The kite community in Holland is pretty big and very vibrant. We have a pretty big crew of pro riders. Kevin Langeree came in 2nd in this year’s PKRA (the world cup for kiteboarders) freestyle competition. Then we have Ruben Lenten, who’s the mega-kite-loop guru. Together with the guys from Kitecinema he’s produced some amazing material of the most scary kiteloops ever. If you’re interested in looking what that’s all about, go and have a look at Stormsjees 2.0 @ YouTube. There’s also a high-quality version of the movie, which is awesome to watch. At the moment however, it’s not possible to get to the movies, because the site is down…
Online, the kite community in Holland mainly gets together in two places: hanglos.nl and kitehigh.nl. The former has been down for the last few days (they’re experiences a failure of the power supply of one of their servers–I guess they don’t have such a good SLA 
).
Anyway, fortunately Kitehigh is still up and I just discovered this little movie of Kevin Langeree. As I said, he came in second in the PKRA freestyle competition, but as you can see in the movie he also likes to rip the waves pretty hard (with and without a kite). Great material to look at when there’s no wind…
Other than that, this weekend wasn’t all that special. I came home Friday night from a trip to Antwerp, had dinner with @maggievie, a few drinks after that with Giorgio in town. On Saturday I had drinks at Jack’s place and today I finally finished all the preparations for the accountant to start filing my tax report (both business and personal) over 2007.
I’m looking forward to the next windy day. In my absence, I asked my dad to get me a little camera from a local shop (they came only came in very limited supply). It’s shock- and waterproof up until 3 meter, uses SD cards to store the footage and has a pretty decent resolution for such a small cam I’ve heard people say. So that means that pretty soon, you’ll be able to see some real action instead of only still photographs. I haven’t picked it up yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it. Going to drop by at my parents tomorrow or so I guess… Oh, if you’re interested to know which brand it is: it’s an ATC2000.
In the meantime I’ve kind of finalized my schedule for the next 7 weeks, which involves 5 weeks of travel. I’m going to be at home for the next two weeks (although I might have to go to Brussels somewhere next week). Then I’m heading Aalborg for a session at a client, followed by Copenhagen for a few customer visits. Then on to Malmø for Øredev. All this in one week by the way. Next up is a full week of Copenhagen (I will be home for the weekend though) for a course and a SpringSource seminar. Then on to Miami for SpringOne. The week thereafter I’ll be in Antwerp, for Devoxx where I’ll be co-presenting on Spring 3.0 alongside friend and colleague Arjen Poutsma. Finally, I’m wrapping up this tour with a week’s worth of Israel, where I’m presenting at JavaEdge, a conference hosting by our friends from AlphaCSP. I hope to stay there for a few days. I’ve heard and seen Haifa has some strong winds in December, so I might be taking my kite gear.
All the conferences should be great. If you’re in the neighborhood and have a chance to make it to one of them drop me a line and we’ll meet up.
