Alef Arendsen

In winter, kite boarding in the Netherlands is not a lot of fun. That’s why a lot of people in addition to for example a skiing holiday, also go on a kite boarding holiday to some kind of a windy location with nice white sandy beaches and warm water. A while ago, I came across the Best Offshort Odysseys, an expedition around the world by catamaran sponsored by Best Kiteboarding. An awesome initiative I definitely wanted to join.

Because in the end I didn’t get enough time to do this, I had to find a replacement trip and when Wouter told me he also wanted to go on a kite boarding trip, we quickly set a date (end of Feb, beginning of March) and started looking for a location.

Kiteforum.com has this forum thread (scroll about half-way down) where all the kite boarding locations are categorized by month. This provided a good number of candidates. Cumbuco (Brazil), one of the ABC islands, or Vietnam proved to be too far of a flight (we didn’t want to spend 36 hours of a one-week holiday on a plane or otherwise being transported to our holiday destination), so in the end we settled for Sal, which is a small island (it’s a rock really) part of the Cabo Verde group of islands.

A ticket was quickly settled upon; we’re flying out on February 27th with Air Portugal (TAP) with a short transfer in Lisbon. Hopefully we’ll get there by midnight.

When going out kiteboarding, luggage is a totally different thing. Air Portugal makes you put all your kite gear in one (kite) bag with a maximum weight of only 23kg. The thing is with kiteboarding: if something breaks, there’s usually no shop nearby to get it repaired easily, so that’s why you have to take some spares of some important things.

Here’s the list of things I’m taking:

• 2 boards (Naish Haze 133 and North Jaime Pro 132)
• 3 kites (8sqm and 10sqm Gaastra Jekyll and 12sqm Cabrinha Switchblade)
• Three handle bars (two for the Gaastras, one for the Cabrinha)
• Harnass
• Shorty (the water is warm enough for only a shorty) + shoes
• Spare fins and screws
• Tube repair kit

I’m splitting the luggage over two bags, one to take with me on the plane. This bag is probably a little bit bigger than what’s allowed on the plane, but then again, I’m good enough at fooling the airline people lately to get it on board. The other bag is a big kiteboarding bag. The hand luggage contains one kite, my clothes, shoes, flipflops and a few other necessities. The kiteboarding bag contains the rest.

Like I said, Sal really is only a rock. The tour guide on Sal says the following:

The arrival at Sal on an international flight is one of the most deliciously depressing descents. For hours the traveller has scanned the Atlanctic from the aeroplane window, searching for the lost islands of Cape Verde with an increasing sense of their isolation. Then Sal appears: relentlessly brown and featureless, etched with dry cracks through which rain occasionally flows. As the descent begins one feels like the Mars Pathfinder as it fell towards the Red Planet – except that Mars is believed by some to be capable of sustaining life.

Disembarking from the aircraft to cross the heat of the runway you will gaze at the rocky plains in puzzlement, trying to remember why you decided to come. There are two possible reasons: either you are going to the white sands and windy waters that lie on the island’s south coast – be assure that they are there and they are beautiful or you are passing through to other islands of much greater interest

Nope, we’re not going to pass through to islands of much greater interest, we’ll be staying there, on the little featureless rock. There is going to wind though! For now, the forecasts look pretty good with 17 to 19 knots on Saturday and 20 – 22 on Sunday through to Tuesday. Enough for me to either put my 10 or my 8 on and have some great fun!

Well, enough for now; I’m going to prepare my luggage a little bit more. We’re flying out on Friday (the day after tomorrow) with an evening flight and will be flying back on the 8th of March, arriving back in Holland on Sunday morning. I’ll keep you posted!

Great footage and editing from a trip by a few guys to Chile and Argentina.

“Passionnément Volcans”, ski, snowkite et speedflying sur les volcans des Andes from Cybercimes.TV on Vimeo.

Typically Dutch that is… As a closer for the day, a great article on some stereotypical Dutch things… Hilarious and… all… sooo… true…!

dailycandor.com – 10 things you probably didn’t know about the Dutch and the Netherlands

The best advice is all the way near the bottom, where the author paraphrases a tourist brochure:

• If something bad happens to you, please find a policeman/policewoman and explain the situation to us. Please do not be embarrassed – we have really seen it all before. You couldn’t possibly shock us.

I just installed the beta version of Safari 4 and so far it’s pretty impressive. Things seem a lot smoother now!

I started it up for the first time and opened a new tab and the following is what I saw…

1. nu.nl – the Dutch news site… I think this is the number one site for a lot of Dutch people
2. hanglos.nl – site for the Dutch kiteboarding community
3. blog.arendsen.net – my own blog
4. actuelewaterdata.nl for IJmuiden – the actual wind situation at IJmuiden beach, close to my home spot for kiteboarding
5. higherlevel.nl – a Dutch community site for entrepreneurs
6. InfoQ.com – a (mostly Java-related) tech site
7. Twitter.com – well, you know what Twitter is, don’t you
8. iGoogle
9. maps.google.com
10. techcrunch.com – a web 2.0 blog
11. kitehigh.nl – another Dutch kite community
12. Google Logon page

I’m not sure if this is ordered at all. One thing to note is that I’ve had hanglos.nl, blog.arendsen.net, actuelewaterdata.nl and higherlevel.nl all as my start pages in the last few weeks, but then again, even if I didn’t, they’d probably still appear on ‘the wall’. I was surprised to find my own blog up there, but then I realized I don’t get emails from my blog when a new comment arrives (for some reason these cat categorized as spam and get deleted immediately), so I check for comments manually a few times a day.

One thing is for sure: I’m going to like this Wall thing a lot! It’ll save me from having to type in stuff in the address bar a lot!

Last Sunday I had my first session of the year (well, if you don’t count that silly ice kiting experiment early January–don’t ever try that, it’s uncontrollable).

The winds were supposed to very good (around 20 knots), but in the end the predictions were way off and we only had about 10 – 14 knots. I only brought my 12sqm unfortunately, so things weren’t all that good.

Well, at least, the season got started. Let’s hope many good session will follow. Next Friday evening, I’m actually heading out to Cabo Verde to spend a week kiteboarding in the warm seas of the island called Sal. Pray with me for some good winds please !!

Last few years, I’ve organized the Amsterdam Java Meetup on a (pretty much) quarterly basis. The last Java Meetup was somewhere late last year and I haven’t gotten around to planning anything since. It’s about time again, so here goes:

• What: beer, wine and snacks while discussing tech stuff
• When: March 13th, 2009, from 5.30pm onwards
• Where: Grand Cafe de Jaren, de Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam ( http://tinyurl.com/bn5o2b )
• Why: because the first few beers will be free because it’s a nice happening and it’s good to meet each other once every now and then. Maybe we can all start complaining about the credit crunch or so…

Also, after having received many requests, I’ve started a Google Group for the Java Meetup. There, I’ll be announcing future dates for the Java Meetup. Well, I’ll also keep on doing it on this blog and some other places, but if you want to have the dates delivered right to your inbox, please subscribe to the Dutch Developer Meetup Google Group.

You might wonder why the Google Group is not called Amsterdam Java Meetup, but Dutch Developer Meetup instead. Well, I figured we might want to discuss other technologies as well from time to time, so although it still is named the Java Meetup, maybe I’ll just go and rename it somewhere in the future . Also, I don’t want to limit myself to Amsterdam. Maybe there’s a huge developer crowd in Loppersum that we haven’t heard of yet that needs bringing together, which means we have to organize a Loppersum Java Meetup…

In the meantime, if you have ideas about the meetup, want to join, or just want to give your comments, join the group!

For a while, I though I was planned to do a course in Brussels this week. So off I went to book a hotel yesterday night. I searched and I searched and I searched, finally found something to my liking and booked it.

So I thought I was done. I was going to Brussels by car this time, so didn’t have to get a train ticket or anything, so I was settled.

I decided to quickly give Dopplr a glance, and noticed that I hadn’t updated my trip schedule yet to include the trip to Brussels. Dopplr is this niche social network for frequent travelers. You can keep track of your trips and share them with your friends. Dopplr will give you tips for your destinations (hotels, restaurants, cool places to visit), based on user’s recommendations and it’ll give you insight into who is close by the period you’re traveling.

So I entered my Brussels trip and hit okay. Then something unexpected happened. Dopplr showed me a message that said: “Iwein has a trip that coincides with yours”. I browsed further and noticed Iwein was going to be in Brussels too this coming week. Hmm, that’s weird I thought, so I checked the planning sheets that we have and quickly came to the realization I made a mistake. I was in fact not planned to do the training, but Iwein was. Some time a few weeks ago, the planning moved around a bit and I hadn’t noticed .

Anyway, I was glad I had Dopplr, otherwise, I would have driven all the way to Brussels for nothing. Well, in fact, as it turns I’m driving to Brussels anyway for two days (out of four), to keep Iwein company (he always feels lonely when he’s away from his family he confessed to me a while ago… hmm, that’s not funny to say I guess ), but still Dopplr specifically and social networks in general proved to useful once again.

On a related note, today marks the day Facebook has modified its terms and conditions. By putting up content on Facebook, you’re essentially licensing it to them for an indefinite period of time (unless you remove it by hand). Disabling or removing your profile will no longer render the content you put on to be useless to them. You’re granting full rights to Facebook to do with your stuff whatever they want. This did make me thing: should I still put pictures up on Facebook and such?

I’ve always had trouble focusing on one thing at a time while working. Yes I’ve read Getting Things Done and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and all that, but somehow it just didn’t work for me. I’ve kept to do lists for some time now and that kind of works, but I only have these very shorts periods in which I’m highly effective and just race through all the to do items on my list. The problem is not that these periods are very short, it’s just that these periods don’t come very often …

Last week while in Oslo, while on my way out to catch my plane back to Amsterdam, I walk into the office of the wonderful people of ProgramUtvikling and I saw this huge projector… well, in fact is was only a small projector, but I guess that what’s you say when a projector is projecting something big. Anyway, the projector was projecting a huge timer. It kind of resembled the iPhone timer and it was set to 25 minutes. It wasn’t running though. As usual, it was nice and cozy in the PU office and after a little chat, I asked what the timer was all about. One of the girls there reacted in amazement and asked me if I had never heard of the Pomodoro technique. Supposedly some kind of a technique whereby you focus for 25 minutes to get one thing done. I joked around a bit and asked if this was instigated by one of the guys trying to get the girls to shut up for 25 minutes (seriously, this was really just a joke, they’re doing a wonderful job there ) and yes, that’s what it was they said and left it at that.

Back home, I was reading some tweets from Jessica (one of the PU people) about still having 73 Pomodori to go and then I figured I should really check this thing out…

I tried it out today and it’s the simplest method I’ve ever seen to get you to focus. The idea is as simple as keeping a little list of to do items, setting a timer for 25 minutes and during these 25 minutes, just focusing on one thing and one thing only. Every interruptions needs to be noted down in order to keep track of what keeps you from focusing all the time. There are only a few rules–taken from the original (freely downloadable, less than 40 page) ‘book‘, such as

• A Pomodoro Consists of 25 minutes Plus a Five-Minute Break
• After Every Four Pomodoros Comes a 15-30 Minute Break
• The Pomodoro Is Indivisible. There are no half or quarter Pomodoros
• If a Pomodoro Begins, It Has to Ring
• Protect the Pomodoro
• The Next Pomodoro Will Go Better

Seriously: so far so good! I’ve never encountered a simpler method yet to get myself focused, so I’ll be trying this out the next few weeks.

The only thing I have against it so far is that the people that came up with this technique really need to brush up on their Italian: the plural form of Pomodoro is Pomodori!

I’m in Oslo for the week and I fly there straight from Italy after having been skiing there for a few days. It has been snowing here as well for quite a bit and and about half an hour driving from Oslo, there are quite a few nice slopes.

Since I had my gear with me (all except a board), we went skiing yesterday night after work. I’d love to live here, being able to ski after work is such a luxury. Funnily enough, I could use the Monte Rosa Ski pass after having bought a ticket, the systems are interoperable. I rented a snowboard and off we went…

The slopes (at Varingskollen were a bit icy and there were only a few slopes, but it was still a lot of fun.

In the picture: carving master Kristoffer, working for a partner of ours in Oslo.

When we drove back to town, I saw the temperature gauge drop to -21˚C, the coldest I’ve seen for a long time. On the slopes, it wasn’t all that cold, since I had put on a lot of clothes (thermo-underwear, woolen shirts, et cetera).

Last weekend, Giorgio, Margriet and I went for another short weekend of skiing in Valle di Gressoney. We skied on Friday and Saturday. This was my third (yup, sounds like I’m lucky this year) trip to Valle di Gressoney for skiing this year already (I was there for New Year’s and for a short trip with Peter a few weeks later) and this was yet a totally different experience than the previous ones.

Whereas the previous two times we had quite some good weather, this time around it had been snowing for the full period we were there. We arrived late afternoon on Thursday and left again on Saturday around 5′ish. When we arrived it snowed already, and only on Saturday at 3pm, we saw the first bits of sun on the slopes. Sight was terrible on Friday and also on Saturday morning, with lots of mist and snow falling all the time. It still was a great weekend though, as going off piste didn’t really matter a lot: the pistes themselves were also covered in powder pretty much all day. The times I did go off piste a little bit (there were avalanche warnings all the time, so I didn’t venture quite far from the pistes to keep things safe) I was covered in powder up to my chest. Fortunately there wasn’t a lot of wind, which prevented things from becoming too cold.

We didn’t stay up in the house, as I figured with all the snow, it’s probably even more difficult to get there than two weeks ago. That time it already took us close to an hour to walk up there, but with at least another meter of snow, it would probably have taken even longer, not even mentioning the fact that I only have one pair of snow shoes and these are definitely needed this time of year.

Later on Saturday we went to Milano, to have dinner with Giorgio’s family (parents and grandpa of 96) and have a few drinks with friends of Giorgio. My Italian has definitely improved a lot this weekend, since I was basically surrounded by Italians all the time. Having a simple conversation definitely is not a problem anymore and I’m quite close to understanding a normal conversation as well. Vocabulary-wise I still have to do a fair bit of learning, but that’s going to be just fine as soon as I start reading newspapers (note to self: since you’re at MXP airport anyway right now, why not buy one).

All the locals in Valle di Gressoney are totally stunned by all the snow. All the records are broken, with almost 5m up in the mountains in the Dolomites. I hope it’s going to be snowing a bit more the coming weeks. I’m thinking about planning another short trip in March some time. As it looks, there will be skiing until the end of April or even the beginning of May this year, so even if March doesn’t happen, there’s still some time.

On my way to Oslo, from Milano, I sat next to a couple that coincidentally had been skiing in the Gressoney valley too. They stayed in Staffal, in a hotel called Ellex, supposedly quite nice according to them. One to remember. Also, this guy mentioned a website I had never seen before, called Gressoney Online. Lots of information about the Gressoney Valley.

I’ll post some pictures later on.