Guus Bosman

Daniël and I agreed last night that it's really inconvenient that the shops in the Netherlands close so early. In the States, Hungary, Bulgaria... everywhere the shops are open till after 18:00 o'clock, so people who work during the week are also able to go shopping.

Alas... not in Holland. The only exception is Thursday evening (in Haarlem) when many shops stay open till 21:00 o'clock. So it's always more lively in the city and I like Thursday evenings. Tonight I had to do the things I didn't have time for during the week. Somehow there's a lot of paperwork to arrange this week and I went to the municipality to get some official paper. That went pretty quick; the people at the civil service there are very friendly.

On of the things I have to arrange is my own fault. When I came back from Washington in October I forgot to turn in my "I94-W" form, a small sheet that had been stapled in my passport when I entered the States. Now I have to send it to an office in the States, along with proofs that I did return to the Netherlands. So I'll send my boarding pass from the return flight, a copy of my passport with the stamps that prove I was in Bulgaria, and some papers of my work.

For my work I came across a new Internet standard: the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P. This allows a website to inform its customers of its privacy policy: how does the website deal with the personal data of its users.

An important aspect of the standard is that the format is both human- and machine-readable. Internet Explorer 6.0 knows how to read this information for example (see the screenshot below). You can tell Internet Explorer what your preferences are, for example that you never want to give your e-mail address to sites that sell e-mail addresses to third parties. Your browser will then warn you if you enter such a website.

I've created a policy for Guus Bosman.nl, to see how it works. My privacy policy is pretty simple: I don't sell, share or give away information on my visitors to other people. However, the website uses "cookies", to keep track of logged in users and to remember your username. <

All this you can read in my Privacy Statement.

Quite a difference with yesterday, when I woke up nice and late: today the alarm went at 7:00 o'clock.

Today I'm going to Jerry's, where we'll play "Diplomacy", a game. I've never played it before, it's supposed to be really good.

When I came into our livingroom it smelly really nice of the hyacinth my mam gave me a week ago.

I managed to activate our fire alarm when I was cooking. I was cooking a hamburger on the small grill and it caused a lot of smoke. In that sense it's quite fortunate that we don't have an automatic sprinkler installation.

Mark, a colleague, borrowed me a very interesting book: "The PhotoShop Book for Digital Photographers"; I'm reading it now.