Monday evening I left for a career fair at Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia. Steve, a colleague, gave me a ride and we left Arlington around 21:30 o'clock.

Blacksburg is about four hours from D.C. and we arrived around 1.30 in the hotel after a smooth and pleasant drive. Finding an open gas station in this part of Virginia after midnight to get some water wasn't easy, it's a really rural area.

We are here with four colleagues, and we had breakfast together. We started the interviews today at 9:00 o'clock, and the sessions ended around 16:00 o'clock.

Today are the elections for Virginia's new governor.

In addition a new lieutenant governor and attorney general will be elected. All three races remain very close.

Campaining has been intense, and the ubiquitous signs color many gardens and public places.

Saturday we went to see a new movie in the AMC theater near us, Good night, and good luck.

The subject of the film is a newsshow of CBS crew in the 1950's, that takes on Senator McCarthy and the way he is investigating people accused of Communist sympathies. The movie was made in black and white, mixed with real TV footage from senator McCarthy's speeches and hearings. This made for a nostalgic movie, so next to the interesting story line it was a pleasure to see journalism at work in the area that TV was a new invention.

Be sure to visit the movie's website, it is a very elegant website with nice previews of the movie. It also has some samples from the soundtrack by Dianne Reeves.

The movie was directed by George Clooney, which he did well, but he was also playing in the movie and somehow the role didn't really fit him. David Strathairn on the other hand, gave a brilliant performance as Edward R. Murrow. Him being casted for this role was a master move, and he looks so much like the real Murrow.

Monday is Mieke's birthday, and in the Netherlands it's Monday already so:

Congratulations from both of us and a happy birthday!

Thursday evening we went to see Lenny Kravitz in the MCI center in D.C.

Sasha knows that I am a big fan of Kravitz, and when she found out he was coming to Washington she had arranged tickets for the show -- a wonderful gift.

We were early at the center, and we had dinner inside -- the real American thing: hotdogs, pizza and Miller beer.

The show started around 20:30 o'clock and Lenny was the first to perform. The stadium wasn't entirely full yet, and not everybody seemed to know Lenny Kravitz, but the crowd quickly warmed up. Especially after Dig In, many people were dancing. He played all the good songs -- Mama Said, Let Love Rule, Fly Away... the best known song here seemed to be American Woman. It was an excellent show, even though Lenny had his foot casted and he couldn't really move a lot on stage. We enjoyed it a lot.

When Kravitz left, it took about 30 minutes for the stage to be re-built and modified. The second show of the evening was Aerosmith. A lot of people in the audience came to see this band from the early 1970s, so there were quite a lot of older people in the crowd, and many ladies with their hair in 1980s style and men with Aerosmith T-shirts.

Even though we are not real fans of Aerosmith is was a good show to watch -- these guys have obviously been doing concerts for more than 30 years so they know what they're doing, and it was a great show. There was quite a lot of songs that we knew, and the crowd was very energetic.

It was over around midnight, so we took one of the last metro's home. It took a while to get home as we had to wait long for a transfer at Metro Center.

This is the first weekend in a long time that I am really free, and it's an awesome feeling.

I'm sitting in front of our building, in the sun with a nice cup of coffee. Since a few weeks there is community-provided wireless internet here.

I called some friends and family using Skype, something I should do more often, and I worked on some pictures I took this week. It's a perfectly lazy afternoon and the weather is just amazing today.

This weekend I went out to experiment with my new camera.

I had never made pictures before in "manual" mode, and it was really interesting. You can configure the shutter time, the field depth and a couple of other parameters that influence the resulting picture.

The funny thing is that my father did a similar experiment yesterday. Like father, like son.

Yesterday I had to pick up something so I worked from home in the morning. I was a bit out my usual morning habits, and for one reason or the other I forgot to drink coffee. Typically, I'd arrive at Starbucks at 8:20 and get a coffee, which usually lasts until 10.30 or so.

Sure, enough, around 10.30 am I started getting a headache. It's a sign that I'm really addicted. I know I am, but it's different to actually feel the cold-turkey pain... There hasn't been a day in the last months that I didn't drink at least three cups of coffee.

Is it a sign of addiction when you look at your drink and think: "did they start making those large coffees in smaller cups?"

This morning when I went to work the metro stopped for a minute in the tunnel as it sometimes does when there's a train ahead. I noticed how quiet it is in the metro at 8.15 -- nobody talks. If you take the metro home in the evening it's quite different.

One of the projects that took most of my time this summer is almost out of UAT, and it will go into production next weekend.

Things in the news here are the indictment of Mr. Libby, the funeral of Rosa Parks and since today a publication of a e-mails by Michael Brown, the former FEMA director who resigned after the criticism on FEMA's handling of Katrina's aftermath.

Joris sent me this great website a while back: The Daily WTF.

They describe "curious perversions in information technology" -- funny coding errors and the likes.

Today they had an absolutely brilliant piece of code:

enum Bool 
{ 
    True, 
    False, 
    FileNotFound 
};

This weekend our apartment building switched from airconditioning to heating -- right on time, it's really getting cold.

Yesterday Milan, Sasha's father had a birthday and today it's my grandmother's birthday too: congratulations to both of you.

We saw Seinfeld yesterday on TV, absolutely brilliant. I especially love Kramer a "hilariously outrageous, completely insane character", who almost killed a whale in yesterday's episode.