An article from The Observer on The Guardian website confirms what we perhaps all knew already: “Employees are becoming tired, frustrated and unproductive after constantly monitoring the electronic messages that keep interrupting them as they try to concentrate at work.” The research that this article is based on was carried out among academics and people [...]

Eek! What happened to my Library thing? Do you all see huge images of covers, too? I didn’t change a thing, and the script in my theme is still set to display “small” covers… I hope this will go away by itself in the course of the night.
Update: it did.

Our house is now officially decluttered. It took two weeks, but bit by bit, room by room (well, we have only two rooms, really — but I did the bathroom, too) and closet by closet, we have thrown out all the unnecessary “stuff” that accumulated during the last two semesters and cluttered our home. I [...]

Anyone here?
If anyone still comes by, I apologize for my long, long silence. Two months quiet in the blogosphere is perhaps irreparable, but I am going to try to resuscitate Serendipities anyway. It was too much fun to just let it die quietly. So I just renewed my hosting package for another year, and this [...]

Over Christmas, I discovered the music of Yaron Herman. I love to listen to Keith Jarrett, and Yaron Herman’s style resembles his. Herman, born in Tel-Aviv, now living in Paris, is 25 years old — and amazingly didn’t start studying the piano until he was 16. Variations is his first solo release.
You can listen [...]

I was at the Photomuseum in Amsterdam (Foam) yesterday. It hosts an exhibition on the German photographer August Sander. Born exactly a century before I was born, in 1876, Sander in the 1920s began work on a series of portraits later entitled “People of the Twentieth Century.”

Young farmers (1914); Middle-class Children (1925); Secretary at West [...]

Well, I…

almost bought an apartment in Amsterdam, but discovered a major construction error just before signing the contract
almost, almost finished my PhD thesis — no major construction errors discovered as yet (fingers crossed)
corrected a huge number of midterm essays (my first time) and loved it (sorry)
developed a love-hate relationship with the Dutch railway system

bought a [...]