Guus Bosman

software executive and technologist

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art

Pride of place: Dutch cityscapes of the Golden Age

Mon, 04/20/2009 - 9:27pm

View of Hoorn. This weekend we made a wonderful trip to Washington DC. On Saturday we arrived in time for lunch at The Boulevard Woodgrill in Arlington, the area where we lived for two years. Lunch there was great, just as we remembered it, and it was a lot of fun to be back in the Courthouse area.

We spent time in Georgetown and in the evening we went out around Dupont Circle, with an excellent late night dinner at Pizza Paradiso. A very small, very friendly place with very good pizza.

Sunday morning we visited "Pride Of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age" in the National Gallery of Art. This exhibition is a corporation between The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in the Netherlands and the National Gallery, and combines works from those museums with many other paintings from all over the world. I first read about it in December when it was showing in the Netherlands.

We spent a long time in the gallery; it was truly wonderful. A highlight of the exhibition for us was "View of Hoorn", by the relatively obscure painter Abraham de Verwer. Together with the two Albert Cuyp paintings this work was a beautiful showcase of 'Dutch light'.

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travelling

Road trip

Sat, 04/18/2009 - 8:13am

We'll be leaving shortly for Washington DC for a short stay; traveling back tomorrow.

It's going to be a fun road trip. Tomorrow morning we plan to visit the National Gallery of Art.

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dutchusa

Dutch bikes

Fri, 04/17/2009 - 7:32am

"But can New York revert to New Amsterdam?"

The New York Times has an article about Dutch bikes, which 'may be the first status symbol of the Great Downturn':

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/fashion/16CODES.html?em=&pagewanted=all

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internet

Forgotten PostgreSQL Windows password

Tue, 04/14/2009 - 9:52am

This morning I've been upgrading the Postgres database on my Windows XP laptop to version 8.3.

During the installation it asks for the password of the service account of previous PostgreSQL version. The default value is 'postgres', but sure enough I forgot what password I used when I originally installed it.

I found this useful post on how to change the password for any Windows user. From the Windows command line execute the following to reset the password to 'postgres'.

net user postgres postgres

That worked, so now I'm ready to complete the installation and be able to use the new Ruby pg gem that was recently release for Windows.

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sports

After a trail run

Sun, 04/12/2009 - 1:33pm

Trail run.I just did a great trail run at the Eno River (where we walked with Ettie and Gerben).

Sitting in the sun now and Jaap just fixed the website (thank you).

Life is good.

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movies

Sons of Cuba

Thu, 04/02/2009 - 10:22pm

Tonight Sasha and I saw Sons of Cuba, a wonderful documentary about Cuban kids in a school for boxing.

This was the openings movie of Full Frame 2009, and it was a great choice. The movie was very touching, very funny, and beautifully shot. After the movie there was a Q&A with the makers, who followed the group of young boxes for a period of over a year. They had amazingly good footage. At one point the film maker said "I was worried there wouldn't be enough action in the movie" -- well, that was a thing he didn't have to worry about.

A great start of the festival.

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sports

Raleigh Rocks Half Marathon 2009

Sat, 03/28/2009 - 2:43pm

This morning was Raleigh Rocks, a half marathon starting in downtown Raleigh. It was my first half marathon this season, and finished in 2 hours and 14 minutes. That's 5 minutes better than when I did this race last year, but well short of my best of 2 hours and 2 minutes (in November last year).

To be honest, I had underestimated the race and just didn't train enough, especially in long runs. I started the race well, with a consistent 9 minutes/mile speed, something that I wanted to try to break my PR. But at mile 4 or 5 I started slowing down -- I just clearly wasn't ready for this speed. One point of light: this time I made sure I didn't start overly fast. In previous race my splits for the first 2 miles or so would be around 8 minutes, way to fast. Miles 7 and 8 starting to get difficult, and miles 9 and 10 through the greenway did me in. It didn't help that after 10 miles or so I started getting blisters on both feet, something that doesn't usually happen to me. My feet may have been still soft from a fairly brutal training run in 2,5 hours of rain and mud two weeks ago.

Still, it was fun to race a half marathon again and Raleigh Rocks is a very well organized race. I particularly liked that there were clear mile markers every mile. Up to the next race, May 17th in Cary, NC, and yes, I will step up my training in the next 6 weeks.

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plants

Beautiful plant

Fri, 03/27/2009 - 7:26am

Beautiful plant.We received a beautiful plant this week via the mail, a present from Jerry and Marjolein. It's a bromelia and a pink orchid.

The plant arrived in a very solid box, with lots of protective materials and it arrived in perfect state. We transferred it from it's temporary pot to a permanent one, and it's beautiful and cheers up the living room. Thank you!

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internet

Data Center Wieringermeer

Thu, 03/26/2009 - 8:31pm

Greenhouses and data centers.In the Wieringermeer, where my parents live, the build a new data center will start this year. It's going to be a 'green' data center, which will achieve a very high energy efficiency through corporation with greenhouses in the area (a PUE of 1.3).

Read more in this article in Trouw. This new data center by Parthenon will be CO2 neutral:

- The Wieringermeer is an agricultural part of the Netherlands with a lot of greenhouses, for flowers and vegetables. These greenhouses produce a lot power; plenty to supply the 50 MW the data center will use
- The heat produced by the data center will be used to warm the greenhouses
- The CO2 produced by the greenhouse energy production will be used as fertilizer for the crops in the greenhouses

Cool stuff. Thanks Jaap for sending me the article.

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foodanddrinks

Vegetarian bouillon

Tue, 03/24/2009 - 7:48am

Bouillon.A few weekends ago we had guests for lunch, and I wanted to make a fully vegetarian onion soup.

Obviously, onion soup is mostly vegetarian by itself, but the exception is the bouillon which is typically based on beef. So the night before I made a vegetarian bouillon for the first time. It was a lot of work, but interesting to do, and the result was very good. I used half of the bouillon for the soup and froze the rest of it.

The recipe was something like this: bake carrots, celery, potatoes and onions in the oven for 45 minutes so they become crispy. Then, put those vegetables and a bunch of herbs in a big pan of water, bring to a boil and simmer for a long time. Interesting enough you can even add the skins of the onion (not baked); they'll give the bouillon a nice dark color. At the end, you filter the vegetables and herb out and you're left with the bouillon.

The lunch the next day was a great success, and the soup was well received.

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