Yeah, I’ve got my PhD¶

Hurray, after 6 years of work I got my PhD on 15 January 2007. Finally I'm done! There was a nice formal ceremony in which I had one hour to defend my thesis against 7 official opponents. Actually pretty funny to do, but very intensive. You've got to keep all your wits about you for one full hour.

That's also exactly one full hour, for after one hour you get a loud bang on the floor of the beadle (Dutch: pedel). That means you've got to keep talking while she looks at her watch as it is appreciated if you have to stop mid-sentence. I even had to stop mid-word, so that went OK :-)

There's a lot more to say, but I'll just link to the photos for now. A switch on the photo camera that was in the wrong position ruined about 80% of the photos, but there are enough left to give a good impression, luckily.

Loads of people have asked me "what I'm going to do now", mostly meaning whether I'm going to continue research or whether I'm going to look for a job now. Well, I'm simply continuing the work I've done for the last 1.5 years: Zest software . Building pretty elaborate websites and intranets (like milieudefensie , triple p , two philips intranets, etc.). For that, I'm working with the content management system Plone that I also used for many of the prototypes in my PhD thesis .

I've got permission (and encouragement) to continue to keep my eye out for opportunities in the building&construction industry. There's still a bit of prototype software lying around that I want to resurrect again as people found it useful and want to use it again. So I'll continue to dabble a bit in it, as it is a really interesting problem :-)