Melinda just did a “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” and tagged “anyone who read the article” to feel free to do their own version. Admittedly I do read her blog and so here I am writing my own list of 8 things you probably didn’t know about me.

1. I have had three consecutive Guinea Pigs who all died tragically before their time. The first one died because of the fumes that came from the new vinyl carpet that my parent’s got, the second because of the fumes coming from the new paint from our neighbour’s fence, and the third died because I gave it Guinea Pig food without vitamin C (Guinea Pigs have a natural vitamin C deficiency and therefore need to get extra vitamin C in their food. Any food that calls themselves “for Guinea Pigs” that doesn’t have this is clearly a scam!).
2. I have a case of Pectus Excavatum which is a harmless genetic deformity in the chest. It is nothing serious but it does lead to some cool facts like: my heart is actually on the left, not left of the middle.
3. Even though I am Dutch, the only drugs I ever used were some very weak hash brownies. I also tend to tell people that in contrary to believe, people in Amsterdam don’t do that much drugs, it is mainly the tourists that do.
4. I never had a true Dutch girlfriend until Melinda got her Dutch nationality last year. I leave it up to your imagination if this is because I had many foreign girlfriends or none before Melinda.
5. Although most of you know me with my glasses, I have only had them since I moved to the UK. I had been complaining about my eye sight for a while and Melinda kept saying “all was perfectly fine”. In the end I ended up having a cylindrical correction of -1.5 and -2.
6. I have flown an airplane when I was 18. This is because I used to study Aerospace Engineering before realizing I was a major geek. It was a Cessna 150 and it was the best flight I ever had. It was also the second flight I then ever had, which brings us to…
7. The first flight I ever made was a parabolic flight. For this who don’t know what this is, this is when an airplane makes a quick ascend and descend leading into a free fall, creating weightlessness for the passengers. It was done in a Fokker 50 and gave us a total of about 3×10 seconds of near-astronaut experience.
8. I once built a bedroom media centre in a desktop drawer cabinet by screwing the main board upside down against the top of the inside of the cabinet. The HDDs and dvd player were glued against the back of the cabinet, and fans were hanging from the side to keep things extra cool. It was a bliss to clean as almost no dust fell on any of the parts.

Now that I have given my list, I would like to tag Alper and Martijn to give us their list.

So, besides organizing a Geek Dinner I thought it would be nice to organize another Werewolf Night. Same venue and time as the Geek Dinner, just 2 days earlier (the 5th of February). If you haven’t ever played Werewolf, take a look at the (incomplete) wiki, and then join us on the night. The more players the merrier.

Let me know if you are coming, either here in the comments, or on the upcoming page.

Yes, the time is near! A Geek Dinner is at hand.

I have been trying to get one going for a few weeks now, after Ian pushed me to try it and take some weight of his shoulders. With the help of Ian and Glyn we managed to get Prof. Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge to talk about:

“Evil ways to make money on the Internet”

I am still trying to confirm the availability of the venue but somehow there is never anyone present to confirm the reservation for me. For now thoug, put the date (February 7th) in your favorite calendar application. The Geek Dinner will probably start at 7pm and go on until we get kicked out. Food is £5 as usual and make sure to either let me know you are coming here in the comments, or on the upcoming page.

[lang_en]
Playing around with the statistics of the last year on the exchange rate between the £ and € I noticed something I already kind of knew but was surprised to see visualized: life became cheaper last year!
[/lang_en]

[lang_nl]
Na wat zitten spelen met de statistieken over de koers tussen de Euro en de Engelse Pond van het afgelopen jaar viel mij iets op wat ik al een tijdje wist: het leven is het afgelopen jaar ietswat goedkoper geworden voor ons.
[/lang_nl]

[lang_en]
As our money is still on Dutch (and therefore in €) bank accounts, the drop in exchange rate above was simply ideal. In the last year the £ dropped from €1.55 to about €1.34, which is a drop of about 13%. To make this a more concrete example: it saves us €125 a month in rent. Obviously this still means we pay a lot of rent because London is expensive, but at least it now is a bit less painful.

Hopefully this drop will continue in 2008.
[/lang_en]

[lang_nl]
Aangezien ons geld nogsteeds in Euros op Nederlandse rekeningen staat, was de bovenstaande daling dus perfect. In het laatste jaar is de Engelse Pond gedaald van €1.55 naar €1.34, wat een daling is van ongeveer 13%! Om wat duidelijker te maken wat dit betekent zal ik zeggen dat ons dat alleen al €125 per maand aan huur scheelt. Nu betalen we natuurlijk dus nogsteeds belachelijk veel huur, want London is duur, maar het is in ieder geval iets minder pijnlijk.

Hopelijk zet deze daling zich voort in 2008.
[/lang_nl]

After reading Melinda’s and Ian’s New Year’s resolutions on their blogs, I decided that it might be interesting for me to document my resolutions too. If not for your interest, at least for my personal motivation.

• Get my MSc Degree: I should have gotten my degree by now, but somehow London has kept me to busy last year.
• Work on my health: I haven’t gained weight in the last year, but this doesn’t mean I feel better. I will have to start eating healthier, although I don’t think that’s the main problem, which actually is: sport. I really need to get my ass moving and away from my laptop. I bought some running shoes and had my first 1.5km run today. Did it in 9 minutes and was completely dead after it. Let’s see if I can keep this up and do this twice a week, and so slowly increase the distance to maybe 3km and beyond.
• Organize events: Since arriving in London almost a year ago (yes, it’s almost a year now) I have been going to Barcamps, GeekDinners, GirlGeekDinners, all organized by great people with too much of a philanthropic nature. So this year I want to go and help people organize events, starting with helping Ian with the GeekDinners, and maybe even eventually help/organize a Barcamp-like-event.
• Read more books: I love reading books, but somehow I never get to doing it. I am not a very fast reader (especially not in comparison to Melinda), but recently I discovered Audiobooks on the iPhone. Especially the option to speedup the audio s simply brilliant. On my list to read for now are Freakonomics, Fooled by Randomness, Wheel of Time - Part 6 to 12, I am Legend, and many more.
• Wake up earlier and more regularly: This goes partly together with my plan to sport, but it is also simply more handy to wake up at regular times. Yesterday I was up until 4am, which meant I didn’t really wake up before 12pm.