Alef Arendsen

With the risk of repeating myself, I’d like to point out that coming June 5th, we’re hosting a Java Meetup. This time with a few sessions. We’ll have Chris Male and Uri Boness talk about Solr, the open source enterprise search solution and we’ll have Iwein Fuld from SpringSource talk about tc Server.

The session are in stand-up format and will only last for 30 minutes, so there’s no reason not to join

For registration (which is required for attendance), go to the registration page and for more information on the agenda, have a look at Written by Alef in: Other |

Last Friday I went to a concert of one of my all time favorite Dutch bands ‘De Dijk’. The concert was in the Southern parts of Holland and that’s where the farmers grow lots of asparagus’ (or asparagi I guess). We took 1 kilo of fresh asparagi home the next day and I prepared a pretty nice salad with them for a barbecue later that day. Here goes:

• 500 gram of asparugs (white)
• Cherry tomatoes
• Red onions
• Forest onions (don’t have a clue how these are called in English)
• 4 eggs, boiled
• Green salad
• Olive oil, salt, pepper, mustard, mayonaise (for dressing)
• Ham, diced in small dices

Peel the eggs and separate the white from the yellow. Push the yellow through a siefe (a ‘zeef’ that is). This is a bit tedious, but creates nice crummy mass of yellow, which spreads nicely through the salad. Cut the egg white into small pieces.

Cut the asparagi in 3cm pieces and cook or steam them (I steamed mine for 25 minutes). Slice the tomaties and the onions.

Prepare a dressing from 3 parts of mayonaise, 2 parts olive oil and 1 part mustard. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix well.

Mix everything and add the dressing after you’re done. Let the salad rest for a while in the fridge.

I’ve been using my current TODO system for exactly one year now and I’m really happy to conclude that it works fabulously!

I’ve read all the books from The Seven Habits to Getting Things Done and took some advice from each and every one of those books, but never really adopted one specific TODO system. Getting Things Done, although supposedly quite light weight, is still too complex for me. I’ve also tried to use the Pomodoro technique for a little while a few months ago, but that also didn’t really prove very helpful.

What I’ve been doing in the last year is keep all my TODO in a moleskine booklet (or whatever you call that). On the right hand side, I keep my TODO items. The left pages are for notes and that’s also where I keep a bit of a diary (not every day, only occasionally). Drawings and notes that I don’t think are important go in the back of the book, so basically everything that’s not in the back of the book is important. Every page fits 19 TODO items and in addition to the TODO item itself, I keep track of when I started on a new page and when I finished that particular page (meaning all TODO items are done). I don’t keep dates for my TODO items and the only prioritisation I do occasionally is putting a little exclamation mark next to a particular item, meaning it’s a bit more important than the other ones. On top of that there’s two rules that I try to stick to:

• Never keep more than three pages with open TODO
• When a page has three TODOs that are not finished yet, I can move them to the next page, causing the previous page to be ‘done’

These two little rules keeps the amount of TODOs limited and also helps me get rid of some of the stuff that I don’t want to do. Today for example I had to call up somebody I hadn’t spoken to for ages and I was really stalling it. But I also had to write down a few new TODOs. These TODOs however would cause the third page with TODOs to fill up, meaning I had over three pages. I quickly made the phone call, moved the three left-over TODO items from page one to the next empty page and done I was.

Keeping my TODOs in a little notebook also gives me the ability to glance over what I’ve been doing in the past few weeks or months, which gives me a little bit of satisfaction (assuming I’ve done a lot).

The notes I keep on the left hand side are relatively limited. In meetings, I usually tend not too many notes. Only the important stuff goes in the book and if I need to take action, I immediately create a TODO item out of it. Last but not least, all my TODOs are in the notebook, not just work items, but also personal ones.

It’s taken me a while to settle on a particular system, but this one has really helped me focus and stay on track.

Current status: 15 things left to do

I was checking out the wind this morning. It is promising to be a great week. Although I typically don’t like easterly winds (it forces me to kiteboard out on the lakes instead of the sea, and I don’t like that), but then again, it usually offers some nice room for tricks. Anyway, I was checking out the winds and came across this actual:

A bit weird huh, to have gusts that are lower than the actual wind ;-).

I typically use a few sites for forecasting. For the long and mid-term forecasts, I typically use Windfinder.com, offering a 7-day forecast that roughly gives you an outlook where the wind is going to be. They also offer a 3-day Super Forecast, which is a lot more accurate than the 7-day forecast. Last season the Super Forecast was really accurate, but somehow this season that has changed a bit. With winds from the Westerly direction (NW-W-SW), the forecast is quite accurate, although a bit on the low side, but when winds are from the East, the forecasts gets worse.

I double check things sometimes with Windguru, another world-wide wind forecast site. Forecasts are typically quite accurate here as well and they offer quite a variety of forecast using different techniques and models.

For the Dutch sailors / kiteboarders / windsurfers there’s Vliegerweer.nl which offers a nice Google map with a layover… Quite a nice site too, although I don’t use it a lot.

For the intra-day forecast, I use the KNMI (Dutch Weather Institute) forecast for the small aviation (KNMI Weerulletin Kleine Luchtvaart). This forecast is really accurate and also offer an insight into which weather systems are passing through. It’s quite important o know about those, as was proven last weekend, with a big system passing through, with unexpected gusts of more than 50 knots. During these gusts, a guy died at Strand Horst.

Last but not least, I use a site called Actuelewaterdata for actuals on the same day. They only have actuals for a few places out on the North Sea (wind speed, direction), but this is good enough.

Combining all of the above offers me enough data to see whether or not I should go out and where… So far I haven’t had a lot of days that I went in vain…

If you have more sites that provide good info, please leave a comment!

In 2002, I got involved with HigherLevel, a Dutch initiative to help entrepreneurs with all kinds of things, ranging from advise about fiscal matters to helping through a bankruptcy. A while ago, somebody started a thread asking people on the forum 5 questions about their company and ideas about innovation.

Today I found out I got the honor to answer these questions as well. My answers are in Dutch and can be found here.

p.s. thanks mom, for the Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote!

Yesterday I was at De Dodenherdenking. On the 4th of May in The Netherlands we commemorate the sacrifices (both in the armed forces and of civilians) during war-time. The ceremony takes place throughout all of Holland, but the biggest ceremony is held on Dam Square in the centre of Amsterdam, where one can find the National Monument, a white statue, erectedin 1956 to remember the fallen soldiers during World War II.

Like many families in the Netherlands, my family has a lot of links with World War II. My great-grandfather (Barend Arendsen) was a trader in wood and quite a prominent figure in the village of Harderwijk. Together with several others in his family and other members of the Harderwijk community he participated in the local resistance. His sons were named Hendrik Arendsen (my grandfather) and Alef Arendsen.

During or shortly after Easter, the German forces captured my Barend Arendsen and Alef Arendsen and took them to a camp somewhere further East. On April 12th, just two days before the allied forces reached Apeldoorn, they were executed in the woods.

This event has played a large role in my family’s history. I believe my grandfather was 26 (his wife had given birth to two children during the war) when he lost his father and brother and was left running a sawmill with several employees to take care of. My grandfather died last year after having lived a long life full.

For a long time, my grandfather received invitations to the Dodenherdenking at the Dam. Sometimes he went himself, sometimes somebody else in the family went. After him passing away, my mum applied for invitations. Due to my having the same name as one of the victims of the April 12 killings, the National Committee for 4 & 5 May is sending me invitations now as well.

Yesterday I took my Italian friend G. to Amsterdam to give him a bit of insight into this Dutch’ish event. It was good to be there.

Traffic killed me the past seven days. I though taking planes, trains, taxis and subways was terrible, and would have hoped that since I’m back in Holland I could occasionally take the car again, but I’ve been cured already, in just little over a month.

Last Friday the winds were on near the beach. The direction was north-east, meaning it’s almost off shore. I still took my chances and it worked out just fine. It took me about 2 hours to get to Wijk aan Zee though, due to very heavy taffic (on a Friday afternoon!!). Normally it takes only 1 hour…

Saturday my buddy Marc called me and suggested we go to Strand Horst, which is close to my parents’ place. We got some real good kiting done there too. Wouter was also present and showed us his new Genetrix Hydra 12sqm kite. It’s a pretty unknown brand, but what a beauty. Too bad Wouter had his toming wrong, so couldn’t really generate enough power to take off… I used my 12sqm and my 10sqm and had a lot of fun and some big airs. Too bad I tore my 10sqm a bit, so I’m going to have to get that one repaired.

On Monday, I didn’t expect anything spectacular, but around 6.30, Marc called me to say he was going to get a session done at Stichtse Brug, which is about 15 minutes from my place. I immediately took the car and tried to get there. Too bad traffic got after me again(!). This time is was road works that prevented me from taking the highway… It took me 30 minutes and with the sun going down and the wind picking up it was pretty annoying to see time go by while in traffic… In the end still got a good session done. It ended with me doing a pretty big air with some (unplanned) 720 in there, after which my kite inverted and I had to swim back to shore. Oh well, it’s all in the game

On Monday the world also saw the news of Oracle acquiring Sun. I did a short blog entry about that over at the JTeam blog about my personal opinions on that. Pretty exciting news!

On Tuesday I figured that if I would ever have to give up kiting, I would try taking on the stuff Danny Mac does. The movie below is really cool!

The remainder of the week traffic continued to kill me. I had to drive back and forth to the convention center in Utrecht today and that took me about 45 minutes each way, while it’s only 15 minutes by foot

It seems I’m on a blogging spree the last few days… This is not without reason. One of our key activities at JTeam is to tell the world about what we’re doing. We’ve always been present at various conferences, both as speakers and as attendees and various people have always blogged about what they were up to. Recently, we decided to set up a company blog. We successfully used a company blog at SpringSource to communicate all things relevant to us and the community, varying from technical articles, to entries about our strategy.

I’m in no way aiming to get the JTeam blog as many readers as the SpringSource blog, but it’s very nice to have a central communication mechanism to let you know what we’re up to. Then again, I guess I don’t have to convince you of the power of blogs now, do I?

Another thing we’ve always done and are just now starting to give a little bit more attention is the occasional event where we share our ideas and discuss things with clients and other interested parties.

Our latest initiative in this area is the Search Symposium we are organizing in the beginning of June. I just blogged about this and if you’re interested in this symposium, please continue to read there.

Last but not least, yesterday I got in touch with an old friend at the Financiële Dagblad (the Dutch version of the Financial Times). He did a short interview with me about my move to JTeam and what I’ve been up to in the last ten years. He was triggered by my LinkedIn profile that (since ages) starts with: “In 2002 Joost van de Wijgerd and me set out on a journey to rule the Enterprise Open Source world”. He was curious about whether or not I thought I succeeded… I think this has been the first time my name turns up on a newspaper that is not dedicated to technology and I was quite happy with that (not with the picture that he put in, but then again, I didn’t have anything else available yesterday). Unfortunately I can’t copy the article here, you’d have to buy the paper to see what awful picture is in there

Okay, that’s it for the week… It seems the wind is picking up, so I’m going to pack my gear now and race to the for a quick kite session…

I blogged over at the JTeam blog about our use of the BCG Matrix and wet-erase markers.

And yes, I totally agree: real geeks should subscribe to both the JTeam feed as well as the feed for this blog (preventing me from having two post in both blogs), but then again, then I would leave out people that don’t have an RSS reader and nope, I’m not going to teach my mum how to install one

I blogged over at the JTeam blog about the upcoming Java Meetup, June 5th.

Hope to see you there!