In 1998 I went to the States to work in a summercamp and I met a Bulgarian girl there. We fell in love, and after working the summer together we went on holiday to the Niagara Falls.

Much later we tried to determine the date that our relationship "officially" started, and we concluded that it was September 11th. Little could we have known...

Two years ago we were living in Amstelveen, and I went to Net.Footworks in the morning -- obviously with no idea about what would happen that day.

We had a nice (Bulgarian) evening. Bulgaria's soccer team won with 3-0 of Andorra, and is still first in their group. I think that means that they'll certainly go to Portugal for the European Cup next summer. Let's see if the Dutch team will also play well tonight.

We had shopska, rakia and pursholka... delicious.

It was quite a crazy morning; I just arrived at Chess. We had to arrange a lot of stuff, which took some time and energy, but things are okay now.

I received a long e-mail from a good friend; feels very nice.

'And what exactly will your role be, Archchancellor?' the Dean snarled.
'I have defined your objectives,' said Ridcully. 'It is up to you to consider the options.'
'In that case,' said the Dean, 'I move that we abandon ship.'
'What for?' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. 'The sharks?'
'That is a secondary problem,' said the Dean.
'That's right,' said Ponder, 'we can always vote to abandon shark.'
The ship lurched suddenly. The Senior Wrangler struck a heroic pose.
'I will save you, Mrs Whitlow!' he cried, and swept her off her feet. Or, at least, made the effort. But the Senior Wrangler was lightly built for a wizard and Mrs Whitlow was a fine figure of a woman and, furthermore, the wizard's grip was limited by the fact that there were very few areas of Mrs Whitlow that he dared actually touch. He did his best with some outlying regions and managed to lift her slightly. All this did was transfer the entire weight of wizard and housekeeper to the Senior Wrangler's quite small feet, which went through the deck like a steel bar.

Two new editions of books about Bulgaria have been released: Bulgaria, the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet Bulgaria. For a long time it was difficult to find good and up-to-date travelguides, but this afternoon I saw these two books in the library. They were both published in 2002 and looked very interesting. The Rough Guide is the 3rd edition, the Lonely Planet the 1st.

At the same time I saw that the archive of the library is now open to the public -- very nice. In the attic there are many more books. There I found an old history book about Bulgaria, written by the famous historican Ilcho Dimitrov. It's from 1979 -- years later Dimitrov became Minister of Education.

'I knew it!' said Truckle the Barbarian. 'Poison!'
'No, no. You don't eat it. You rub it on your body,' said Mr Saveloy. 'Watch. And you get what we in civilization call clean.'

All right -- I won't keep you waiting any longer... I made it. It would have been a big disgrace if I didn't, after all these years programming, but I'm happy with the result. There were 61 questions and my score was 90%. For the programmers, what is the result of this code when run?

class Test {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    int i = 1, j = 0;
    switch (i) {
      case 4: j += 6;
      case 2: j += 3;
      default: j += 2;
      case 0: j += 4;
    }
    System.out.println("j = " + j);
  }
}

It's not a very prestigious certification, but I'm happy I did it. It forced me to study many details of the language I had never studied before. I found that quite useful. Now it's up to the next one, which will be much more difficult.

I woke up a bit earlier to study some more. I'm fairly certain that I'll make it, but of course a good mark is always nice. The examination center is in Haarlem, near the station. I'll be there at 9:30.

Tomorrow morning I'll take a Java certification test and I'm revising some theory now. There are many older tests online to exercise; a site that helped me a lot is Java Certificate.com.

It was very pleasant yesterday evening, and the cake was delicious.

I left Leeuwarden really early this morning. I took the bus from 6:57, and had a good connection with the train. Got really scared when voice-over said "This is the train to Steenwijk, Heereveen..." -- I thought I stepped into the wrong one. Of course: these places are on the way from Leeuwarden to Amersfoort, silly me. In the train I worked on my current Chess project. Too bad my laptop's battery got empty.

In Amersfoort the connecting train was 15 minutes late, but when it arrived the trip was really short: no stops between Amersfoort and Amsterdam at all. The intercity brought me to Haarlem; I arrived here at 10:30 o'clock.