January 2003

Today it's exactly a year ago that we first entered our current house with our own key. From that day we were working 3 weeks to get everything ready.

A detailed description of the moving you can find in the look back at 2002. My father sent me a few pictures of the day we moved.

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This picture is from beginning of February. We just moved all the smaller stuff from Amstelveen. Notice the carpet... it looks fine on this picture but would take many weeks to be completely finished.

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The big things had to be carried up using our very small stairs. Here's Joost, doing a hell of a job.

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Some isolation; I think it's the weekend this article mentions. I regret it that I didn't write more often in my logbook those months.

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A part of the crew; these were the people who helped moving. Ettie and Gerben were also there (I think Ettie took the picture. Steven wasn't there this exact day but also helped a lot the days before.

I never knew that the song 'Happy Birthday to You' is protected by copyright. This story however, describes the history of the song and the copyright transfers.

For private use you don't have to pay royalties but for commercial use you do. The song generates about $2 million in royalties annually.

From the article:
The next time you hear "Happy Birthday" in a movie -- and now that you’re listening, it won’t be long -- stay for the credits at the end of the movie.

NRC Handelsblad made a focus group of 25 people watch the last TV debate and measured their reactions using a perception analyser.The article describes what the reactions of these viewers are on statements of the party leaders.

This kind of tools were also described in the book I read on last years campaign of the Labour party (PvdA).

On the Urban Legends Page I found a reference to somebody putting an teapot for sale online with a rather unfortunate picture...

I've found the old version of my website! You can find it here.

It's the first website I had ever made; it dates from 1999. That was just after I came back from Bulgaria and two years before I registered 'guusbosman.nl'.


It is so nice to see some pictures of Florijn again.

We went to the Chess New Year's party yesterday, in Zeist. Sasha and I got a ride from Mark and Saskia. It was uncertain till the very last moment if we would be on time... but we made it! Well, at least for the main course of the dinner.

After a long dinner we saw the newest James Bond movie, 'Die Another Day'. It was surprisingly good, I really enjoyed it. Perhaps one of the best Bond films I've ever seen.

On Slashdot I found an interesting article about the computer problems that caused the American national TV stations to be so wrong in their predictions of who would be president.

"There was not enough collaboration between the networks and the IT people. And, worse, there was nothing we could do about it. You can't postpone an election."

When I wanted to use the iron a big explosion occured.

I decided to take the power plug of the extension-cable out of the wall. Just before I did that there was another big bang and the lights went off.

There was a small flame on the plug, instinctively I blew it out.

The result:

Dick Bruna doesn't like the postcards with drawings of party leaders in his style.

I was curious what kind of drawings they were and found them at King Jay's website.