Nice comic + some general notes¶

Funny PhD comic today

Time for a little update

• Just returned from a one-week holiday (Kootwijk, Veluwe, the Netherlands). Rianne enjoyed the swimming pool very much, which means daddy is practically still coughing up water :-).
• Currently enjoying a free week in the back garden. Half of the time I'm working on my PhD thesis, though.
• I've restarted planning for a seriously good model railroad. Difficult to do, though. I want it to be something I can enjoy for a long time and that takes work in the planning stage. Mind you, I want a real model, not a piece of flat wood with a circular railway with a steam loco running flat-out at 350km/h as you can get in a child's kit. Good, recognisable buildings and landscape, that sort of stuff. Ah well, if it works out I'll mention it later ;-)
• I'm going to the EuroPython conference next week. The conference is monday-wednesday (27-29 june), but I'm going there on friday to help re-work plone.org to the 2.1 plone version and thursday/friday after the conference I'm staying for some additional sprinting . I hope to work on ArchGenXML then, but as it's my first sprint I'm not going to organise one. I better figure out who's coming, otherwise there are two other sprints that look great to participate in (functional testing platform and cmfeditions).
• I'm also giving a talk at europython!, it's on my PhD research where I use python and plone a lot. Hey! Surprise! I'm slotted for the second day, at 16:00. That's a surprise as I've had a talk at some 7 conferences and at 6 or so of them I was slotted on the last day.
• Mr. and Mrs. Boss of Zest software are getting married next week and are gone for nearly a month. This year Zest will keep working merrily along all the time for the first time in it's existance as we've grown a bit. There'll be two or three of us manning the ship.

  Not that I'm unused to working without much supervision or so: as a PhD, the most fundamental thing you should prove is that you're capable of working all by yourself, supervising and steering and managing yourself as much as possible. But at Zest there is a much more direct link between the work you do and the bills going out at the end of the month to our customers :-)

  I don't know why I'm writing all of this down, probably because this will be an entirely new experience for me. I'm not worried or so, but there'll be all sorts of things I'll learn ;-)

• Yeah, Debian "sarge" is out! The new stable version! We'll be going to run our new Zest webservers on Debian and having a fresh stable version right now is great timing from my viewpoint.