Didn't see the State of the Union live -- it was a little too early for that. In these uncertain times it's good to stay up-to-date; it's nice that the transcript of the speech is online.

"Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union."

Yesterday evening we had dinner at Zoltan's place. Daniel cooked, but rather unusual it wasn't spicey at all.


Michel and André where there too. Did some promotion for... Guus Bosman.nl.

There was a man on the news yesterday who is always making pictures from his window. He lives at the river Amstel in Amsterdam, and now there was an exposition of some of his best photos. He made pictures of many events such as the Gayparade and the marriage of Willem-Alexander and Maxima.

He is a really good photographer and made very nice pictures, so that's not comparable to my 'work'. But I recognized that you can see much about the world from your own window.<

In the past we saw the flag on the Adriaan on the day of the funeral of HRH Prince Claus, Sinterklaas arriving in Haarlem or the prison that was being cleaned.

In the morning when I just woke up this was the view from our window:

The fire brigade went into the number 8, two houses further. Luckily enough nobody seemed to be hurt, and there wasn't a big fire.

In the Haarlems Dagblad today:

"De bewoners van een appartementencomplex aan de Hooimarkt moesten dinsdagochtend hun woningen verlaten bij een korte binnenbrand in het pand. De Haarlemmers werden door de brandweer geëvacueerd. Niemand raakte gewond. Hoe de brand is ontstaan, is nog onduidelijk."

("The tenants of an apartmentcomplex at the Hooimarkt had to leave their house because of a small fire in the building. They were evacuated by the fire brigade. Nobody got hurt. How the fire started is not clear yet.")

Of course this reminds of the situation 23 years ago when a big part of our house burned down.

A new version of my paper is online. Finally crossed the psychologically important 30-page limit, and I've been reorganizing the structure quite a lot today.

It even has a picture for those who are interested in pictures. Tomorrow morning I'll see Ralf to discuss the paper.

See -- it's a family thing.

A couple of days ago I've found a nice website that categorizes other website by geographical location.

It can show the neighbours of Guus Bosman.nl. Another site with the same functionality but based on Dutch zipcodes is LogMap.

Websites close to me are for example Een Scherpe Blik, Willy Boerland.com (in Santpoort) and Websnacks.nl (in Haarlem).

Because I don't like winter I'm always optimistic about the coming of the spring.

Our plants seem to share this optimism.

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This is (a part of) the plant from Florijn.

The end of March it will be 6 years ago since I moved into Florijn and found it there.

With the risk of losing one of my most frequent visitors to another site: online Tetris!

Very interesting article at the BBC about Putin and Dobby:

"Dobby the house-elf could be taken to court because some people think he looks like the Russian president.


They are angry because they think the filmmakers deliberately modelled Dobby on the face of Russia's boss, Vladimir Putin. "

Our beloved prime-minister Balkenende is also mentioned. (Found it through Loglynx).

They don't smell but they are beautiful.