Yesterday we went to a "dumpling party" to celebrate the Chinese New Year organized by Bonnie and Emily.

It was a fun evening, and it was interesting to see how dumplings are made (I stirred a big pan with stuffing). Ingredients included a lot of finely cut cabbage, pork, some shrimp, garlic, ginger and an egg. The dumplings were boiled for 10 to 15 minutes and the result was delicious.

The party was in Emily's place which is a few minutes walking from our house and was nice to be able to go to a party by foot. New Year in China and Taiwan is a big event -- our office in Taiwan is pretty much closed for a couple of days.

Home made dumplings.

This morning I went to work a bit later after an early conference call. When I drove on the I-40 I saw a car crashing in front of me.

The driver lost of control over the car somehow, perhaps a blowout. The car swerved back and forth for a few seconds and then hit another car and bounced off the road. It happened in the lane in front of me, but I was far way enough to evade the car next to the crashed one that came to an emergency stop.

I pulled over to the other side of the road and called the police. I was about half mile away, but luckily it seemed that the driver of the car was okay. I saw him standing outside the car a bit later.

I was parked on the side of the highway and the police operator told there was no need for me to stay, so after a few minutes I waited for a gap between passing cars and joined traffic again.

Tonight I had dinner with Klaas, Petra and Ron. I met them online through AllesAmerika.com and it was great to finally meet them in real life.

Klaas, "Blips" on this website, lives in Minnesota but was in Durham for business so the four of us decided to meet up and we had a very nice evening. Ron and Petra moved from the Netherlands to North Carolina about two years ago.

When I arrived in the restaurant the waiter came and asked me if I'm "with a party of 3". I said yes and he said he had recognized my accent so he brought me to the right table.

It's been a while since I had spoken with Dutch people face-to-face and we had a lot of experiences and stories to share.

It was great to meet you all.

Time for some down time this weekend after a nice but busy week, with performance reviews and other things.

Yesterday morning I ran some errants in the morning, and went for a walk in Umstead Park afterwards. It wasn't as cold as last week and it was great to be outdoors.

I had lunch sitting on a rock overlooking the trail and a creek in the sun.

We saw Office Space, the movie, for the first time in years. Last time we saw it we were living in the Netherlands, when I was not so familiar with a typical U.S. office environment. It was even better this time, with so many famous quotes and scenes ("what is WRONG with you people?!").

Saturday morning I washed our car. After the winter weather we had here the car had gotten pretty dirty.

It was very cold but it was rewarding to wash off all the dirt and see the difference before and after the car wash.

Before.

After.

There is a car washing facility in our apartment complex.

Tonight was the Super bowl XLI, the final match of the NFL 2007 season. This year I haven't really followed the football season. A shame really: the Super bowl game reminded me how much fun it is to see American football.

The match started with a very spectacular first quarter with a touch down for the Chicago Bears; the first touch down ever on an opening kickoff. However, the Indiana Colts came back in the 2nd quarter and continued to rule the match during the 2nd half.

The Colts won with 29 to 17. I was kind of supporting the Chicago Bears in this game but it was great to watch anyway. Next season I'll definitely follow more games in the NFL -- let's hope that the Redskins will do well.

My favorite commercial was one by Blockbuster, about using a "mouse" to get on internet. There was a nice preview of a silly movie that I'd like to see, Wild Hog. While Pepsi is the official soft drink of the NFL Coca Cola placed a lot (great) commercials around the game.

Yesterday I worked from home. The weather has turned bad, and the weather forecast included ice and sleet and I didn't want to drive 25 miles in that.

Wednesday night I worked on our taxes, and like last year I used an online service, TurboTax, to file. Since we moved last year I had to fill in 3 tax different declarations: one for the federal taxes, one for Virginia and one for North Carolina. TurboTax made filling them in a lot easier, and their advices on deductions (for example for our moving costs) made a big difference.

Last night we went to Emily to celebrate her birthday and it was a fun evening.

In the last week the server for this website has experienced three outages. There seems to be something wrong with the fan on the motherboard (just like 2 years ago). Today's cause was not related to the fan, but there was a power outage in my parent's house and the main fuse switched off.

If the situation continues I might have to replace a part or some parts on the server.

I have access to a world-class monitoring system, so I receive a text message on my cell phone as soon as the web server is unreachable, and get nice reports on its availability (94.7% in the last 24 hours).

Today I hiked on another trail in the William B. Umstead Park. Last week I started at the Reddy Creek entrance, and today I started from the main visitor center and took the Sycamore Trail.

The weather was very nice. It was warmer than last week, and I had no need for the jacket that I had brought just in case.

I spent a few hours in the woods, and walked around 7.5 miles. It's great to spend some time outdoors. Some pictures.

The presidential elections are less than two years away so candidates for both parties are starting to express interest in running.

One of the candidates that has announced last week to set up an exploratory committee is Barack Obama.

He is an interesting candidate because he is African American and relatively young and he has received a lot of positive buzz in the last year or so. I'd read some articles about him but never really heard him speak.

I found a nice TV fragment about him on YouTube: watch Barack Obama on the Daily Show.