August 2004

Today I received a present from Tibor and Janneke.

I have been using the operating system OpenBSD for my webserver for a couple of years now, and I became a fan of this very secure and stable OS.

Their present was therefore nice: an OpenBSD T-shirt. Thanks guys!

	Tibor with the present.
	The backprint of the t-shirt: OpenBSD.
	Wearing the new t-shirt.

Found an interesting test to see if you can recognize fraudulous e-mails from real ones, the
Phishing IQ Test.

I had a 90% score; some were hard to recognize.

The weather today was great -- sunny, warm, but not as humid as last week. In the morning there were three artists in front of our house painting windmill De Adriaan.

In the afternoon I visited my grandmother, Oma Bosman, and we had dinner together; a very pleasant Sunday.

Yesterday afternoon I went to see the Gay Parade in Amsterdam. The Gay Parade is a boat parade on the canals in Amsterdam, organized every year by the gay community.

I had never seen the Parade before, except on TV. It was beautiful! There were a lot of spectacular boats, with various acts and performances. The weather was wonderful: very sunny and warm, and the city was crowded. The audience was very divers; gay, straight, young and old. I went with Jelly and her friends, and we had a great time.

See some pictures here.

Yesterday I went out with a group of colleague's. The weather was great so we started in the late afternoon at the outside café 'Paris'. It's a long-standing tradition of Chess to celebrate the weekend there every Friday.

At the Grote Markt was the annual "Haarlem Culinair" festival; but as we were with a large group and it was very busy it was unpractical to find a place for dinner there. Instead we went to Jills, where we had a fun dinner. The food was good; I enjoyed the chicken salad very much.

We went for drinks and dancing in Van Stoffelen; that was great fun, as always. They played "Dragostea Din Tei"; one of my favourite songs at the moment.

The project I'm working on is going well. We're creating a web-based management application for an existing product, and yesterday I tested the integration with the real application. Everything works smoothly.

Choosing Hibernate was definitely a right choose -- it increases the productivity a lot.

It's a quiet period -- many friends and colleague's are on holiday, as are my parents. Next week Sasha will be coming back! That will be a very busy time for both of us; there's a lot to do.

The last two months I have been running a few times per week. It's fun to do, especially in the beautiful summer weather.

Lately I discovered a new track to run, the track of the Haarlem Grachtenloop. There are two distances: 4.6 and 9.2 kilometers; I must say that the 9.2 km track is way out of my league. But the 4.6 kilometers is just right for me, and I have been running it a couple of times now.

It's nice to compare my result with the official times of this year's Grachtenloop. The quickest guy runs the track in just under 15 minutes, it still takes me about 35 minutes.