May 2004

Yesterday we studied about the Subjunctive I, or Konjunktiv I in German. It was a logical next step after learning about the Subjunctive II last week. The Konjunktive is a so-called Modus: a way of structure a sentence.

We also watched TV: we saw the German 20:00 o'clock news together and discussed it afterwards.

Today I've been doing homework all day. For the German course there was more homework than usual so I spent the whole morning on it.

I'm also working to get a new Java certification. The subject is not very difficult, but it requires some time.

In Middenmeer there was a large fire last week.

I had a fun evening watching the Eurovision Songcontest. Last year we watched it for the first time, and I was looking forward to see the show again.

Like last year, a very large part of the fun were the comments by Terry "only 23 to go" Wogan, the voice-over of BBC 1. About the Dutch: "Watch out for the vocal group, they are making their own particular fashion statement".

I liked this year's winner, Ukraine. Terry Wogan: "This is gonna get a lot of votes when the pubs close". The Ukrainians made a really nice show; a real performance. The Dutch were really boring, just two guys on stage.

Today I've been working a nice Java project, just for fun. It's been quite a while since I had time to do that; I've been quite busy the last few weekends.

I looked into a feature of the new Tomcat, a servlet container that I often use at my work. I've been working with version 5 for a while now, but one of the new things I didn't try yet was clustering. This is a mechanism to provide more up-time and better scalability in a web-application.

Today I set up a few instances of Tomcat at my desktop, and experimented with and read about the clustering and load balancing features of this open source server.

I found two nice articles on OnJava.com about this ([1], [2]) that were very helpful to provide a quick start. The experiment went quite well; the hardest aspect was to configure a multicasting IP address.

It's nice to see 'little' Tomcat start to support features that its bigger brothers have had for a long time. However, I feel that it's mainly useful for testing purposes and as a development tool. If your website is big enough to warrant clustering, you'd probably want to go for a commercial tool such as WebSphere or WebLogic, if only for the support contract.

Jaap, my father, is going to Bulgaria! He left yesterday evening for a study visit. The visit is about is the quality of initial vocational training and quality assurance mechanisms for training, which he has been working on here in the Netherlands.

The cool thing is that he decided to go by train, which is a real adventure: he's traveling through seven countries. This morning around 7.00 o'clock he arrived in München, where he took a direct train to Beograd. He'll arrive there around 23:00 o'clock, and then take another train to Sofia.

Jaap is keeping track of his stay in Bulgaria on his website.

Today we had a Chess meeting in Zeist all day.

There was an informal get-together yesterday evening. I had to do some administrative work, so I arrived only at midnight in Zeist. The bar in the hotel had just closed, but the personel was very friendly and gave me a beer anyway.

Soon afterwards we went to a pub around the corner, De Druppel. That pub closed around 2:30 o'clock, which was probably for the best as everybody had to get up at 9:00 o'clock.

It was a very interesting day; there were presentations of projects Chess did, and presentations on the business processes and quality assurance of Chess.

Yesterday we learned about the Subjunctive II, or Konjunktiv II in German. Next week we'll get the Subjunctive I; it's useful to refresh all these things.

At my work I started on a new project. It's a small project, but with a tight deadline: in about two weeks the program has to be ready. I enjoy the fact that there's a mixture of short-term speedy projects and long-term projects at Chess.

This was a special weekend. Not only with my first driving lessons, but also my very first visit to a soccer game! My employer Chess gave us tickets for the match. Together with my colleague's Joris, Pascal and Sabine I went to AFC Ajax vs. NAC Breda.

We planned to go to this match a long time ago, and it was really a happy coincidence that this was the match in which Ajax became Dutch national champion. Ajax won with 2-0 of NAC.

I've never been a big soccer fan, but I enjoyed yesterday's match a lot. It's a very impressive experience to be in a stadium with so many people shouting and waving banners.

We didn't go to the celebrations at the Leidseplein.

Today I had my first driving lessons!

My father and I went to the Cultuurweg, a quiet dead-end street, just outside Middenmeer. There was no traffic there at all, but it's a longer road so it was an excellent spot to start driving.

Years ago I once drove my parents' car a bit, on a parking lot in Wieringerwerf with my mother, but that's about all the experience I had with driving a car. I never really needed a driving license, but now I want to start taking driving lessons.

Today was really fun. First I learned how to start the car. Then I drove a bit in first gear, and learned how to use the gear-lever to get to the 2nd and 3rd gear. The highest speed I drove with today was 50 km/hour, but I can assure you that that felt really quick. I trained a lot on turning the car around, and later I also started to "park" the car on various locations. It's really fun to drive a car, I found out.

I'm not sure exactly when and how but somewhere in the next few weeks I want to either start taking regular driving lessons or perhaps take a full-time course to get it done quickly.