17:36 Saturday. MJ's talk went well. Have I said that? I don't know. Beer is good, here at HIP. Nobody drinks too much, though, apart from the occasional journalist. This morning, we had coffee and melon for breakfast, and some fruit biscuits. After some chatting and relaxing in the sun we went for real breakfast at the FOOD tent. There was fruit, no krentebollen. Then all of us split up and attended a workshop or lecture, or went on typing (like me). In the afternoon, Gien paid HIP a visit, together with Thomas. Thomas is her baby, just a couple of months old. The poor child couldn't stay in the sunshine too long, so Gien sat down in the HALL tent. She lives in Almere, is a prominent member of Dutch webgrrls, and collaborated with me and some others on writing the webgrrls internet course (here). When Thomas got too hot, she went home again. Still, it's good so see people like her visit HIP. Also, Peter showed up, with his girlfriend. We hadn't any time to talk, because MJ was about to give her lecture. Peter has an important homepage, which I don't mention here for obscure reasons. The longer I am staying at HIP97, the stranger things happen. Not the hacking, that's normal. Hacking my file system or employing a bug in windows95 to blank my screen, that's not special. It's those eery things, like people read my mind or I read theirs. Hard to explain. I was on irc, and while I was talking a person queries me. His or her name was parsec. Now, yesterday, the astronomers got into an argument about the length of a parsec, which is an astronomical measure of length. It's the distance of a start which has a parallax of exactly one arcsecond. This person Parsec starts to talk to me, and only after a while I realized I knew her. About a year ago, I met her on IRC. She was on a channel, I joined that channel out of curiosity, and we got to talk. She's into AI and Artificial Life, while I was thinking whether I would abandon those fields or spend the effort keeping my knowledge about them up to date. She seemed an expert in AI, especially the psychology of AI. She knew all about cognitive modelling. We didn't really flirt, though others could have disagreed about that. We kept meeting on IRC, for about a month, when she started to write me email. In the meantime, she made a homepage on AI, in a directory at MIT. The homepage wasn't much more than a collection of links to relevant AI research all over the world. Now I come to think of it, there was no real content whatsoever. Nothing written by her, just links. And a picture of her. She looked rather beautiful, but in the unnatural way some worldfamous models are beautiful. Like they're made of plastic. I asked her about that, but rather than explain about it she interrogated me about how I would have thought she'd look. I said I never try to imagine how a person looks like when I meet them on the net, because I've proven to be wrong very often. She insisted. I surely must have had a picture in my mind, some ideay how she'd look? I gave in and described the rough image that hat built up in my mind. Thought she'd been taller, more slender, maybe blond. Now the peculiar thing is, I think the woman I met here at HIP, yesterday, I wrote about her, that woman may be Parsec. However, she doesn't really look like Parsec. I mean, she doesn't look like the picture at her homepage. I made a copy of that picture, but I lost that. The real Parsec (if indeed it's her) looks taller and skinnier. If she really is Parsec (which is her nick on irc, I don't know her real name) why didn't she say so? Might she be afraid of something? Does she like to play with me and wait till I gues who she is? I've asked a couple of people if they'd seen her, but nobody knew whom I was talking about. She's not in the HIP97 homepages. The organization doesn't know her, or at least won't give me details. I've seen every place of HIP, I've been walking around from early morning till late at night, but I haven't seen her but at the occasions I told you about. On irc, her dutch is perfect now. She must be very intelligent. I hardly dare talk about it with my gf. Hope she doesn't read these pages too often, she may get jealous, though there's no reason for that. I'll keep looking for her, and next time I'll see her I'll ask her name. If Parsec is on IRC tonite, please let me know. OK, it's 18:14 now (on Saturday), and we'll have dinner soon. Next page