Yesterday I went to Steven to celebrate his birthday. It was a very nice evening, and the cake he baked was excellent. Later at night he showed me the Yahoo chat program, which was really fun -- there was also a Bulgarian chat room.

This morning I installed a new version of my (desktop) operating system, that's always fun. Everything still seems to work, and the computer didn't get a lot slower.

A week ago I placed an article about a game with a penguin. It was a great success: many visitors had a lot of fun trying to hit the poor bird as hard as possible.

The article is truly a record for this website. It has been read more than 1700 times already, and attracted a huge number of visitors (through Google and Altavista). And so many comments! Today I've decided to "close" comments for that article for anonymous users.

If you would like to see some information about the visitors that were attracted by this game you can see a NedStat counter I've put online for a few days.

Next weekend I'll be going to Frankfurt, to Milena's birthday. Today I (finally) bought a train-ticket. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and I love the fact that I can go by train.

I did some more useful things today: I took some pictures and applied for a new passport.

In the evening I was chatting with Daniël, who now has a webcam in Hungary, which is really great. Daniël forwarded me an e-mail. Sometimes you have to laugh about something, even though in reality it's sad.

It has been raining and snowing today.

Just when I came back from Jelly, where I had dinner, the snow came back and I made some pictures.

When I came back in Haarlem Janneke and Fiona were at Chess -- the first time I saw Fiona in real-life. I saw her before, on a webcam, but that's not the same.

There was beschuit met muisjes. It's a Dutch tradition to serve aniseed sprinkles on a buttered rusk when a child is born. Blue aniseed sprinkles for a boy and pink aniseed sprinkles for a girl.

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.