Around 13:00 o'clock I arrived in the hotel, and even though check-in didn't start before 15:00 they gave me our room right away. That was great because I needed to catch up with my e-mail as I had been off-line all morning.

The room was awesome! It is probably the nicest hotel room I have ever stayed in; very large and luxurious.

At 16:30 o'clock I went to pick up Sasha who arrived at Penn Station. It was raining a little bit, but it wasn't cold and we had a big umbrella. It very nice to see each other again like this after a week, and with a great weekend ahead. We brought the bags to the hotel.

We had dinner in a nice bakery nearby, not a long restaurant-type-of-dinner, because we wanted to arrive early for the concert.

Friday morning I left from San Juan to New York. The plane left at 7:30 o'clock so I got up really early. My alarm went at 5.15, and so did my cellphone and the wake-up call: I didn't to miss this flight.

There was a new machine at security in the airport, an Ionscan Sentinel II. It looks like a typical airport metal detector but it uses an new technology called Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS). This performs a chemical analysis and identifies a "fingerprint" of a target substance, such as explosives or narcotics.

You step in the machine for a few seconds, and it blows small plufs of air to you, Then the gate at the other side opens and you can leave. Someone in front of me got surprised by the pluffs of air and the screener guy laughed at her.

The moving side walk to the Starbucks terminal seems to have been fixed, but apparently they don't switch them on very early in the morning. I was glad to see that Starbucks was open already.

The plane was not as full as the afternoon flights that I usually take when I leave. I worked on the plane, and had some time to refresh my Spanish lessons. I arrived at 11:00 o'clock in JFK and took a bus to Manhattan. Originally I thought to leave the bus at Penn Station, but when I had to transfer at the Grand Central Terminal I realized that our hotel was very close and I walked to there.

Tonight there was a party in the Holiday Inn because it has been open for almost a year. I never really realized that the hotel was so new (although it certainly looks good) but it was a nice occassion for some entertainment.

On the invition it said "techno party". I wasn't sure what to expect but "techno" turned out to mean "related to technology" and it was just a buffet with drinks afterwards. The music after the speeches was actually DJ Tiesto. Of the 350 nights that the hotel exists I have been a guest around 50 nights.

Today was my last day in Puerto Rico, I'm leaving tomorrow morning early... a 7:40 flight to New York. Really excited about that, Sasha and I will meet each other there in the afternoon, and in the evening we'll go to U2!

This afternoon we went for lunch in San Patricio plaza, a shopping mall nearby.

Puerto Rican food tends to be a bit heavy and to compensate I had a salad for lunch. It came with a really nice soup, creme de calabaza.

Work goes well, UAT testing started and we're making good progress. It's nice to see everybody here again.

On the street in front of Court House Plaza a couple of new pedestrian stopping lights was installed.

The other day I was crossing the street, and wondering: "hey, have I been ignoring that light for the last year?!"

Tomorrow morning I have the 7 am flight to Puerto Rico -- setting the alarm for really early. I just called Blue Top to reserve a cab, these guys are amazingly efficient in how they deal with phone calls, in about 15 seconds you can reserve a cab:

"Blue Top -- phone number?"
"What time do you want it?"
"Where are you going?"
"All right, you're all set."

Friday we finished the integration testing of one my projects. There's some complex interaction with a back-end system, and I'm glad to see that everything works. This weekend the code will be deployed to the user acceptance test servers, and Monday morning the UAT team will start testing.

I'm flying down tomorrow with a colleague. It's been a while since I was in Puerto Rico; I'll stay for a week.

We're having an easy weekend. As always, there is some work to be done from home, but it's not as busy as it has been the last few weeks.

Wow... it has been pretty crazy these days at work. We are completing the IT testing phase of my project, and that means we've been working in 'crunch' mode the last weeks.

However, the end is coming closer and the good thing is that the code looks pretty good. It will be quite busy tomorrow and Friday, but most IRs have been fixed and we're now basically cleaning up some of the smaller stuff.

Anyway -- it took quite some time and energy so I took less time to update the website. Should slowly improve next week.

By then I will be in Puerto Rico, I'm travelling Monday morning, to assist the customer with the start of their UAT testing.

Tibor and Janneke are moving to Italy for a year. This Thursday they are leaving their house in IJburg and moving to Palazzo del Maggiore, in northern Italy.

They'll be working in a hotel there, owned by Tibor's father and enjoy the good life in Italy... an excellent plan. Tibor and Janneke created a website about their plan.

Tibor being Tibor, he also has great plans to connect the (mountain) village to the world wide web using an ambitious wire-less uplink to the coast, where a multi-line DSL connection will connect a number of villages with internet.

We wish you an enjoyable adventure and a great time!

Today I brought some drop to my work.

"Drop" is Dutch for liquorice, and it's quite popular in the Netherlands, with many different flavors.

The reaction of my colleagues was mixed. Most of them were very polite, and there were three people who actually enjoyed it (I was one of them).

Today we spent the afternoon in Alexandria where there was an art market in the main street. There were many different artists and styles. We had a good time looking at the different paitings and sculptures, but found nothing for our house.

When the market was closing, we had a few beers on the main street. The waiter said: "oh yeah, we might have some Belgium beer: Heineken is Belgium, right?" It was a special day today, as we celebrated our 7th aniversary together, and we went for dinner in a really nice French restaurant. The food was delicious and we spend a lot of time there. It was an outside restaurant, we were sitting in a garden.

When we took the metro back, the orange line had a huge delay and according to the sign we would have to wait 20 minutes at the Rosslyn station, so we walked home.