Guus Bosman

The Dutch national public library has a research service. You can ask them questions, typically about books but also other topics, and they will research the answer for you.

Mieke suggested that I should post a question that has been in my mind for a very long time: to find the author or title of books that I read at school when I was around 11 or 12 years old.

Unfortunately the research service could not answer my question, so it is now published as a hersenkraker (challenging puzzle) on Aladin.bibliotheek.nl:

"Ik zoek een jeugdboekenserie, maar ik weet de titels of auteur niet. Ik las het toen ik zo'n 10 tot 12 jaar oud was, in 1988 - 1990. Het was een spannende serie, met meer dan 1 boek, ik meen ieder geval 4 stuks. Het ging over kinderen die in aanraking met heksen komen. Het verhaal speelde zich veel 's nachts af. Een belangrijk plot element was dat heksen niet over stromend water konden vliegen. Hierdoor konden de hoofdpersonen zich af en toe in veiligheid brengen."

You may have noticed that the website has been really slow in the last month or two. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and I'm happy to say that the speed is back to normal.

The problem started two months ago when a new DSL modem was installed and the website started to work really slow. Jaap and I have done a lot of research to see what happened, including re-wiring lots of cables and switches and network cards... thank you so much! The first suspect was the new modem, a "Fritzbox", but all the settings looked fine and there was nothing in the log files. Traceroute told us that performance was quite decent. Thanks also to Ben from OpenNMS for your help.

In the end, it turned out to be unrelated to cables -- instead, there was a configuration setting on the server ("DNS servers") that needed to be updated. Once that was done, performance was back to normal. A great relief.

We saw Frost/Nixon recently. We had heard good things about it and I picked it up from Blockbuster without reading the summary. So it was somewhat surprising that in the first few minutes of the movie the whole Watergate-to-Nixon-resigning story was told. Obviously, the film was not a documentary about the actual affair, but about 4 interviews that President Nixon gave after his resignation to Mr. Frost, a celebrity journalist.

An original angle to take, and the movie was very interesting. The journalist, obviously looking for a spectacular 'scoop' of some kind, is depicted as in an battle against the smart and ex-president, who is looking for redemption in the public view.

Very good acting, especially by Michael Sheen who was playing President Nixon's role.

Grown up Soda, or... Gus.

We saw this in a supermarket and gave it a try. "Gus is the first soda made truly for adult palates. It's less sweet than typical flavored sodas, juice drinks and bottled teas."

See also: Gus Busman.