There's a hermit in Amsterdam

That would be me. This is the first time I've left my cousin's apartment since 3:00pm yesterday. It's refreshing to leave the curtains closed, eat all day long, not shower, (I did put on clothes, though), and sit at the computer until I really really have to pee. After hours and hours of fighting with mental ray in 3D Studio Max 7, I gave up and reverted to the slow as snot line renderer without any lighting solution, and guess what? It looks fabulous. *sigh* I don't want to only use the line renderer without a lighting solution. I want to use mental ray with fairly realistic materials and results. And if I had an internet connection that didn't cost me a euro an hour, I could look this stuff up... Such are the rantings of hermits.

Before I went into seclusion I ventured out, briefly, on Wednesday to the Rijksmuseum and to the "beach" on Thursday. E.'s museum card has been handy, if only to prevent me from feeling cheated. I've been to the Rijksmuseum three times now, with this last trip taking only half and hour, maybe. This huge museum is currently under renovation, like the rest of Amsterdam, and so only the comparatively tiny annex is open. A couple positive improvements are that The Kitchen Maid, or Milkmaid, is no longer sharing a wall with thirty other paintings and The Night Watch truly has it's own room instead of a lobby.

The beach, at Blijburg aan Zee (there are photos--"fotos"--even if it's in Dutch) had sand and was on water, but there weren't any waves and the wind was too sharp to stay long. The island it's located on, Haven Eiland, didn't exist a few years ago, according to a man at the tram stop who is looking to move there. He said that the land was pumped into place from the bottom of the sea. It's one massive subdivision about 1/4 finished, but the architecture is more contemporary and varied than anything one would see in an American equivalent. For one, besides forms that Americans would see as daring, it's all mixed use. It's a bit creepy to walk through a neighborhood devoid of people, risking the random catcall from construction workers, but soon it will be a nice place to live. Across the little stream next to the water was a tent village which may have been a carnival, but it looked closed.