Kenneth Rohde Christiansen

The life and feelings of an individual not like the most.



Monday, October 31, 2005

Home sweet home, where are you?

I'm getting a bit tired of the Netherlands or of Groningen, at least. I do not really know why, but lately it seems that everything Dutch tend to irritate me. I have had a great time here, found good friends and enjoyed the city a lot. But suddently it is all enough. Everything seem too Dutch to me and it is very hard finding out why. Maybe I just don't really fit in with most people here, maybe I am just to different.

In Passau I didn't really like the mentality of most people, that was clear, and the city was too limiting. On the other hand I enjoyed the time there a whole lot. It was of course also a special time as I grew there together with my Lívia. When we moved to the Netherlands, before she went to Brazil, we were really happy to be in Groningen. The first week we needed to adapt, but there are so many options here, nice shopping street, nice bars and it was possible to prepare a lot nicer food that in Passau.

I can wonder why things are different now, and I think I might know several reasons. First of all, I live alone now, and my fiancée isn't around. With her, I truly had someone who I could share things with, one who could understand me and read my feeling. I really had someone around that I fit 100% with. In Germany we also had our own place, and here I have to share bathroom, kitchen and I never really feel home, and that I did in our appartment in Germany.

Another reason is the culture and nature. I see almost no nature here in the north of the Netherlands; everything looks alike, everything is flat and I'm never in a forest or so - I never see nice gardens, etc. The Netherlands is very beautiful and special when you are here for the first time. Everything has its own special Dutch style to it, but when you have seen it once and gotten used to it, you see it the whole time, and everything seems too much alike.

I really miss the curved, small streets of Passau, the rivers, the many different coloured houses... It was truly beautiful there - it was. So many good memories, even of things that seem stupid, like bringing back a DVD during the night while walking in the moon light. It will never be the same, and it will never be a place I want to live, though it would be nice coming back once.

Maybe I have a better idea of where I want to live now... maybe I don't. Every place has its advantages and its disadvantages... Let's hope Cologne is the place that combines all my wishes, but I think there is a good chance that it is.

Chaos Theory

Yes, I turned in my TSR report and I also finished the first report in modeling and Simulation! I spend the last week looking into the Chirikov map - aka Standard map - and it's properties (thus chaos theory). It was quite interesting I must say. Really nice working with a bit of Math again.

Today I played with the winding numbers to see if I could characterize when a given K, X0 and P0 would result in periodic, quasi-periodic or chaotic behavior. Indeed ,this seems possible!

It was quite nice as I recognized many theorems from the generally hated course Complex Function Theory that I did in Copenhagen. A course that I ended up liking a lot =)

The Dr. Phil test

So today me and Jens did the Dr. Phil test. When I did it using the test someone mailed Jens I got a 51, but the same answers on other sites as 1, 2, gives me different results varying between 43 and 45, which leads to the following conclusion:

Others see you as fresh, lively, charming, amusing, practical, and always interesting; someone who's constantly in the center of attention, but sufficiently well-balanced not to let it go to their head. They also see you as kind, considerate, and understanding; someone who'll always cheer them up and help them out.
Taken from the test, copyright reserved.

Not that bad I guess =) Still want to be my friend?

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Remembering the good old days

I just watched the movie Sahara and at some point someone was using a computer running IceWM and some pre-GNOME 1.0 Gtk+ application called Notepad. Hmm, this really remember me about the time around 1998-1999 where I was sitting in my dad's room slowly getting involved with GNOME development...

It gives me good feelings of nostalgia, but I am also very happy with the progress we have made during the years, and the way my life has changed.

Life is not always perfect, but I love where it has taken me. My future looks really bright, but I am standing at an edge and a lot of huge changes will happen during the next year, just like this last year.

Very soon I am going to Brazil to visit my fiancé, see her country and meet her family and friends. Never in my life have I looked so much forward to anything. I thought a big part of the reason was because I am going to see Brazil, but when I get in touch with my feelings, I feel that Brazil means very little - at least very little, compared to being with my love. But when you combine those two, you have heaven!


Posted by Picasa Picture from the SkørHårFest. © the Fotocie

Me and the girlfriend (forgot her name) of Klaas-Jan. Apparently, I was quite tired that evening :) if you compare with this picture taken the day thereafter:




But well, nothing beats the crazy color-changing, christmas-tree-like hair of Emil =)

Posted by Picasa Picture from the RaarHaarBorrel. © the Fotocie


My friend Frank really found the perfect hair gel =)

Posted by Picasa Picture from the CrazyHairParty. © the Fotocie

Getting used to the new me

So at last I finished my summary report :) And I even think it is not that bad at all, though it is a bit critical of the original article.

I didn't do much else today. Actually, I even got to sleep long for a change! and that even after I changed my watches to follow the Daylight Time Saving that took affect this night! Unfortunately this means that it will get dark earlier and that it is winter time again... and like most people: I HATE winter :(

Jens dropped by for a little while and I had a nice, relaxing chat with my fiancé, making me feeling a bit better than yesterday. I didn't feel so nice yesterday. I'm a bit stressed and I sometimes have some feelings that I feel that I shouldn't have. I'm trying to analyse those and trying to become a bit more calm, and it is really helping. I don't want to have these feelings; it hurts me and I end up hurting people who care about me, which then again hurts me.

I've been missing out on some things in my life due to different reasons and now my whole life has changed for better and I have really opened my eyes. It feels like a bit late to do that and I feel a bit afraid of missing out on things again. It is like I want to do all these things that I have missed out on and I have no patience to wait. That is of course unrealistic and I know that. I guess I just need to relax and with time I will get used to my new wonderful life and the new me.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

So, I'm still fighting with that article... progressing slowly though.

Yesterday evening was quite nice, nothing amazing happened or so, but I went to visit Binne together with Jens, and we ended up talking about interesting things such as life, future until 4:30 in the morning. I was home around 5 am and kind of counted on sleeping loooong... but around 11:00 I already woke up. A nice shower, something to eat, a cup of coffee and I was ready for the day.

Right now I just ate one of the most delicious salads in my life. Well, it still doesn't beat the one Lilly and me made in Passau, but this one is getting close... I also ended up eating it all, which is kind of scary as it consisted of:
  • 300 g of mixed salad
  • half a package of tomatoes
  • half a package of nice Danish feta
  • 220 g of chicken (put in a nice marinade)
  • 70 g of garlic croutons
  • plus some nice Italian herb dressing
Oh, well... some times I am just hungry I guess :) Now back to work...

Friday, October 28, 2005

A bit of this and a bit of that

So not the most interesting day, but on the other hand also not that bad. Most of the day I worked on writing a summary article for the course Technology of System Realization. In many ways it feels like a great waste of time. I enjoy writing articles about things that I have worked with and have gained a lot of knowledge about, but having to summarize a difficult article that doesn't interest you one bit is not really nice, and it is not that I am learning a lot of new stuff.

Oh, well, I got the first two pages done, but I must say that I'm not progressing so quicky as I would like to. I just took a few hours of sleep so maybe I can work a bit further now.

My fiancé is trying to take care of a lot of beaucrazy today so that she can come back to me in January. I really hope that everything will work out, but I have a good confidence in it. Speaking of her, I just received a nice letter this morning that she sent from Salvador... oh.. It is all those small things that make me so happy. I also got a letter saying that I will get half of the money back that I paid for my study! Nice! It would have been really nice if I had known about this option last year as well... but yeah, in the Netherlands you should expect anyone to guide you on the right path.

I also looked a bit on SWAT today. Looks interesting and promising. Reminds me that I need to look more into Ruby of Rails as well... oh, well, if I get ever some time =)

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Uh.. what a boring saturday

So, my plan was to relax today and sleep really long. Unfortunately, I woke up quite early taking into account that I went out yesterday night. I wasn't really supposed to, but when your friends invite you :) you don't say no, do you?

So, I also didn't really get to relax. I donno... but it is quite hard for me relaxing when I know that there are lots of things that I need to finish. Instead of doing something school related, I did some work-related work. I am currently working on putting a dictionary online, but I cannot say much more than that.

Anyway, I first got samples in one format and developed some tools to transform it into a structured format (XML) and another tool to dump the data to the database. But the authors only have the final version as a PDF :( Well, there is an option to export to XML, but unfortunately it gives me text filled with weird spaces, weird letters and randomly places XML tags. Scheisse....

The file is around 6-7 MB so I didn't really feel doing this manually :) and instead spend today (and most of yesterday) figuring out the different structures of entries and developing some regular expression rules that can convert the file together with some Perl code. It seems to work quite well, but some places it has gone totally wrong (leftover from the PDF->XML conversion) and I have to clean that up manually; bummer!

Complicated regular expressions can give you a hard time, but man, they save you a lot of time as well :) Doing this work manually would take me around a year.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Na ja....

As my friends most of you know that I am sad that my parents never visit me, even though I have invited them many times. This week I got even more sad as I was talking to my sister on the phone and she told me that my parents went camping in Belgium! :-O Oh, but my place in on the way to Belgium from Denmark, and they didn't say a word not visited me! Anyway, not much to do about that except hoping that they would visit me on the way home.

I sent an SMS and hoped for the best. Today, 4 days later or so, my dad called. I had had a very real dream with him this night and I kind of had the feeling that he was going to tell me that they would drop by on the way home. He sounded kind of happy and I talked and asked how it was in Belgium.

Then my dad suddently changed subject and said, "no Kenneth we won't visit you, it is not so easy with the caravan". I said, "why not, there are plenty of camping places outside the city, it is no problem." He said, "no no, we just won't do it. Another time we will come." Hah, my experience tells me that that means that they won't come and I don't care about words without action, so I said, "That is what you always say and that means that you don't come at all... Please count how many times you have visited me the last 6 years."

He answered "Yeah, but Kenneth it is not so easy... we don't have so much time etc." Then I said, "but you can always plan and you are at least in Belgium now. Apparently you have time for that! You could also have choosen to visit me. It is all about what you prioritize."

"...Yeah", he said, "but we don't have so much time to have fun and have it nice..." and I said, "well it is nice to know that you don't consider visiting your son as being nice or of any importance ..." and I really felt hurted and like crying... and that kind of ended the conversation with him.

My mom took the phone, I didn't really listen as it was too much for the moment, but I'm could feel that she felt that I was deeply hurted. Now... Let's see if they will ever visit me here in the Netherlands before I move... I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

Thursday, October 20, 2005


Fatty? Hey, is this a hint or so...?

Sunday, October 02, 2005


In Frisia we went to find ús mem (our mother) which is supposed to be the mother of the frisian people I suppose :) It turned our to be a cow... makes you wonder...