Work setup

This is what I look at for roughly 36 hours a week. It's a good thing I have to tidy my desk every night before I leave, because otherwise I would be swamped in papers.

Oh, and I need a bigger monitor. The left one is used to access a developer environment which runs our production environment (don't ask). The right one is for office and e-mail. Applications on the right can span to the left. But those on the left cannot spill-over to the right. And as always with software, there is so much anger and hate going round. To minimize this, I dutifully follow http://we.hates.software and Worse Than Failure.

Zaaf

My old phone

I just received a new camera phone. It allows of to post straight to my blog. So here is a picture of my old phone, taken with my new one. 

The only thing I wanted from T-Mobile was to lower my monthly subscription fee to €5,-. But no, they had to sent me the Sony Ericsson K800i for free, including a bluetooth headset. Well who am I to say no to that.

Zaaf

Hear who swims there, kids

Someone past me this link of the Saint Nicolas welcoming parade in the town where we live: Piet Overboard.

Zaaf

Chess master

Last week my seven-year-old participated in the school chess championships for primary schools in our town. This was a cross primary school event where 24 teams of eight different schools bested their chess playing skills against each other. Each team consisted of four persons. My son's team was the on average youngest team with an average age of 7. And although they ended 23th of the 24, I still think he did a remarkable job: 4.5 of the team's 9 points where his. Of his 7 games, he won 4 and drew only one.

But the most remarkable feature was that he only played 10, 11 and 12 year olds. Giving away only 2.5 out of 7 points to kids that are at least 50% older than you is reason enough to make me proud. And the first time ever he came in contact with a chess board was two months ago.

Yes, I'm a proud parent,

Zaaf

Double counting kid

Last weekend, on Sunday morning, the 7-year old crawled into our bed and told me what he had been up to that morning. Turned out he was just playing with figures and doing some "double counting" as he called it. He basically calculated the powers of 2 up till 256. So he went 1 + 1 = 2; 2 + 2 = 4; 4 + 4 = 8, et cetera. But the interesting part of this was that instead of starting from 1 he started from a quarter.

He must be destined for a life as a programmer (or an accountant)

Zaaf