blogs

Nice weather, now and in the weekend. Didn't do anything special the last 2 days. Rested a bit. Read the newspaper (saw an interesting ad from ASML, registered for a workshop/interactive seminar blah blah on a by public transport unreachable spot (The House of the Future). Anyways, first wait for a confirmation, maybe they think I don't fit in their profile. We'll see.

I spent last evening and night at Henk in Rotterdam. Had dinner in the cafe het Trefpunt. Decent food for decent prices. We stayed up way too late discussing GIS, Imagem, software etc. We had a good time.

Getting up this morning was a bit of a struggle, but managed to get to work in time: 7:15AM.

Yesterday my mom was in Eindhoven. Very exciting for Hannah, they went downtown and had lunch in the V&D after picking up Hannah from school. So it was very nice to come home to a house filled with warmth. My mom sewn a very nice dress for Hannah. It looks splendid on her. And my goodness, the things that come out of her little mouth ! unbelievable at times. Allthough most of it is in Dutch, we really have to make more effort in getting more English out of her. Understanding it is no problem, actively speaking it is another thing ...

It's a sunny start of the day, even had to change seats to avoid the glare. Just found: http://www.projectwonderful.com a different kind of web advertising initiative. Found the link on drupal.org where a discussion is going on about how to get more funding for that project. I just signed up and I'll see what happens. This site is not getting enough visitors for anybody to bid on advertisements. But you never know. The Google adsense is bringing so little (a few dollars a month) that I don't think I can quit my day job soon ;-)

I wonder how Angelo is doing. On the 21st of this month Kim gave birth to Michael ! So now Isabel has a brand new brother. Hopefully everything goes well. I'll call him today.

It's the last short week for weeks ! Had a good relaxing long weekend. Bastiaan and Maarten Staal (our old neighbours on nr 9) visited us. During the lunch we had time to catch up. Admiring the photo of his wife to be: Rosa. And they had a chance to see what has become of their old house. It changed a bit during the last 18 months ...

Sunday Annie and her children: Savannah and Alex came by. It was their first visit to our house. The children enjoyed themselves enormously. Franny made somosa's (not sure about the spelling ...) she used filo pastry because we can't buy the loempia pastry in the supermarket. Because of that we had to use the oven to cook them, but they didn't come out so well as we had hoped. By the way: always check the bus schedule on Sundays ... not much busses in the mornings. So I had to take a taxi from the station. It was not too bad actually, the fare was a bit more than 10 euros. About double the bus fare for the 5 of us (I took Hannah with me on the bike to pick them up).

a long weekend ! Pentacost (Pinksteren in Dutch) I think it's called. It's the last one till Xmas. Last week was Ascension (Hemelvaart). I spent last night in Hotel Kok in Delft after Debby brought me with Henk's car. We lost our way in Delft, but luckily Henk's car has a routeplanner.... ;-)

We had some time to catch up. It was the first time since we came back from Pittsburgh in 2005 that we met again. Glad to be back in contact. Henk showed me some nice stuff he and his company are working on. Looking forward to learn more and start to use some of the mapping features/modules with Drupal and of course also on this site.

I'll be sleeping over in Delft again tonight and I'll visit Henk this evening. All things that break the daily routine a bit. Had to bike hard just now to reach in time. I had to put the bin outside and I forgot to bring the city map of Rotterdam. I was on time, sweating like a pig ...

I was planning to upgrade this site yesterday evening, Fran was out playing badminton and Hannah in bed. But unfortunately Drupal had a scheduled downtime for a database upgrade. Hmmm, too bad. I watched some MythBusters. A nice episode with a lifter as a trembucet ... uuhh, shit forgot the name of that medieval sling kind of thing. And testing if driving with windows closed + AC is better than driving with no AC and windows down. Conclusion: better lower the windows ... even though the drag is increased the AC consumes more power.

This morning I had my first real conversation with a lady in the train who boards the train in Breda and often ends up in 'my' compartment. Talked about hay fever, cold, air pollution, pollen, soft winters etc. I think she works in the VROM ministry in The Hague. A very sympathetic woman.

Spoke with Henk (http://www.koorneef.net/node/31 ) for the first time since years on the phone. Felt good to hear his voice. He is doing ok, his company http://www.imagem.nl is even doing better. Heard a lot about new projects etc. WMS, OpenGis etc. Very interesting. The http://drupal.org/project/gmap module has WMS support too. WMS really looks a lot like XML-RPC. Maybe something nice can come out of this. Coming Thursday I'll visit Henk in Rotterdam. I already made reservations for a hotel in Delft, so that's quite convenient.