Guus Bosman

Today I am travelling back to Virginia, and I am looking forward to it.

Last weekend was very busy, and now I've been away for a week... time to spend some time together. It's a long weekend, Monday is July 4th, a national holiday in the US.

It has been a productive week -- we finished a proposal for a large new part of the project, and looking at the scope of another, smaller, part. It will be useful to spend some time in Virginia though; there is some work that needs to be done in the next weeks which I need to make sure happens on time.

In Haarlem I had a subscription to The Economist, a magazine that I really enjoy. When I moved the U.S., I asked The Economist to transfer my subscription to the new address, but I never received the magazine there. I kind of neglected it for a couple of months, but a week ago I decided to ask them about it.

This morning:

"Dear Mr. Bosman,

We received your complaint that you have not received all of your issues.

We have checked into the delivery problem for you. It appears the account was placed on a postal hold. The post office notified us your issues were undeliverable as addressed.

We have corrected your address to include your full apartment number. Your account has been extended for any issues not sent. Your subscription is being restarted with the July 09 issue. The new expiration date on your account is now November 12, 2005.

Thank you for alerting us to this problem."

Very happy!

A few hours ago a new princess was born, a new daugther to the Dutch heir to the trone. We were having breakfast, and enjoyed a quiet morning after a hectic Saturday. I worked a couple of hours yesterday, even went into the office in the evening.

It's still very warm here (86 Fahrenheit, or 30 Celcius), but not as hot as yesterday.

Tomorrow morning I'll travel to Puerto Rico with the 7am flight, to stay a week in San Juan.

Today was a very long day at work. A major part of the project that I am working on will be going "into production" this weekend.

The final tests are now being executed, and that means we are having long phone conversations until late at night. I wouldn't want to do this very often, but it's fun every now and then: everybody eating together in the office and working to get the application ready for prime-time.

It's been enough though, and I'm packing up. Another long day tomorrow.

There was a long article in the Washington Post last week about the World Bank and people that work there.

Developmental economics, it's called, and hundreds of World Bankers have PhDs in it. The idea is simple and noble: The world is very rich and very poor, and this disparity is both morally wrong and, in practical terms, dangerously destabilizing. But how to lift up 1.2 billion people living on a dollar a day?

This is what World Bankers think about. In a city obsessed with political maneuvering, real estate values, traffic congestion, baseball, summer humidity, maybe all in the same hour, the World Bankers are a tribe apart.

I am back in Puerto Rico. The requirements document for my project was signed off on time, something I was rather proud of, but there are additional things to do, and we're also starting with the design of the program.

I arrived around midnight at the airport yesterday. One of the passengers on the plane was Cynthia Olavarria, the Puerto Rican candidate at the Miss Universe competition in Thailand a few weeks ago. She did quite well, a second place I believe.

I left from JFK, which was interesting because Sunday there was a Puerto Rican parade in New York. There were a lot of people in the plane who were traveling back home after the party.

I've stayed in the Holiday Inn quite a few nights now, and that made checking in very simple. They gave me a nice room on the 5th floor, 501.

We are leaving Jonathan & Irena's place now, and going towards Penn Station. Sasha will go back to D.C., I'll travel to JFK airport to take a 7:30 flight to San Juan.

We arrived about an hour ago at Jonathan & Irena's, in New Jersey.

The busride was about 4,5 hours, there was quite some traffic.

I worked in the bus -- no wireless internet of course, but a lot of e-mails to go through, and I was working on a document.

Saturday night we went for a drink in lobby of the El San Juan hotel, a few minutes walking from our place. Because we had a heavy lunch, excellent hamburgers in the Holiday Inn's restaurant, we wanted just a small bite so we had a salad and soup, with a glass of red wine.

The wine was very delicious, and we were having a really good time looking at the people in the lobby. There is a large nightclub in the El San Juan, so we were watching the dressed up people going out for dancing. White clothes are all the rage in San Juan, it seems.

Went the waitress served me my soup, she accidentily hit my wine glass and I got the full contents over my clothes. A rather dramatic incident, and I was afraid I might not be able to wash it out of my clothes at all. The supervisor told me I could borrow a shirt from them and they would immediately dry clean my stuff. Because our hotel was so close, I choose to go back to our room and changed clothes and had a very quick shower. When I came back the waitress had brought me a new glass of wine, and a warm onion soup.

I was very nicely surprised that when I picked up my clothes the next day, they were completely clean.

Yesterday's weather forecast indicated showers for today, but when we woke up the sun was shining brightly.

We went for breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. It was nice to be there with Sasha, and I introduced her to the intricacies of ordering breakfast in San Juan. The main point is: "you cannot beat the system".

The waiters are very friendly, but also very, very slow, and the key is that no matter what you try, having breakfast will take you a long time. That's fine for in the weekend like this, but it took me a while to get used to it during the week, when I have only 30 minutes to have my breakfast. It's a real challenge to get more than one cup of coffee in that half hour. This morning we stayed longer of course, and I managed to get three cups of coffee, a record.

Around noon we went to the beach. The hotel is located on "Isla Verde", an area with very nice long beaches (much better than Condado, where we stayed a few weeks ago). My skin is, as usual, pretty white and I've been to the beach only once this year, so we took a lot sunblock and hired an umbrella. Sure enough, I burned my shoulders, but only a little bit and just my shoulders this time.

The water is very warm here, and there were good waves. It was windy, which made it possible for us to stay a bit longer at the beach -- it would have been to hot otherwise. We went for a swim twice, and we both studied a little bit; Sasha her French and I worked on my Spanish.