The Haarlems Dagblad has a picture of the tree that fell yesterday.

You can see the prison in the background; compare it with a picture from the view from our livingroom window.

Picture: United Photos de Boer / Marco de Swart

Wow... the wind is really strong now.

A tree just fell on the road, blocking it for traffic. A public transport bus is parked against it, it looks a bit damaged in front but luckily enough the tree didn't fall on top of the bus itself and nobody seems to be hurt.

It happened right in front of the Hofje Van Noblet, very near the policestation. Here's a satellite picture of the Hooimarkt; the arrow is pointing to the tree that fell.

Ten minutes after it fell the police and firebrigade arrived, five minutes after that photographer came. He parked in front of our house and he didn't pay for his parking. Normally that is a very bad idea in our street, as there is very often police checking. Let's see how it will work out for him in this weather.

It's been a while since we had such an easy Sunday. Late breakfast, coffee... and now catching up with some magazines and books to read.

The wind is really strong here; happy we don't have to go outside.

As you can see on the Haarlem webcam the Grote Market is completely empty.

On the Spaarne the waves have white heads, just like the sea.

Quite an interesting matter. On Schiphol.nl it says that Ettie's plane is due to arrive at 2:10 (so not 4.00 o'clock). However, this night at 3:00 o'clock the clock will put turned back one hour. So if it says 2:10 does that mean 2:10 summertime or 3:10 summertime?

My parents are guessing the first -- so they're leaving now.

Oma Bosman has a birthday today and we went to see her. My parents will pick up Ettie from the airport tonight, but she just called that her plane has a 2 hours delay.

So that means that we have to fill the time till 04.00 o'clock. Guess what we'll play... Steden & Ridders of course.

A TV-program was made in De Oude Beurs in Middenmeer last week. A couple of kids were kissing each other on stage in front of the camera. Big scandal, local government upset.

There was an item on the local TV-news about it, featuring my old school.

Found a nice article in the AD:

"Het stelletje tongzoent, de bezoekers in de zaal juichen, televisiecamera's registreren. Dát bracht een schok teweeg het vorige weekend in het 2800 inwoners tellende vlekje in de Kop van Noord-Holland."

(The couple is kissing, the audience screaming and the cameras recording. Now thát was a shock last weekend for the middle-of-nowhere village in northern Noord-Holland).

I found this interesting article on Slashdot today. Three mathematicians at MIT proved that Tetris is NP-complete to solve. That is: if you know in advance the exact order the pieces will fall, it is NP-complete (ie: there is no smart algorithm for it) to maximize your score. The original article is here, it's quite readable for non-mathematicians too.

In the past similar results have been established for other games (for example Minesweeper). Pacman however, has 1 perfect solution (to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 will give you a total of 3,333,360 points).

I'm happy I'm at Chess again, and that I can start with my internship.

I have 50 e-mails in my inbox and there are many people I want to talk to today so it'll be a busy day. The coffee is as nice as always.

Just came back from Utrecht. I saw four lectures of different companies all working with embedded technology, and on the open questions they still face. The one I liked the most was about automatic vehicles, steered electronically.

The afternoon sessions were more commercially oriented, not so interesting for me personally now. I took the proceedings from this year and 2001; there were some articles worth reading.

Today I'll be at Progress 2002 in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht. It's a day on embedded systems; there'll be a number of lectures and workshops.

Although their website is pretty bad the agenda looks very promising with interesting subjects. Some of them are about Formal Methods, the subject I just did an exam on yesterday. My teacher will also give a lecture.