The Lilytopia exhibition next week will feature tens of thousands of lilies grown by Dutch and American companies. Longwood Gardens, a large display garden in Kennett Square, PA, will host the event.

Many Dutch lily growers are participating. Dutch newspaper Agrarisch Dagblad writes that 500 cases with lilies were sent to the United States for the event. Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos will open the exhibition on May 21.

Inspired by the Keukenhof
The exhibition, which is open to the general public, is inspired by the Dutch Keukenhof. According to the organizers it will be the largest display of lilies in North America. In celebration of Lilytopia Netherlands carillonneur Gerard de Waardt will play Longwood's 62-bell carillon. De Waardt is the city carillonneur of Rotterdam, Schiedam, Maassluis, Tholen and St. Maartensdijk in the Netherlands; he will play on May 22, 23 and 24th.

The logistics are impressive. From the press release:

"At this point, the plan is completed and implementation of the show is well under way! We are using an estimated 50,000 stems of display-grade lilies. Display-grade lilies are the highest quality grade flowers—a grade rarely seen outside of the Netherlands. These flowers are grown every year for the Keukenhof “Lily Show” and starting this year the tradition includes Longwood Garden’s Lilytopia.

Lilies slated for a show need to be harvested at just the right time. Certainly lilies can be stored in refrigerated coolers, however longevity of the cut flower may be reduced. Therefore we are planning on installing lilies that were harvested just hours before in Holland. An extensive logistical network of breeding houses, warehouse and shipping facilities, airports, export agents, import and shipping companies, government agencies, and trucking companies have been lined up to ensure a safe and speedy transportation of the flowers."

Symposium for lily professionals
Professionals from North America and the Netherlands will conduct a symposium on May 24. Design demonstrations will focus on everything from proper handling to cutting-edge design trends. Growing seminars will explore the latest cultivation techniques, including pest and disease management, on lilies. Marketing seminars will offer techniques to boost consumer awareness and demand of lilies.

Lilytopia 2010
Longwood Gardens, Kennet Square, PA
May 21 through May 31, 2010

The Google developer's event is going on right now: lots of HTML5 and several new and improved Google APIs. The event is held in San Francisco, but I've been following the news coming out.

I especially liked the announcement of the Google Font Directory, a directory of high quality open source fonts. They can be included in commercial and non-commercial projects alike.

Non-Latin fonts, such as Cyrillic for Bulgarian, are not yet supported but this is coming soon, according to the blog post.

It's very easy to use. Add the following to your HTML section:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

and now you can use 'Font Name' the standard way:

<div style="font-family: 'Font Name', serif;">Your text</div>

Just before the weekend Sasha's laptop screen died. When you start the laptop the screen displays vertical, colored stripes.

Dell sent a replacement screen today and tomorrow an engineer will come and install the screen at my work. I could have easily replaced the part myself but it's a nice service.

Sasha and I left at 8.40 am this morning, and arrived around 2.00 pm in Washington DC in the house where she'll be staying. We met our friends there, and I left two hours later.

The second part of the road trip was much less fun than the first, driving alone, but the radio kept me company. David Plouffe, the campaign manager of Barack Obama, spoke in Richmond last week and NPR in Virginia broadcasted his very interesting speech on the influence of new technology on his work and on election campaigns.

Speaking of new technologies: with Google Maps and Yelp I found a nice place for dinner on 85 South. In the middle of nowhere really, but a nice place to sit down. I arrived in Durham at 9.30 pm. Good to be back home.

We'll be leaving in a few minutes from Somerset to Washington, DC. Sasha will start an internship on Monday at the International Monetary Fund. A great opportunity.

After I bring Sasha to her new place there, I'll continue driving for another four hours until I reach Durham, NC.

A while back I connected my accounts of several social networks and tools to each other. If I update my 'status' in one place it shows up in the others automatically. So if I type a status update on my phone, it gets routed to my website, to Facebook and to Hyves (a Dutch Facebook clone).

I maintain two separate streams; I have a separate stream for work-related updates. Those will show up in my LinkedIn account, on Skype and on Yammer, which is a sort of Twitter for companies.

This week I changed the way status updates are displayed on my website. They are no longer limited to a box 'What am I doing?' but they became real nodes on the site, so you can add comments to them on the site.

(Diagram source).