Well, the summer seems to have ended in the Netherlands. After a few days that were just grey and rainy, today arrived with a big thunderstorm and a fair amount of rain. Oh well, it has been quite a nice summer.

It's just wonderful to be together. Although we are both working a lot life is good. Sasha is writing her thesis, I am finishing the project here at Chess.

Friday morning Sasha arrived at Schiphol. It was great! We went out Friday evening to a Greek restaurant. Just then was the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, which was celebrated there with a big Greek flag, drinks and a large TV screen.

Funny to see that when Prince Willem-Alexander was on TV everybody was waving; when Balkenende was shown on TV the restaurant starting laughing.

We had a good weekend. Sasha is working on her graduation thesis. Yesterday Jaap celebrated his birthday in Middenmeer; thanks Christianne and Peter for the ride home.

Sasha's plane is landing in 45 minutes, so I'm going to Schiphol now!

The plane has some delay so I slept a wonderful extra hour after waking up and checking the arrival time.

Today Jaap has a birthday.

Congratulations from both of us!

Today I received a present from Tibor and Janneke.

I have been using the operating system OpenBSD for my webserver for a couple of years now, and I became a fan of this very secure and stable OS.

Their present was therefore nice: an OpenBSD T-shirt. Thanks guys!

	Tibor with the present.
	The backprint of the t-shirt: OpenBSD.
	Wearing the new t-shirt.

Found an interesting test to see if you can recognize fraudulous e-mails from real ones, the
Phishing IQ Test.

I had a 90% score; some were hard to recognize.

The weather today was great -- sunny, warm, but not as humid as last week. In the morning there were three artists in front of our house painting windmill De Adriaan.

In the afternoon I visited my grandmother, Oma Bosman, and we had dinner together; a very pleasant Sunday.

Yesterday afternoon I went to see the Gay Parade in Amsterdam. The Gay Parade is a boat parade on the canals in Amsterdam, organized every year by the gay community.

I had never seen the Parade before, except on TV. It was beautiful! There were a lot of spectacular boats, with various acts and performances. The weather was wonderful: very sunny and warm, and the city was crowded. The audience was very divers; gay, straight, young and old. I went with Jelly and her friends, and we had a great time.

See some pictures here.

Yesterday I went out with a group of colleague's. The weather was great so we started in the late afternoon at the outside café 'Paris'. It's a long-standing tradition of Chess to celebrate the weekend there every Friday.

At the Grote Markt was the annual "Haarlem Culinair" festival; but as we were with a large group and it was very busy it was unpractical to find a place for dinner there. Instead we went to Jills, where we had a fun dinner. The food was good; I enjoyed the chicken salad very much.

We went for drinks and dancing in Van Stoffelen; that was great fun, as always. They played "Dragostea Din Tei"; one of my favourite songs at the moment.