As Jojo pointed out in a comment it has been a long time since I blogged. Life's still busy. This is the last week of the guitar course that I'm taking at Coursera. It's been rather stressful. Learning to play the guitar in 6 weeks is hard. You do not have enough time to really get your muscle memory up to where it should be. The barre chords and power chords have been most vexing. However, I just handed in my last assignment (2 songs consisting of 2 separate recordings each; one for the chords and one for the melody) so all that's left is peer reviewing after 23:00 today and waiting for my final grade. I did well on the quizzes but on the assignments there's no doubting that I'm a beginner still.

This is also the last week of the Interactive Programming in Python course which Matthijs is doing as well. Two quizzes and a mini project plus peer reviews a week takes careful planning. But we managed. I still have to do the last quiz (before tomorrow 07:00 preferably) and the last mini project. I'm so glad the Friday is my day off. So far we've built a Stopwatch game that you needed to stop at the exact seconds. On every whole second stop you got a point. We also programmed Blackjack (including drawing the cards of course), Memory, Pong and now we're at the final project: Rice Rocks. It's a version of Asteroids. Last week we fleshed out the Ship class and spawned rocks and missiles. This week we're going to do collision detection, blowing up rocks and such. It's fun, but it takes quite a lot of time. And after you've finished your project you have to review 5 peers and yourself. So the actual end of the course is Wednesday next week, when the last peer reviews are due.

There have been times that I was able to 'slack off' at work, with just no work coming in. At this moment we're still working on a major project without a clear deadline (as soon as possible, of course) and no complete functional design either. The functional design is still in progress while we're already building stuff. You may be able to imagine the frustration after you've built a piece of the interface and it gets rethought again and you have to go back and adjust stuff. It's like 2 step forward and one (or one and a half) step back. It's not only frustrating for me but also for Jeroen,my project manager, or more accurately the toilet of the company: all shit goes there. So, not so much fun all around.

This Saturday morning there's the last rehearsal for our belly dance performance on Monday. Last minute some people requested that we add another piece of music to the already 6 minutes long tune we're dancing to. It's no problem for me because all the moves are alike... a bit boring perhaps even. However, I really enjoy performing and there's about 10 people that will come to see me. Exciting!

After belly dancing we'll have the general meeting (? ALV in Dutch) of Amersical with a barbecue at the end. I'm very curious as to which musical we'll be doing next year and who is going to quit Amersical and who will stay. Then on Sunday we'll go to my father's place to cook and have diner together. Matthijs and I are making the desert: apple crumble. I would like to visit the Hip en Handgemaakt market before we go to Ermelo on Sunday. I've seen advertisements before but up till now I was always otherwise engaged. Here's my chance!

There's lots of work to be done still for Xenophobia and Taboe is closing in too. I need to check if my Taboe costume is complete or if I still need to make stuff. I'm playing in a different tribe now so I can not reuse everything from last time. Matthijs and I will cook (on a campfire) for a group of 15.

Well, there's still a python quiz to do, so I'd better stop blogging now. Hope the next entry will not take a month. ;-)