It's a sad day today in the Netherlands.

During a parade in honor of Queensday, a crazy guy drove a car through a crowd of people, killing five and wounding many others, in an apparent attack on the Dutch royal family.

The Geen Stijl weblog had the most update information, both factual and rumored (viewer discretion advised).

It was 91 degrees Fahrenheit today; 32 degrees Celsius. Summer has began!

I went for a run in Umstead park in the afternoon. Of course I ran slow to be careful about the heat; it's good to start getting used to the high temperatures again. The humidity has increased but it's not as muggy yet as it will be in the summer here.

Yesterday we had a dinner from the Duke Economics department, with a traditional 'pig-out': North Carolinian style barbecue (pork) with hushpuppies, coleslaw and other 'fixings'.

Later in the evening we had a fun birthday party. Our Argentinian friends told me that the newspapers in Argentina were full of speculation that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands may announce her abdication next week. The official state press agency is denying it -- so it may be true.

Ettie is celebrating her birthday today -- happy early birthday!

Next to the bookstore in the National Gallery of Art there is a lunch restaurant.

When we walked by it I was surprised to see a menu in Dutch, with dishes such as gebakken vis and rode kool. In line with the exhibition, the menu was in Dutch style and the restaurant was temporarily called "Cafe Amsterdam".

We had already had lunch so we didn't eat, but the appeltaart was on a buffet and looked very authentic. According to the menu there was also boterboek and flensjes with apples.

Tonight I attended a presentation on Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex by Rob Kainz and Derrick Heffner.

We went to the presentation right after work; it was organized by the Triangle User Experience group (an Adobe Group) and sponsored by Railinc.

Rob and Derrick founded Roadierage.com, a website for the music industry. Rob has been developing the website using a combination of Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex.

In the presentation Rob spoke about the caching and paging mechanisms that he used, including an interesting trick to cache the Ajax responses (essentially query results) as XML files on the file system to speed up repetitive queries. Using a Ruby sweeper method to invalidate the cache when model objects changed made for an elegant implementation.

My main interest was to learn more about Adobe Flex and it was useful to get hear some real world experiences; it was a well spent evening.

This weekend we made a wonderful trip to Washington DC. On Saturday we arrived in time for lunch at The Boulevard Woodgrill in Arlington, the area where we lived for two years. Lunch there was great, just as we remembered it, and it was a lot of fun to be back in the Courthouse area.

We spent time in Georgetown and in the evening we went out around Dupont Circle, with an excellent late night dinner at Pizza Paradiso. A very small, very friendly place with very good pizza.

Sunday morning we visited "Pride Of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age" in the National Gallery of Art. This exhibition is a corporation between The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in the Netherlands and the National Gallery, and combines works from those museums with many other paintings from all over the world. I first read about it in December when it was showing in the Netherlands.

We spent a long time in the gallery; it was truly wonderful. A highlight of the exhibition for us was "View of Hoorn", by the relatively obscure painter Abraham de Verwer. Together with the two Albert Cuyp paintings this work was a beautiful showcase of 'Dutch light'.

I also liked the 2nd View of Hoorn, by Cornelis Vroom, which had a lot of fine detail and was a beautiful big overview at the same time, and there was a surprising painting by Ruisdael from the top of the newly build city hall in Amsterdam (now the Royal Palace). Vermeer's View of Delft was not there.

There were many maps of the Netherlands, and it's always cool to see Opperdoes, the village Ettie and I were born in, on a map of 500 years old.

One of the maps we having in our living room was the inspiration for a painting by Jan Micker that looked like an aerial view of Amsterdam, with the clouds creating a black and white pattern on the city.

View of Hoorn by De Verwer.

View of Hoorn by Cornelis Vroom.

A map of Amsterdam by Jan Micker, after the original by Cornelis Anthonisz. We have a reproduction of Anthonisz' map in the living room.

A Pier in Dordrecht Harbor.

We'll be leaving shortly for Washington DC for a short stay; traveling back tomorrow.

It's going to be a fun road trip. Tomorrow morning we plan to visit the National Gallery of Art.