merpel

Initially I had bought a nike ipod sport kit for my dad, but he pulled a muscle in his leg or something so he’s not running for a while and instead going to a physiotherapist. Through the latest Nike Men vs. Women ad my brother Hans got interested and competitive and now he’s using the Nike+ iPod thing. Besides joining the Men vs. Women challenge he challenged me, so today we started our own challenge on Nikeplus.com. In three weeks we’ll know who ran the most…

By the way Hans, what do I get when I beat you? ;)

Two days from now I will leave the rainy north to see some sunshine in Athens for EACL (well, hopefully because the weather there isn’t great at the moment either). Anyway, a change of scenery is always good and I like the atmosphere at conferences.

This morning I also booked my flights to London. London? Yes London. This lucky lady’s fiancé happens to be in the UK for work next month so I might as well go there too (sucks to be me ;) ). It won’t be a holiday, as he’ll be in the office all week and I will hopefully be filling in the last gaps in my thesis but at least we can have breakfast, dinner and drinks together.

Lastly, not related to travel, but yesterday I managed to compile the last test corpus for my thesis work (I had to dig into some archives), so now it’s ‘just’ hacking it all together, running it and writing it up.

Life is good!

(if only the sun would come out too now)

I was just zapping along the different channels and came upon Louis Theroux’s weird weekends: Self Fulfillment and I recognised some of the places it was filmed at: the shopping centre in Marina Del Rey and 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

Is it immature to think that’s cool? ;)

Busy busy busy….

Tulips from Amsterdam (from Paul):

Thesis work that’s going pretty OK. It’s still going to be quite a race to get it done before Summer but there’s good stuff happening right now.

I went to Amsterdam (with mum, Diana and my grandmother) to see the Richard Avedon exhibition at foam (very, very good stuff, if you have time and are near Amsterdam, do go there!), and to wander around the canals, sit on a terrace, enjoy some ice-cream in the spring sun and watch people :)

My Grandmother and me in Amsterdam

And when I got home from Amsterdam my Amazon order had already arrived. I reckon they distribute some stuff from Amsterdam these days as well because it didn’t get sent until Thursday (and this game won’t be released in the Netherlands until April 10, and it’s a lot cheaper from Amazon.co.uk). Anyway, I’m very happy with it, it’s great to see the old videoclips again and the songs are just really really fab (and hard to sing too!)