This weekend we spent in Middenmeer. Saturday we sorted and moved my old things.

They were stored on the attic of my mother's school. They had been there since we moved to Amstelveen, almost three years ago.

The attic of the school is very long and is divided in several compartments. The doors to these rooms are very low, so you have to bend to enter. The scary thing is that you can only walk in the middle: if you step outside the path, you'll fall through the roof.

My things were stored at the end of the attic. However, the light in the compartment at the end of the attic was broken. There was a tiny window but it was very, very dark. Mieke went to get a light from home, but I had to get started. Fortunately, the solution wasn't very far away: Christmas decoration lighted my path.

We took all the things downstairs and brought it to my parents' home. There was some old furniture and a number of boxes with unsorted things, books, some old clothes.

At my parents place I sorted it. Most of the things were for throwing, especially the old computers. I didn't know I had so many keyboards, mouses and computer components.

In the end, I kept only two boxes. One with personal things such as the T-shirt I got when I went to a summercamp in the US in 1998. The other box is full with books. I took the "Dune" books to Haarlem, I want to read them one of these days.

We had a long dinner and a very cosy evening together. It had been almost a year since my parents and Sasha had seen each other, so there were many pictures and stories to be exchanged.

We went back to Haarlem Sunday afternoon.

Well, the summer seems to have ended in the Netherlands. After a few days that were just grey and rainy, today arrived with a big thunderstorm and a fair amount of rain. Oh well, it has been quite a nice summer.

It's just wonderful to be together. Although we are both working a lot life is good. Sasha is writing her thesis, I am finishing the project here at Chess.

Friday morning Sasha arrived at Schiphol. It was great! We went out Friday evening to a Greek restaurant. Just then was the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, which was celebrated there with a big Greek flag, drinks and a large TV screen.

Funny to see that when Prince Willem-Alexander was on TV everybody was waving; when Balkenende was shown on TV the restaurant starting laughing.

We had a good weekend. Sasha is working on her graduation thesis. Yesterday Jaap celebrated his birthday in Middenmeer; thanks Christianne and Peter for the ride home.

Sasha's plane is landing in 45 minutes, so I'm going to Schiphol now!

The plane has some delay so I slept a wonderful extra hour after waking up and checking the arrival time.

Today Jaap has a birthday.

Congratulations from both of us!

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.