Douwe Egberts coffee at Burger King, the third-largest hamburger chain in the United States.

Douwe Egberts is an old Dutch brand of coffee producers, that was bought by Sara Lee a couple of years ago.

Last April we visited the Douwe Egberts museum with my grandmother.

It hasn't been snowing anymore the last few days, and today will actually be a sunny day.

The snowman that was all of a sudden there, in front of our apartment building last Sunday is disappearing.

Sunday evening we visited Bella, who was hosting a Bulgarian dinner party.

Bella lives in an apartment near Pentagon City, about 15 minutes by car from our place.

It was nice to meet Bella's friends and it was a very cosy evening. The food was great: there was banichka, two (excellent) types of surmi and shopska salad with real Bulgarian imported feta cheese. Saturday evening we prepared our first mlechna in the U.S. and everybody liked it. There were home-made brownies for desert.

After dinner we stayed for real Bulgarian tea. We really enjoyed closing the weekend like this.

Yesterday evening we went to do some shopping, and when we opened the door we were surprised by snow.

It's a very gentle snow -- not so strong as a last week but it covered the world in a nice white layer.

It's been a very productive weekend for both of us. Yesterday I arranged a lot things that I wanted to do for quite some time, such as getting my photo ID, getting a haircut and wrapping up some paperwork. I've also set up a new backup system for my website. All the same it's a very relaxing weekend; a great combination.

This afternoon I went to the office to arrange some things for about two hours. When I left I took some pictures of the "snow world" around our apartment building (see below).

A snowman right in front of the entrance of our apartment building.

The street in front of our apartment building, Courthouse Plaza.

The entrance of our apartment building.

Yesterday I went to get a Virginia photo ID. A photo ID is a state-issued pass, the size of a credit card, that contains your picture and personal data.

Even though it's not mandatory to carry an ID, unlike in Holland, it is still very useful to have a form of ID with you.
There are quite some times that you have to show your ID, such as when buying alcohol. Until now I was always carrying my passport, because that's the only official type of identification I have. But carrying a passport is a bit scary -- if I'd loose it, there would be a lot of paperwork to replace the passport and my US visa.

Most Americans use their driving license for identification in daily life. Since I don't drive a car, I got this "Photo ID". Just like a driving license, it's issued by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, that deals with driving and car registrations.

The only office of DMV around here that's open on Saturday afternoon is at Springfield mall. The good thing is that it's reachable by metro -- many of the other offices are hard to reach by public transport. Yesterday I took the blue line all the way down to the last station, Franconio/Springfield. From the metro it was a 15 minute walk to the mall.

The mall was large, and it's easy to get lost in these huge shopping buildings. I asked the way at an information stand, and the lady told me where to go. There was a long line in front of DMV, Saturday afternoon is rush hour for them it seems. Once inside I received my card pretty quickly. They took my picture and captured my signature digitally (no fingerprints here) and the whole things was done it 15 minutes. I didn't know my length in the US measuring system, so the lady at the counter guessed and we filled in 6 feet 4. Later when I was home that turned out to be a fairly accurate guess, my real length is 6 feet 3.

Recently I discovered that my university computer account no longer works. I graduated a long time ago, but my e-mail account has never been disabled. I didn't really use it anymore, but I regularly read the newsgroups and university news online. Last week I tried to login, and received "Access denied", and my old homepage has also been deleted.

I guess the Vrije Universiteit and I are now completely separated.

The only thing I was still using a VU server for was to create a daily backup of my website. Now I'll have to (quickly) find an alternative for that; I'm now back to my old habit of manually downloading backups on my own desktop. I must say having the script-based automatic backups to the VU felt a lot more secure.

My father started a photo project a few weeks ago, and since then he placed a new picture every day.

Many of the pictures are pictures about Middenmeer and other places I know, which makes it even more nice to see the daily addition to the site.

Visit Jaap's photo project, and for the Dutch visitors: be sure to also read the accompanying blog.

Today I spent all day making sure that our applications were deployed correctly on the test servers.

The systems that they were being installed on worked fine with the old version of the software (we did a very nice baseline check a few days ago). However, the new version has a lot changes that were also reflected in the configuration, so it took quite some time. But we made it. At the end of the day all the applications that I wanted deployed for today were deployed, and the last two will be ready by tomorrow. In the mean time the testing team started testing already, and they found the first bugs.

It's a nice thought that we're going to the testing phase of the project. When I started on the project there was uncertainty (at least for me) on what we should, and should not implement. Figuring out the scope of the work has taken a fair share of my work so far. Being able to go to testing means that an important first phase has been completed. Now up the next step: we're ready for bug fixing.

On the road from Court House to Rosslyn, Clarendon Boulevard, there is an old bar. The place is run down and seems to be no longer in use.

The commercials and outside decorations are still there, and an eye catcher is a car that's standing with its front in the air.
The car a curious sight, and it's a strange idea to see a closed nightclub: people had a lot of fun there, and now everything's gone.

However, when I looked on internet for "Dr. Dremo's", the name of the place, I found out that the bar is not closed at all. Only the patio is undergoing "winterizing". The day after I read this, I went to look at the bar and indeed, what I had seen so far was only the backside: in front there was another part that was fully lighted and in full use.

It said in the Washington Post that they have an extensive beer collection with a lot of beers on tap. So, it might actually be a nice place to visit once, but probably only in the summer, when it won't look so terribly desolated anymore.

The last picture was taken on a very snowy day last week, the other two a few days earlier.

The piece of software that we've been working on is ready for testing.

The testing team is almost ready for it, and the software is good-to-go, so now I'm making sure that our software gets installed correctly on the right places. I'm also verifying that we have all the down-to-earth things in place, such as a bugtracker repository, and a testing and deployment schedule.

I really enjoy the work I'm doing: it's interesting, fun and I am learning a lot. The walk home from work is a nice way to leave the hectic work behind and arrive home with a 'fresh mind'. Cooking is also perfect way to relax and slow down; tonight I made couscous which turned out to be quite nice.

I went to the bank the other day to ask about my PIN code. The lady told me to wait for a letter with a new, different PIN code, instead of trying to use my old one. I am pretty sure that's not what they told me initially, and I haven't seen a letter yet. I'll wait another day or so and then check with them again. In the mean time I'm still paying with cash everywhere (my current card only works in the bank's ATM, not at merchant's registers).