Root canal

Last Monday, all of a sudden, one of my teeth started hurting. Of course, this is nothing special, it happens. And usually it passes in a day or two. Not this time.

It just started to hurt more and more. I pride myself on the fact that I don't complain about physical things easily. But yesterday, it hurt quite bad, even after I had 5 glasses of whisky with a couple of friends and a couple of painkillers, it kept hurting. I didn't sleep until 2 AM, and woke up again around 5 AM. Not much for sleep. So today, since I coulnd't focus at work, and even the Ibuprofen (600 mg) didn't do much, I called the dentist. Luckily he had an open spot in his agenda for me.

He told me I had an infected root canal. One of my teeth (or its nerve) is quite dead, and dead nerves don't do anything, but they still shed some liquids in the rootcanals. Mine was full and that hurts (bad in this case). So he took out a drill and opened it up, which relieved me enormously. Thank God for dentists (in this case)!

The bad thing is that I have to go back there a couple of times so he can get all the crap out, and fill that teeth up again. So that's going to cost me several hours. But hey! It doesn't hurt anymore!!!

Minsk report (3/3)

Day 4:

The fourth day consisted entirely of the trip home. We had to get up around 10 (tops) to get to the airport in time, and we went to bed after six, so that was hard. Of course, as I am used to, I woke up around 8.30, took a long long shower and packed my bags. I took a couple of pictures of the view from my room.

After that, I was 5 minutes too late for breakfast, so I only had a cup of coffee. After that, I still had not found any of my collegues, so I walked around the hotel like a ghost for a bit. After an hour I met Max, and we just sat around the lobby for a while. Alexei (one of the Belarusian guys) was at the hotel around 11.00 and still Max and I were the only ones there.

Everyone was downstaires and checked out at around 12 o'clock, and we went to the airport then. We should fly around 14.30, and it was a 45 minute drive. Just enough time to check in, see the Tax Free shop, and go airborne.

Of course, when we got to Minsk Airport, and the guys that dropped us off left, we noticed that we had a three hour delay. Bad weather at Frankfurt. Shit...
Especially shit, since Minsk Airport has not much entertainment, only one little restaurant, so we sat there for a while.

The menu came along, someone noticed Shashlik, we'll have six. Coffee? Make it six. Bottle of water? Six as well. So we had a very good lunch and then we waited some more.

After hours, we were allowed to check in, which took very very long, and after customs, there was the tax-free shop. Since I already had a bottle of Kryshtal Vodka (the best of belarusian vodka) I went out for something else. In the shop I found a 10 years old Bushmills (Irish Whiskey) and a bottle of Becherovka (Czechian liquor).
Compared to regular shops, the whiskey had a 42% discount, and Becherovka was cheaper than it is in the Czech Republic.

After all was said and done, the airplane left with a 3.5 hour delay. The flight was easy, but Frankfurt was still catching up on delays. So we missed our transfer, the next flight to Amsterdam was cancelled and there were about 500 people in line at the ticketbox. Flight to Schiphol had four tickets available, but we were with six.
So, we (the boss, Jan Hein) decided to rent 2 cars and drove to Den Bosch from Frankfurt. Best solution, because it would take us home faster than flying and the two who got left behind didn't have to wait till the next day and then hope for an early flight.
We raced home, and just hit the 190 km/h with the two Ford Focusses we rented.

We got home around one o'clock. Tired, but satisfied and happy, I just crashed in my bed. Finally, with Anneke next to me.

The best thing about this day? The fact that waiting in Minsk for almost four hours, waiting for luggage that didn't show up for 90 minutes and missing our flight (with only 3 hours of sleep), we were still having fun, joking around and making fun about everything.

All in all, we had a lovely time, it was useful for connecting with the Minsk Team, useful as evaluation of the first three months of cooperation, and clubbing.

Thanks boss!

Minsk report (2/3)

Day 3:

Although clubbing till morning light is quite hard if you have to work next day, we did just exactly that. On day 3 we had plans to finish the evaluation of our cooperation with the Lectric Minsk team. Max (a collegue) and I were awake reasonably early, and when we wanted to go to the meeting, Frank (the project leader) was still in a booze coma. So we went without him to Belhard.

The meeting went reasonably quickly, since we had saved the shortest points of the agenda for this morning, and the bulk of the work was already done. After a couple of hours we were done, so we had a 'quick' lunch. At least, that was the plan. The waiter at the restaurant told us he could give us four steaks in 20 minutes, but after 35 minutes, the table was still empty. All of a sudden he didn't understand English as well as he did before...

When we got our steaks, we ate them in 3 minutes, and went to the bus to go to Dudutki (an open air museum). Dudutki shows the way of life in Belarus in the days of yore. This meant manual labor, a baker, a potter, a smith and so on. The funny thing was that the things Belarusians did are not that different from the way things went on here. Making butter, woodcutting, pottery, blacksmithing, more or less the same. They even had a windmill. The strange thing about this was that it all looked older than it was. Not to be disrespectful, but things industrialized a bit slower in Belarus. An example:

A dutch windmill of 1740 and a Belarusian windmill of about 1800.

At Dudutki, the museum, the showed us how they made their Moonshine long ago (moonshine being the illegal drink that almost every farmer made a couple of decades ago). It smelled like a running engine, but I thought it didn't taste like much, except alcohol. The custom is to eat something after drinking Samagon(ka), but the options were limited. At the first stop we could eat a rye sandwich with honey and pickle, and the second stop offered rye sandwich with onions and pork fat. Not my cup of tea, but I had a couple of Samagons nonetheless.

After the tour we ate at the museam and had some traditional farmers food. Potato 'pancakes', sausages, and regular pancakes, with beer. That was very ok. We had a very good time there, and talked to all the guys from Belhard for a while, as well as their managers. Good to get to know eachother.

We left for the city after dinner, and agreed to go clubbing with the Minsk team. They would take us to a different club than we were at the nights before. They took us to The White Tower or Belaya vezha (spelling differs). The club was awesome! Really good looking interior, good music with a live DJ. The only drawback was that it was Wednesday night, so not too many people there. We had a lot of fun, especially when the bottles of vodka came out!
Of course, I had way too much to drink, and after several hours we went out to go to the Max Show club again. The Minsk team was not too fond of that, because the club has a bit of a reputation.
We had lots of wodka again, danced till morning light, and paid a cabby way too much to take us to a MacDonalds, since we all were hungry like a horse. After that, we went to the hotel for a well deserved sleep (for a few hours).

Minsk report (1/3)

So, I have been back for a couple of days already, but I have not found the time to blog about my trip to Minsk, so here it goes.

Day 1:

On Monday, my manager picked me up in Den Bosch at 4.30 AM to go the Schiphol Airport. From there we went to Frankfurt Airport, to transfer to Minsk from there. Flying was boring, but nothing special. Time to read a book...

We were picked up at the hotel by the managers from Belhard, that is the company from which we hire 4 developers. Minsk Airport is about 50 kilometers outside the city, in the middle of nowhere. It is one of those 'communist' buildings, big, impressive, but not functional and almost entire empty and deteriorating.

We drove to the city, and on the road you see some of the apparant contradictions that make the country. We drove a normal car, but sometimes you saw a Porsche Cayenne, and the next thing you saw was a horse and carriadge on the highway.

When we got to the hotel we dropped off our luggage and had a couple of beers at the hotel bar. We stayed in a business hotel with very basic rooms, but with 3 bars, shops, a restaurant and a striptease club.

At about 5 o'clock we went to the company there and met up with the developers. I already knew 2 of them in person, and the other 2 from email and skype, but seeing each other always does something for connecting with them. We had pizza on top of the building and stepped out on the roof for some views of Minsk.

The look of the city is hard to compare with anything I have ever been to, since it looks like eastern Berlin, but even more grey, and without billboards and neon.
After pizzas and beer we went into a bar next door, for some coffee, and to a club after that. We had fun, beers, vodkas and danced until about 4 in the morning. The club is inside a cinema, and had loads of good looking women in there (we learned that a lot of them were prostitutes from our belarusian collegues).

Day 2:

After about 4 hours of sleep, a couple of coffees and breakfast I was up and running again, to go into a meeting with our collegues. The two meetings we had that day took from 10 in the morning to 5.30 PM, so that war hard for all us.

After the meetings, which were very effective and have a very positive outcome, we went to Raubichi, for shashlik. Very good food, lots of beer (although the first was warm...) and some toasts with vodka (about five or six).

Raubichi is one of the only places in Belarus where you can ski. It has some ski jumping ramps, but they are not in use anymore, and are just standing there until they fall apart. The shashlik place belonged to a hotel that has something to do with Dynamo Minsk.

We stayed there till (I guess) around midnight, and went clubbing again after that. Same place, same situation.

The contact Lectric has in Belarus joined us in the club, but (since he is 66) fell a sleep on a chair, and didn't see the strip show that was performed on the dancefloor... too bad for him.

I was a bit more drunk than the night before, so my collegue Max and I went to the hotel a bit more early. When we got to the hotel (after getting ripped off by a cabby, it cost us $4 instead of the expected $2) we were sobered up a little bit and decided to check out the striptease club I mentioned earlier. Nice...

Minsk

Tomorrow morning I will be picked up by my boss to go to the airport. Since we have a department in Minsk (Belarus) we are going there for meetings, evaluation of the first couple of months. Thursday evening we will already be back, so no company holiday in it.


We have 2 days of work and one day of being tourist. Visits to the National Museum and the National Library (above) are planned.



I have had a lot of communication with the developers there, because I did the technical 'guidance' for four projects already. So they promised me some wodkas, and beers. Hope I don't get alcohol poisoning :-)
Really looking forward to go there and see a bit of the city. It is not a city I would normally go to for a holiday, so the opportunity is really great.

Japanese food

A couple of years ago, I didn't like fish, at all. The only thing I would eat was a herring, which is typically dutch. But since I met Anneke I have changed that a bit. Her family has roots in/on Urk.

Urk was a small fisherman's island in the Zuiderzee, but since the second world war, the sea has been degraded to a big lake, with a huge 'dijk' around it, to sever all direct connections to the North Sea. It has been poldered in. That means that land has been created around it, and now it is just another farmer's town in the Dutch polder.


But, because of the fisherman's heritage, her family has a reunion every few years, when they go out to have a big fishing trip with an ancient boat. I have never been on the trip, since it more of the ancient generation. Her parents come home with massive loads of fresh fish, which I didn't like. But more and more I have come to like it, so now I even enjoy Japanese food. A lot!


We had our Lectric team-trip to a Japanese restaurant a couple of months ago, and now my dad quit his job to start his own imterim automotive management company (link will follow, when the site is live). He has worked for Toyota his entire life, and since he helped my sister and me with buying our houses (helped us very much at that, thanks again), we decided we had to do something for this occasion. Japanese food it was.

We had a great dinner at Pettelaar Paradijs. It is a local Japanese Restaurant, which had a big and famous name 2 decades ago, and is struggling to get it's fame back. The quality of the food is high, the organization is pretty awful, but it is still good price/quality.



We had ourselves a good menu, and were stuffed when we left the place. Love it. Good fish, good meat, good everything. Recommended.

We had fun, laughed at other people and ourselves.

Next dinner is planned near Eindhoven, somewhere in July, to have loads of steak at a grill restaurant.

Computer stuff

On Monday and Wednesday I had to train several users of a site we (Lectric Internetsolutions) are building. Since I (for some reason completely unknown to me) happen to be quite OK with people, I had to go there, although I am a developer and not a trainer. Things went well, the 'students' picked up on the Sitecore way quite quickly.

Today I went to the Microsoft DevDays in Amsterdam (RAI Conference Center). I tried to go to 5 sessions/lectures, but since a collegue had my ticket and he was stuck in traffic I missed the
first one on WPF.

The second session I planned to see was about Linq 2.0, but I went to the AJAX session instead, since everyone else was going there as well. Quite interesting, but a little bit boring in the end.. I almost dozed off. Dino Esposito presented this session, but since he is not of "English nativity" he talked a bit like they do in "Allo Allo".

Third session was about XNA game programming, (I intended to visit Silverlight, but games have a strange pull on me). This was the best session of the day. The guy who did this one is an English tutor from Hull University. He had a lot of very corny jokes (my line of work :-) ).
He was quite enthousiastic as well, which made it easy and fun to go to.

The fourt (and last one I visited) was Silverlight part 2. Interesting, but not really new information. A lot of things going on were a bit out of my league. Not so much in capability, but more in line of interest and professional usefulness.

The list of gadgets scored:

• 5 pens
• 1 fluffy parrot
• 1 rubber ducky
• 1 ice cream
• 1 tin of peppermints
• 1 calendar
• 1 inflatable chair
• 3 cans of Red Bull

The only stand that didn't want to give me anything was Lectric's. But since I already work there, they don't have to leave a positive impression with me ;-)

The best thing from the DevDays was the XNA session. I bought a book about it afterwards, and though I don't own an XBox 360 (yet?) I really want to get programming. It works very very well. It is free, it is multi platform, and mostly because it is easy. Usually I have great plans but nothing ever happens because I do not know where to start. But with this, it should be easy. Especially since the entire XNA source code for Mech Commander 2 is freely available on MS' download pages.

Maybe after I get back from Minsk I find a bit of time to start doing this all. Another thing on the list of things to do... As well as work through all my other development books, and the ones I like to have/buy.

The Dutch are pussies...

And why? Because they can't stand anything.

Last year we had one (1) snow storm. A snow storm, meaning the wind was there and a bit of snow fell. Wheather alarm, traffic jam galore, trains didn't go anywhere. And what happened? nothing actually, but everyone got so careful that the entire country went off the radar.

In January, there was a storm. Sounds boring, as it was. Another wheather alarm. A couple of roof tiled fell down, some trees, but in the end, all roads closed, trains were cancelled. Pussies. After it all passed I just wondered what would happen next...

That was a couple of weeks ago. We had a slight drought. Meaning, it didn't rain in six weeks. No big deal, there was enough water in the ground so crops didn't die. B ut then, after about 45 days, rain fell. It was not the problem, but in the six weeks before, a lot of dust landed on the roads and with the rain, it could get slippery. Wheater alarm. Can you believe it? A wheather alarm, because of DUST ON A ROAD?!!??! Absolutely nothing was scary, slippery or whatever. Just making people scared of nothing.

And then AGAIN last week. It was warm outside. Wheather alarm. The government advised people to stay indoors, and if they had to go out, to take bottles of water in the car. It was a friggin' 27 degrees Celsius. That's all. The entire world suffers from heat at least like that for seasons, and here, people get scared of one damn day.

So, yes I am frustrated with the government, and more with the people here. Everytime something happens that is just a little bit out of the ordinary. People get scared shitless, and alarms go off. Extra news broadcasts to show all the traffic jams...

Why can't people behave like they are sane or responsible every now and then. When it's hot, just go out, almost everyone has airconditioning, and if not, open the window. When it is 'slippery', just drive a bit more careful, nothing will go wrong.

That's just it. I got a bit tired of the news and stuff. Venting...... Done

Targets 2

A while ago I posted about the targets I was setting for myself, just to get things done. I think it is time for an update, since it has been a couple of months.

The list was:
Building a site that is more than just a blog.

1. Build a website for my father's soon to be existig company.
2. Inform myself about cars, and buying one.
3. Do the last MCSD Training, to get to the next title.
4. Finish Command and Conquer 3 (NOD Campaign).
5. Finish some other computer games.
6. Read a couple of books that have been sitting on the shelf for the last 4 years.
7. Try to sell some stuff on Marktplaats and/or eBay.
8. Listen to all the music I have.
9. Go to the cinema with Anneke to see 300.
10. Fix my bicycle.
11. Really get into whisky tasting, so I can recognize and describe tastes and smells a bit more.
12. Read all the magazines about site building I have bought the last 6 months.
13. Get my finances a bit more ordered.
14. Start working with Microsoft Silverlight.
15. Move the site to a hosting party with SQL Server support, instead of MS Access.

To be honest, not much has been done from the list. I have been busy at work, and with loads of other stuff. Some things are getting somewhere, but I have to say that I am not satisfied with my own efficiency in this.

I have sold some books online, but most of them were Role Playing Games, since my school books turn out to be quite out dated. We used some books that weren't in print anymore when I was still in school, and these books were used 3 years ago. Not much chance of selling them.
I also have been listening to much much music, but not everything by far. My collection has grown fast, so I can barely keep up.
I went to the Cinema with Anneke, but to see Spiderman 3 and Pan's Labyrinth, not 300. But that counts, I guess.
The whisky tasting is going pretty well, but that's mostly because it is fun.

That's about it. Some things can be removed from the list, since my dad doesn't need a site anymore, he has someone else for that, that would do it (almost) for free...

Another couple of items can be added to the list:

1. Get a couple more quotes on the price of fixing our roof.
2. Get my car's radiator fixed. It is the weakest point of the things, and should be repaired.

Trying to get more things off the list again...

All things happening

So, a couple of things went down this weekend. Not as much as expected, but still...

First of all, the most important thing: Anneke has a job!

She is still graduating at the AMC (Amsterdam Medical Centre) for her Master of Oncology. But last Friday she had job interview for a position as a lab. technician, which she got!!! I am incredibly happy for her (and myself, she tends to stress about these things :-) ).

Friday night, we had my cousin's wedding. She is of the "black socks church", which means as much as they are a little more modern than Amish. And since those people breed like rabbits, and that results in about 200 people there, with about 50 screaming kids. Quite boring...

Saturday I had planned to go to the Scotland Festival (about which I blogged earlier). But just before we (Thomas and I) went we called and decided the Festival would have to do without us. We didn't feel like driving for an hour to see some geeks in dresses, sheep herding and bagpipes. We had the great idea to have our own little Scotland Festival somewhere this week (focussed on the Highlands, Islay and Skye).

We had a little introduction, with a The Arran (10 years old) and a Tobermory (10 years old as well). Those two will probably end up high in the list for my "Cheap Scotch" project.

We went to Krommenie for my dad-in-law's birthday, but since the government is doing major renovations on the main highways in the Netherlands, we had to take a 50 kilometer detour, along with about half a million other people. It took us 3 hours to get to Krommenie, which usually is done in about 75 minutes. The birthday was nice. Talked to a big part of the family, had a couple of drinks, and found out I was really tired, so I went to bed "early", it was 1.30 AM.

Yesterday was a quiet day. I just sat on the couch reading a comic book (The Punisher MAX, volume 3, very brutal).
In the evening we had a delayed celebration of Anneke's job.

Whisky Project Status:

The Arran 10
Old Pulteney 12
Smokehead
Tobermory 10
Glen Grant 10
Glenfiddich 12

Tasting will be done somewhere this week.