Wednesday and Thursday I was at a big trade-event for Chess. It's called Intertraffic, and it's a trade fair for the design, maintenance and management of traffic and transport infrastructure. The fair was in the RAI in Amsterdam.

Chess has been working on a new parking machine for Vialis, which is one of the projects we demonstrated this week. The goal for Chess was to make contact with potential customers and suppliers.

It was a lot of fun working there and explaining people about what we do. There were a lot of international visitors; I found good use for my (renewed) German knowledge and interesting enough also for my Bulgarian! There were a couple of visitors from Bulgaria and Macedonia.

It was also nice to learn more about other Chess projects we do from my colleagues who were at the fair.

The Chess stand at Intertraffic 2004.

Roger.

Rob with the Vialis parking machine. On the computer next to him the back-office program for parking machines that I've been working on is running.

A picture from the Intertraffic website that gives an indication of the other stands that were at the fair. Left in the back you can see the booth of Vialis.

The Intertraffic fair is an important meeting place for buyers and suppliers of traffic equipment etc; there were over 600 exhibitors.

A colleague was experimenting with a mobile phone-with-camera, so here's a picture of my new desk.

Petra and Raoul gave me a ride to Antwerp yesterday. We first picked up Barbara, and we saw their new house. Then we drove to Antwerp. The road was blocked near Breda, so it took longer than we expected but it was cosy in the car. We had lunch and coffee at McDonalds.

Around 15:30 o'clock we arrived in the hotel. The hotel had a remarkably bad parking place but the hotel itself was beautiful. After checking in we walked to the bar which we knew was somewhere near the Grote Markt. It took a while -- we got lost. The meeting place was The Pelgrom, a Middle Age-like decorated bar, in a cellar. It was very stylish, and lit only by candlelight. There was a separate room for Chess, and when we arrived most collegue's where there already. A lot of people brought their partner, so it was quite full; there were around 100 people.


There was of course a lot of nice beer. Erik and I tried "Poorterbier", in a stone bottle. We stayed a couple of hours there. It was great fun, both to drink beer with colleague's, and to meet many partners of colleague’s.

Dinner was in another location; we walked to there with the whole group. Again we had some difficulties making our way, but we found it soon enough. The place was called The Stage and it was close to the hotel where Sasha and I stayed in August.

The Stage is a combination of a restaurant and a theater. There was a life-show during the whole evening, with magicians, dancers, singers, all in beautiful costumes. It wasn't the best theater or restaurant ever, but I found it very entertaining and we had a lot of fun.



The program there was over around 1:00 o'clock, and with 15 people we went to a pub nearby. We talked, danced and drank beer.


I was sharing a room with Joris, a colleague, and after we got back in the hotel we chatted a while and went to bed around 4:30 o'clock.


This morning the alarm went at 10:15, to make sure that we wouldn't miss breakfast. A lot of coffee and a good, solid breakfast were quite welcome.


Gijs and Martha gave me a ride back to Haarlem (thanks!), I was home around 1:00 o'clock. In the afternoon I had a nap. I didn't do a lot more today, except for some reading and two homework assignments for tomorrow.

We have moved to another floor. I am now at the first floor, on a really nice spot. I'm looking out over the Nieuwe Gracht, and over a bridge on the street that goes from the station to the Grote Markt.

I still feel a bit feverish, but not too bad.

Next week my project will move to another floor in our building. There have been some small organizational changes that are accompanied with a re-shuffle of most projects in the Chess buildings.

Because I have been located on this desk since I started working full-time here, I thought it's nice to take some pictures.

The Chess building, seen from the backside. My office is on the top-floor, on the left-hand side on this image.

The desks of our project.

Erik, my colleague on this project.

My desk. Here I'm working on on some Java code. The red bar on the screen indicates a failed unit-test: this part of the software isn't ready yet. Notice the webcam.

Tonight we had a meeting of my work, a so-called 'tuning'. There are three branches of our company, in three cities in the Netherlands that are far from each other. Therefore this kind of of meetings is always in the center of the country. The philosophy is that if people from all the three cities have to drive far, nobody can complain. Today it was in Zeist.

It was quite interesting, and good to see collegue's from the branches in Eindhoven and Groningen. Serge gave me a ride to Zeist; Sandra brought me back home in the evening (thanks, both of you).

I have been working for a long time on a project for Vialis. Vialis produces and sells parking machines in the Netherlands, and Chess has been developing a new type of parking machine with them (smarter, quicker, more payment methods).

About a week ago five parking machines of their new type have been placed in Nijmegen, and are currently being used.

Personally I've been involved in the back-end part of the system: the computer that registers and detects what's going on with the parking machines.

There has been quite some publicity about the new system; today we saw that there was an article in the Intermediar, a Dutch technology magazine.

I just got a confirmation that I'll go to Groningen tomorrow for Chess. There's some work to be done there, probably for one or two days.

It means of course a long train journey; almost three hours.

Today I was at a customer of Chess in Utrecht. We were testing some of the software that I wrote in the last weeks. It's exciting to see if the program does the things it should do, and to verify it doesn't crash when something unexpected happens.

It worked out quite well. In the beginning there were some trivial things that needed to be adjusted, but we were very satisfied with the final results.

It's my birthday!

I just got some cakes ("vlaaien") for my collegue's here at Chess, we'll have coffee and cake soon. I allowed myself a small birthday present: a wonderful cup of espresso.

I received a lot of e-mails and cards already, which gives a nice feeling. Tonight there'll be a party, I'm looking forward to that.