March 2007

Last weekend when we were in New Jersey we could still see melting snow on the streets.

In Durham spring is clearly starting. As I am writing this there is a bird singing outside, which is somewhat annoying but a hopeful sign of spring.

Last night we had dinner with Belén, Estéban and Hernan and we had a really nice evening.

This morning I went to pick up our car and after a cup of coffee I'm on my way to Southpoint to get a haircut. A good hairdresser is another of those important amenities to have around, but I haven't really found a good one yet. Regis is not bad but it's in the mall and quite far.

Spring at the Belmont.

Blooming trees.

Today I ran some errants: I went to the post office, super market, shoe maker, library, dry cleaners and Target all in one afternoon. Since nothing is close to each other that means a lot of driving.

Shortly after we moved to Durham I found a good shoe maker nearby, one of the important amenities to have around. It's a family owned business and they do shoe repair and clothes alterations. I've been at Butlers a few times and their work is of high quality.

The only downside is that it's hard to get to their store as the entrance for cars is very steep. If you're not careful the car won't get enough clearance and you'll hear a loud scraping sound under the car -- not nice.

Tonight I upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.0. This is the first time I upgraded the operating system remotely.

It was a bit scary because I couldn't walk to the console if something would go wrong, but the upgrade went fine. The package management system of OpenBSD made the upgrade of applications like MySQL, PHP and Apache a breeze. I upgraded to OpenBSD 3.9 in October of last year when I was in the Netherlands.

The server has been very unstable this week. I'm pretty sure this is fall-out of the full hard disk and things should be better now after I did a fsck. Sorry for the inconvenience, dear reader.

Elke mentioned that sometimes a message "Unable to connect to database server" appears for a while. This should be taken care of now -- the database server will start up automatically after a machine reboot.

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.