September 2002

Quite surprisingly the new government did something I agree with: they've cancelled the (temporary) referendum law.

There was going to be a change in the constitution that would allow a referendum to be held among Dutch citizens. In preparation of that there was a temporary law put in place by the previous government, and this one has been cancelled.

I'm quite happy with that. I believe a government is elected because it has a whole package of ideas and measures, you can't just take one single decision seperate from other measures. A government is exactly there to balance things, and this balance would be disturbed with a referendum. A quote that summarizes this: "a referendum would probably show that the majority of citizens wants to abandon nuclear weapons, and at the same time that they want a nuclear bom to be dropped on Al Qaeda."


The political party D66, which considers a referendum to be a good thing, is now thinking about trying to organize a referendum on whether or not to abandon referendums.

My father send me an e-mail about Opera, the browser he uses. They claim they are the "fastest browser on earth".



Don't know about that but they surely have a nice feature. They support CSS2 and when you switch from normal browsing to full-screen mode it will display a presentation version of your website, just like a PowerPoint show.



Here are two screenshots. The cool thing is that it's the same HTML code, it's just using CSS2 that they achieve this effect. Try it yourself at OperaShow (get Opera first).

We'll never play Steden & Ridders again!

Somebody (whose name I won't mention here) has been winning the last six games in a row, without giving the others any chance.



Well, in fact we will play it again, we already made an appointment for next weekend. My parents came after dinner, and we played 2 games. I was so close in the last one... really very close but you know how it is: just not enough cards. Anyway, we had a very pleasant evening. Now quickly to sleep, tomorrow studying again.

It might seem like I haven't done anything on the website this weekend.

However, behind the scenes there's been a lot of work. I've finished the transformation of my old Microsoft Access based addressbook to a MySQL/PHP thing. This means that more than 300 addresses are now online (only for registered users of course). This week I'll try to bring back the information in the database up-to-date. Two years is a long time for an addresslist!


Currently I'm trying to see if I can display somewhere who has a birthday today.

I've been working on the addressbook. A little more than a year ago I wrote that I created an addressbook, and now it's back.

It is only available to registered users, you can find it here. At this moment I'm still working on it. I also have to update the information in the database. If you search for 'Guus' you'll get our old address (in Florijn)...

Sasha and I were watching the weather, when the weatherman announced that this had been the last news bulletin of the anchorman, Harmen Siezen. Too bad!

Harmen Siezen has been working for the NOS journaal since 1974. There's a small interview with him here. It is estimated that he read the news about 17.000 times!

Harmen Siezen started his career at radio Veronica. In 2001 he was elected as the best anchor man of the Netherlands.

After a long, long time the website I've spent so much time on is live. It's www.reisbureau.nl.
In the beginning of August I also wrote that it was live (see here) but this time it's for real :)
Currently only a few travel agencies are online but it's fully functional, so from now on you can book a holiday online.

My very first day in the States, in 1998, I went to the World Trade Center. Together with some other students who were going to work in the States I saw New York from to the observatory on top of one of the towers.

Marjolein, Daniël, Jerry and I played a new game: Wongar. It's a boardgame from the German company Goldsieber, based on an Aboriginal theme. The game is a bit similair to El Grande.

We played from 20:30 till 23:00, and... I won! After that we played my all-time favourite game, Koehandel. Jerry won that one. had to run for my connection at Centraal Station, but the train guys were so kind to wait for me.

Picture: Goldsieber Spiele