Last full day in Nederland

I was up for a couple of hours again last night. I watched an episode and a half of LOST, and chatted with Max for a few minutes online. Speaking of chatting with Max, I looked up what GPRS rates are and they are $0.015/kb. So far I have used 466kb in Europe, so I’ve spent $7 on internet for my phone, 7 minutes of phone calls at $0.99 a minute, and 14,99€ for 180 minutes of WiFi from McDonalds (of which I have 34 minutes left as I type up this entry offline). Connectivity is damn expensive here.

Ate breakfast downstairs again, then we were off to DAF. I spent the morning working with Erik (my evil twin) doing code stuff. It’s amazing how many of the problems we are finding with the systems independently and finding different ways to solve them. We both promised to try to communicate more so we can get better collaborative efforts on some of the problems that we both find.

The afternoon sessions sucked. The management got into quite a bit of political posturing that I just don’t care much for. I wrote up my report of the morning, just to make sure I had everything clear to myself, and then I wrote up the majority of the Sunday and Monday blogs. As I expected, we got done with meetings at 5:00pm, but did not leave the office as we talked to everyone that passed by (me included, all of the instrument integration guys are great over here, very friendly).

Back here in the hotel for a bit of downtime and to get a bit of juice back into my starving laptop battery. Marty and I are going out to dinner; I need to find a way to get to the Greek place.

Not any more pictures to contribute. I’m kind of disappointed how everything is under some sort of construction.

We just got back from this Greek place down in the Centrum. I was pretty disappointed; matters were not helped much by our Greek waiter that probably could not speak Dutch, much less English. The food was pretty good, but I did not get really the selection that I wanted, as the waiter was not much in leading us in what to order, other than miming putting food in his mouth. It took 2 minutes to communicate that my colleague wanted white wine.

I just picked up my train ticket for tomorrow back to Schiphol. I had to borrow another 20€ from Marty because they only take EuroCards, no amex or visa. (I’m in the hole now 40€; I suppose I should call STCU and try to get my PIN so I can get cash).

And I did not have the balls to use the outdoor urinals… I just could not bring myself to do it. They are an awesome idea though: Imagine a device the size of a porta-potty, except “inside out”; it’s a T with four urinals. They have these on a handful of street corners around the towns here. Definitely something that would never fly in the USA.