The last couple of weeks have been rather busy for me. First of all there has been the fact that I had to have my PhD thesis finished to get everything to the printer to be able to make it in time for the oral defense of my thesis on the 10th of September. Luckily this all worked out and I got everything in time to the printer.
The fact that I am finished with my thesis meant also that my contract with the university has ended (well, actually, it is the other way, I had to finish my thesis because my contract ended :) ) and this means that I was looking for another job. After filling in my resume on Monsterboard, I got presented with a possible interesting possible vacancy right away. After I sent my resume to the company and had the first and second interview, I signed the contract three weeks ago and will start to work at Paragon (http://www.aimms.com) from monday the 25th on already :)
Luckily the start date of my new job still allowed me to go on holidays, from which I returned last monday. Justyna and I decided that we wanted to have a really relaxing holiday again and not having to do anything. This meant that I lived for almost two weeks without a watch and paying attention to time in the Dominican Republic. On the other hand, even if you have a watch, it does not help you that much there, since they have a different concept of time in the dominican republic, namely dominican minutes and I still don’t know how many ‘real’ minutes one dominican republic minute is, but it is quite a lot ;)
Only a couple of times I had to be present at 8:15 in the lobby (well, dominican time that is, so the bus was never there before 8:45 ;) ) because at that time the bus arrived to pick me up to get to the dive-center. During the vacation I made another 7 dives and I have to say that I really like the diving. Two years ago we also went on vacation to the dominican republic and there I got licensed. After that I didn’t dive anymore, but I have to say that everything went without any problem. The only thing is that I still don’t understand how the dive master (Carlos) was able to stay underwater without using almost any air. After we surfaced we all had about 50 bar left, while he still had 140 bar left. We all had to get a second tank, while after the second dive he still had enough air left to do even a third dive. That was really amazing :)
After we got back last monday, I found an email that my PhD thesis had arrived back from the printer. I really have to say that the result is really great and I am especially happy with how the cover turned out. Now the only thing left for me to do before I finally get my PhD officially is the oral defense at the 10th of September :) Can’t wait for that day now :)
Finally, I will look into an easy backup script for my website, since I don’t want to have this issue of a crashing harddisk happen again :) On the other hand, shit happens ;)