Wednesday 8 July 2009

Business Time

The weekend was fairly uneventful, with grocery shopping on Saturday and a visit from some friends of Pieter. Sunday all four of us went to the pool in Almere-Stad again. This time I spent a great deal of time talking to one of the staff there, an older woman. I ended up telling her my 'secret' and everything. She seemed very understanding, having some experiences of her own, mostly related to her not-so-feminine twin sister which made it easier for her to relate. I also ended up talking a bit with her daughter, who was also working there.

Near the end of our time at the pool I kind of collapsed, though. I felt very dizzy, nauseous and such. The woman of the staff I had talked to before told me to sit down and got me some tea so that I could recover somewhat. After Pieter and I got home and had lunch, I really crashed. For some reason when Pieter was helping me get up from the couch it suddenly appeared to me as though he was twisting my wrist. When he noticed my discomfort he moved my arm to what he thought was a more comfortable position, but by then I was freaking out, having descended into some kind of nightmare world where he was intentionally trying to hurt me.

When Pieter let go off my wrist I curled up in a ball on the couch and just lied there, shivering and trembling. Then as he tried to pull me closer to him to comfort me I began to spasm and cry and... I don't really remember all that happened. All I really remember is that afterwards I felt so completely tired that Pieter had to nearly carry me upstairs where he put me down on my bed. When I fell asleep shortly after, it was up to Pieter to call my mother to inform her that I wouldn't be able to make it to the dinner my older brother had organized for my younger brother, my mother and me. Later that day I talked some more with my mother by phone and assured her that I was doing fine again.

It took me a few hours of sleep to recover. That day I also had a sleeping pill, but it didn't prevent me from feeling intensely sick during the morning. As I don't have a fever or anything it seems likely that it's just a combination of stress and exhaustion.

On Tuesday I had my appointment with my GP. She wasn't fully updated yet on the situation yet as she had just returned from her vacation, but I brought her up to date with the most important changes, including the suspicions of fraud, which she didn't seem to dismiss. She will read through the documents I sent her (on the irregularities etc) and also call professor Weijmar Schultz of the UMCG as he had tried to call her earlier this month when she was on vacation. She will call me afterwards to inform me of the contents of that discussion.

At 2 PM I had an appointment in Lelystad with my contact person for the Bbz welfare request. When he came downstairs to pick me up from the waiting room he seemed to be taken aback for a bit when he saw a woman instead of the man he had been expecting, but when I explained my situation he quickly caught on. He had read the summary I had put in the request form as well, so he wasn't totally unprepared.

We had a pretty good talk, the good news is that my request isn't rejected, they just want to have an external company investigate the viability of my company a bit more. To this purpose someone will call me for an appointment, then they'll come here (1 or 2 people) to check things out. We talked about the things I need to prepare, such as fully defined revenue projections, a completely overview of expected costs and required profit/income, and so on. I'll attempt to get this all sorted as soon as possible. He also offered me part of the first welfare cheque if I wouldn't make it financially, with of course the catch that if I wouldn't get accepted for it, I would have to pay it back. I thought it was very kind.

The two items which are or will be the main sources of revenue for Nyanko are its games and its software products, particularly niche software such as the VHDL/Verilog hardware simulator I'm working on. With a few weeks I should have a prototype of it up and running, by which time we should have the first demo of our first game working too. At this point Trevor is working on a quick demo to show off (and help in debugging :P ) the game engine.

In other news, I finally took some more pics and updated the picture on my blog. Enjoy! Or not :P


Maya

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