A Moment’s Rest

Geoff headed back to California yesterday after an enjoyable visit, affording us 36 hours of respite before Sarah’s folks arrive from Providence. That means another early day for yours truly to pick them up from the airport tomorrow.

The car has been repaired and you’d never know it had been damaged. Let’s hope the insurance claim is processed smoothly.

The dry, sunny spell that has seen the city picnicking in the park every day for the last month and a half is coming to an end, they say. Sunday will supposedly be our last warm, sunny day for a while and some much needed rain is heading this way. As sad as I’ll be to see the return of normal spring weather, Mother Nature will be happy, so there’s some consolation to be had.

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Koninginnedag 2007

Our photos of Koninginnedag 2007 are up. They’re not as good as I’d hoped, but they still capture the atmosphere of the day.

The weather was perhaps the best ever on Koninginnedag, with uninterrupted sunshine for the duration of the day. The temperature was pleasantly warm without ever becoming too hot.

Sarah was the earliest to rise, up and out the door at 07:00 in order to snap up the early morning bargains with Mina along the Apollolaan. I rose soon afterwards, as a disconsolate Eloïse had just awoken and was now wondering where the hell her mother had gone so early in the day without her.

All in all, it was a long, but very gezellige day.

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Fair Weather

April 2007 isn’t even over, but it’s already the warmest April ever in The Netherlands. It’s also the driest calendar month in 100 years; and it’s not even a summer month!

Of all of the Aprils since 1900, there have only been 14 with a day in which the temperature rose above 25°. April 2007 has already had 6 such days and more are expected before the end of the month.

The broken records for April go on:

  • The temperature was, on average, 5°C higher than normal.

  • There were more hours of sun than ever before.

  • The first >25° day was never before so early in the year: 14th April

  • It has never been so dry for so long before. Some parts of the country have had no rain since 22nd March.

Will it be the warmest Koninginnedag ever next week? We’ll see.

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Reversal Of Misfortune

My one day photography course planned for last Saturday ended abruptly before it had even begun when I had to rush to the aid of a sick friend. Happily, the Volksuniversiteit has agreed to allow me to move my enrolment to the next instance of the course on 1st June.

I’ll be starting a separate three-part digital photography course this coming Friday and am looking forward to getting stuck into that.

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to attend Lisa Gerrard‘s concert at the World Forum in The Hague. It was a fabulous concert, but I was slightly preoccupied during the show, on account of the fact that just a few minutes before the concert had been due to start, another car had collided with mine in the venue’s underground car park.

In his enthusiasm to secure a parking space being vacated by a car on his left, the driver of the errant car slammed into reverse and shot backwards without looking and before I could sound my horn. A couple of seconds later, he rammed my stationary vehicle with the towing hook of his vehicle, thereby knackering my number plate, its holding frame and the grille behind.

The car is due to be fixed next Wednesday and shouldn’t cost more than €300 or so, which — barring any anomalies — the other party’s insurance will be paying. The other driver immediately admitted culpability and hopefully won’t have a memory lapse later on.

Speaking of the car, its ECU (Electronic Control Unit) was flashed with new software a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to fix a problem with the keyless starter mechanism. It seems funny to have one’s car flashed, but cars contain an amazing amount of computing technology these days, so it makes sense. I suppose it’s just because I still tend to think of them as being more hardware than software, but these days, they pretty much contain equal measures of both.

Geoff has been here for the last few days, which has been fun. He headed back to Dublin for a few days on Monday afternoon, but will be back at the weekend in time for Koninginnedag. That’s going to be a good laugh.

What else? Well, we’ve finally joined the ranks of the responsible refuse disposers and purchased a paper shredder as a precaution against identity theft. Yes, yes, we should have done this ages ago, but at least we’ve finally done it now.

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Sonos Web Controller

I mentioned the other day that I would like to see a Web controller for the Sonos music system to supplement the remote controller and the (to a non-Windows, non-Mac user) largely useless desktop controller software.

Well, it tuns out that an inventive user has done just that, and written a Web-based controller in Perl. It actually works as advertised, too, although it’s not quite as functional as either the remote controller or the desktop controller. Still, I can now manage the Sonos from the comfort of my laptop, which — let’s face it — is where I spend a lot of my time.

How it works is quite clever. You install it on any system that can run Perl, so I put it on our MythTV box. When run, it starts a Web server on port 8001. Pointing a browser at the server yields a menu that allows one to select a UI and various plug-ins. Once that is done, one can access most Sonos functions, including the all-important ones, such as selecting zones, playing music and altering the volume.

On the back-end, a UPnP control point listens for UPnP events and talks to the Sonos boxes. With my scant knowledge of UPnP, this has the appearance of happening rather magically.

I’d like to see Sonos take this piece of software and continue its development. There’s clearly a need for a controller that one can manage from one’s Web browser.

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