Guus Bosman

software executive and technologist

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dailylife

Card from Bulgaria

Sun, 06/06/2004 - 5:53am

Postcard from Bulgaria.A few days ago I received a card from Bulgaria, which my father sent two weeks ago when he was on a business trip to Bulgaria.

I'm taking it easy this weekend. This morning I'm studying from a list of practice questions for the Java test I want to do.

In the afternoon there's the homework for the German course. We've been asked to write a lexicon article about the "greatest Dutch person in history". It's very difficult to choose one!

I'm sticking to my own profession, engineering, and I'll write an article about Simon Stevin. He was a Dutch (Flemish) engineer and mathematician living in the beginning of the 17th century. He invented many Dutch mathematical words that are still in use today.

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chess

Project ready

Sat, 06/05/2004 - 7:16am

Yesterday I went out for a drink with my colleagues after work; I was home around 20:00 o'clock. I felt pretty tired after a week of hard work. But also very satisfied: the project I've been working on the last three weeks is a great success!

In a period of three weeks we have created an online shop where customers can buy a variety of products. For the actual content delivery we implemented interfaces with eight external suppliers, which was a challenging task because of the short time-to-market.

But it worked, and the shop is running nice and smooth. It's very exciting to see how many visitors we have (from a mailing sent to many potential customers), and how well the shop handles the large amount of consumers. Quite a difference with my own tiny website ;)

I really enjoyed this project: I like to work in dynamic and high-pressure projects like this one. It was also great fun taking the fundamental technological decisions of the project and interacting with the customer so frequently.

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chess

Music choice

Tue, 06/01/2004 - 12:29pm

A day of hard work today, and things went well. The project is ready; there are only a few small things to be done tomorrow, and the next project presented itself already.

I often listen to music while working. In the morning I start with soft, mellow music. There are a couple of RealAudio internet radiostations that provide a perfect non-stop stream of background music. After lunch, I often switch to a more up-beat station with dance music.

I noticed that it depends on how I feel: today it was quite busy at work. I guess there was no need for music after lunch to wake me up, and I'm still listening to the easy "morning music".

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dailylife

Fair organs

Mon, 05/31/2004 - 5:58pm

Ettie and Gerben stayed over tonight, and in the morning my parents came to visit us.

We had coffee together, and then we went to see the Haarlem Organ Show. This is a fair organ show, at the Staten- and Prinsenbolwerken near the train station in Haarlem.

It was nice to spent the morning (and yesterday evening) with family; it was a pleasant day.

In the afternoon and evening I studied a bit.

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movies

Troy

Mon, 05/31/2004 - 10:08am

Troy.Ettie and Gerben came for dinner yesterday. The asperge-season just started, so we enjoyed the 'green gold'. After dinner we went to the movies. We went to Cinema Palace, a movie theater I haven't been before. It was really nice, much better than Brinkmann: clean, cosy and a great theater.

We saw Troy, a heroic epic about the Trojan war. Of course, the plot is well known from the Iliad, but the movie was still very dramatic and great to watch. I'd certainly recommended it, especially if you liked Gladiator.

The movie took about three hours and we were home around midnight.

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dailylife

Martijn's birthday

Sun, 05/30/2004 - 8:45am

Martijn 30 years.Martijn celebrated his 30th birthday yesterday.

His party was in Florin Utrecht, a pub in the center of the city. Jelly and I travelled together to Utrecht by train. There was a really nice mixture of old friends and new people at the party; it was really nice to talk to so many people.

Later that evening we went to "Stairway To Heaven", a hardrock café which was founded by Henk Westbroek, a Dutch politician/singer/bar owner. This place was for dancing, which we did of course. It was a great evening.

Marjolijn and André gave me a ride to Haarlem (thanks a lot!) and I was home at 2:30 o'clock.

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dailylife

Project getting ready

Sat, 05/29/2004 - 10:41am

The application we have been working on the last three weeks is almost ready. It has to be finished Tuesday, which won't be a problem.

In the evening I went out for a drink with Joris. It was great fun; the weather was excellent and we sat in an outdoor cafe all evening. I was home around 2:30 o'clock.

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chess

20.000 emails

Fri, 05/28/2004 - 9:31am

The project is getting ready. Yesterday night I ran a so-called "stress-test" on the application. I flooded it with fake-consumers all through the night, to see if the application would stay up & alive, and it did. It's a nice idea that it can survive so many visitors.

A side effect was that in the morning my mailbox had almost 20.000 e-mails, all generated by the application.

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Deutsch

Das Präteritum

Tue, 05/25/2004 - 5:35am

Yesterday's lesson was a fun evening. We revised our knowledge on the past tenses in German, das Präteritum and das Perfekt.

At work it's getting busy now. I'm discussing last minutes changes to external interfaces, keeping the developers busy, talking a lot with the firm that delivers the HTML layout, making sure the server is ready and configured, requesting SSL certificates... hardly any programming this time. It's great fun though -- I enjoy work like this.

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dailylife

Easy weekend

Sat, 05/22/2004 - 3:32pm

It's an easy weekend. It started nicely yesterday evening when Mieke, my mother, came for dinner. It was very cosy.

My father is coming back from his business trip to Bulgaria tomorrow morning; I hope he won't have problems because of the train accident yesterday.

I've been studying for my Java exam all day today, which I enjoy quite a lot.

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