Pre-leave post

It's not that far away now anymore, the exchange. I may or may not have mentioned this, but I will leave for the states august 11, just under two weeks from now. I am strangely calm. Serene, I would almost say. In contrast, my mom is sort of freaking out all of a sudden. She has the impression that I need to do a lot of things before leaving. I wouldn't know what, really. Clean out my room, pack my bags, and we're all set.

Tania, my mexican alter-ego who will be replacing me during my time abroad, will arrive the ninth, two days before I leave. She'll have to bear with the guest room for a few days, but I don't think that's such a big deal. I'm floating between excited and nervous about meeting here. She speaks decent english, so it probably shouldn't be a problem, but I'm still nervous. More than about my own host family, which incidentally I don't know a thing about.

I should probably mention the dark knight. A friend of mine had tickets to the (Dutch) pre-run, the night before the official opening. We were seated basically exactly in the center of the IMAX theater, which was really awesome. As a bonus, free beer and nachos were served. And let's not forget the movie, which is awesome for a three reasons: the performance of Heath Ledger, the character that really drives this thing along. Second reason is not placing all attention on awesome special effects. They're there, but they don't take center stage for a change. And third reason is Morgan Freeman, one of my favorite actors of all time. In my eyes, a movie gets points just for him being in it.

I'll be seeing Wall-e tomorrow. I'm really expecting a lot from that movie. I'm hoping it'll be a pixar movie worth owning, which I haven't seen since Finding Nemo. Ratatouille is also good, I heard, but I never got the chance to see it. Maybe I'll rent the DVD once.

for the sake of content

So, after almost a month hiatus, I am now back to entertain you with another post. I'm not going to think up any more excuses for not posting. Frankly, with my day job progressing normally, there's just not much going on worth blogging about. I am of course kept busy, implementing the A* algorithm in python and other such niceties. This one jumps out at me since the use of a heuristic makes A* annoyingly unpredictable. Moving around the goal or start points of a graph might work just fine. Alternatively, it could blow up in your face for no apparent reason and take off finding a path to China.

I'm writing this at work right now, to keep myself from falling asleep. Yesterday was my friend's birthday party. The main dish was the movie The Happening, a horror/disaster movie not unlike The Day After Tomorrow. This time around, the plants are angry at us and dispense a neurotoxin that makes people want to literally kill themselves. I am not joking. The movie started with construction workers jumping off their buildings en masse, in an enactment of the infamous lemmings. Though we noted and appreciated the ties between this movie and the suicide bunnies, we feel safe in recommending that you do not go see this movie.

Despite resolutions to the contrary I was (mis)led by temptation to party on far too long, finally hitting the sack at about 3:30 AM. Of course our little kittens no longer have any qualms about going into my bedroom, jumping on my bed, and start hunting one of my body parts that happens to be moving at the time. This was not appreciated, and I conveyed this message to them in clear and concise manner. No excessive violence was used, of course.

I will make a feeble attempt at dragging myself through the day. I am afraid that with my limited concentration, the bugs/lines of code ratio would exceed one, which makes programming an extremely bad idea at the moment. I've decided to focus on the simple things, letting the hard ones for after the weekend, when my mental state has returned to normal levels.