August 2015

Nora's Bulgarian has improved greatly. She is a lot more fluent and melodic when she talks and according to Sasha her sentences resemble those of Dyado and Baba. This is a wonderful benefit from her vacation abroad. I haven't heard her say them yet but I know she learned various Bulgarian poems and rhymes also.

Her Dutch had a temporary setback. Especially the first two days she had a hard time making herself understood to me and she would often just be quiet. It was interesting to see how much 8 weeks of virtual no Dutch matter, and it's a good reminder how important constant reinforcement is.

In the car from the airport I asked her, as a joke: "wil je een boterham met boerenkool?" -- she loves "boterham" but obviously not with "boerenkool" so she replied with two words, after searching: "eh... alleen!"

The same day at home she made several grammatical mistakes: "papa, wil je mij in doen?" (instead of "papa, wil je mij er in doen?" -- she wanted to jump in her bed). In bath she talked about: "de wit eendje" and "in de water".

Slowly but surely her fluency is coming back. Yesterday were about to go down the stairs and she said "knuf!" so she hasn't forgotten that. And this morning she woke up yelling "papa ben je wakker?!".

Like Jaap said this morning, traveling internationally and the corresponding jetlag and tiredness surely were a big factor and I'm glad she's becoming more vocal again. We haven't tried her English yet -- but that will happen in full in two weeks when she'll start her school.

Nora is back home!

She left Bulgaria very early on Sunday morning. She stayed with Dyado and Baba in a hotel in Sofia, in order to make the 6.00 am flight from there. She had an amazing summer with them. She told them not to be sad: "не плачете баби. Ще ме видите на Skype. Но в самолета няма Skype!". Nora was traveling back from Bulgaria with Lelya Snezha, Lelya Lilyana and their grandkids and they flew through Heathrow.

At 2.00 pm our time we left for the airport to pick her up and at Dulles we met Silko and Mariela. When they came through the doors we didn't see Nora at first -- she was hidden by the cart with the luggage. She is so little! A tiny human being who is ours. She was very happy to see us.

Lily gave her some balloons and with those we went to the car. Her Bulgarian was very good but her Dutch has faded to the background, especially since she was very tired.

Once at home she immediately grabbed her bicycle, later her stroller and then sat down with her blocks. It took her a while to get acclimatized but after a while she had smiles for Opa and Oma also. She had an early dinner and then went to bed. While we were drying her hair she fell asleep in my arms. In the evening Sasha and I looked at the pictures and some videos from her camera, it was really great to get an impression of her wonderful summer.

I've been bicycling to work every day after I came back from paternity leave and it feels great. My regular commute is short enough so I don't get too warm and it uses safe and easy roads. It's about 1.1 miles.

The conference this week was in a hotel near the Capitol, which is 6.5 miles from our house. I loved bicycling! And I felt great. On Tuesday my knee felt a little weird so I took the Metro instead but that was probably just from the wrong position on the bike and the rest of the week I didn't notice anything. I did feel a little guilty about my running -- I haven't ran at all last week -- but then again 13 miles a day is good exercise also.

The infrastructure in D.C. is getting nicer every year. I positively loved the bicycle lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue. They are protected from traffic and provide a great connection from the Capitol to the White House. It's also very symbolic that one of the best known streets in the United States now has bike lanes. Near Union Station they built a wonderful bicycle track on a street that I rode in 2006 when I said: "On my way back it was really cool to approach Union Station from the north, although traffic was pretty crazy there". Clearly, that has now dramatically improved.

Jaap has a birthday today and tonight we celebrated it. We had rakia with our appetizer and grilled sausages for dinner. Then there were presents -- several books -- and we had a home-made apple pie for desert. It's great to celebrate this together.

This is the third time we are celebrating Jaap's birthday in Arlington. The first time was ten years ago and then in 2012 when Jaap and Mieke were here to take care of Nora.

Monday and Tuesday I attended WOOT, a series of presentations on computer security attacks. It is part of the USENIX Security 2015 conference.

Two years ago I attended the same conference, and like two years ago, TLS and Android were favorite topics.

The keynote session by Adam Langley on TLS v1.3 was quite interesting. He also spoke about his practical experiences in disclosing vulnerabilities, and how difficult is is to 'manage' that process. He tried several approaches, including telling a small group of trusted companies first, only to be criticized by those outside of the "nice list". Later he tried to expand that circle but then the information started leaking out. His main conclusion was that there's just no good, clean, result you can expect.

I always like approaches like FLEXTLS. They created a framework that made it easy to test the state-machine in TLS. That way, the were able to systematically test which implementations allow the skipping of important steps. It ended up getting a price for the best paper at WOOT.

A presentation that stood out on the second day was about weaknesses in the routers provided by Dutch ISPs. They did some old-school reverse engineering to be able to crack the WPA2 passwords.

Very interesting new approach to attack is to abuse voice recognition.

During the lunches and breaks I spoke with several people. It was nice to meet Dr Lorenzo Cavallaro, the teacher of the online course I took a while ago.

This morning we had coffee with my parents and then Jaap and Mieke took the bus to Georgetown from where they'd take a boat to Alexandria. In the mean time, we hang out with the boys. Around 11.30 am we went for a walk and had lunch together at Le Pain Quotidien. The boys were deep asleep; they were now in their new stroller seats and clearly liked those much better than the small car seats.

While we were having lunch Adrian woke up and we took him our laps. With wide open eyes he looked around him.

The elections are more than 15 months away but yesterday was the first big debate for the Republican Party for their primary. We watched it and had a great evening.

To be sure -- the campaign for the Presidency is no joke and some of the candidates are scary -- but debates like these are entertaining. Donald Trump was in excellent form and dominated the debate; Chris Christie got some singers in as well and overall it was a great show to watch. Again, if you ignore the content of what's being discussed. Some of these candidates are quite extreme.

We had some difficulties finding the right streaming site to view the debate but ultimately we watched most of it through the official FoxNews website.