And off we go. In an hour, the taxi will be here to take us to Schiphol to catch our plane to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where we’ll spend three nights before driving east towards Oman.
We have our international driving licence, a brand new Maclaren Quest Sport buggy for Eloïse, our guidebooks and lots of enthusiasm.
We’ll be sure to take lots of photos and provide travel updates along the way.
With just a couple of days to go before we fly out to the Middle East, we’ve been making some improvements to the house and setting other things in motion.
A few days ago, our new Arclinea kitchen cabinets were installed. Finally, we have enough storage space for all of our plates and glasses, as well as our food. I thought we would be sacrificing the look of the kitchen for the more practical storage issue, but it turns out that the kitchen actually looks better now — much more homely — with the new cabinets installed.
The Lundia bookcase we purchased for my office now has two rows of rails in one of the cupboards to accommodate hanging files, so we can finally clear up and file away all of our old invoices, bank statements, etc.
On Friday, we had a new floor partially laid on the bedroom balcony. The people who came to do it turned up at 08:00, which was pretty rough. None of us are used to getting up at that time of day, especially not I.
Anyway, the work was being done to fix a leak in the ceiling above our dining-room table, where the slanted glass roof attaches to the upstairs balcony. That annoying leak is now hopefully a thing of the past, but the workmen still need to come back on Monday to finish the job.
The sitting-room sideboard arrived a week ago and has really added to the quality of that room. Finally, we have some cupboards and drawers into which we can stuff all of our downstairs items. It also looks great and gives the room a more homely feel.
One of the things I’ve been looking forward to doing (but procrastinating with) has been getting the house wired for sound. The time has finally come to put in a decent sound system. Given that much of our music collection is already stored as compressed digital files and that the future of music definitely lies in this direction, it was a more or less obvious decision to choose a Sonos-based installation.
We’re going to divide the house up into various zones, each of which will be able to stream music from either the server in our cellar (which houses our own collection) or across the Net, for example when we want to listen to Internet radio stations. This is basically what we already do in the living-room, thanks to the MythMusic module of MythTV.
The multiple zones will each be able to serve their own music, so Sarah and I could be listening to different things in living-room and office, for example, whilst friends in the guest bedroom listen to their favourite radio station from back home in the US.
More on all of this when we get back from our trip, at which point all of the equipment should have arrived and be ready for installation. It’s going to be cool.
It’s official. According to a study by the UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, Dutch children are the happiest and enjoy the greatest well-being.
The study looked at the children of 21 wealthy western countries and The Netherlands came out on top, ahead of predictable Scandinavian stalwarts Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
At the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest children in the western world can be found in the US, in 20th place, and the UK, right at the bottom of the pile in 21st place.
This BBC article gives some good background to the study with insightful quotes from Dutch teenagers.
According to this USA Today article, the British government has criticised the report, claiming that some of the data used in the study is five years old and therefore does not reflect recent improvements in child well-being in the UK. How reassuring it must be to British parents to know that their government has actually been concerned about their children for some five whole years now. Unsurprisingly, UK politicians in opposition parties believe the findings of the study.
Both the BBC and the USA Today article make for good reading, especially if you’re a parent. You can find more using Google.
If you don’t have time to read the 52 page full report, you can suffice with this UNICEF press release. The BBC has also put together a list of the key points at a glance.
With The Netherlands continuing to top the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index in 2006, there are currently at least two profoundly good things to feel happy about as a resident of this small, wet country.
I found out at the weekend that we’re soon to be offered ten days of free viewing of the Film1 film and sport channels as a promotional stunt. Now, I have no interest in the sport channels, but there could be some good films on the film channels.
Unfortunately, during most of the ten day free period, we’ll be in the UAE and Oman. So, how to ensure that we don’t miss any good stuff?
Enter the latest version of tv_grab_nl_upc, 0.6.1, which is the grabber I wrote to feed my MythTV system with programme schedule data for UPC’s digital television network. This new version is able to look up the IMDB viewer rating for each of the films that it finds. This rating is actually a very good indicator of the true quality of the film in question, as it reflects the opinion of real viewers and, usually, with sufficient quantity that a reliable average results.
The only thing that remains to do is produce a custom recording rule in MythTV; and here it is:
program.stars >= 0.75 AND MONTH(program.starttime) = 2
AND DAYOFMONTH(program.starttime) >= 16 AND DAYOFMONTH(program.starttime) <= 25
AND channel.callsign LIKE ‘F1%
This says to record any programme that has a star rating equal to or higher than 0.75 (equivalent to a 7.5/10 rating on IMDB), when the start of the broadcast is in February, between the 16th and the 25th of the month, and the broadcast channel is any of the Film1 channels.
Using tv_grab_nl_upc and the above rule, we should have a few decent films to watch when we return from holiday.
Again, I find the above a great example of the power and flexibility of MythTV. No other PVR gives you this level of control.
The KNMI have issued a weather alert about heavy snowfall expected tomorrow. Five to ten centimetres are expected, which isn’t a lot in some parts of the world, but could be enough here to throw a serious spanner into the transport infrastructure. We’ll see.
As you might expect, it’s been quite cold today. I was glad of my heated driver’s seat and steering wheel in the car this morning, as I took Eloïse to play at the Little Gym. She’s really starting to love that place now, after a period of some trepidation and timidity. She plays on much of the apparatus, but still doesn’t feel much for the group activities. I see much of her father’s stubborn individualism in her. Perhaps that will mellow over time.
We booked another hotel in Dubai today, where we’ll stay for the first three nights upon our arrival. It’s in the Bur Dubai district, close to the Dubai Creek. This is a good location, as we’ll have a number of attractions right on our doorstep and can use the abra (water taxi) to visit the Gold Souk, the Spice Market and other things.
The only other hotel we’re likely to book prior to our departure is the one for our stay in Muscat, the Omani capital, as accommodation can be scarce in the high season. Outside of the capital, we’re trusting that things will be less in demand.
We’re still considering our itinerary. We don’t have much time to plan and there are a lot of things to do, including desert treks, which allow you to spend the night in the desert, ride camels, etc. You can also go sandboarding down the dunes if you want. It all sounds great to me. Trekking with Eloïse will be lots of fun, I’m sure.
Tomorrow, a sideboard arrives for our sitting-room and some kitchen cupboards will hopefully also be fitted.
We had a new roof laid a couple of weeks ago, too, as we had sprung a couple of leaks on the top floor. Happily, those seem to be remedied now. Slowly but surely, the house is coming together.
We constantly hear stories of people trying to move into this area, but experiencing great difficulty in finding anything for sale, let alone anything actually suitable. We’re so glad that we acted decisively and bought our house when we did, or we, too, might now have been stuck trying to get into the neighbourhood.
