I'm going to Leiden again. This time I'll leave a bit later, but early enough to enjoy the great coffee-place just around the corner of the place I'm working today.

It wasn't busy in the train at all yesterday; it's just that I almost missed my train because it left from platform 4. Somehow this is really awkwardly positioned in Haarlem’s trainstation: much further than platform 1, 2, 3 and 5 and higher.

A nice letter to the Editor in The Economist this week:

"Sir -- you gave both candidates in the 1998 American presidential election -George Bush senior and Michael Dukakis- the collective name "Mr Bushakis". Your cover of January 3rd inspires me to suggest a name for the younger George Bush and Howard Dean, the potential cadidates in the forthcoming election: Mr Bean."

For my work I'm going to Leiden today, which is about 20 minutes from Haarlem. I guess it will be busy in the train around this time.

Jean-Paul put some of his pictures of Center Parcs online. I especially like the ones where we're playing Koehandel.

This weekend I went with a group of friends to Center Parcs, where we stayed in a small holiday villa. We were twelve people, and we had a really wonderful time.

It was relaxing, and I had a lot of fun. It was terrific to have so much time to talk to everybody. We've played many boardgames; I especially enjoyed "Koehandel" a lot.

Jean-Paul and André had organized everything very well: thanks!

I've placed some pictures of Center Parcs online. If you'd like a bigger version of some pictures: let me know. There are also two short movies, one of Daniël explaining a game and a short fragment of Saturday's dinner.

This weekend we'll be in Center Parcs, a holiday parc where I and a number of friends go every year.

It's in Zandvoort, a sea-side village close to Haarlem.

A nice game for the Friday afternoon: Smack the Pingu.

My highest score so far is 492.2; rumor has it that higher scores are possible.

This game is not recommended for penguin-fans.

We are now officially P3P compliant:

> Thank you for making your site P3P-compatible.
> I added your site to the list.

Daniël and I agreed last night that it's really inconvenient that the shops in the Netherlands close so early. In the States, Hungary, Bulgaria... everywhere the shops are open till after 18:00 o'clock, so people who work during the week are also able to go shopping.

Alas... not in Holland. The only exception is Thursday evening (in Haarlem) when many shops stay open till 21:00 o'clock. So it's always more lively in the city and I like Thursday evenings. Tonight I had to do the things I didn't have time for during the week. Somehow there's a lot of paperwork to arrange this week and I went to the municipality to get some official paper. That went pretty quick; the people at the civil service there are very friendly.

On of the things I have to arrange is my own fault. When I came back from Washington in October I forgot to turn in my "I94-W" form, a small sheet that had been stapled in my passport when I entered the States. Now I have to send it to an office in the States, along with proofs that I did return to the Netherlands. So I'll send my boarding pass from the return flight, a copy of my passport with the stamps that prove I was in Bulgaria, and some papers of my work.

I have been working for a long time on a project for Vialis. Vialis produces and sells parking machines in the Netherlands, and Chess has been developing a new type of parking machine with them (smarter, quicker, more payment methods).

About a week ago five parking machines of their new type have been placed in Nijmegen, and are currently being used.

Personally I've been involved in the back-end part of the system: the computer that registers and detects what's going on with the parking machines.

There has been quite some publicity about the new system; today we saw that there was an article in the Intermediar, a Dutch technology magazine.

For my work I came across a new Internet standard: the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P. This allows a website to inform its customers of its privacy policy: how does the website deal with the personal data of its users.

An important aspect of the standard is that the format is both human- and machine-readable. Internet Explorer 6.0 knows how to read this information for example (see the screenshot below). You can tell Internet Explorer what your preferences are, for example that you never want to give your e-mail address to sites that sell e-mail addresses to third parties. Your browser will then warn you if you enter such a website.

I've created a policy for Guus Bosman.nl, to see how it works. My privacy policy is pretty simple: I don't sell, share or give away information on my visitors to other people. However, the website uses "cookies", to keep track of logged in users and to remember your username. <

All this you can read in my Privacy Statement.