Next week my project will move to another floor in our building. There have been some small organizational changes that are accompanied with a re-shuffle of most projects in the Chess buildings.

Because I have been located on this desk since I started working full-time here, I thought it's nice to take some pictures.

The Chess building, seen from the backside. My office is on the top-floor, on the left-hand side on this image.

The desks of our project.

Erik, my colleague on this project.

My desk. Here I'm working on on some Java code. The red bar on the screen indicates a failed unit-test: this part of the software isn't ready yet. Notice the webcam.

Tonight we had a meeting of my work, a so-called 'tuning'. There are three branches of our company, in three cities in the Netherlands that are far from each other. Therefore this kind of of meetings is always in the center of the country. The philosophy is that if people from all the three cities have to drive far, nobody can complain. Today it was in Zeist.

It was quite interesting, and good to see collegue's from the branches in Eindhoven and Groningen. Serge gave me a ride to Zeist; Sandra brought me back home in the evening (thanks, both of you).

My parents were here tonight and we had dinner together. It was very pleasant; we hadn't seen each other for a couple of weeks. They have a holiday now, the spring-holiday.

I heard a wonderful new song on the radio: "Vondeling van Ameland" by Boudewijn de Groot, perhaps the greatest Dutch singer ever.

Tonight was my first lesson of the German course and it was a lot of fun.

We were a group of ten people, and one teacher. She is a native German speaker. I was a little bit scared to go, because I had missed the first lesson and I wasn't sure what to expect. However, it was a very nice evening -- it's really fun to go 'back to school'.

The lesson started at 18:30 o'clock. Tonight's theme was der Urlaub. We talked a lot of German with each other and the teacher. The grammar tonight was about Wechselprëpositionen, prepositions that can be followed by either der Dativ or der Akkusativ. We were done around 21:00 o'clock.

It has been a while since I've spent the whole weekend in Haarlem. Last week I was in New York, the weeks before that Leeuwarden, Frankfurt, Broekhuizen, Center Parcs... quite some traveling!

This weekend there is time to do some of the small things that I wanted to do for a while. I spent the afternoon in the city, buying smaller stuff like new soil for the plants in the house.

I also bought three books! One for my work: Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen, an expert in website usability and design. I hope that I can apply some of the knowledge to my new website design. I bought the book second-hand, which I'm quite satisfied with. It's the original (English) edition, and it was € 25,00. Later I saw the Dutch translation in a bookshop for over € 55,00.

The two other books that I bought are related to the German language course that starts Monday. The first is a book to train German vocabulary that I've used in high school, "Duits examenidioom voor 4, 5, 6 vwo". The second German book is a novel: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, one of the German writers I liked the best.

When I came home the computers were off (including this website's server), there must have been a short power outage.

It has been cold the last week here in Haarlem, even snowing.

Still, it was a surprise to see that river Spaarne was frozen this morning.

New York City: the Promenade at Battery Park, February 23 2004.

Haarlem: the windmill Adriaan and river Spaarne, February 28 2004.

Tonight I went to Juma, to prepare the making up of the annual account and balance sheet of the shop's inventory. Years ago I wrote the software that is running on the cash register machines.

I think it's fair to say that this is the software that I'm most proud of, of all the software that I have ever made.

I had dinner in the shop with everybody, which was very cosy. I also had a haircut at the hairdressers next door.

The plane landed at 8:30 o'clock, and I had the bus only 45 minutes later. Traveling without checked in luggage is really speedy.

Yesterday Sasha and I said goodbye at Madison Square, in the heart of New York, where she took a bus to Washington and I took a train to the airport. Obviously it wasn't pleasant to have to say goodbye again. However, I am very happy I went there this weekend: we had a lot of fun and it was great to be together on Sasha's birthday.

The plane was full; so this time I couldn't stretch out on multiple chairs. That was fine though -- I got one of these travel-pillows at the airport, and that was really useful. I think I slept around five hours.

Originally I planned to stay home today, to get some rest, but I feel pretty good now and after I take a shower I'll go to my work. It saves a day off, after all.

Sunday we went to New York all day. We did some shopping, I bought a jacket and new shoes. We walked around Times Square and Madison Garden. In the evening we went out the two of us.

The weather Monday was really very good; it was almost like spring. We had coffee at the Promenade at Battery Park, looking out to the Statue of Liberty. We were taking our luggage with us.

We also saw Ground Zero, and the reconstruction that was going on there. It was the first time since September 11th that I was in New York. The very first thing I did when I was the first in New York in 1998, was going to the World Trade Center to the observation deck. It is really sad.

Sasha's bus to Washington was at 16:30 o'clock, my train to the airport (Newark) as well.

We went to see Hairspray, a Broadway musical, to celebrate Sasha's birthday. Hairspray is a new musical; it started in 2002 and it has had very good reviews.

It was a extremely entertaining and funny show, with a lot of spectacular dancing and costumes. I absolute loved Edna Turnblad, one of the two main characters. Ms. Turnblad is a house-wife turning into a TV star during the musical. Her role is played by a male actor, Harvey Fierstein, who received a Tony Award for his performance. The climax was the duet of Wilbur and Edna Turnblad: absolutely hilarious.

We had a really good time watching this show together. The audience was very enthusiastic too -- a lot of laughing and clapping.