Alef Arendsen

I had never noticed before, but when I took the latest issue of Harvest Business Review, three leaflets feel out, all of then heavily promoting the magazine and subscriptions to it. I’ll post some details later on, as I left all of the three leaflets home before taking a flight and I don’t remember anything of what’s printed on them. What did strike me though, the tone of the leaflets in nothing resembled the letters I got from the Economist, after having canceled my subscription (or rather, forgotten to renew it). They were way too commercial for me and almost caused me the throw the magazine away. Again, I can’t give you the details right now–I’ll get you those later.

Two things that made up for the way too commercial leaflets. First, the humor in one of the articles, combined with a little arrogance was great–especially because I started laughing in such a way that it caused a good conversation to start between the guy in the aisle seat and me. The second (which I had never noticed until now) was the fact that you don’t have to pay in advance for a subscription. I always buy the magazine in the store (as opposed to the Economist, which used to be in my mailbox every Friday–until I forgot to send in my renewal which I still haven’t done . I’m still doubting whether or not I should subscribe…

“Nobody knows if we’ll ever receive a message from extraterrestrial life, but if we do, one-third of the world’s population would probably worship the remote intelligences, one-third would probably want to conquer them, and the final third (the readers of this magazine), would want to do some extraterrestrial market research and sell them something.”

^{Paul Saffo, Six Rules for Effective Forecasting, HBR July/August 2007}

p.s. by the way, there was a great article on IT strategy and SOA in the July/August issue. Often nothing too technical, but nonetheless a pretty interesting read.

Finally!! At last, my motor cycle is fixed. It has been sitting in my garage for over a year without having moved an inch. I didn’t have the time to, nor was I ever in the mood to go and replace the battery. I don’t think I will ever be in the mood to do things like that and because he already expected this to happen, Roald (from JTeam) offered me to fix it, in exchange for him being able to use it once every now and then.

So yesterday we (well, err… he…) fixed it (note to self: I still need to pay him the money for the battery).

Unfortunately I don’t have time to take it out for a ride, as I’ll be abroad for the next ten days or so. It’s a Dragstar by the way. I’ll try to post a picture of it soon.

When friends of mine visit from abroad and they’ve never been in Holland there are always a few things that we have to do. If we’re in Amsterdam, of course we have to visit the red-light district, although for me, this is definitely not a place I like to visit. Then of course, we always have to drop by at a so-called coffee shop (where strangely enough, you can’t get coffee). Some find it weird that *not* everybody in Holland is addicted to weed and are surprised to learn that there are still people (such as me) that do not smoke a joint every day .

One other thing that’s a tradition in Holland is raw herring which, according to Wikipedia is the Dutch fast food. The herring is actually not entirely raw anymore. It’s been cleaned, its head removed and conserved a little with salt. It’s a typical Dutch delicacy, often eaten with raw onions and/or pickles. The typical way of eating it is first picking it up by the tail and then letting it slide into your mouth gradually. We actually have one day a year we call ‘Vlaggetjesdag’ (Little Flag Day in English) which is when the first catch of the year is sold at a big auction. The proceed of this auction go to a charity. Generally, the first bit of fish (several kilos) are sold for several 10s of thousands of euros. I believe the record is at 40k EURO or something.

Anyway, I’m very pleased that my brother has kept this tradition alive and does not only eat herring himself by letting it slide into his mouth, but has also taught his little kid and my nephew to eat it like that. This is how Mas ate his herring yesterday !!!

It seems there’s software in my camera and it seems sometimes it can’t cope with certain situations … No adjustments to this picture, straight out of the camera. If anyone can explain, please don’t hesitate!! This picture is taken with the sun close to the horizon, almost setting.

It seems like JRoller screwed up again. At least, that’s what it looks like to me…

Cameron’s blog looks like this today:

And I also found another blog, which doesn’t even show the entry text.

Way to go! Fortunately Hani abandoned JRoller a while ago, so we can still enjoy his stuff

When I was young, my dad used to have a boat. It was a really small boat, somewhat resembling a Laser. I really enjoyed sailing it, although I wasn’t big enough yet to sail it on my own. I like being in and on the waters, so does the rest of the family. Recently, my dad got a new boat and my brother also has a sailing boat and with those two boats, we just started a tradition last weekend.

Until last weekend, it wasn’t a tradition yet, because we had only done it once, but from this year on, it’s going to be the yearly ‘Rondje Noord-Holland’ tradition!

Here’s some pictures of the trip, taken with my Pentax K10D. That’s the camera that I bought a couple of weeks ago and I have to say: I’m *very* happy with it!!

– this post is part of a series, read the previous post here –

So, after we came back from Costa Rica, we actually didn’t forget about all of this. We actually decided to push this through. Still in Costa Rica, we had come up with the following conditions for the house we wanted to go and buy:

• Deadline: 18 months from January 2006
• The house should be closer to home than Costa Rica
• We don’t want to rent it out
• It should be reachable within a day’s travel (8 to 12 hours max)
• Ideally it should have skiing closeby in the winters
• It should be good fun in the summer
• Budget: unknown

So what do you do when you have a whole bunch of conditions but no idea where to start? Well, I guess you start writing a TPS report, don’t you? So that’s what we did…

Okay, all kidding aside, Lars actually was in the States until mid-June, I had a pretty busy time ahead of me at work where things were quickly becoming very hectic for several reasons so we didn’t have a lot time to actually get together and decide on things. The first thing we actually did to get towards a more specific idea about what we were looking at was deciding on an initial pick of locations. Italy was first on the list, and more specifically, the North-West region of Italy, known as the Valle d’Aosta. Both mr. Stockbroker, mr. Management Consultant and Mr. Myself had been there a couple of times already. It already met a couple of requirements (skiing, summer environment, close enough), so looked to be a good candidate location.

Of course we had no idea about what we were looking at in terms of budget though…

After Lars came back from the United State somewhere mid-June, we had already decided that he and I were going to spend about a week’s time in Italy, to start investigating what the buyer’s conditions were. We had planned a week in the beginning of July and we planned to stay on campsites.

After having arrived in the middle of the night, we couldn’t really find a hotel that was still opened, so we drove up into the mountains and parked my car, set up the tent and slept for a while. The next morning we drove back into the valley when the famous italian traffic hit us. A crazy italian guy wasn’t paying attention (and okay, I must admit, I was probably speeding a little too) and didn’t give way enough. The result was that he bumped into the side of my car, causing quite a bit of damage.

Fortunately, we could continue our journey without too much delay and we started to look for realty agents. We quickly found a few and were a little disappointed when they told us it would never be possible to buy a house with our requirements for about 100k euro (which was the budget we had kind of settled on).

We left again and started driving around the various town and small villages. We took every possible turn and road we saw and spotted all Vendesi signs in the area. Then we went to our campsite, had dinner and went to sleep.

The next morning we visited the realty agents again, this time with a list of houses we had seen. The realty agents had done a little homework as well and so it became that we in the afternoon we were driving off together with the realty agent to a couple of houses.

It was terrible! One house was a complete ruin, the other didn’t even have walls anymore, the third was good, but too big and too expensive. On the third day, we actually came across a couple of houses that were ‘in our category’ so to say.

We visited one of them a second time, a third time, a fourth time. Then all of a sudden one of our other friends (Joost) arrived out of the blue (he had taken some time off and was able to come to Italy too for a couple of days) and with him we visited the house a fifth and sixth time.

After about a week, we had a pretty good idea about what we were looking at in terms of budget, location, things to do. And in fact, we even had one good option to take back home. We didn’t expect this house to stay on the market for long, but at least we had a benchmark to compare future houses we would find with.

(to be continued)

Back in 2005, when in Costa Rica with a couple of friends of mine, we decided to start investigating the possibility to buy a small summer house somewhere. At first, we thought Costa Rica would be a nice place to do something like this, but after flying back to Holland a week or so later, we decided to stay a little closer to home, ‘coz the jet lag really wasn’t funny and flying to Costa Rica just for a weekend sounds a little to over the top .

Anyway, it had been sitting on the backburner for a while until Lars and I decided to go and have a look in the Aosta Valley in Italy to scan the region for good opportunities.

We were very surprised to see that shopping for a house there really *is* possible and that the prices were very much in our range.

That’s when the Casa Pura Vida plan was born. More updates later on…

I generally don’t do links very often, but this I did wanted to share. I’m almost part of it, but it’s fun to see how and if the ‘young’ generation can be reached using traditional marketing techniques and if not, what does interest them.

I think Europe is still far beyond here. What I get from people is that here in Holland for instance, people (and specifically people between 15 and 24) are certainly watching TV for more than 1 to 2 hours a week. Of course people here are much more in doors than in the Bay Area (the panelists for from the Bay Area). We’re certainly not seeing that many people using PVRs here, but it’s probably inevitable, as well as the drop in time people are watching TVs.

Interesting stuff!

This newsitem struck me last weekend.

In about a year you won’t be able to smoke anymore in Dutch bars, club and restaurants. Finally, after years and years of delays, the government finally decided to push this through! I’ve been a heavy smoker for years, and even when I still lit my 25 Camels a day, I though it was a good idea to ban smoking from public places and from bars and restaurants.

Somehow, however it never got this far. If I recall correctly, a couple of years ago, the government came to an agreement with the smoking lobby and an organization representing bars and restaurants. In this agreement, there were certain deadlines bars, restaurants and clubs had to meet with respect to smoking-free sections in those places.

When somewhere in the beginning of this year a new coalition came to power, they immediately started to investigate if a full smoking ban would be possible, based on the fact that the deadline previously agreed upon wasn’t met (it wasn’t even close).

In what the smoking lobby calls a unilateral ending of a previous agreement, the government has decided to ban all smoking in restaurants, bars and clubs as of the 1st of July next year. Immediately of course, the smoking lobby starts to viciously complain. They claim to have gotten 15.000 signatures of people that don’t want this public smoking ban to go in effect. Of course–I can find those too, but the question is, is in inevitable anyway?? Of course it is, so why bother.

It’s unbelievable, the Netherlands really is one of the last places in North-Western Europe that still allows smoking in public places, bars and restaurants. I think it’s pathetic the smoking lobby still tries to prevent this from happening. The effects on health have been proven, so why resist!!. Oh, and research even shows that business doesn’t suffer all that much anyway…

Thanks to Allen Cavanagh from Ireland for the nice comic. He runs the website Caricatures Ireland.com, for all your wedding and corporate entertainment.