Every Dutch person knows that today Sinterklaas arrived in Zaltbommel. As always, in the end everything turned out to be fine (although they almost ended up back in Spain).

There's a nice agreement between St. Maarten, St. Nicolaas and Santa Claus.

If you would like to help Sinterklaas there is a weekend course for it that gets you officially certified.

A friend of Sasha told us about a cheaper way of calling Bulgaria. It's called Teledump. The rate to Bulgaria is 5 ct per minute, including tax.

Calling using KPN is at least 32 ct per minute, using 1658 it's also at least 32 ct per minute so it's a big difference.

The quality of the connection wasn't extremely well, but then again: 5 cts.... When we call my parents we pay 3,7 cts per minute.

It went a lot quicker than I thought it would: the new processor and motherboard are in the server now, and everything works fine.

The website will be quicker from now on. On the bottom of this page (in a very small font) you can read the page-generation time. For the frontpage it changed from 1,5 seconds to about 0,5 second.

From now on the main bottle-neck will be the bandwidth of the ADSL connection and not so much the server. Anyway, I consider it a big improvement. Thank you Edo!

Two weeks ago Edo gave me some new hardware (Thanks again). The extra memory is in the server already, but now I'll try to use the processor he gave me.

That means that Guus Bosman.nl will be offline for a few hours, starting in a few minutes.

Guus Bosman.nl is expanding its audience to outer space. The name Guus Bosman.nl is on a DVD that will be in NASA's Mars Exploration Rover. I have an official certificate to prove it!

"Together, we will journey into space to discover and understand the many wonders of our universe."

Let's hope it works. The previous campaign was a big succes. However, the Mars Polar Lander and its CD-ROM mysteriously disappeared when it was preparing to land on Mars in 2000.

I've almost completed the project plan for my internship. You can read a draft version here (PDF).

My schedule is to be ready March 8th, 2003.

The last few days my internship has been getting started. I'm working on the final version of my assignment and project plan, Friday I'll sent it to the Examencommissie.


My internship supervisor is dr. ing. Ralf Lämmel, an Assistant Professor here at the VU. My external supervisors are Bert Bos and Petra Eu ssen of Chess-iT.

The internship is about development methods that combine the design of hardware and software.

We played a new game with Marjolein, Daniël and Jerry yet again. It's called Puerto Rico and it's really nice. Not only because I won of course.

Daniël showed us Boonanza and we played it once. It's a nice game and seems to be suitable for more than 3 players very well too. Another update for the Games List.