So I graduated officially last Friday. It was a lovely 32 degrees in Maastricht! My parents, sister and Susanne were there for moral support. Markus Walzl (my thesis supervisor) held a nice speech. It was fun!
Markus confessed that all 21 students he’s graduated so far had found a job before graduation! What a record…

On Wednesday 18 May, my sister and Trevor got married! She is now Mrs. Sherwin! I’ts pretty weird, I have to admit.

Despite having gotten married now, her wedding party will take place at the end of August. She got married earlier in order to be able to commence work in Kenya before August.

Added a few more photo’s today after finding them online at this old Obliks site.
- edit 25/5 -
Fixed the photosize in Internet Explorer. This page doesn’t seem to be very IE friendly… (now why doesn’t that bother me;)

Even though I thought I’d take the easy way out for a while and use Blogger, my good friend and teacher Jan recently convinced me WordPress is much more fun. I must concur – after browsing through all the available themes at alexking.org, I found the theme you’re looking at now, with randomly selected images that make up the header. I’m pleased with the result anyway.
The “photo’s” page lists all images I’ve used for the header, with a short caption stating what’s in the picture and where and when the picture was taken.
- edit 1/6/05 – There’s a strange RSS problem as commented by Bayard and Curly below. It seems like the feed goes blank for no apparent reason. Last time I solved it by posting a new item. This time I’m trying to fix it by editing this item. Seems to be a bug of some sort, will look through WP support as soon as I have the time & will.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I finally finished studying. To do so I wrote my final thesis, “Analysis of self-reporting in law enforcement against cartels in the Netherlands”, over the past six months (September 2004 to March 2005) during an internship at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (Competition Directorate) and at the Competition Authority (Leniency Bureau).
My thesis ivnestigates the effectiveness of the Dutch leniency programme, by comparing it to several other programmes, analysing it from a game-theoretic perspective and by looking at current practice of the Competition Authority.
Defense of the thesis took place on March 29th which went well; the thesis was graded a 9. The graduation ceremony takes place on May 27th.
The thesis can be downloaded here (PDF, 0.5 Mb).

Kind of as a PS to the last post: so what is my life about these days?

First of all, I’ve finally completed my studies. After six and a half years I now have a Dutch equivalent of a masters in Economics, with a minor in European Studies inbetween. For the past half year, I have been working as an intern at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and at the Dutch Competition Authority, where I was able to spend fifty percent of the time working on my final thesis. (This is it) (PDF, 0.5 Mb, for those interested. (Also see the next post if interested)). After finishing the internship and my thesis, I started working for the Dutch Telecom & Post regulator, OPTA. I am currently a member of their Economic Analysis Team.

Secondly, private life: sadly Mayke is currently in Nepal, on an internship at the Koirala Institute of Health Sciences. Fortunately she won’t be gone for too long, and she’s seems to be enjoying her stay there. Meanwhile, I rely on my friends to keep me busy! Only Jan has a blog right now.And then there’s family to tell about: After returning to the Netherlands (after 13 years in Kenya) my parents appear to have finally settled down, in the wonderfull city of Almere. My brother is in Brazil on a study exchange right now. My sister is doing an internship in Kenya, after which she’ll have completed her Physiotherapy study. She’s getting married in August! In Kenya, so the whole family is returning to Kenya for the occasion. I’ll be spending a month over there, together with Mayke and two friends, Olaf and Sabine. I can’t wait till August!

That’s the status quo for now.

after seven months of radio silence, I have finally regained access to the internet from home. For the past seven months I’ve been able to check my e-mail at work, but other than that have not been able to do much with the internet at all.
I have to admit it feels a bit strange to be replugged – all sorts of programs and sites on my PC that seemed hugely useful or fascinating at the time but seem to have lost their purpose now… Maybe it will just take me a while to get back into things.
Another phenomenon is my apparent amnesia concerning MySQL. I am quite sure that I had a nice little homepage running on my site a year ago, but since I accidentally crashed that and didn’t bother to repair it, I have now entirely forgotten the first thing about getting a similar site back up and running…
That’s why I’ve taken the easy way out. I’ll be using blogger for a while, and simply inline it on my homepage. Minimum fuss that way.
All I plan to do with my homepage for the near future is blurb some general nonsense anyway. Like the current post. That way, if people bother to visit my homepage, they won’t be treated with the annoying under construction message anymore.
So feel free to return any time. Don’t expect to find any life-altering information here though!

Greetings, Jonas