Guus Bosman

software engineering director


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ourhouse

A new front door

A new front door was installed today! We're very happy with it.

The door we had until today was the original 1967 one, and it was at the end of its useful live. Very drafty and it made the downstairs cold. Because our thermostat isn't too far from the door, it would make the rest of the house overly warm. The new door has glass windows, with privacy glass, which gives a little more light in our hallway. And no more noisy and cold mail slot.

The installers came at 10.00 am, and they took about 4 hours to do the full install. At the end I discovered some concrete that needed to be repaired, so I drove to Home Depot to get a patch and they used that to finalize the step.

It was great working with these guys; a marked difference compared to the previous project five years ago.

Leo and Adrian were quite excited to see all the machines and instruments. When they got home from AMH they could hardly wait to get changed and check it all out. The contractors had a power cable going through the window to the front yard, that was interesting for them to see.

After the work was done, the contractor's car didn't start. I helped try to kick-start, but that didn't work either so they had to call their boss.

sports

Ten years of running

Now 2018 is behind us I have 10 full years of data on my running.

I started tracking my mileage and speeds in January 2009 and have been faithfully recording my runs since then: a combined 3,737 miles during 804 runs. In an average year I ran 80 times, with an average length of 4.7 miles.

Some observations:

  • My average mileage is 374 miles per year, so 7.2 miles per week or 31 miles per month. Or 1.02 miles per day.
  • The years after Nora was born, I ran more than average. Even in the year after the boys were born, in 2016, I ran a lot, but things have been slower since then. 2017 in particular was tough, with only 5 runs per month.
  • Thing were getting better last year. Even though I started doing more Pilates, which lowered my 2018 miles, I still made it to 339 miles.
  • My longest run ever was from the Dijkgatsbos to Middenmeer, 16 miles. My shortest run was 0 miles.
  • My average run is 4.7 miles. This make sense, since for years my training runs have been between 4 and 4.5 miles.
  • July through November is clearly the best period for running for me. December and February the worst -- funny enough January isn't too bad, the New Year's resolution effect I guess.
  • So in the average month I run 6 to 7 times -- in my top months sometimes up to 13 times a month. That might be a cool record to try to break.
  • Before 2009 I don't have as thorough data, but I do remember running in Haarlem and of course my first attempts in Durham, NC
  • Running brought me in some beautiful places. Some highlights? I ran with Gerben in Leeuwarden, many runs in the awesome William Umstead Park in North Carolina, on St Maarten, in Holland and Bulgaria, beautiful races in San Diego and Hickory -- too many to name. I ran with Nora in the stroller and later with the boys. I ran with the Raritan Valley Road Runners and the North Carolina Roadrunners Club. I ran races together with Sasha -- great times.
dailylife

Back home

It's Saturday morning, and there's a big pile of Lego and Duplo and toys in front of you...

This weekend there is no gymnastics so we slept in and are taking it easy today.

Yesterday I went back to work, a quiet day at the office due to the holidays. I've added photo's to the articles I wrote over the past 10 days, it's nice to work on that.

internet

EC2 instance unavailable

I moved my blog to EC2 last weekend and last night the instance stopped working for the first time.

"Design for failure", is the mantra, and I'll do some work on automated reboots when monitoring fails.

Seems like the httpd server went ran out of memory last night.

Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 8250 (httpd) score 37 or sacrifice child
Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Killed process 8250 (httpd) total-vm:526616kB,...
Dec 15 00:26:53 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: httpd invoked oom-killer...

books

Nora completed Veilig Leren Lezen

Nora completed Veilig Leren Lezen, a Dutch reading curriculum for first grade. It's the curriculum used by 75% of all Dutch kids to learn how to read and write.

I'm extremely proud. We started in February 2017, and in those 22 months Nora has learned how to read chapter books in Dutch, how to spell basic words and she expanded her vocabulary greatly. I remember that I had to tell her what a put was.

One of her favorite first books was Op is op by Annemarie Bon, who became one of her favorite authors. A big thank you to Mieke, who helped us with a lot of materials.

It's been fun for me to teach her. It's like homeschooling, I suppose. We did one or two sessions a week, mostly in the weekends. In the past few months she has been reading independently so wrapping up Kern 12 today was a formality, but a nice milestone.

plants

Putting up the Christmas tree, 2018

Yesterday morning after gymnastics we went to Home Depot to buy the tree. Like last year, we wanted a manageable size -- on that wouldn't be too dangerous if falling over -- and we found a fresh 5' tree that suited our needs.

Adrian took some branches from Home Depot ("baby boom") and Nora took random string of rope (which I secretly threw away a few hours later). After lunch we brought the tree inside, as promised, and then it was nap time. It took Leo a long time to fall sleep. I brought Nora to a birthday party in Clarendon and when I came back the boys were deep asleep.

After dinner we decorated the tree. The kids also played with the Dick Bruna nativity scene, always a favorite.

In the morning the boys were downstairs for a while... then I saw Adrian walking around with a dustpan. When I asked what happened, Leo explained that they were kicking the big blue exercise ball, it bounced off the fireplace and then hit the tree and broke one of the Christmas balls. "We waren erg geschrokken", said Leo. Other than that, no damage so far.

dailylife

Visiting Sinterklaas 2018

Saturday afternoon we went to the Dutch Embassy to visit Sinterklaas.

This year the boys have been really into the celebration, they understand it well now.

Nora was calm and collected, and has a conversation with Sinterklaas. Leo and Adrian didn't say a word, Leo was smiling all the time though.

After collecting the gift, Leo whispered: "Ik wil slapen" and so we left back to home.

internet

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

I just completed the exam for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, a certificate that shows I have basic knowledge about the different Amazon Web Service offerings.

The exam was relatively easy. I've been preparing for this conference for a while, and done quite a bit of studying on the various AWS products. I did study a few trial exams from Udemy.com, and those were helpful for questions on more basic stuff like the Billing and Support models -- the less technical topics.

Still, it's been a while since I had done an official test and I was a little nervous, and now I'm very happy I passed the test. "Certified individuals" also get access to a special area here at the re:Invent 2018 conference.

Topic: 

AWS re:Invent 8K Fun Run 2018

I'm attending a conference this week, and this morning there was a charity run. It was a fun morning. We walked 30 minutes from our hotel to the start of the race, did the race and then walked back -- so plenty of exercise.

I was wearing my E*TRADE T-shirt and halfway the race someone ran next to me and shared that he used to work at E*TRADE. In fact, someone I vaguely knew -- it was nice catching up with him for a few minutes.

Back in the MGM I finally had my first cup of coffee and a nice breakfast. Then immediately on to the first session of the day, on Amazon Prime Video technology.

Distance: 
5 miles
Duration: 
44 minutes
dailylife

Thanksgiving 2018

We had a lovely Thanksgiving meal with the Zane family and my cousin Eva.

More text later -- here are the pictures.

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