Guus Bosman

A brightly colored fire hydrant, in Arlington, VA.

For a long time, I wanted to take a picture of such a device, but I never found the right moment -- the light not good, a car parked too close...

Last Saturday was a good day for pictures. You can see that the November sun is creating long shadows.

I had a very pleasant birthday yesterday. During the day I received a lot of e-mails, comments, phone-calls from friends and family, very nice.

In the evening we went of for dinner to a really nice restaurant: Cafe Belga, a Belgium restaurant in the Eastern Market district of DC. It was great to have real Belgium fries with mayonaise, and the cheese croquette.

This in combination with the triple beers made for an excellent evening.

Today is my 27th birthday! We celebrated it together this morning, and Sasha gave me a really nice present -- a tripod for the digital camera.

There was a chocolate cake, and a lot of mail and e-mail as well -- thanks everybody for the birthday wishes!

It is also exactly a year ago that I started my new job, so double the reason to celebrate today.

We had dinner tonight in a local sports bar, the Hokie House. Blacksburg is a real university town, and the night life seems to be dominated by the university population.

We had two shows two forms of ID to get in, and we got both our hands stamps with a big black stamp to show the bartender we're over 21 years old and thus allowed to order alcohol.

The name Hokie Bar refers to the name of the mascot of Virginia Tech. It's some kind of bird, some people say it's a rather unfortunate turkey, other say it's just a bird.

More about the hokie.

Today are the elections for Virginia's new governor.

In addition a new lieutenant governor and attorney general will be elected. All three races remain very close.

Campaining has been intense, and the ubiquitous signs color many gardens and public places.

Monday is Mieke's birthday, and in the Netherlands it's Monday already so:

Congratulations from both of us and a happy birthday!

This is the first weekend in a long time that I am really free, and it's an awesome feeling.

I'm sitting in front of our building, in the sun with a nice cup of coffee. Since a few weeks there is community-provided wireless internet here.

I called some friends and family using Skype, something I should do more often, and I worked on some pictures I took this week. It's a perfectly lazy afternoon and the weather is just amazing today.

This weekend I went out to experiment with my new camera.

I had never made pictures before in "manual" mode, and it was really interesting. You can configure the shutter time, the field depth and a couple of other parameters that influence the resulting picture.

The funny thing is that my father did a similar experiment yesterday. Like father, like son.

Yesterday I had to pick up something so I worked from home in the morning. I was a bit out my usual morning habits, and for one reason or the other I forgot to drink coffee. Typically, I'd arrive at Starbucks at 8:20 and get a coffee, which usually lasts until 10.30 or so.

Sure, enough, around 10.30 am I started getting a headache. It's a sign that I'm really addicted. I know I am, but it's different to actually feel the cold-turkey pain... There hasn't been a day in the last months that I didn't drink at least three cups of coffee.

Is it a sign of addiction when you look at your drink and think: "did they start making those large coffees in smaller cups?"

This morning when I went to work the metro stopped for a minute in the tunnel as it sometimes does when there's a train ahead. I noticed how quiet it is in the metro at 8.15 -- nobody talks. If you take the metro home in the evening it's quite different.

One of the projects that took most of my time this summer is almost out of UAT, and it will go into production next weekend.

Things in the news here are the indictment of Mr. Libby, the funeral of Rosa Parks and since today a publication of a e-mails by Michael Brown, the former FEMA director who resigned after the criticism on FEMA's handling of Katrina's aftermath.

This weekend our apartment building switched from airconditioning to heating -- right on time, it's really getting cold.

Yesterday Milan, Sasha's father had a birthday and today it's my grandmother's birthday too: congratulations to both of you.

We saw Seinfeld yesterday on TV, absolutely brilliant. I especially love Kramer a "hilariously outrageous, completely insane character", who almost killed a whale in yesterday's episode.