Ramblings of a Water Dragon

Only three days into vacation now and I am already feeling so much better. It is amazing how much a vacation can make a difference in one's mental state.

We flew in to Italy on Friday and came to Viola's parents house in the mountains. I have only ever been here in the winter before and it is incredible how different it is in the summer. It is so green here. Viola's mom tells me this area is called the "Garden of Italy" and I can see why. The family garden here is incredible. Green beans, zucchini, tomato's, potatoes, basil, mint, sage, salad greens and more. We have eaten from the garden more than anything else and it has been just wonderful.

On Saturday we had an amazing day. We slept late and then went into town. Viola's mom had decided to buy a new laptop so the three of us went to the electronics store and picked one out along with some accessories. Next, we went and shopped for shoes and I was content to dissuade Viola from buying the ugly ones and then we went out to the lake and sat on the beach for awhile and went swimming. Her dad is in incredible shape and swam a very long way. I swam quite a bit as well and got good tired. It is amazing how much better my body felt after swimming. I actually really like swimming, but I have chlorinated water which makes swimming in Amsterdam all but impossible. If there where a lake as clear as this one in Amsterdam I would swim a whole lot more often. The water was so clear you could see the fish swimming around. It was incredibly beautiful with this quaint little, picturesque Italian town at one end of the lake. There where children playing and people playing volleyball. After swimming we came back up to the house and had the most amazing dinner. The Italian's really know how to make good food.

On Sunday we got up early and drove with Viola's dad out to San Domenico, part of the Italian Alps. Viola and I went skiing there last winter. It was interesting to see the same place in the summer time, all green and gorgeous. We took the ski lift up to the top of the mountain and then hiked around the mountain and down into a neighboring valley. We where up around 5,500 or 6000 feet and the hike took us down about 1,500 feet into the valley. There was the cutest little village in the valley made of stone houses and surrounded by cows. Apparently the people only live here in the summer and bring the cows up to graze because it is too dangerous with the snow fall and avalanches to live there in the winter. Viola's dad bought some cheese from one of the houses in the village for us to have for lunch. It was really incredible to go into the little stone building where they made the cheese after milking the cows every day. There was a stone slab with cheese loosing water under a cheese cloth, the days batch, and a low fire to keep the building at the right temperature and I imagine it added flavor with the smoke and all. There was a dark room just filled with wheels of cheese. It was really incredible. I also really liked the turkey and the chickens all hanging out with the dog. I imagine they understood the dog was important for their safety but who really knows. We then walked on into the next little town in the valley and bought fresh ricotta from another little farm house. We found a nice little spot under a tree and had a lunch of fruit, bread (bought fresh from the bakery on the way up) and the cheese. It was all really fantastic. We then hiked up to a little falls that had a little fountain coming out of one of the rocks that produced iron rich water. There was so much iron you could see the rust collecting on the rocks below. Viola's dad filled his bottle and we all had some and I have never tasted water like it before. It was like drinking rust but with a mineral flavor too it as well. I wasn't particularly fond of the taste but it was very interesting none the less. The hike out was mostly down hill from there until just shy of San Domenico again when it was uphill for the last little bit of the road. It was an incredibly clear and gorgeous day and I got some great photos in addition to a little sunburn, despite lathering up in sunblock 3 times throughout the day. We returned to Esio and had another amazing dinner prepared by Viola's mom.

I spent the morning today configuring and setting up the router and the computer and showing Viola's mom how to use it. They finally got DSL and we got it working, largely so they can skype with Viola. I am glad that they have though as Viola misses them a lot and I think being able to video conference with them will be really important for her. We then went down to the lake again. I was too sore to swim again but Viola gave me a massage and I went in the water for a little bit and they swam around. We then went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant with a great terrace overlooking the lake. It is incredibly beautiful here and I would love to be able to spend more time here.

Tomorrow we are going to Milan in the morning so Viola can run some errands and deal with some issues with the house in Milan. On Wednesday morning we fly to Sicily for 7 days of relaxing on the beach. I don't think there will be Internet there which is probably a good thing.

All in all I am sore, burned, relaxed and extremely happy! I really needed this and I look forward to a whole lot more to come.

Very recently my lovely Viola turned 27. To celebrate her parents flew out from Italy for a visit. We picked them up at the airport and then went out for dinner at a very nice Italian place around the corner from our house. I had previously arranged to have special roses on the table for her and a special sweet ready for her with candles after dinner. I gave her the first present of the evening, tickets for the four of us to go to the Ballet. I think her parents where shocked that I had spent so much for her present but I thought it would be a very special thing for all of us and Viola had been talking about wanting to go to the Ballet for some time. I think we all enjoyed the dinner a great deal.

After dinner we took a walk through the red light district and around the old church and then over to Dam square. We then went home and had cake I had baked and Viola opened other presents from her family. She seemed to enjoy it all a great deal.

The following day we went to the Rembrandt House in the morning which was nice but a little disappointing because they did not have his etchings on display. After that I went home to pack my bags and get ready to go to Boston while they went to the Jewish Historical Museum. They came home and we went to the ballet, a production of Copellia.

Copellia is the story of a bit of a mad scientist who creates a robot dancer. The boy in the town spurns his real woman for the robot girl and then she wins him back by showing him the errors of his ways and they marry. The ballet was wonderfully choreographed and the sets where just incredible. The second act had wonderful motorized set pieces that moved around on stage in homage to the robot inventory and the third act started off with wonderful black and white set and black and white costumes. The set changed color part way through though through the use of colored lighting and people in colored costumes came out. It was truly a very enjoyable experience and I think we all enjoyed it very much.

Unfortunately I had to leave very early on Saturday morning for Boston so I didn't get as much time with her parents as I might have liked but the little time we did have was much enjoyed.

It has been quite a long time but I have been much to busy to blog. Having finished a wonderful holiday though and now being a little too tired to sleep I decided it was time to try to catch up some.

In November mom and Ed came to visit for some wonderful time. They stayed in our little apartment which was nice because Viola and I where both quite busy so we where able to see them more every night than we would have otherwise. I still need to process the photos from their visit but it was great to see them.

Since then, my life has continued to be very full of work. The PhD is going pretty well over all I think. I have finished a first small project now and am working on a paper about it. I don't think it will be a top paper or anything, but hopefully I can get it published. I am told it is not particularly common to publish something your first year so I am happy to have something already though I still feel like I am looking for exactly the right question in some ways.

I have also been invited to revise my masters thesis a bit and to publish it in a social science journal by the editor, so I am excited about that. This opportunity just came about this week! I did my masters on the use of smart phones for disaster management. Recently, the VU hired a new professor working in the area of disaster management and we had a meeting with him on Monday to discuss our ideas and see if they where realistic. He was actually very excited and invited me to publish in his "Journal of Contingency and Crisis Management". It is too new to have a huge impact but it is still a publication and for work that I did not expect to get a publication. It will be odd to have my first publication in a non-technical journal but my thesis was partly non-technical as I was really looking for an area of actual utility to focus on. Anyway, this week we are working on revising a grant proposal based on the ideas to try to get more money for more people to work in this area. It is also helping me to search for the right question to answer and so is helpful in that respect.

On the holiday front Viola and I spent a lovely two weeks in Italy. We spent time in Milan hosting her friends for dinner twice which was quite enjoyable. I made "pasta fresca" with gorgonzola and walnuts that I was quite proud of and got rave reviews. We then went to her grandmothers house to celebrate Christmas which was lovely of course. The food in Italy is really amazing and I really enjoyed seeing all the people again. Then on to Esio where her parents live, where we spent some very nice days with them and Viola's friends in the mountains. We even managed to go skiing which was just fantastic. It has been years and I was sore as hell afterwards but I really enjoyed it a lot.

For New Years we took the train down to Napels to stay with a very good friend of Viola's there. He cooked the most incredible dinner with about 8 or 9 courses including a wonderful desert with sour cherries, pistachios, chocolate and marscapone. I really enjoyed the evening which included setting fireworks off out the window of the apartment. Naples is apparently the fireworks capital of Italy and it showed. In some ways it resembled a war zone with big window rattling blasts on a regular basis. In the morning we went for coffee and pastries and passed several dumpsters that where warped and smoking from people putting essentially small bombs inside. It was pretty crazy.

Unfortunately, the next night Viola's purse was stolen. We where standing behind a cop car for a minute while our host was looking for a place to eat when a scooter with two guys on it drove by and the guy on the back snatched her purse. We spent several hours making a report at the police station and Viola lost a day in Milan to getting all her documents back but she handled it very well. Better than me in fact. She was happy she wasn't hurt, and of course I was thankful for that, but it really shook my faith in humanity a bit. I think this was in part because of another unfortunate event on this trip.

When we came down from the mountains I immediately payed the rent because I suspected we wouldn't have internet in Naples and then I checked my email only to discover that the landlady had sent me email. In this email she informed me that she had gone into the apartment and removed some furniture and replaced some other furniture. She said something to the effect of "I am coming over tomorrow to do this, if I don't hear from you I will assume it is okay." What kind of crap is that? It was extremely upsetting and we are still discussing what we are going to do about it. She took the couch, the desk, the table, a bureau, the chairs, the coffee table, the oven, the iron, the ironing board, the blender, the juicer, the house plants and more. She replaced some of these with super cheap crap! We where paying as much as we where paying in part because we where renting a furnished apartment. It was very upsetting to come home to a messy house with crap furniture. She agreed to give us half of this months rent back and we are discussing what else we are going to do about the issue. She even moved our Christmas tree. You just don't come into somebody's house at Christmas while they are on holiday and move their tree! I am still upset about it and think I will be until we move so we are considering it. We are debating between trying to rent something else for a year or trying to buy something now.

I am sure there is a lot more I could write about but I have already taken far too much of your time. ;) Happy New Year to all of you!

Today is the big day. At 14:00 there will be tea. At 14:30 the event is supposed to start. I suspect my portion will being at 14:45 and I will have a masters degree in my hot little hands by 15:00. I couldn't be more pleased really. I have achieved all I set out to achieve two and a half years ago when I started looking for masters programs. I have a masters, spent two years outside the US and have a PhD position. That the PhD is also outside the US is a bonus I had not intended, but I didn't think I would like living here quite as much as I do. I love it here in Amsterdam. It is a gorgeous city and I smile every day as I look at the architecture on my way to the tram stop.

Today I am sublimely happy! The one big piece of my life I have been missing has returned. She arrived yesterday, late as usual, though not her fault this time. ;) It was amazing to see her again. Viola is the most shining example of humanity I could ever ask for and I am incredibly thankful to share space and time with her again. She seems to be happy with the apartment I have found, as am I, and spent some time unpacking yesterday and getting settled. It somehow felt a lot more like home with her clothes hanging in the closet. I have really missed her and the 105 days we spent apart was far too long. I hope we never have to be apart so long again. I am very hopeful that she is going to manage to find a position here so we can be together for a long, long time to come. I think she is really, really good for me and challenges me to grow and improve in so many ways but does so in a loving, non-judgmental way that makes it really easy for me to understand and improve. I am incredibly thankful to have her in my life. It doesn't hurt that she is incredibly beautiful either. ;)

As for work, I love my job here at the University. The Dutch are incredibly easy going and my supervisor is so, so nice. I am still settling in a bit and waiting for the wheels of the bureaucracy to turn but it is still very enjoyable. The Dutch love their bureaucracy and are exceptionally good at making certain simple tasks incredibly inefficient. The current tour de force involves not getting me a computer, access to the staff printers, pass card for the building, pigeonhole in the mail room, name on the door, or updating the PhD website with my information. I have been here almost a month and a half now. The computer is the most annoying of course and the complete incompetence of the IT department here is simply mind boggling. Despite all of this I am really insanely happy with the job. I am largely free to do what I want every day and have a (usually) weekly status meeting where I tell my supervisor what I have been up to.

Most of my time so far has been consumed by writing a grant proposal which I think is in pretty good shape. We are soliciting feedback from various people on it now. The hope is to get a post-doc to come in and help out with the work I am doing. I am told that it is unusual to write a grant as a first year PhD but I am thankful for the experience. I think we have a pretty strong grant proposal and I hope that it gets funded. It would be super cool to already get funding for work I have done and would make me feel better about being able to find finding in the future.

The other part of my time has been spent on the class I am running this semester. It isn't exactly like teaching since it is one of the lab courses and so there is no lecturing. I would love to give a lecture at some point but I would have to push hard to make that happen I think. I got to stand up in front of the class on the opening day and sort of describe what the heck they are supposed to do but that was the extent of the lecturing. Of course I got access to the materials for the class the day I was supposed to give the introduction so it was a bit of a mad scramble for me to read the assignment and the code and prepare the lecture but the professor said that I did a very good job and nobody would have guessed that I had never looked at the materials before.

The rest of the time I have been updating the code we give the students and fixing up the absolutely incredibly unmaintainable test suite I am supposed to use to test the students code. They changed the version of Minix, the operating system developed here by Tanenbaum's group, that the practical is supposed to be done on this year but I was left to update the code we give the students to work with the new version of the OS. I also had to update the test suite and decided to largely rework the whole thing as it was a nightmare. The system I inherited was a completely unmaintainable pair of shell scripts that dumped C code out to a file, compiled it and then ran the code. It did nothing to handle students code hanging and required reading the log file to determine if certain timing related tests passed. It also violated the layering of tcp on top of ip by calling ip_init() to initialize the ip layer for the students, possibly masking errors in their code for them. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out what everything is supposed to be doing and fix it up so that it works correctly. I am quite happy with the results now though. The work will pay off this year by reducing the amount of time it takes me to test all the students code and I am told I may have to do the same practical next year. Thus, it may be a boon for me again and will certainly be useful to anybody who comes along after me. This effort is largely done now and I am looking forward to making some progress on my actual PhD.

The rest of my time has been consumed by getting the work for CA done. We are just about to go into alpha testing and I am thrilled at how far we have come. It will be interesting to get feedback but I expect to be very busy fixing bugs for some time to come. There are of course numerous improvements that I would also like to make to the system. The list of desired features is simply mind boggling but I would really like to see the system go live before adding too many more features. My hope is to roll out new features on a fairly regular basis once we are live. There are some features I am particularly keen to add, but I am trying to focus on getting the quality where I want it for launch.

All in all I am very happy here and happy with the direction my life is taking. It is a huge change from where I was 3 years ago, completely miserable in California and I am incredibly thankful to everybody who helped me make it possible to get where I am today.

Today was my first official day at the University. It went pretty well overall, even if I didn't get a whole lot done. I managed to get keys to my office, order my computer, and get my desk setup. The biggest problem was that my desk had 5 rather loud computers on it which I was informed were an "IPv6 testbed". After a bit of hunting around I found the owner and managed to get them shutdown so I could move them off of my desk and into a corner. I would prefer that they weren't in the room since they make a lot of noise, but apparently there are issues in our server room with weight and power consumption and so they will live where they are for now. It is certainly better than it was though since I can now use my desk for the intended purpose.

I also managed to get the book for my "Scientific Writing" course which begins tomorrow. It will only meet once a week through October but I am hopeful that it will end up being very educational. I have decided that I am going to try to write a book next semester and so the training should be very valuable in that venture not to mention my PhD. My hope is to come up with an outline for the book this semester and then start actually writing after the holiday break.

I also confirmed that I will be grading the Computer Networking practicum. This is apparently the most challenging practicum offered by the department and I did not do it myself since I heard nothing but horror stories. For the technically inclined the task is to implement a subset of TCP on top of an IP stack and then to implement a subset of HTTP 1.0 on top of your TCP stack. I have heard that it is extremely difficult to get right. The introductory class is on Wednesday and I am looking forward to it.

It would be better for the group I am in if I were to do the Parallel Programming practicum since that is run by my group and is supposed to have two PhDs assigned to it. I have the feeling it can be done by one though it may be a lot more work. I will most likely be assigned to that one next year so it would be better to have done it this year but because of a shortage of PhDs or something this year I have to cover Computer Networking instead. My group will be loosing the two people that have ever run it at the end of this year so next year I will most likely have to run it off of the documentation but I imagine that is pretty good by this point. Perhaps it is better for me this way since I will end up with at least two courses instead of teaching the same one over and over again the whole time I am here as has happened with Rob.

I also managed to get the Internet to work at my apartment today so I am thrilled about that. Hopefully I will get to talk to Viola a little more though the time difference we now face is proving to be the hardest yet. It will only be for a month though so I am sure we can get through it.

I am slowly settling in to life in Amsterdam again.

The apartment I have found is just fantastic. It gets lots of light on account of having one wall in both rooms be nothing but windows and having a west-south-west exposure. The evening light is just amazing. I can also hear the bells of the old church from my apartment which is just lovely. I am already thinking that I will be loath to leave the apartment in November when the time comes. The only odd thing about the apartment is the amount of stuff that the woman I am sub-letting from left behind. While I appreciate the furniture some of the decorations are not exactly to my taste. It has this slightly odd feeling of being somebody else's space still. I have largely unpacked though and fixed the dishwasher today and have spent enough time in it for it to being to feel like my place.

The only big issue I have left is that I have not been able to get the Internet to work. It is cable internet so I am pretty sure it is a PPPoE connection that I need a user name and password for. I have put a call into the woman I am subletting from but have not gotten a call back. So for the moment I have no internet at home. I am over at my friend Tom's house now using his connection and I will have a connection at the VU which I will be able to use to get internet things done but it does make communication with Viola more challenging. This is unfortunate but bearable for the moment.

I am thrilled to be back in Amsterdam though. I missed being here so much. This city really feels like home to me and I am so happy to be closer to the heart of the city. I can't wait to get to work on my PhD.

I have arrived safely in Amsterdam!

It is an extreme joy to be back in this city, particularly after such a personally challenging summer.


So I am pretty much done with my Masters, thrilled with the start of my PhD and overjoyed to have found an apartment in Amsterdam!

I have been having trouble lately getting focused and driven enough to finish my masters. I have a lot of work left to do and not a lot of time to do it in. My personal goal was to have the first draft completed by the first of August. It doesn't look like I am going to hit that. My professor has asked for a draft no later than the 6th of August. I think that may even be hard to hit with going to Portland on the 2nd but I am going to do my best in the next two days. If I could get really long productive days in for the next two days I think I could come close.

My big problem is that I am not happy with the work I have done so far completely. I just feel like the project is only partly done and yet I have to stop working on it and write about it which is hard because I find myself saying a lot about what it doesn't do yet which really bugs me. I would like to write an end of project report instead of this in the middle analysis that is totally unsatisfying. Such is the jam I have gotten myself into. Life goes on. I will turn in what I have when I have to turn it in and hope to do well enough. I am pretty sure they will pass me based on the effort they have seen so far but I would like to get at least a seven going forward so that I graduate with honors. That will certainly help funding in the future.

I am a lot frustrated and a bit annoyed but I am trying to press on anyway.

Last night I had a rather bothersome dream. It was really about missing Viola I think in part prompted by last nights ruminations about the topic.

At first it was an okay dream. She and I were in a building her father was helping to build. It was still very much under construction but there was the artist living there already who was working on the bathrooms. He had done a gorgeous job on the bathroom in his studio and some nice tile work on the wall outside his studio. There was still a need for concrete in various places in the building though and I remember telling her dad to use couscous as a filler in the concrete. I am really not sure what that was about but he apparently thought it was a great idea and used couscous cement to level the floors throughout the building. Maybe it is the next big building material! ;)

Then somehow it turned bad and I was in jail and so I wasn't allowed to see Viola anymore. I kept trying to get out to see her but I couldn't of course, it being jail and all. I just really wanted to get out to see Viola but I kept ending up back in the jail bathroom somehow. I suspect the location was caused by my full bladder but still it was so hard to want to get to her but be unable to.

I woke up badly in need of Viola and coffee. I have my coffee now but no Viola of course. I am rather addicted now to my morning cappuccino since Viola got me a stove top espresso maker and milk foamer. I have my cappuccino every morning and it reminds me of being with her. It is a comfort food now but I know that I am drinking too much of it. Maybe I will consume less when we are together again. Then again, she is Italian, so maybe not. I miss her so so much!

It hasn't even been a third of the time that Viola and I will have to be apart this summer/fall and I already feel like I am having a hard time with it. We last saw each other 32 days ago now and the soonest we could possibly be together again is in 67 days when she returns from Brazil.

That is only if I go to Italy immediately whn she gets back which is doubtful since the plan is for her to move when she gets back and she will probably need a week or two to pack her things up and then I will probably fly to Italy to help her drive her car out. That means that it is probably closer to 85 days until I see her again which at this point seems totally unbearable. I am sure I will get through it but the doing is proving challenging.

It has been really hard to be without her. Somehow it is different being on different continents and in different time zones. She sometimes is up by the time I am going to bed and sometimes I stay up late just for the chance to hear her voice before I go down for the night. I slog through the morning just waiting for her to get out of bed so I can hear her shining voice again.

She comes to this time zone on the 9th of August and that may help for the two weeks I am still here but we will still be very far apart, only to return to different time zones again except swapped positions. My light at the end of the tunnel is being able to actually live together though so I am waiting for that with as much patience as I can possibly muster. I have no doubt that the wait is worth it but that doesn't really make the waiting any easier.