A TV-program was made in De Oude Beurs in Middenmeer last week. A couple of kids were kissing each other on stage in front of the camera. Big scandal, local government upset.

There was an item on the local TV-news about it, featuring my old school.

Found a nice article in the AD:

"Het stelletje tongzoent, de bezoekers in de zaal juichen, televisiecamera's registreren. Dát bracht een schok teweeg het vorige weekend in het 2800 inwoners tellende vlekje in de Kop van Noord-Holland."

(The couple is kissing, the audience screaming and the cameras recording. Now thát was a shock last weekend for the middle-of-nowhere village in northern Noord-Holland).

I found this interesting article on Slashdot today. Three mathematicians at MIT proved that Tetris is NP-complete to solve. That is: if you know in advance the exact order the pieces will fall, it is NP-complete (ie: there is no smart algorithm for it) to maximize your score. The original article is here, it's quite readable for non-mathematicians too.

In the past similar results have been established for other games (for example Minesweeper). Pacman however, has 1 perfect solution (to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 will give you a total of 3,333,360 points).

I'm happy I'm at Chess again, and that I can start with my internship.

I have 50 e-mails in my inbox and there are many people I want to talk to today so it'll be a busy day. The coffee is as nice as always.

Just came back from Utrecht. I saw four lectures of different companies all working with embedded technology, and on the open questions they still face. The one I liked the most was about automatic vehicles, steered electronically.

The afternoon sessions were more commercially oriented, not so interesting for me personally now. I took the proceedings from this year and 2001; there were some articles worth reading.

Today I'll be at Progress 2002 in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht. It's a day on embedded systems; there'll be a number of lectures and workshops.

Although their website is pretty bad the agenda looks very promising with interesting subjects. Some of them are about Formal Methods, the subject I just did an exam on yesterday. My teacher will also give a lecture.

Ettie says hi from Gran Canaria!

"He iedereen krijgt de vakantie groeten van mij!

Doeiii Ettie"

Again I'm at the CWI, I just had my test of Formal Methods.

And I made it!

It went quite well, the beginning was a bit difficult but the final mark is an 8; very happy with that.

Tomorrow I'll start my internship with a conference day on Embedded Technology in Utrecht. My teacher will be there as well as a number of people from Chess.

Now I'll see if I can find a nice book on Computer Science from this library.

There seems to be a fire near the train-bridge. Perhaps the cacao-factory? Again, no camera.

Too bad I don't have Ettie's camera here anymore. There are 3 guys on top of the prison that we see from our window. They're part of the cleaning operation that started a few weeks ago and will take about a year (!).

But at the other hand, who knows?! We're waiting for the helicopter to show up to help them escape...

This winter we'll take care of somebody's plants. They'll go abroad for a couple of months and they left 4 big plants in the halway. It's nice to have so much green in the house.

Today's is the last day before my test.