Guus Bosman

This afternoon I'm doing some work to assist another team. It's relaxed, working from home, and things are going smoothly so far.

I went for a long run this morning. Last Thursday I ran to DC from here for the first time, and on the way back to our house there's a 1 mile stretch that's entirely uphill. It's not a super steep incline, but it's hard at the end of a long run. Oh well, a good exercise.

The last two days we have been eating turkey sandwiches. The 10 lbs turkey would have been enough to feed 6 adults at least, so we'll continue to have turkey for a few more days. Real turkey breast is so much better than from a deli... so delicious.

We had a great Thanksgiving Day. In the morning we put some of our Haarlem and Amsterdam maps on the wall and the house is getting cozy.

We started cooking in the afternoon, and Pascal and his daughter Hanna joined us for dinner. A classic Thanksgiving meal, with a 10 lbs turkey as main course. Hanna enjoyed the home-made apple sauce. It was a great evening, topped off with a long walk through Arlington. Almost all stores and business were closed; some will open very early tomorrow for "Black Friday" shopping specials. Not for us!

This weekend we moved to our new apartment in Arlington. It took three trips with the car, including a dedicated drive for the plants, but all our belongings are now in the new house. It will take several days before everything is on its right place, and we have quite a few boxes from Durham still to unpack, but it's definitely 'liveable' already.

Today Verizon FiOS was installed, high-speed internet access, and a window in the living room was replaced.

Our good friends Daniël and Erika are blessed with a baby boy!

Várdai Botond was born on November 20 at 12.56 PM. He was 56 cm long and weighted 7 pounds.

Congratulations!

A few days ago Sasha was featured in the alumni spotlight of her university, a great honor!

Read the interview here: http://econ.duke.edu/news/archive/2011/11/09/tabova

We spent the Saturday relaxing and doing small chores. I changed our address with a lot of companies and spent some time doing insurance paperwork. All this with my new laptop; the new hard disk arrived and I completed configuring the laptop for the most part.

In the late afternoon we went to the Pentagon City mall and did some shopping. We had a bite there and then did grocery shopping in Clarendon. We went to our new apartment for a little bit; we'll be back there tomorrow to put together the Ikea furniture we bought last weekend.

I arrived in DC last night, and two hours later the Zane family arrived from New Jersey. We had a nice evening together. They are staying in our D.C. apartment; we went for the first time to our new apartment in Arlington.

I woke up at 7.30 am, which felt quite early after a week on the East Coast and after a late night yesterday.

Sunday we went to the new apartment to unpack some more boxes. Slowly but surely it starts to look liveable.

Yesterday I arrived in the San Francisco area for work. It was nice to meet the people in our office here. We're staying in Palo Alto.

I went for a run over the Stanford campus earlier; it's easy to go for a 6.00 am run when there's a three hour time difference. On my way to the office now.

For several days now my Firefox browser has been freezing up every now and then. The browser will try to connect to a website but never get there. Sometimes it succeeds after a minute or two, sometimes it gets stuck completely. It feels as if the internet connection is dead, but Internet Explorer and other internet applications are not affected.

First I blamed the anti-virus software, but the problem occurred even after I disabled it.

Finally I got around to Googling it, and thankfully other people were experiencing the problem as well. The fix is simple. On the about:config page cange the settings for

network.http.max-connections-per-server

back to 30. In Firefox 5 the default was value 30, in version 6 and 7 it was increased to 256, which caused the problem for me. More information here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2321783.

Yesterday I left work at 6.00 pm, and from our metro stop (Foggy Bottom) I walked towards Sasha's work. We walked home together. The police had close off Dupont Circle, so we waited to see if the President would come by. A few minutes later we saw him and the motorcade, always an impressive sight. He was on his way to a fundraiser.

We had a great dinner at Pizza Paradizo on P Street, and then we went for a walk through a part of Georgetown that we had never been before. We ended the evening in Barnes and Noble on M Street, where we browsed some books but didn't buy anything.