rulecam

My internship at Philips Medical Systems is goin' all right. I work full-time on my final project in Best, which is 1.5 hours travel from my front door (using bike, train and bus). My project is coming along fine. I work on automatic segmentation and measuring of polyps in the colon, which sounds more disgusting than it is in practice, since I work on black&white CT images :D

Polyp size is important for doctors to determine if the polyp is going to be a malignant tumor in the near future. Lots of mistakes are made measuring these polyps by hand, so maybe I can come up with an automatic method that does it better.

Well I will be busy with this project (and my final master thesis) until January or so, then I have to pass one more subject, and then I am done with University! Yee :)

Someone discovered that you can spam photogalleries :( So for now, you can only react to photos when you've registered.

(and I fixed the comments on normal posts as well..)

I was on my way from Best to Heerhugowaard (2,5 hour trip ;) to hear Anne perform, when near Amsterdam the conductor announced that we arrived at Amsterdam Duivendrecht station. A man with a foreign look who had entered the train at Utrecht looked puzzled to me and asked what the message was. I explained him and we got talking. The first thing I asked him was where he was from. Well, had I known how difficult the answer was, I would never asked him :D

Instead of just answering my question, the stranger came up with all kind of riddles and hints and made me guess a dozen time what his home country was. The man looked quite Arabic so I first named Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Saudi-Arabia but this was all wrong.He explained me that in his home country he was working in the electricity business, but almost all the other hints I did not understand. He spoke a little English and absolutely no Dutch..

When he finally realised I only understood half of his hints, he got his MP3 player and played me two songs. The first one was of Shakira, but I forgot what her home country was, although I named all the other South-American countries, all wrong of-course :D The next song was an Arabic tune, you know them, with some girl singing high and all kinds of sitars and flutes. Then I was puzzled... what was the connection with Shakira? Where was this strange man from?

It took me the whole trip from Amsterdam to Alkmaar (where he was going to visit some friends) and still I did not guessed his country right.

Then he got out in Alkmaar and said: I'm from Iraq, goodbye! He waved at me and disappeared...

If you're looking for some good music to accompany you through the weekend, I can recommend you one of the following new albums:

muse - black holes and revelations
thom yorke - the eraser
peeping tom - peeping tom

all the three albums are a nice mix between beats, electronics and traditional instruments and contain great songs (if i could make songs half as good i would be very happy :)

Jules finished his master thesis a few weeks ago and this means that he is the first of my friends to get his master degree. Cum laude. Nerd :D

He actually celebrated it three times. First after his graduation talk, secondly after he got his actual master diploma and Saturday he threw another party. And that was a really good one :) Lots of free beers, and that is something I can not really stand. I am a fast drinker and with free beers I get too much alcohol in a short amount of time :)
There was a notebook where you could write congratulations in, and I wrote in it 4 times that evening. And I wrote a lot of strange things, luckily Jules can not read them anymore.
Friends of mine do lots of weird things when drinking free beers :)

june is now in the archive!

Summer officially started in the Netherlands. Temperatures are rising, the sun is shining, you know how a summer is :D This is all nice for people that have days off and can go swimming or sit in their garden. For me it is less pleasurable. I have to work 8 hours a day @ Philips, luckily my office there has airco

The worst part of the day is the train-trip from Best to 's Hertogenbosch in a stop-train. When it is 30 degrees outside like today, it is at least 40 inside the train. The stupid thing about these trains is that the windows only open half and it is packed with sweating, stinking people on their way home from work.. After a few minutes I'm sweating and stinking myself..
Worst part of my trip home today: a man entered the train at Boxtel station, sat down in the chair next to me, and started drinking a half-full bottle of Coca-Cola that already stood there when I entered the train and probably was standing on the table in the sun for the whole day.. gross!

Now I am in the air-conditioned intercity train from 's Hertogenbosch to Utrecht, much better :D

working at philips in an airconditioned office provides almost the same effect (without getting wet) :D