Alef Arendsen

I’m at home for two weeks and this has been a while. In the past six weeks, I’ve had trips to Malta, Malmo, Israel, Stockholm, Milan and Cairo, so I’m glad to spend a little bit of time in Utrecht.

Yesterday I spent some time working / hanging out in Rotterdam with Arjen. We went by the bookstore and I bought Ed Burns’ Rock Star Programmer book. I ran into Ed in Cairo and he showed me his book. I like the idea and I think a lot of other people will too. It’s a book in which Ed Burns interviews a bunch of the most influential and famous software engineering gurus / programmers to see what they have in common. I also bought Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns, a book about communicating through code. On my way back to Utrecht from Rotterdam, I ran into a .NET developer that was looking at the books I was reading. I ended up giving him the titles and although the Rock Star Programmer book does have a lot of Java guys in it, it sure is interesting for .NET programmers as well I think.

I also bought a few other books, which I’ll probably post about when I’m done reading them. I first have to finish One Big Damn Puzzler by John Harding.

Arjen and I had dinner by the way in restaurant Stockholm in the Oude Haven, which was very good!

Today, I did some shopping for clothes. I ran into a ex-classmate of mine a few weeks ago and we decided back then that we were going to do some shopping together, so that’s what we did today. I bought some very cool-looking jeans by Kato, a pretty exclusive Japanese brand. I also bought a jeans by Blue Blood, a little more mainstream Dutch brand. A pair of sneakers from Maison Martin Margiela, whom I still think has one of the coolest websites ever. I also bought a few dress shirts, because one can never have enough of those . My shopping partner didn’t buy anything, she is going to the US pretty soon, so she’s saving up some money to do shopping-galore in NYC.

We had lunch in Broodnodig, a nice place on the Mariaplaats.

Well, with all that, and some stuff I already have, that should certainly get me through some of the parties that I’ll be having in two weeks, when I’m heading to the Salone del Mobile, the international furniture design exhibition in Milan with a few friends.

In the meantime, I’ve started looking for a new house. I’ve always wanted a house where walls where (almost) non-existing and ever since I bought Taschen’s Big Book of Lofts when I was in NYC last December, I’ve been thinking about really getting myself a slightly bigger place and tear down all the walls. If I’m moving, I’ll probably keep my old house and rent that out. I need to figure out how that’s going to work out financially. I’ve created a few Excel spreadsheets that should get me a bit of insight.

I live in the centre of Utrecht. I bought a place there a few years back. The apartment block has a parking garage underneath the house where I bought myself a place as well. Originally, the place cost €40.000 euro and there were 50 something places.

Because not all of the places were sold to the owners of the apartments, the government took the remaining places, to rent them out to other people. Obviously, the city of Utrecht do not want to loose money over the places. Taking into account an average interest rate of 5%, the interest alone would cost the government about €2.000,=. Add to that the service fee and a little bit of administrative overhead and you get to about €.2500,=. That’s kind of about right, because I can remember the government charged about €3.000,= a year per place.

Apparently nobody wanted to rent a place for that amount of money, so the places remained unoccupied for quite a while. Which in fact was good for us (the owners of the apartments), because now we could let visitors park at the empty places.

Just this morning, I received word from the head of the owners’ council, telling us that the government have rented out almost all places. This means, free parking for visitors is done and over with

What’s interesting though is the rate at which they rent out the places. Apparently, they’re charging about €1.500,=. This means they’re essentially loosing money on renting out the parking places, or in other words, they’re subsidizing the parking in the city centre. I’m not too bothered with that (although I do pay the €2.500 approximately for the interest, service fees, et cetera) because it’s just too convenient to have a parking place right underneath your house.

So it’s either the government doing subsidized parking, or maybe it’s the government taking their losses and speculating on a big increase of the prices of the parking spaces so that they make up for the losses when selling the parking spaces eventually…

Just for those that have to park at my place in the future, here’s a link to the parking map that you can use to figure out where to park if you do not want to pay the maximum rate of €3,85 per hour.