Palfrey's life

Despite having done zero dutch-learning over the last 2.something weeks and failing the test in the week before that, I'm getting better. After going to the cool Promood BBQ last night (met various cool ppl, but they all appear to be SO's of the rest of the c'ttee....), we ended up in De Ruif, and for the first time I was able to order without them switching to English at all. When you're ordering things like a Kriek and Hoegaarden, both of which might as well have "warning: foreigners will fuck up the pronounciation" all over them, this is pretty damn impressive. Also, when getting passport photos this morning (going up to Amsterdam early tommorrow morn to deal with renewing my passport), I *almost* got through the whole thing without any English. Something said at the checkup completely threw me... damn. Admittedly I was running on context for the bit where the person said "now, look at the camera" (but in Dutch), but still cool.

Submitted my revised paper to the Globecom 2004 Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks workshop today. I somehow got from 11 pages down to 7 (using IEEE-authorized midget margins + 9pt font helps), which is a suckily low page limit. Hopefully I'll get the paper accepted to this one.

MLP: Braille t-shirts - I actually want this despite the irritating models, and the site that's desparately going "no we're not normal! promise!!" (in a Benetton-style we're-individuals-in-our-identical-clothing dichotomy). Anyway. Nice product, pity about the company. I'd have bought one already, but something appears to be a bit messed up with HTTPS connections around here right now.