Ettie and Gerben, my sister and her husband, arrived in Durham!

They were at home when we arrived home yesterday, and it was great to see them again. It's been so long since we've all been together! So that asked for a picture to be taken.

In the evening went together to the Cheesecake Factory in Southpoint Mall, and the guests were duly impressed by the huge portions. A very nice evening.

Jaap and Mieke arrived in Durham today!

We spend a great day together around Duke and in the Sarah Duke Gardens.

Ettie and Gerben arrived in the U.S. yesterday, and they'll join us next week.

We came home from a great weekend in Asheville. We visited the Biltmore Estate for the first time, and it was gorgeous.

Saturday afternoon we spent in the winery, the farm and various trails. Today we visited the gardens and the main house.

Friday we made it just in time to our car when a huge lightning storm hit Durham, including the trail around the Duke golf course where we were walking. The storm stayed above Durham for at least 1,5 hours that night.

Today my run brought me on the trail again, and since I now have a phone with a camera built-in I took a few pictures of the storm damage.

This weekend we did a lot of preparations for our coming guests. Ettie & Gerben and Jaap & Mieke will be in the USA soon! We're looking forward to it, and now the house is getting ready also.

A warning for high warning a little down the road.

Another place were the trail was blocked.

My first experiment in growing herbs was not entirely successful. Of all the seedlings I planted, only one grew out to a full and healthy plant, the others didn't make it. I'll try it again.

I'm not sure of what type the surviving plant is, we'll find out over time.

We didn't go to the official fireworks in the Bull's stadium last night since the weather was really bad. We went for a walk around the Duke golf course, and about half way we heard a thunderstorm coming our way -- we made it out just in time before the rain began. There was a lot of lightning, at least one per minute.

Today is Independence Day, so a day off. In the evening we'll go and see fireworks, but during the day I did some Ruby programming. I really enjoy this language!

To connect to our corporate network I use a Cisco VPN client and I ran into a small but annoying issue. The window of the VPN client wouldn't "Restore" anymore, I could only have it open Maximized or Minimized.

I did a scan on the registry but ultimately I found the settings that I needed in vpnclient.ini. The offending items:

WindowWidth=655
WindowHeight=96
WindowX=4294935296
WindowY=4294935296

I stopped the VPN client and replaced this with more reasonable values that I found here:

WindowWidth=578
WindowHeight=367
WindowX=324
WindowY=112 

That solved it completely.

What's wrong with the following piece of JavaScript?

pbar.wait({
  interval:200,
  increment:15,
});

document.myform.myaction.click();

Well, nothing according to FireFox.

Internet Explorer doesn't like it though: "expected identifier, string or number". It turns out that the extra comma after "increment:" throws IE off. Debugging JavaScript used to be a total nightmare 5 years ago, but tools like FireBug and www.jslint.org made development a lot more productive.

I know we live in a state with beautiful nature and lots of wilderness, but this news article still surprised me: black bear spotted in Chapel Hill.

Sadly, the bear was apparently hit by a car and died, but I had no idea that there were black bears around here.

A related article on WRAL.com talks about two bear sightings in May of this year in Raleigh and Durham: "Law-enforcement officers said they believe the larger bear could weigh around 200 pounds. Residents are urged to stay away from the animals."

It's over 10 years ago that I saw bears in real live, from the bus in Tannersville, NY.

The Lego company has a vault with all models they ever sold, in their original boxes.

Tonight I saw a video of this vault and it's was a real trip down memory lane. They showed the castle, the space ships and many other goodies.

They even showed the Monorail, one of my all-time favorite Sinterklaas presents. Oh, the memories!

"Underneath all that there's a primal connection, something that makes everyone tune into the childhoods when they see the bricks, and get back into brighter, careless moments, even at the subconscious levels".

The match between the Netherlands and Russia was the first one I saw live in Euro 2008, and with the 1-3 result it was also the last Dutch game to see in this tournament.

We went with a a couple of friends to Woody's Tavern in Cary, where about 40 Dutch people were watching the game together. It was nice to meet Dutch people in the area, and to watch the game together. Petra was there, and we met Maarten for the first time as well. Two years ago in the World Cup I watched the elimination of the Dutch team against Portugal in a bar in DC.

After the first 90 minutes the result was 1-1, so another 30 minutes were played. About half way that extra time all TV screens stopped showed the game, and a Weather Alert interrupted the broadcast for about 3 minutes, without showing any information on the game... A big storm was coming over the Triangle, and when we drove home we were right in the middle of it. In the evening we had friends over for dinner and it was a very nice evening.

Watching soccer.

Argentines rooting for Holland.

Plenty of decorations.

Belen and Sasha.

Petra, Guus and Maarten.