, the coat was definitely too much, so I bought a thin jacket. Even so, I was surprised at how I was sweating basically everyday. Almost everytime I left the house and wanted to take care of business (at my pace), I was sweating. I know I'm in bad shape, but is it this bad? Well, I got used to it.

But now that I got in less than three days ago, I am definitely feeling the difference. The humidity here is ridiculous. People are wearing pants and sweaters, whereas I'm in shorts and a t-shirt and I'm still sweating when I'm out there. There is no way I would come home sweaty after some quick business in town in Trondheim when it's 16 degrees out, this is not normal.

Relative humidity for September 5, 2006:

• CNN weather
• Utrecht 95%, Trondheim 79%
• BBC weather
• Utrecht/De Bilt 75%, Trondheim 89%
• kweather desktop applet (source unknown)
• Utrecht/Soesterberg 93.8%, Trondheim 76.8%
• goutrecht.nl
• Utrecht 73%
• weather.com
• Utrecht 94%, Trondheim 82%

So trying to find out from established sources fails spectacularly. All I know is, the humidity here is way too high. So I either have to move very slowly or I have to prepare to sweat. :lazy:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is something I noticed in Italy. I'm not saying it's an Italian specific thing, but that is my association at least. See, Italians are temperamental. If you make a mistake, they won't gently tap on your shoulder, whisper "I'm terribly sorry to disturb you, sir" and *then* tell you what you "could have done differently". No, they will come right out and say it, yell it most of the time. If you make a small mistake in traffic, you get car horns going off all the way around you, because order must be preserved.

Here's the rub. Italians will stand in line at the post office or the check out line in the supermarket for an hour without issuing a hint of complaint. They will happily blather on with their friend (or on the cell phone) without the slightest sign of alarm of urgency. This is what I call Italian patience, because in spite of being so impatient in some contexts, they can be incredibly patient elsewhere. Why get pissed off about waiting in line? There's nothing you can do about it anyway, this is just the way it is.

I had a long list of things to do today, and I haven't done any of them, because I don't have Italian patience. At the student desk, you take a number and wait your turn. My number was 30, t-h-i-r-t-y, numbers beyond the current number being served. At a processing rate of about 5 minutes per person, that means I would be waiting 2.5h. It would probably be closer to an hour, because of all the people who took a number, realized how long they would be waiting, and went home. They open tomorrow at 10, I intend to be there at 9.50.

At the bank there was a similar line, and at the train station, ditto. I do wait my turn when I don't have a choice - waiting to board an aircraft, waiting for a bus, waiting in the check out line. But I refuse to waste time waiting when it's completely pointless. And it's not because I manage my time so efficiently that it would set me back, I just cannot accept that 5 minutes worth of business requires waiting 45 minutes in line, it's a matter of principle. If I accept these ridiculous waiting times now, I will never get anything done efficiently ever again, it's all a question of mindset.

Adding to my woes is the delightful ever-present wind that totally sucks blows the fun out of biking and the fact that UU is increasingly a messy construction site. Not only did they not finish anything before the new semester, they have stepped up the degree of chaos since I was last here in July. Since the book I needed wasn't in the store, I went to the library. Well, I tried. It turns out the entire stair case of the building that houses used to house the computer science department is closed off for asbestos removal. So the elevator works, but most of the floors have been shut down entirely as well, including the top floor where the library is once was. There is a note in the elevator about where the various departments have been moved to, but no mention of the library.

Is there such a thing as Polish temperament? I think I may have it.

Back from vacation, school starting in a couple of days and there's a list of things to do before the kick-off, as usual. To make the menial tasks more fun, I decided to blog it.

• Buy book for functional programmming course
• if not available in the store, loan it from the library
• else order it online
• pay rent
• set up tennis with my old tennis partner
• pick up toiletries from Kruidvat
• get a hold of that fancy train discount card
• obtain the internet banking package from my bank so I can check my balance from home
• reset my school password at the student administration desk
• coerce the school to give me a certificate of credits earned last semester

I know it sounds glamorous, but it's just business as usual here at Kramerica Industries.

[thanks to a full page ad in Aftenposten] IBM stands for International Business Machines [Corporation]. Now I feel like a kid who's just been told there's no Santa Claus. It never actually occurred to me that IBM was an acronym, it just sounded like a cool name for the world's biggest computer company. Business machines? What the hell is that? It could be anything, from big lawn mowers to saw mills. It's probably the most abstract name I've heard for a company, literally doesn't say anything about what they intend to do (everything, apparently).

What's more, if you open wikipedia and you're looking for IBM without knowing the acronym expansion, you are presented with these choices, none of which seem especially plausible:

• Inclusion body myositis
• International Business Machines Corporation
  • IBM India [I guess this one gives it away]
• International Brotherhood of Magicians
• Intercontinental ballistic missiles

How is that for a metaphor? Investing funds (ie. time) to obtain assets (ie. knowledge), whose worth is determined by the free market. Or if you cut the bs, simply deciding which languages to learn based on knowing its current value.

The TIOBE Index is the place to be if you want respect and admiration. Surely something Yukihiro Matsumoto (on the right) is presently enjoying, as his creation, the Ruby language, is about to crack the Top 10. And we trust Japanese engineering, don't we? If you buy Japanese electronics, you know it's gonna be good.

TIOBE tells us that if there is one thing all those colleges and universities teaching Java can't be accused of, it's being business oriented. Java is the number one 'enterprise language' at the moment, and after 3-4 years of Java, most graduates have learnt enough about it to look for jobs in companies that don't use it.
So, looking at TIOBE in terms of owning stock, this is my break down.

01] Java -- well grounded, hope I never have to use it
02] C -- familiar, only done a little hacking
03] Visual Basic -- no knowledge
04] C++ -- have learnt it, never used it in a project
05] PHP -- quite familiar, a couple of projects
06] Perl -- very basic
07] Python -- very comfortable, favorite language
08] C# -- meaning to start a project in it, but haven't yet
09] Delphi -- the high school years, don't remember much anymore
10] JavaScript -- always been avoiding it, not a big fan of client side scripting
...
13] Ruby -- see C#
16] Lisp/Scheme -- see C#, but lost interest in it after I started learning Haskell
27] Awk -- barely touched
32] Bash -- intermediate skills
46] Haskell -- basic skills, will be seeing plenty more of it in school soon