The Netherlands is (not) great for foreigners

The Netherlands is often considered to be a nice place for foreigners. Most of the Dutch people are able to converse at an acceptable level of English. This is great. If they need help, they can ask for it without much trouble at all.

But then there is this problem of written communication. It's in Dutch and it's a pain in the ass if you can't read it. At work, I'm one of the few in the group that's Dutch and colleagues often come to me when they need a translation. It ranges from letters from the Dutch Railways (NS) to error text messages from mobile network operators.

This made me wonder. If these companies managed to help my colleagues in (spoken) English in the past, why can't they continue to service them in English? Oh, wait. Right. Probably has something to do with software and automated messages...

The genesis of yet another blog in cyberspace

I've finally created a blog. A brief intro about myself: I'm a 25 years old scientific programmer at the Delft University of Technology. I'm interested in Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Programming Languages, and I'm currently developing interests in (Multimedia) Information Retrieval ((M)IR).

So why did I start a blog? Well, I will not discuss that in this first blog post. If you are looking for compelling reasons yourselves, I'd recommend watching "Hanselminutes on 9 - Social Networking for Developers - Part 1 - Every Developer Needs a Blog".

Instead, I will discuss why I've started this blog now. For long I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog, but I've never had any concrete ideas for the actual blog posts. What good is a blog if it does not have any posts on it?

So I put my blogging ambitions on ice.

With the advent of Twitter, my frozen ambitions started to thaw, albeit slowly. I first had to look past Twitter's "Sitting in my chair now"-image before finding good uses for it. But when I found my raison de twitter, I started spreading links/news/etc. about the fields I'm interested in. Soon, people interested in my tweets followed me and I followed them back (if I deemed their tweets to be interesting). For sharing news and giving a short opinion on a recent event every now and then, 140 characters were enough.

However, microblogging obviously fails when you don't want to be micro. Some findings simply cannot be embedded in a tweet of 140 characters, although sometimes I got away by splitting the to-be-shared message in two tweets. Now I've come to the point where I can no longer cheat my way out. I simply needed more than just a small multiple of 140 characters for what I wanted to share (my next blog post).

So yeah, I've finally found something to write about which doesn't fit in a tweet. :)