Today at 11.30 am I landed at Amsterdam Schiphol airport. The flights from Raleigh to Gatwick and from there to Amsterdam went smoothly, although I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted.

My parents picked my up at the airport, it was very nice to see them again. At home we prepared some last minute things for the wedding tomorrow. Jaap and I went to do some shopping in Middenmeer, it's always nice to walk through town and see so many familiar faces.

It's 6.30 pm now in the Netherlands, and I'm about ready to go to sleep.

The American Airlines plane, parked at the gate in London Gatwick.

'Glorious Britain.'

The flight from Amsterdam was a code-share with British Airways so instead of closing the overhead bins we were asked to close the lockers.

I'm on my way to Holland to attend Ettie's wedding!

Tonight at 6.45 pm is my flight from RDU to London Gatwick. For the first time in a long time I'm traveling without a laptop. I'll arrive in Amsterdam Thursday late morning local time.

Today I visited the Raven Rock state park, about an hour south of Raleigh.

It's not very warm anymore but it was a pleasant day for a walk. I did a 5 miles trail, through fall colored woods.

Entrance of the Raven Rock park.

Just when I started on the trail I saw this bird trainer with his bird.

Showing the bird to a family in Sunday dress.

The bird.

A creek through the park.

The trail.

Fall leaves.

Where am I going?!

Falls in the river. I took this picture with a shutter speed of 1/30 seconds to smooth out the water. I used a water bottle as a made-up tripod.

The result of an experiment in taking pictures of a dark subject. I took the picture around 5.30 pm; it was getting dark.

This year I transitioned my hand made address book to CiviCRM, an open source CRM system.

Today I added a block with upcoming birthdays (only visible for registered users), based on examples I found on the Code Snippets page of CiviCRM. I contributed my code back to their Wiki.

This birthday block is based on CiviCRM 1.8.

Update August 2009: See this page for a version of the block that works with CiviCRM 2.x.

// Check if CiviCRM is installed here.
if (!module_exists('civicrm')) return false;

// Initialization call is required to use CiviCRM APIs.
civicrm_initialize(true);

$select = "SELECT contact_id, birth_date, CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < 
RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth_date,6)) AS bday, 
concat(concat(month(birth_date), '/'), day(birth_date)) as displaydate,  
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE)) AS toBday FROM civicrm_individual  WHERE 
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE) < 7) ORDER BY bday, RIGHT(birth_date,5);";

$query  = $select;
$params = array( );

$dao =& CRM_Core_DAO::executeQuery( $query, $params );

echo "<div class=\"item-list\"><ul>\n";
while ( $dao->fetch( ) ) {

  // Contact API returns contact info

  $contact = crm_get_contact(array('contact_id' => $dao->contact_id));

  echo "<li><a href=\"/civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&cid=" . $dao->contact_id . "\">" . $contact->display_name . "</a>, 
" . $dao->displaydate;

  echo "</li>\n";

  }
echo "</div></ul>\n";