One of my all-time favorite books has been voted the "best Dutch book of all times". It's The Discovery Of Heaven by Harry Mulisch, a novel about the mystical journey of a man to return the Ten Commandments to Heaven.

The vote is based on an internet poll, and I am always skeptical of those because it's so easy to manipulate. However, this first place for what is De Ontdekking Van De Hemel in Dutch is completely deserved. The second place was for Het Huis Van De Moskee by Kader Abdolah, a book completely unknown to me. I looked it up and it was published in 2005.

Strange that this new book ended up above such classics as Max Havelaar or De Avonden, which I suppose proves my point above the unreliability of internet polls (or the odd literary taste of the people that voted). Simon Vestdijk's books didn't even make it into the top 10, neither did Erik, of het klein insectenboek by Godfried Bomans.

The Discovery Of Heaven was published in 1992, the 2nd year I was in high school. Although at that time reading Dutch literature wasn't high on my list with favorite things, I enjoyed reading Mulisch a lot (and so did many of my classmates). In 2001 a movie made of the book came out, which was okay but not as brilliant as the book.

Good news for Dutch Starbucks fans: the company will open its first branch at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam this summer.

The "coffee giant" will just open a single branch for now, which is only accessible for airport passengers who have gone through customs. Starbucks has not mentioned any future expansions yet.

See the first job advertisement for barrista's for at the airport.

Thanks to various readers of this website have pointed out this news to me. A good step forward for Dutch coffee lovers!

Last night I made couscous, inspired by my father's couscous dish. He placed a recipe for couscous on his website a while ago.

Interestingly, one of the ingredients is "koeskoes kruiden", literally "couscous spices". If you'd do a google for "koeskoes kruiden", like I did, you'll see as a first result... indeed, my father's website.

Further research learned that the spices may have been turmeric, ground cumin and paprika powder.

The result, over whole grain couscous, was nice but a little bit bland so I'll have to keep working on getting that right.

Cutting the ingredients.

Just after putting the ingredients in the pan.

The 12 finalists for American Idol were chosen last week. Antonella Barbara was rightly sent home, surprisingly Sabrina Sloan had to leave as well.

This week's show brought few surprises. The ladies are consistently better than the men, with LaKisha Jones and Melinda Doolittle taking the lead. Both are extremely strong singers, but I think Doolittle is more likable and has a better chance of becoming number 1.

Somehow Sanjaya Malakar made it through this week to the next round, perhaps because of his new hairstyle. He and Phil Stacey are probably next to go.

Tonight I noticed that the website was very slow so I checked if there was enough free space available. And the /var partition was 100% full again, while I had just cleaned it up yesterday.

So I did a quick sanity check and quickly found that I had left MySQL logging on "verbose", with this result:

A 2.5 GB log file on a 3.0 GB partition... So there is clearly no need for a new hard disk yet.

The plane landed in Newark on schedule this morning. At the airport we went to National, a car rental place to pick up our car. We got a Toyota Corolla... so small! I could hardly fit in the driver's seat. Later I adjusted the wheel so at least it wasn't on my knees anymore but it was still pretty tight. Last summer when we were buying our car we were also considering a Corolla; I'm glad we went with its bigger brother, the Camry.

From Newark it was a 20 minute drive to Secaucus. It took slightly longer because I took a wrong turn, but over-all the trip went smoothly. We met with Jonathan, Irena and Ilana and spent the late morning together. In the afternoon we all went to New York, and I drove!

It was really nice to drive in New York City, and it was very different than driving at home. I quickly got used to it and I enjoyed it a lot. The distance between cars, I learned, should be as small as possible ("bumper to bumper") and the horn is there for a reason. I think I managed quite well to adjust and also kept the car and everybody in it safe. We went for a walk in Soho and we had a good time together. We parked 2 hours and payed $24.00... another difference with North Carolina.

In the evening we went to Kitchen 22 where we celebrated Sasha's birthday and closed a great day.

It's 6.20 am on Saturday and we're getting ready to leave to the airport.

Sasha had her last mid-term exam yesterday and now it's spring break! Time to enjoy and to celebrate her birthday with Irena and Jonathan.

Our plane is at 8.40 am, and we plan to be at the airport around 7.30 am so we'll leave in 45 minutes or so.

A few weeks ago I had my first appointment at my new dentist, and today I went back for some additional things.

The office is right next to ours which makes it convenient to go for an appointment. I really like their service -- very professional, very friendly. They gave me a tooth brush and and little tube of tooth paste.

In lighter news, a Duke graduate has invented a beer-tossing machine:

"It took the 22-year-old Cornwell about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a minifridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing machine, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload."

Today I added air to our car's tires for the first time.

We've driven around 9500 miles with the car now and last time a warning light for the tire pressure came on just before the service appointment, and I wanted to take action earlier this time.

A week ago or so I bought a tire pressure gauge -a fancy digital one- but the gauge in the air hose at the gas station was much easier to use. For some reason my digital gauge didn't give a reading on two of the tires, only after trying 6 or 7 times it worked.

It cost me $1.50 in quarters because it took a while before I had it all figured out, but now the pressure in all the tires is nicely around 30 psi.

When I drove away from the gas station I could feel the difference, or at least I imagined I could feel it.

This tire gauge is not great. The one built in to the air hose at the gas station was much easier to use.