We celebrated Jaap's birthday outside. The weather was marvelous so we sat in the garden all day. A very nice weekend.

We arrived in Middenmeer around 18:30. My parents and Len where playing a game (guess which one). Jaap won which is nice because it will be his birthday soon.

We had a wonderful barbecue, with lots of different things to eat. Very nice. Now Jaap, Mieke, Len and Sasha are playing Steden & Ridders downstairs. Unfortunately we don't have the extension set here, so there can only be 4 players per game. Good suggestion for Mieke's birthday I'd say.

The hard core Steden & Ridders players. Len has been "infected" with the Kolonisten virus by my parents.

It's been more than two months since the last time I've played this game.

It's a warm day again but not as hot as the last days. Here at Chess it's nice: the new aircondition was installed right on time for this heatwave.

These days I'm working on something new. A company asked us to make a proposal for a new project they have. I'm estimating the costs that will be involved in it and writing a document that describes our proposed solution.

It's quite interesting to see this part of the job: it not only involves technological decisions but also commercial ones. Part of the job is to describe various options in our solution: a basic variant will costs you X, and possible extensions are A, B or C, each with different prices.

This evening we went swimming. The Boerhavebad, a swimming pool in Haarlem, is open till 21:45 which is really convenient.

The weather was excellent today, and when we came back from the swimming pool it was still very warm outside. We had a drink at the Grote Markt, a lot of people shared that idea. Just when we got back home it started raining, for a short time but with really big drops. Happy to be inside.

We spent this weekend in Antwerp, Belgium.

Friday afternoon I left Chess at lunchtime, and we took the train to the south. It was a very quick connection: at 15:30 o'clock we had checked in already. We stayed in a small hotel, Hotel Eden (click on 'Virtual Visit' for some nice surround pictures), located in the Diamond District. I've been in Antwerp twice before, but it was long ago so I didn't remember the city well. Once I was there with Joost, to visit the Vogeltjes markt. This Sunday we saw it again, quite interesting all these little birds and animals for sale.

The weather was marvellous! It was very sunny all weekend but never too hot. It's great that it stays nice outside till late -- at midnight it was still very busy in the city.

We had very enjoyable hours at the terrasses in the center. There is a surprising amount of squares. We thought we had found the Grote Markt, so we sat for a beer. When we left we saw another square, and said: "oh, that must be it!". A few minutes later we reached a third square, even bigger, and saw the street sign "Grote Markt".

Every restaurant had mussels on the menu; there was even an ice-cream place where they had them. Saw the big cathedral inside, as well as a diamond museum. It said that 85% of all global rough diamond trade goes through Antwerp, and diamonds account for 6% of Belgium exports... a huge industry. A funny place was the Frietkot museum.

One evening we had dinner at the only restaurant at the river Scheldt, het Zuider Terras.

This morning my laptop didn't start up anymore. I had some problems with the harddisk the last weeks, and now it just gave up. I had backups of everything, but I had to re-install a few programs.

Went to a customer this morning, to talk about a potential project. Interesting.

A few weeks ago there was an article in the NRC (a Dutch newspaper) about Chess. It was nice to see a picture of the floor I'm working, but it wasn't exactly the frontpage.

Now we've made it: the front-page of a national newspaper. It's de Telegraaf this time. The project described is Yeahronimo.com, a project Chess has been working on. It allows (legal) downloading of music and online TV broadcasting. Chess wasn't mentioned in the article in the Telegraaf, but a few weeks ago there was a press release by Chess about it.

The website they're talking about is Yeahronimo.com.

Sasha arrived this morning, we just came back from the airport by bus.

She was in the States for two weeks, I'm very happy she's back.

I installed a new harddisk this morning. The server now has 40.85 GB harddisk space, instead of 0.85 GB.