Ettie and Gerben stayed over tonight, and in the morning my parents came to visit us.

We had coffee together, and then we went to see the Haarlem Organ Show. This is a fair organ show, at the Staten- and Prinsenbolwerken near the train station in Haarlem.

It was nice to spent the morning (and yesterday evening) with family; it was a pleasant day.

In the afternoon and evening I studied a bit.

Ettie and Gerben came for dinner yesterday. The asperge-season just started, so we enjoyed the 'green gold'. After dinner we went to the movies. We went to Cinema Palace, a movie theater I haven't been before. It was really nice, much better than Brinkmann: clean, cosy and a great theater.

We saw Troy, a heroic epic about the Trojan war. Of course, the plot is well known from the Iliad, but the movie was still very dramatic and great to watch. I'd certainly recommended it, especially if you liked Gladiator.

The movie took about three hours and we were home around midnight.

Martijn celebrated his 30th birthday yesterday.

His party was in Florin Utrecht, a pub in the center of the city. Jelly and I travelled together to Utrecht by train. There was a really nice mixture of old friends and new people at the party; it was really nice to talk to so many people.

Later that evening we went to "Stairway To Heaven", a hardrock café which was founded by Henk Westbroek, a Dutch politician/singer/bar owner. This place was for dancing, which we did of course. It was a great evening.

Marjolijn and André gave me a ride to Haarlem (thanks a lot!) and I was home at 2:30 o'clock.

The application we have been working on the last three weeks is almost ready. It has to be finished Tuesday, which won't be a problem.

In the evening I went out for a drink with Joris. It was great fun; the weather was excellent and we sat in an outdoor cafe all evening. I was home around 2:30 o'clock.

The project is getting ready. Yesterday night I ran a so-called "stress-test" on the application. I flooded it with fake-consumers all through the night, to see if the application would stay up & alive, and it did. It's a nice idea that it can survive so many visitors.

A side effect was that in the morning my mailbox had almost 20.000 e-mails, all generated by the application.

Yesterday's lesson was a fun evening. We revised our knowledge on the past tenses in German, das Präteritum and das Perfekt.

At work it's getting busy now. I'm discussing last minutes changes to external interfaces, keeping the developers busy, talking a lot with the firm that delivers the HTML layout, making sure the server is ready and configured, requesting SSL certificates... hardly any programming this time. It's great fun though -- I enjoy work like this.

It's an easy weekend. It started nicely yesterday evening when Mieke, my mother, came for dinner. It was very cosy.

My father is coming back from his business trip to Bulgaria tomorrow morning; I hope he won't have problems because of the train accident yesterday.

I've been studying for my Java exam all day today, which I enjoy quite a lot.

I am preparing for a Java exam I want to do. The certificate is called "Sun Certified Architect for J2EE", and it's my goal to get it in the next two months.

The exam consists of three parts. The first part, which I'm studying now, is a theoretical exam. It is not very difficult, because it deals with things I often work with. It is interesting to read all the theory again, and also to learn the vocabulary by hard. This makes communicating ideas with others much easier. Today I've been studying all day on it, and tomorrow I'll continue.

I hope to do the test for part one in the beginning of June, after the deadline of my current project.

Tonight I was looking up something on the website of my university, and I noticed it was extremely slow. I didn't pay a lot of attention to it; I thought there was perhaps a problem with their internet connection.

But the real cause is very likely this article on Slashdot that I accidentily came across a few minutes later. The article about an ex-professor of mine, Mr. Tanenbaum, is making so many people go to the VU website that the webservers there are having a hard time staying 'alive'.

This is called the Slashdot effect: a link on the frontpage of that hugely popular website would cause Guus Bosman.nl to immediately go up in smoke and it would definitely upset my ISP.

Today is Ascension Day, which is a national holiday in the Netherlands. Chess is closed today, and many colleague's are taking tomorrow of as well.

For me it was a working day today. Since a week I've been working on a new, short project that has to be ready somewhere next week. I didn't mind working today at all -- the project is very cool and it's really fun to make sure that the project will be ready on time.

It's my job to make sure that whole project take makes sense from a technological point of view, which is a nice responsibility. The website we are creating has to be secure, and we are integrating the website with around 10 external parties, which is really nice.