May all your Christmas wishes come true! My Christmas wish is that you join an organization like Kiva.org and help someone in need. Dat al je kerstwensen in vervulling gaan! Mijn kerstwens is dat je lid wordt van een organisatie zoals Kiva.org en iemand in nood helpt.
Zwarte Piet, wie kent hem niet?
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 […]
Passport RenewalPasport Vernieuwen
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 […]
Boston – Cambridge
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 […]
Steve, thank you
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 […]
Of chip cards, family and friends
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 […]
Please sponsor me!
On Sunday June 12 I will be participating in the Tour de Cure here in Rochester. This is a charity ride in support of finding a cure for diabetes. Every one of us has a relative or a friend who suffers from this disease or has succumbed to it. In my family both my mother […]
Waiting for Superman
This is the title of a new documentary on high school education in the US. I haven’t seen it yet but I watched Larry King on CNN a while ago now paying a lot of attention to it. It got me thinking about my teachers. Here is a rundown of the good and not so […]
How to travel internationally without a passport
Over the coming weeks I’ll be re-posting my favorite entries from an old blog. This is the first one, first published on March 14, 2007. The weekend of Feb 24-25 was the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Just a train ride away from Amsterdam, so I flew over a day earlier to first swing by the […]
Real Musicians Don’t Need Electricity
…or maybe just a little of it… Last night my friend Mark returned to the live performance circuit with his brother-in-law, Jeff. Their acoustic duo is called Head Space. The performance was at the Cottage Hotel in Mendon, according to Mark’s email “a cool, roadhouse kind of joint. Good food, good drinks, ace sound system, […]