Googlewars

Whenever I've wanted to quickly know how to spell a word that could be spelled two different ways I used to compared how many hits google would find for each and pick the most found one as a winner. Googlewar does this for me. It's quite funny.

Mini Cooper vs Ford F150 crashin against a wall

If you plan on crashing into a wall, you're better off with a MINI Cooper than a Ford F150. Check out the article on Bridger.us.

gnome-blog

I just installed gnome-blog. So let's see how that works.

I guess I'll be posting my entries with this little applet whenever I'm under GNU/Linux now.

Hilarious: the perfect guy.
Here is one for you woman/girl-who-thinks-like-that:
We are who we are. Don't love for who you want us to be but for who we are. Some of us manage to do that. Please let's all work towards that goal. ;)

Visa (TM) is back on track, they charged me the amout they were supposed to :(

Anyhow... The weather is dull and friends who just got here are feeling down because of it... a little sunshine please.
Why do people feel down so easily when is dull outside? Are our moods so unstable to be influenced by minor details like that?

Hey... I should have mentioned this earlier. The British show Coupling is quite funny. I've been watching a few episodes and got hooked. I showed it to some friends on campus and they got hooked too. What have we started? The show is a bit explicit on some subjects but the situations and the humour are really good and funny.

I've been using my visa card this long weekend when I went shopping with friends. It doesn't show any money spend on my bank's website... peculiar. It also shows I have a credit limit of zero... kinda wierd. I hope it will show the correct data by tomorrow (not).

I started "observing" at work. It's quite interesting really. A lot of tuning is done, mostly for supervised learning apparently.

Here's a little map of what States I have been in:



create your own personalized map of the USA
or write about it on the open travel guide

I checked out Gossip today. It looks pretty sweet. To bad I don't have any contacts on Jabber. I wish I could figure out how to use transports/gateways for ICQ, AIM and MSN... if that's possible yet.

Friday night I went to Brian's record release party. His music will be available on his website soon. His is talented, if he continues like this he will eventually be famous. I hope he'll find the motivation to keep on trucking, being an artist is not always easy... gosh I hate how the market works.

Yohoo! Tuesday around 9am I found out I've been accepted into the CAI Master's programme at Utrecht Univeristy. I have three choices now. I really don't know what to do.

I have to take a decision by June 1st. Many people tell me Utrecht is probably the best choice over Saarbruecken or the Universiteit van Amsterdam. The only thing that's annoying about Utrecht is that, it will be the first year of the CAI Master's. The CAI already has a grad programme but it's still the old dutch system, not the new Ba-Ma-Doc that's supposed to be paneuropean. Some courses haven't been worked out yet.

I've also been thinking about deferring for a semester or two. I could work, and if work is not a available, a semester long holiday could be good ;)

This morning I got up at 3am, watched a bit of Coupling, and then called my commune in Belgium. It's bad news. The only way I can vote is by procuration... er... through a proxy? I don't know, whatever... le grand dictionnaire doesn't help me much on this unsure english translation.

So, what sucks is that my mother has to go get the form, send it to me here. I have to fill it in, send it back along with a letter from work or school. Then my sister will be able to go vote for me.
Abroad vote or vote by mail is only for federal elections (fr,nl). I can't believe it isn't possible for regional nor European elections.

Woohoo... I've been accepted at the University of Amsterdam... now I don't know what to do.

I'll go check out what my profs at McGill have to say.

So... I've completed my degree.. yoohoo! I'm waiting for a letter from McGill now.

On the IPA side of things:
Doulos SIL
Gentium
are good Unicode fonts to have. Too bad they are not Sans.

There will be elections in Belgium in June. I still have to figure out how I can vote from abroad, but most importantly I still need to figure out who I will vote for... Parties' websites suck big time.. err.. oh btw, it's regional and European elections.

The parties are CDH, FN, MR (freaggin' resizes the browser window and then full screen? dude, and then I'm supposed to vote for them?, talking about a reform eh), Ecolo, PS, CDF, R.W.F., MAS, FNB, PTB+. pfou, what a list.

ok, so I had a glance over the MR program, it's interesting, they want non-EU foreigners to be able to vote if they ask for it, but they have to have lived in Belgium for at least 5 years... wait a minute 5 years, isn't that like the EU norm for them to be able to become citizens? Too bad they have a bad website... I have a tooth against them, they'll really need to convince me now.

hmm.... the CDH has an extensive list of candidates with their addresses... I should ask questions... Man their candidates are young on average!

oh man... If they weren't xenophobes I'd vote for Neo.
or I could be French and pay Quebec fees... wait it doesn't matter. I'm done!

So... I'm currently waiting for my grades. According to Immigration Canada I can get a work permit as soon as I get my grade and my degree is officially over. It shouldn't be too hard to get it if I have a job offer...
Which I might get for the summer. I just hope they will allow me to work for the summer instead of the full year.

I've been accepted at Uni-Saarland, which is really sweet. There's a DFKI center in the same town, it makes it more attractive. I'm still waiting for the other places' answers.

Also, after a bit of browsing over the DFKI, I found this interesting Language Technology links: A comprehensive survey on LT by 90 international experts (PDF) and LT World, a LT directory, sortof...