Onno's Blog

Today I finally brought the two cable set-top boxes back to TimeWarnerCable. My bill is now lower by about hundred dollar to around $60/month. I’ve been playing to do this since the summer so my laziness donated some $400 extra to Twc. Oh well, but now it is done.

The first steps were taken almost a year ago by first canceling the phone. I was hardly using the home phone anymore. Previously it was useful because phone calls to The Netherlands were a lot cheaper than via my iPhone. When AT&T greatly improved its pricing, that advantage went away and I was basically paying $75/month for no particular reason.

I already had an AppleTV connected to the living room and bedroom televisions. Via iTunes and Netflix I watch tv-series and movies. I added a Roku in each room which gave me BBC World News, CNN International, NOS Journaal and Politiek24 to provide for a selection of news. These four stations come courtesy of the NowhereTV private channel. Streamfree.tv is an excellent source for Roku private channels.

Between iTunes, Netflix and Amazon.com I have plenty of choice in tv-series and movies. Netflix and Amazon may not have the most recent season yet of say Breaking Bad but that doesn’t matter much. The Roku box does a good job in covering the need for news. What remains then is sports.

Cable TV (and satellite) currently still beats the internet in availability of live sports. While much is streamed on-line too, in most cases you need a cable-tv subscription in order to watch the stream: NBC and the winter/summer Olympics to name one example. However, most of the sports on American television doesn’t interest me: baseball, football. I have a passing interest in basketball and hockey but not enough that I stay home to watch. The sports that do interest me – cycling, Dutch soccer, speed skating – I am either not able to see it anyways due to international copyright issues or there are on-line options. Steephill.tv has pointers to live streaming of most/all of the cycling spring classics. The Tour de France is provided through an excellent iPad app. And on my iPad I can see the NOS’s live stream of the speed skating events. I can see this stream on my iPad but not on my MacBook. This is a big secret, you must promise not to tell anyone.

Via Airplay I can then stream this from my iPad or my MacBook to an AppleTV and watch it full-screen on the tv.

The main casualty of ending the cable subscription then is the ability to watch Dutch soccer. ESPN’s iPad app, ESPNWatch, streams a few of the Eredivisie games each weekend. This requires a cable-tv subscription (you log in to the app via your service provider account) so that will go away. But then, seeing how Ajax is playing this season…

I did get an HD-antenna (AntennaDirect CMS1 from BetsBuy) so I have access to over-the-air tv-stations. What with a north-facing apartment and Lake Ontario straight ahead I am pleased with what I receive. Eight stations which include the local affiliates of ABC, CBS and CW, and a couple of PBS stations. And all of them in HD.

An article in the New York Times a little while back introduced the terms “lean back tv” and “lean forward tv”. The first referring to cable-tv, the second to on-line watching. These are very accurate characterizations. Watching cable-tv you just zap around the channels pushing the button on your remote or by scrolling through the guide. After cutting the cable, you can still get much of the same content but their sources are separate (different web sites etc) and are accessed through separate devices (AppleTV, Roku, computer) and so requires more activity.

Friday night my dad passed away due to heart failure and other complications. He was, in his own words, almost 89 years old. He was a difficult man, I didn’t have a close relationship with him, often I didn’t really know how to relate to him and I think it was the same for him. But still, he was my dad and I will miss him nonetheless.

I like to share some of my memories of him with you. I don’t think I have often talked about any of these.

My dad was not one to show his affections easily. Not that I do so either – hey, we’re Kluyts. But he did in different ways show his solidarity. When I was 10 or so my football team was playing Ookmeer. I was the goalkeeper. The whole match I did not get a single ball; we won easily. The whole match it poured rain. I was soaked. The whole match my dad stood next to my goal. He didn’t have a raincoat nor umbrella. He was as drenched as I was.

Around that time, it might have been a year earlier, my dad and I learned to play chess. I joined the school’s chess club for a bit. During vacations he would buy a Dutch newspaper, often De Telegraaf if we were abroad. The sports section would report on recent matches between grandmasters.

At the camping table we would replay to those matches and try to play on from where one of the players offered a draw or defeat. We would talk through the moves then switch the board around and try again only to discover 15 moves later that the masters were right about how it would end. I enjoyed those moments. No, I never told him this.

After I moved abroad, one time my dad came to pick me up from Amsterdam Airport. He drove, I sat next to him. I looked over and noticed how he sat behind the steering wheel, how he held it, the back of his hands. I realized that I sit so too, I hold the wheel that way, the back of my hands look like his.

When we were young my dad would take books with him on summer vacations about the Club of Rome and other rather serious books on economic policy. My dad left school when he was twelve. My sisters and I would joke about this behind his back wondering, doubting if he understood what he was reading. One of my great pastimes is to read nonfiction books; a short list of books I read recently include a Robert Oppenheimer biography, a book on quantum mechanics, Six Easy Pieces by Feynman, Plato’s Republic and some of Karen Armstrong’s books.

There was one thing that for many years I wanted to do together, and that took too many years to finally fulfill: have a beer with my dad in a pub, just he and I, just talk and hang out. Or as in Jeffrey Gaines’ song: “Did all the things that good friends do, Worked together and talked about girls, Talked of dreams and traveling the world.”

I only managed to achieve this just a few years ago. I visited our mom in the nursing home. A while later Ger, my dad, arrived too. When we left we walked back together to my parents’ home. Halfway is the Buikslotermeerplein shopping center and a cafe with a terrasse and it is nice weather. I stopped and said: “Let’s have a beer.” He looked at me, nodded. After we were seated and had our beers in front of us, I told him that this was something I wanted for a long time. He smiled.

The last time I saw my dad was when I was back home last year September for his birthday. As usual he took the family for dinner to the Chinese restaurant he goes every week. I sat across from him, not everybody had arrived yet, he and I chatted a bit. I told him that one of things that surprised me about life as I got older is that when I was, say, in my twenties I expected people in their forties, okay fifties, to feel that age and to, well, feel old. “I still feel 24,” I said. He was looking at me, nodded a bit. “What age do you feel you are on the inside?” I asked. He thought a bit and said: “35 or so?”

I had my DNA tested for ancestry analysis. I must admit that I forgot what exactly triggered the decision to have it done other than that I have been interested in it ever since scientists began to use genetic analysis to work out the human tree.

My dad and others in the family have traced our family ancestry in the more traditional way by researching birth records. This traces us (the paternal line at least) back to the Dutch province of Zeeland back to roughly the mid-17th century. When Yvonne was on vacation in Utah she got the family tree from the Mormons which claims us going back to Germany in Roman times. The latter is interesting but as it is unclear where their information comes from (the practice of birth records is not that old unless you’re of blue blood which we aren’t. My dad’s tales of having coffee with the queen notwithstanding) it is hard to draw any firm conclusions from.

In most cases the genetic research uses mitochondrial DNA which is passed down via the X-chromosome. As a private person that analysis is expensive to get done; I am not that curious. After some internet searching I found DNA Tribes (http://dnatribes.com). DNA Tribes uses a different method. They use 15, 21 or 27 (you get to choose how accurate you want to get and how much you want to spend) genetic markers to build a DNA profile. The profile is built up from both the X- and the Y-chromosome. This profile is then compared to populations around the world in two ways to establish how the profile compares to population groups that have stayed mostly in the same geographical region for centuries, and then to the population groups but also including those that have migrated. The first result gives what DNA Tribes calls the Native Population Match, the second is the Global Population Match. DNA Tribes’ descriptions are a bit dense for laymen (I’m going to need my nephew Martijn to explain some of the terminology to me). The way I am interpreting the two sets of results is that the first shows how my profile compares to groups that have been in a region for a long time, the second how it compares to those now living in a region. Together it allows me to draw some conclusions how my ancestors migrated over the course of thousands of years.

Alright, let’s get to the results then. I had two tests done. In addition to the above I also asked DNA Tribes to drill down on Europe. Looking at the results I may have them drill down on the South Asian region but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

What you see here is that my DNA profile most commonly matches what is now eastern Russia and the Caucasus and then further back the region that is now Pakistan. There is a relatively high match with Venezuela which may mean that a few common ancestors migrated there a long time ago or it can just be coincidence. What is intriguing is the low percentage match with Northern and Western Europe.

This chart shows the numbers behind the map. It shows that the highest match is with the Hazara region in today’s Pakistan. You see two numbers in the chart. The score to the right of the bars is called ‘Match Likelihood Index’. This number locates the ethnic groups and regions where the DNA profile is most common. The other number (in parentheses) is the TribeScore which compares the DNA profile’s MLI score to members of each ethnic group and region. As I said it is a little cryptic.

A conclusion that can be made from this data is that my ancestors appear to have originated in the India and Pakistan region many thousands of years ago and from there over time migrated to The Netherlands where we have been last few centuries via nowadays Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Poland or in other words in a mostly western direction. Curiously enough that could match the Mormon’s record of the Kluyt family in Germany in Roman times.

The Europa test I had done is less interesting other than that it confirms this route. I’m emailing DNA Tribes some questions to confirm my interpretation. Depending on that I may have them test against the Central and South Asia region if there is a likelihood of that turning up further interesting things.

We’re well in our teenager years!

I claimed the domain on March 3, 1997. The first web pages went up a few days later.

In the beginning I had a specific need for the web site. Locating it at onno.com was pleasing to the ego. But back to the purpose. In early January of ’97 I relocated to the US from England to work for Apple in Cupertino, CA. My new role was Product Marketing Manager for OpenDoc – a technology for developer to build their application from smaller pieces that could be mixed and matched depending on the user’s needs. Just around that time Apple had acquired Next (or as the inside joke went, Next acquired Apple). Quite soon after getting off the plane and inhabiting my new office on the 4th floor with a lovely view of the Mount Hamilton range two things were obvious:

-        a substantial re-org and layoff was just weeks away, and

-        OpenDoc was not going to survive.

A team member and I, forgot the guy’s name, decided to use the time between now and when D-Day would be to prepare for the next step in the career: we walked down to the Computer Bookstore on the ground floor, bought ourselves copies of Java In A Nutshell and Symantec’s Visual Cafe for Java. To learn Java I wrote a Checkers game as an applet. Once that was working well I wanted a place, a web site, to host that applet so that my intended new colleagues of Sun Microsystems could play with it and admire my knowledge of the Java technology. And thus: onno.com.

Later it became a personal web site and blog to host my photographic exploits and my stories about travel, cycling and whatever else I choose to write about. The first number of years this was all handcrafted html. Over time I replaced pieces with off the shelf tools: the photo gallery moved to MobileME and very recently to onno.smugmug.com, and the main content is now managed by wordpress running on onno.com. The hosting moved from pacbell.net to yahoo to lunarpages.

A few times a year I get inquiries to buy the domain. A t-shirt company in Colorado tried a few times; it was never clear why “onno.com” was meaningful to them. Various fellow Onno’s asked including Onno Tijdgat who was known as a hacker during the 80-ies and the Chaos Computer Club days. The most recent request was a few months ago from a Polish company building a portal at onno.pl. I somewhat regret not having grabbed the .nl and .org domains at the time and so now other Onno’s occupy those.

The site hosted Rachel’s photography business for awhile before we moved it off to its own home at rachelgracie.com. It hosted my consulting business for the year it was active. Last year onno.com was hacked and I spent some long nights going through every file to check if it was compromised. And I once got a death threat – a comment on a story about gun control.

Sadly I don’t have a backup from the very early days of the site. The image you see above shows what the main page looked like in April 2002. Web crawlers visited the domain a few times and so there are some fun nuggets in the wayback machine. Such as my December 2000 roadtrip: http://web.archive.org/web/20010216193812/http://www.onno.com/travel/newyearseve.html and the 2000 Thanksgiving weekend Amtrak journey: http://web.archive.org/web/20010422061814/http://www.onno.com/travel/allaboard.html. I may lift a few of those and re-post them; I have quite fond memories of a some of those trips.

May all your Christmas wishes come true!

My Christmas wish is that you join an organization like Kiva.org and help someone in need.

This is a line form one of the traditional St Nicolas songs that children in The Netherlands will sing leading up to the holiday on December 5. Part of the tradition is the character of Zwarte Piet, Black Pete. He helps St Nicolas, or Sinterklaas, with bringing all the gifts to the children, keeping track of who has been good and bad during the year and so on. In the past he was often characterized as clumsy, very friendly but not very smart, speaking with a Surinam accent. In recent years his role has been elevated somewhat to a capable assistant of the Good Holy Man.

Yesterday I read a very interesting opinion on the festival of St Nicolas and in particular Zwarte Piet by Slate.com. It is interesting because it gives an outside view. A few weeks before I read a newspaper article reporting on the Dutch society in Ottawa canceling a St Nicolas parade in response to racism and discrimination protests over the character of Zwarte Piet.

Initially my reaction to both was a wary one: “ohh, just let it be, it’s just an innocent children’s festival.” Not unlike what Jessica Olien writes she encounters when trying to discus the topic with Dutch people. That made me take a step back and consider this issue more objectively.

I don’t know about the context in which the tradition came about regarding the intent behind the designed role and appearance of Zwarte Piet. But likely it built upon the prevailing opinion that black (or probably any non-white) people were children of a lesser god; not as intelligent, smart, enterprising, noble – insert your favorite – as the white. If I look back upon my childhood in the 60-ies and early 70-ies some of that was still present and visible. Since then, as the Slate article as notes, it has been equalized a bit but certainly the visual image is still there: the good saint is white and the wise leader, the assistant is black and in a subordinate role.

I believe it is time for the tradition to take the next step and let go. It will be hard to rename and rebrand the character. On the other hand if we just retire “Zwarte” from his name and insert something different then all the song lines still rhyme. Rhyme is an important aspect of the experience. How about “Goede” (good), “Sterke” (strong), “Grote” (great)? Well, you get the idea. And the black face paint has to go. There is no way it be can argued that one should not read any racist intent or characterization. It doesn’t matter what the intent is, this is about how it is received.

Let’s put Zwarte Piet to rest and move forward.

My passport will be expiring in a number of weeks so time to trek to New York City and the Dutch Consulate to renew it. At first I thought to fly in early Monday morning, visit the consulate and then fly back in the evening. But, on second thought, spending the weekend in Manhattan and then do the passport stuff on Monday seemed much more fun. Plus, a little road trip with the new Dr Frits was also due.

This created a delicious photo taking opportunity and so the tripod came along to take night shots on Saturday and the lens baby to play with street scenes and architecture. Grand Central station was on the list to visit. First, it’s a marvelous piece of architecture and Apple just opened a store on Friday.

On Sunday I basically walked down from 48th Street where I was staying to Battery Park with the obligatory stops for coffee along the way to let the feet rest. In Grand Central station there was a Christmas market, lots of stands with products from local designers and artists. In a park along the way south, Washington Park perhaps, another little market to walk around to find a few presents. At one such stand while I was paying for my purchase, the lady looked at my name on my credit card exclaiming in Dutch: “You’re Dutch!”. And so we chatted for a while in the funny language.

Monday morning it was time for the official business. First, I needed passport photos. These days the requirements are very specific (no smiling, mouth must be closed, ears must be showing, look straight at the camera, etc etc). Near Rockefeller Center, where the consulate is, is a photo store that specializes in these photos. You tell them which country and they know the exact requirements. Then up to the 11th floor at 1 Rockefeller Plaza. There are two desks and each was helping someone. So I was basically next in line. Now, consulates are a bit like post offices the world over. Everything goes at a certain, not particularly hurried, pace. Just like post offices they don’t have competition. You can’t go to someone else to get your passport. Anyways, eventually it is my turn, actually it all goes swimmingly and just a few minutes later it is all done: Fedex should be delivering the new passport in a week or so.

 Lunch, and then picking up the luggage from the hotel, retrieving the car from the parking garage across the street. Time to drive back to Webster, NY. Somewhere in New Jersey before the Delaware Water Gap I’m in the left lane overtaking some traffic going about 75 mph. A large white SUV is catching up behind me. I move to the inner lane after passing and slow down a bit. The SUV comes up next to me and stays next to me. I glance over and see that’s the New Jersey State Police. He’s looking over. I slow down a bit further, he does too. After we get to 60 mph he moves on. Ahead is an open pickup truck. He does the same thing: driving up next to him. They both slow down and so I slow down too. The speed goes down to 40 mph; there is some gesture exchange between the trooper and the pickup driver. Just ahead is the exit for a rest area. The pickup truck indicates right and moves onto the exit, the trooper follows.

A few miles before Binghamton I stop to refuel Dr Frits and me. For Dr Frits a good helping of Exxon, for me a Quarter Pounder with a vanilla milkshake! Thusly refreshed and with the iPhone connected to the car stereo on the Singer/Songwriter genius list we swing back to Webster.

The photographic proceedings can be admired in the gallery.

Photo gallery

Last weekend I was in Boston: an Azure bootcamp event at Microsoft’s R&D center in Cambridge. It took two attempts to get there: our flight Thursday afternoon got canceled and so instead we flew over early Friday morning.

I had been playing with Azure (Microsoft’s cloud computing platform) for a few weeks and this event was a good opportunity to boost that learning effort, hear from other developers what they’re doing with it. The trip proved itself worthwhile within the first half hour with Bill Wilder simplifying the distinction between web roles and worker roles down to one sentence: “a web role is a worker role with IIS enabled”. That’s it. Many of the Azure books manage to fill many a confusing chapter trying to explain the purpose of each.

Some areas of Azure are very impressive: the behind the scenes replication of data for example. Some areas need improvement. Diagnostics for one. The pricing model especially is way too complex. It’s very hard to understand what your real costs are going to be. Some areas are intriguing. The pricing and limitations of SQL Azure versus Azure Table Services: Microsoft seems to want you to use table services where and when you can, and SQL Azure only when you really have to. I suspect their reasoning is somewhat similar to Google with GAE and BigTable: the ability to do optimizations behind the curtain.

Friday evening Mark and I had dinner at Villa Francesca, a very nice Italian seafood restaurant in North End. Together with the dinner with Rich the next evening at Blue Room in Cambridge it made me think whether it is time to move back to a real city. I like living in Rochester (or Webster to be precise) but the culinary scene is not the same…

Originally Rich and I planned to have dinner on Thursday. Saturday evening I had hoped to meet up with several of my fellow Sun alumni but that didn’t come together. I sent out an email invite a few days before. I do this as well during visits back to Amsterdam and California: proposing an evening and checking who’s available. This always works out in those two locations but here it failed miserably. Not one positive response, just two declines. I am quite disappointed about that. However, in the end still had a great evening. As I didn’t make it to Boston until Friday morning, Rich and I moved our dinner to the Saturday evening.

My flight Sunday wasn’t until 5pm so I had much of the day to be a tourist. From the hotel I first walked over to MIT’s campus near Cambridge Center. Lovely new architecture. From there back to Charles river, across Longfellow Bridge zigzagging through the little streets until I came to Boston Common. From there down State Street down to the wharf admiring the old stores converted into beautiful apartments. Then zigzagging through North End back past the Museum of Science to Cambridge and the hotel. With stops at Starbucks and Boston Beerworks as needed. The photographic proceeds of the hike are in the gallery.

At the airport I learned that the flight back to Rochester was delayed. I checked the FlightTrack app on my iPhone: this flight gets canceled 17% of the time. That’s high. Hmmm. US Airways pushes back the departure time at 20 minute intervals. I hate that. It locks you down at the gate. In the end we boarded two hours late. I much prefer that they tell me straightaway that the delay will be that. Then I can go do something: have a drink, have dinner, or just leisurely wander about. Back in Rochester it was much colder than in Boston, making searching for sweater and rain jacket the first order of business.

I had planned a different post, the trip to Boston last weekend, but that will have to wait.

I didn’t really know much about Apple, or had heard of Steve Jobs, until 1987 when my employer at the time, KMG, merged with Peat Marwick. We were an MS-DOS firm, they were an Apple shop. A calculation was made and it was decided it was cheaper to rewrite our DOS programs for Macintosh. The next couple of years we had a blast learning about and developing Mac apps. And getting drawn into the Apple culture.

I attended my first Apple developer conference in 1989 in San Jose. My first trip to the US. The registration lines for the conference were long, stretched out way outside the convention center. People were grumpy, I was grumpy. Finally we got inside and into the main hall. We were delighting in complaining to each other about how Apple got this wrong, the long way we traveled to get here, the …. The lights dim, the music swells and on the two enormous screens the 1984 commercial starts playing: “and you will know why 1984 won’t be like 1984!”

Oh we knew.

Gone were the complaints about the long line, the long wait outside. We were going to change the world one person at the time!

Since that event I believed. I knew two things. I wanted to live in Silicon Valley and I wanted to work for Apple. It took some years to fulfill this dream but it came true. With the help of Jeroen in 1993 I landed a job with Apple in the UK. With the help of my manager Kate I secured a transition to Cupertino in January 1997.

Before all that happened I read John Scully’s Odyssey, his story about his journey as CEO of Apple. Which is how I got to learn about Steve and the characters that built the first Macintosh: Bill Atkinson, Andy Herzfeld, Chris Espinosa and many others.

It changed my life. I wanted to strive for the best, be uncompromising, to impact, inspire and change lives of those within my reach, build the most beautiful things I can. Care about how I view me and not how others view me.

My move to Cupertino in January was just after Apple acquired NeXT, or as the inside joke went, NeXT acquired Apple. I was the product manager for OpenDoc. I knew quickly this wasn’t to last long and indeed in March Apple laid me off. A little before I met Steve. He asked me what I was working on. I stuttered and stumbled. I didn’t make an impression but he did.

I moved on to work for Sun and then on relocating to Rochester eventually returning back to the profession of software engineer and joining Odyssey Software.

I wish to be able to call Steve Jobs a friend but I can’t. That’s okay. I am content knowing that I knew him and that he impacted my life.

Think differently. Be insanely great.

I was back in The Netherlands for the first time in two years. Chance to see family and friends again, and to meander through my favorite city.

The meandering included use of the public transport and that required getting used to and obtaining an OV-chipcard (public transport chip card). Trains, trams, buses now all use the same payment system: a chip card you load with funds and then wave in front of a reader as you enter (check in) and leave (check out) the vehicle. Yvonne sent me an email with instructions beforehand and I also browsed the Dutch Public Transport web site. It seemed reasonably straightforward with the most tricky part being to remember to check out when leaving the train, bus or tram.

I flew into Schiphol (aka Amsterdam Airport) which has a train station: the place to obtain the card. There are several machines where you can buy and load a card. As at least one improvement over earlier visits these machines now accept credit cards in addition to a Dutch bank pass. Using the touch screen I indicated I wanted to buy an anonymous OV-chipcard (a named one can be automatically reloaded via your bank account but for that you need to live in the country), inserted my credit card and out came my very own OV-chipcard! Except, it didn’t yet have any funds on it. Why this is a separate transaction, I don’t know. A card without a balance is pretty much useless. Anyways, added 20 euros to the card which should be sufficient for the travel planned for the week. Proudly holding my card high in the air I descended upon the track where the train to Amsterdam Centraal will be departing from. Found the pole with the card reader to check in, waved the card in front and I got a red light and a short message that check in failed. Hmmm…. No further explanation…

Luckily, several train conductors stood around doing nothing (with this automated system what role/job do they still have?) and asked why my new card wouldn’t work. The lady said I needed to assign to first or second class for train travel. Why didn’t the machine ask this when I bought the card? She shrugged her shoulders. How do I do this, I asked? I have to go to the ticket desk. The machines do not provide this function. Alright, back on the escalator and standing in line for the next agent at the ticket counter. He held my card in front of a reader, tapped on his keyboard and I was all set. Back to the track to wait for the next train.

Friday afternoon I hiked up and down the Nieuwendijk, Kalverstraat, Bloemenmarkt, surrounding streets and canals to collect presents. During the running around I thought of a little photo assignment: taking pictures of what Amsterdammers to do to and with their bicycles. They make phone calls, send and check text messages, haul groceries and small children around, walk the dog and much more. Check the photo gallery for yourself of how to use your bicycle in Amsterdam like an Amsterdammer. This also represented an opportunity to try out the photography workflow using my iPad instead of the MacBook.

Saturday was birthday day for my dad and Wouter, the oldest son of my oldest sister, Marja. Yvonne and I first brunched at the Koffieketel before taking the tram to the Muntplein to obtain the last needed present. It was a hot and humid day. We took a break at Cafe De Jaren to cool off. We were tempted to text the family to come and celebrate here rather than us having to get back out in the hot weather… At the parental home in Amsterdam-Noord my 6 year old nephew politely accepted his present and put it down next to him. After a little while, his grandma asked him: “Aren’t you going to open your present?”
“No,“ he answers, “I’ll do it later. It’s too hot.”
Priceless!

It’s more or less tradition that we go to my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner. Since a few months he has a Canta, basically a narrow two-seater with a moped engine for disabled and elderly people. These are allowed to ride on bike paths and park on the pavement. I asked my dad if he was going to drive. He was and I went with him. My first time in a Canta! I recorded the experience. Can you enjoy my Amsterdam accent!

One of the nice things about the restaurant is that they know our dad very well and keep an eye on him. The seating arrangement didn’t work out as intended and I used the excuse of a toilet break to effectuate a little reshuffling of the chairs. We generally had good fun and amusing dinner conversation. Wouter and Marina leave a little earlier because Lennart was getting tired. But for a 9 month old baby he did extremely well! After dinner we said goodbye to my dad and I promised to come by Monday afternoon.

Also tradition is that Yvonne and I end up at Cafe Kale after a parental visit. It was finally cooling down making it even more relaxing to sit on Cafe Kale’s terrace and watch the Amsterdam nightlife flow by.

Monday evening I met with my friends. I hadn’t seen Wouter in about five years and Leon perhaps even longer. Wouter sat already at the bar when I walked in. He recognized me before I recognized him. He’s all gray! And a tad, just a tad, heavier. Eric still looked like the schoolboy of many years ago, Gero and Leon hadn’t changed much either. Cafe Kale delighted me by having mussels on the menu. We chatted about cycling, technology, life, the universe and everything.