Alef Arendsen

I didn’t know Denmark had that much of a beer culture. People looked very weird at me when I told them I had been in Copenhagen for the past four days and I hadn’t visited a beer pub yet. The immediately started pointing me in all kinds of directions to what in their opinions were the better pubs.

I also didn’t know Denmark had that much of a Christmas culture either. Christmas beer, Christmas lighting, Christmas everywhere (at least, more than in Holland that is).

I like the city (haven’t been here since I was 5 or so). Too bad it’s raining and getting dark very early. Oh well, I have three books with me, I won’t get bored

Which books am I reading now? Well, I’m just starting in Mad Dogs, from James Grady. I’ll let you know if I like it or not.

When I was a kid, we used to play a board game called Wildlife, created by the World Nature Fund. The game was meant to create an understanding with young kids for endangered species. It was one of the many board games we played (we also played Monopoly a lot, and Risk and many other board games). Wildlife had a map of the world that you had to travel across and on the way, you had to save all kinds of endangered species. One of the species I believe was the Dodo on the island of Mauritius, that went extinct in the 17th century.

Mauritius is a small volcanic island next to Madagascar and only because of the game, I knew where it was. I can’t remember exactly why, but the game caused me to always have a kind of weird idea about Mauritius–the island used to intrigue me when I was young.

Last October I got the chance to actually visit Mauritius. One of our clients has an office on the island and there was of a group of people that needed training. I decided that a week of holidays in addition to spending a week working on the island would be nice, so that’s how I ended up on Mauritius from the 21st of October until the 2nd of November.

I left for Schiphol on the 21st and took my kiteboarding gear with me. I had heard and read that Mauritius has strong and very consistent winds (due to the SE trade winds) between 15 and 25 knots. Because 15 knots isn’t enough for my 8sqm and 25 is a little bit too much for my 12sqm kite, I brought both, in addition to my board (a Naish Haze, 133cm). I also brought my shorty, which you really don’t have to do if you’re going to Mauritius at any time other than in the middle of their winter (the water was 23 degrees, warm enough for just a rashguard and board shorts).

I had quickly taken a look at the luggage limitations for KLM, Air France and Air Mauritius and I learnt that they still allow 1 piece of 32 kilos (that’s exactly the weight of the kite board bag I borrowed from a friend). On Schiphol I had to pay 40 euros to get it shipped to Mauritius. On my way back the woman at the check-in desk mistakenly held my bag for golf equipment which apparently is free. A German guy told me to look at the Prolimit kite/golf bag that supposedly looks like a golf bag so is allowed on the plane without paying.

The first week I had to work and unfortunately only did some kiteboarding on Wednesday when I was done early. That already proved to be very nice!

The week after I was done with work I actually had more time to do some serious kite boarding. I was staying at the Indian Resort (which is located right at the best kite boarding spot on Mauritius: Le Morne beach), so the beach was just minutes away from my hotel room!

About the hotel: it’s a resort with all kinds of people staying there on an all-inclusive basis. I usually don’t like this a lot, because I’m more into the boutique hotels (smaller, owner-occupied, et cetera), but for this time, it was actually very nice, because of it being so close to the kite spot.

Kiting on Mauritius was great. I was used to doing water sports in warm countries with warm water already because I had visited Costa Rica three times in the past to get some serious wave surfing done, but this was even better. Having a kite to propel you, clear blue waters below you with a big lagoon with flat waters, but a bit further out big waves to play in is just awesome! Seriously, although Wijk aan Zee is great too, this beats everything.

I hope to be posting some pictures soon. I did make some, but didn’t get them off of my camera yet.

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

In Holland, we have TV shows that show how people buy houses in foreign countries without decent up-front research. This often results in situations where the people have to spend way more than they’ve initially planned and sometimes even have to sell the house again, because it’s way over their heads.

We of course, wanted to prevent something like this from happening, so we decided to do some decent brainstorming after we came back from our first trip to Italy. I do a lot of brainstorming for work already and so do the others, so we didn’t do this is a very formal fashion, but had the occasional glass of beer accompany it. The end result though was pretty good and we came out of it with a good idea about a budget about what we wanted to look for.

One unfortunate side effect of such an exercise with a group of four people is that it’s getting more on more explicit and clear where differences in opinion are and how big those differences are. One of the guys realized during the brainstorming he really had very different ideas from the rest of the group and during the process, he decided not to continue with it. So, left were the stock broker, an entrepreneur and a management consultant.

We took a little break from all of this and started looking at houses again early 2007. To our surprise, the house we had seen at first was still available!! After having seen this, we really didn’t want to take our chances and wait much longer, so the one guy that hadn’t seen it yet, quickly went to visit the house, which is somewhere in the North-West of Italy.

The most unfortunate thing happened: he found another house that was much bigger and which he liked a lot more $#*($%*#@(%@#!!! Back to square one. Lars and I thought we had everything nailed: a good house, decently priced, not too much to do about it (in terms of DIY), but well, we were with a group of three and couldn’t just decide on our own. That’s why we had to go there again and decide (with the three of us) which house it was going to be.

Long story short, After having visited both houses, we finally managed to decide the first house was the best one to pursue. Less renovation and reconstruction to do and less pricey.

In the meantime, we had started budgeting everything. From costs involved with arranging a translator to costs involved for getting there and arranging and paying the notary. We also planned and budgeted the (re)construction of several things in the house, such as an extra stairs, an upgrade of the bathroom and everything else.

Then the buying process began. We had gathered several good resources and had contacted a Dutch guy who would be able to do help us during the process of negotiations. The process was three-ways:

1. Gathering of all the necessary papers and arranging for formalities such as a bank account and fiscal number in Italy (codice fiscale)
2. The creation of a preliminary contract of sales, the basis for the remainder of the process
3. The actual transfer

The process is more thoroughly documented here (in Dutch).

The preliminary contract of sales took quite a bit longer than expected, as there were several things that we wanted in there. Guarantees for the process to be ending in time, with the right people present at the notary, et cetera. There is no standard contract available for this (although templates exist) of course and we just added everything we wanted.

The price (for which the house will be sold) is also part of the contract. This essentially means that if both parties agree to the contract, the negotiations about the price have finished too. After a little while and after several rounds of negotiation about the price we finally agreed and the contract was signed. Together with this, we paid our first installment.

The next step was for the other party to start arranging several things with the local government. There were some issues with the zoning of the property that needed to be resolved first. This took a while, but finally, after a couple of months we were able to set a date for the transfer. We’re talking September/October 2007 here!

Finally, mid-November 2007 we drove to Italy to transfer the house. It was fun to see how many people had joined at the notary (I think there were about 10, with witnesses from both sides and several brothers and sisters of the selling party also present). Because we don’t speak Italian, not only did the notary have to read the contract in Italian, but our translator also had to do the same thing in Dutch. Two hours later we were finally done and we got the keys to our new place.

p.s. Yes, these are the keys to the house

Okay, apart from Java 6 not being available on the Mac, I’m not complaining at all:

Last login: Thu Nov 15 10:06:52 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which ant
/usr/bin/ant
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn

I just got a new laptop and immediately installed Leopard on it. I was in such a rush that I really didn’t have time to do anything else than the bare necessities. So when I checked out some source code today and needed Ant to build it, I didn’t need to download it at all!

Thanks, Apple

And about that Java 6 thing: who’s on Java 6 anyway

I was reading a piece on Leopard the other day over at Ars Technica and I was dumb-struck by a survey that Apple apparently took among its customers before creating Time Machine. Apparently only four percent backup regularly:

Apple took a survey of its customers’ backup habits before creating Time Machine. Eighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should backup their data. (This is scary already. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do backup their data. That actually doesn’t sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only four percent backup regularly.

I realized just now that I’ve been pretty lucky that I do a backup every two weeks (or whenever I’m at home), to a networked drive at my place. This is meant to make any data survive that’s not in our version control system. I actually needed the backup desperately a short while ago, as I had to switch to a new laptop without having access to the old one all of a sudden anymore.

The story is that Time Machine takes away all the hassle of doing backups manually and completely and transparently automates the process. As Ars Technica puts it:

If you have more than one hard disk attached to your Mac, it’s more difficult not to use Time Machine than to use it.

I do have to change my setup a little bit though. I heard it’s possible to first connect a networked NAS drive via USB and initialize it as a Time Machine drive, after which (if the NAS supports AFP) you can reconnect to it through the network and Time Machine will still work. That’s suboptimal though, as I want to change to a RAID setup anyway. I’m going to buy a Firewire RAID drive soon that will serve as my Time Machine drive. The networked drive that I already have (a Lacie too) will continue to serve as my music drive (I don’t have backups of my music, maybe I’ll use the RAID drive for that too).

If you have any suggestions (different drives, different setup), let me know!

That was the recipe for the Life of Pi a book written by Yann Martel.

I’ve just finished reading it and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. All in all a definite page turner that keeps your attention until the very last page. Using a highly unusual scenario (a 16 y/o boy gets trapped on a life vessel with a Bengal tiger, a Chimpansee, a Zebra and a Hyena), the author does a very good job at building up the tension until the end of the book, although the outcome is already known (the boy survives).

Interestingly, I came across a guy last week that had lived in Pondicherry. He could not confirm if there had ever been a zoo there.

[update - november 28] The more I think about this book, the better I like it. It has stuck all this time (well, it’s only been a month anyway, but that’s enough). I think this is going to be my 2007 favorite.

I travel a lot on planes. When on the airport or in the plane, working on the laptop is not always my favorite activity, so for times when I get fed up with Eclipse, Mail.App or any other computer’ish something, I always have a stack of magazines with me. Titles that are always in my handbag are Esquire and Economist.

I have a subscription to the Dutch Esquire and also to the Economist. I value the Economist highly as it brings me up-to-date on all major issues happening everywhere. I basically serves as replacement for my television set (I don’t have one) and my newspaper (don’t have one either). Even I had ones of those, I probably wouldn’t be able to use / read it much, because I’m hardly ever at home.

Anyway, when traveling to Holland last weekend, at Paris CDG airport I came across Monocle. It was new to me, and as a regular visitor to the book shops on the airport, that’s quite something. I bought a copy (the November issue) and was pleasantly surprised by the content. Sometimes I find the Economist a little too heavy a read (too much on the business, too little lifestyle) and from the Esquire, it’s a little bit the other way around: too much lifestyle and no ‘useful’ information .

Until now, I find Monocle to be a good cross-over between Economist and Esquire. Gents@Monocle: I you don’t like this comparison, let me know if you have something better