Tonight I had a bit of a shock. I was downstairs and I kept thinking I was hearing something upstairs. The washer was going, so I just assumed it was that. But every now and then I would hear something else. I wasn't really sure what it was, just, well...something else.

In the 4 months I have been living in this apartment, I have been getting used to the sounds that it makes. There is the massive skylight that groans as it stretches and contracts with the warming and cooling of the day. There are the kids running up and down the stairs next door. There is the music that rarely comes through the floorboards. But it was a different sound tonight.

I decided to climb up the stairs to investigate, not exactly sure what I would find. The door to my home office was closed, though I always leave it open. The wind must have closed it. And then I thought I saw a shadow move. That gave me a fright. So I inched quietly back down the stairs so that I could clearly see through the crack at the base of the door. The setting sun allowed for a bit of light to come through. I then saw the shadow move the other way. I was pretty sure that wasn't my imagination.  There was some rustling around in there too...boxes shifting, papers shuffling.

Now there should be nothing in that room. Well, nothing living. I live alone and I don't have any friends staying with me, so I was at a bit of a loss when trying to come up with an explanation for what I was seeing and hearing. I inched the door open and watched out for an intruder to rush past me. There was nobody in the room...and then swoosh! A sleek black cat rushed from one corner of the room to the other and slunk out the window. Well, I assume that's what it was. It moved so quickly that I can't be certain, but I guess I shouldn't leave that window open anymore...

Wow, its been some time since I last posted here. Lots of travel, and mostly being sick. I moved into my new apartment at the end of January and then about 2 weeks later I got sick. Very Sick. 2 weeks later, I got on a plane to go to Argentina...still sick. Then I spent a hard week of working in Buenos Aires (It WAS alot of work), while still sick. Then a week in Seattle. I thought I had gotten better but then a tickle in the throat started. By the end of the week I was feeling like death again. The flight was hell and when I landed in Amsterdam, my ears hadn't popped. The taxi back to my apartment was tough, constantly coughing. An hour in my apartment to shower and repack a bag, and I was off to Central Station for a train to Brussels. I was actually heading to a much smaller town south of Brussels where Dialogic has an office. Dialogic is a very important partner for Captaris and I was going to attend a Fax over IP class they were holding. I was to change trains at Brussels North, but the connecting train got cancelled...twice. An hour on a cold wet train platform totally sucked. So then I took a cab instead. That first day in class was tough. The instructor's voice was fading(she was sick too, but was still going, amazing) and my ears still hadn't popped so I couldn't hear anything. Thankfully two Theraflus that night at the hotel fixed me up and by morning I could hear. The second day of class was much more successful, but the instructor's voice was down to a whisper (but she kept going!!). By the weekend, the illness had come back in full force. Monday I returned to the doctor, and yesterday got an X-Ray to try to figure out what is wrong. But I think I am on the mend. Still a bit of a cough, but nowhere near as bad as I was a month ago, or even 3 days ago.

Ahhh, its nearly finally done. The floors are in, the painting in done, and the kitchen comes today. I can't wait for it to all be done, but looking at this video, you can see its getting VERY close.

I am down to the last two weeks before I can move in to my new place. When I first move in, I will have minimal furniture. By that I mean really minimal. In fact I can count all bits of furniture on one hand....one ugly hand. I have some IKEA Billy shelves, and IKEA Ivar shelves that are actually my current computer desk, and an IKEA mattress I lie on the floor when visitors come. That's it!!! Which means I have a hell of a lot of stuff I need to buy.

To help me figure out what gets the priority, I have been using some of the cool features of Excel 2007. Actually, the features could have been there before, but I just noticed them now. First, I listed the item, a rough cost, a location and a priority. I set Conditional Formatting for the Priority to show ratings. Then I set Conditional Formatting for Cost to show Green to Red for value of the item. Then I sorted by Priority then Cost. As you can see, the XBox and LCD TV come way before a real bed. Over on the right, I have sums of items based on priority. Using the function SUMIF, I can sum up all priority 4 items easily: =SUMIF(C2:C26,"=4",B2:B26). I thought that was pretty cool.

Prices on most things are fairly low because at first lots of things are expected to come from Ikea. Some of that is because I want to get the basics, and then there are some things that IKEA does better than anyone else. An example is a good desk. My last desk was an Ikea Effectiv. The thing cost me 900 USD and was rock solid. It held 2 19" Viewsonic CRTs, plus me standing on them and they wouldn't budge. I sold it for 500 just before I left San Francisco so it retained value well too.

Its over!!! My month long vacation ends tomorrow when I have to wake up before 10 for the first time. 30 days ago, I created a list of things I was going to do. Time to go through that list and see what I actually did. I think it worked out even better than I planned and I'll tell you why afterwards:

• Tweak this site - come up with a blog design that I really like and that isn't broken in some spots. Make it easier to update and friendlier to you - Well, I tweaked it a bit, but not a whole lot. I had some fun with it.
• Read some books I have bought in the last few months (and put them into action)
• CSS Anthology - Yeah, I flipped through it a bit
• Principles of Beautiful Web Design - I read it, but didn't really take it to heart
• Windows Powershell in Action - Didn't even touch it
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# - Touched it, but didn't crack the cover
• Organize my life -
• Get rid of some of this extra crap in my apartment - I bought some more crap instead
• Get rid of the extra feeds I don't really read in Google Reader - They are all too important
• Get rid of the extra crap on all my PCs, etc. - Nope, didn't do that either
• Every time I have seen something interesting on the net, I added them to my del.icio.us account. Now I can actually look at them. - OK, good in theory, but didn't quite get around to it
• Prepare for my new apartment - Be a bit more involved in the renovations as they come closer to completion. - It was certainly easier to do when work didn't get in the way, but I wasn't any more involved than before
• Write up some reviews of amazing software I use everyday and that I can't live without
• Dash - No, but I still love it
• ClearContext - A review would have given me a free license, but I just paid up instead to upgrade
• SpinVox - Did that one
• Trog Bar - No, but its really cool...did that count?
• Learn about new and interesting technologies that I haven't had a chance to really focus on yet (I could probably spend a month alone on each of these):
  • Sharepoint 2007 - I am still riding on the memory of my time as a Sharepoint PM at Microsoft...didn't touch it this month
  • Facebook and Facebook development - Nope, but I played plenty of Scrabulous on Facebook
  • Windows Vista Sidebar development - Nothing here
  • Firefox and Thunderbird addon development - I briefly looked into Chrome dev
  • The new stuff in Visual Studio 2008 - Never even launched VS
  • LINQ - I can now spell it correctly
  • Windows Presentation Foundation - No
  • Windows Communication Foundation - Nada 
  • Windows Workflow Foundation - Zilch
  • Silverlight - I tweaked a Silverlight slideshow
  • YUI - I scrapped it from my site
  • Everything else in .NET 3.5 - Closer to nothing else in 3.5
  • System Center - Still need to download it from MSDN
• Actually start to use Powershell more often so that I don't have to relearn it every time. - Never touched Powershell
• Maybe see a little bit of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. There is so little I have seen of this place. This guide might help. - Didn't see anything new
• Sleep - I plan to sleep a lot. I haven't been getting much of that for a while. - I did exceptionally well on this one.

So there is my list. As you can see I did far better than I had ever expected. I managed to stay away from semi-work-related stuff for an entire month. It was magical. And I did a lot of work in managing my photos and using Lightroom and Photoshop to prepare for a wall of photos in my new place. My Lightroom catalog went from 4000 images to well over 11000 photos. Very few were new, I just had them scattered across 4 different PCs. It was especially amazing to find some photos I thought I lost from Nepal, Costa Rica, Moscow, and more.

I wholeheartedly recommend taking a month off at the end of the year to relax. Don't go anywhere, just sit and rest. What? You only get 2 weeks vacation? OK, sell everything, move to Europe, get a job, and then take that month off. Even better, take the full 6 or 7 weeks everyone gets over here. I will someday be able to change my ways to do that too...

I set up the SlideShow in my gallery a few weeks ago, and then I went away for Christmas to visit family in the UK. I just got back and had a chance to get it to work on machines other than my own. Doh!

For some reason, I have been sitting on this for a week without posting...well here it is now.

I am heading over to the place to do week 6 in an hour or so.

OK, this is not likely to get results, but I have to try. I live in Amsterdam and I just bought a place in Oud West. I signed up for street parking 2 months ago and have only another 22 months to wait. Until then I need a place to park. I know I can do Europark or whatever that is called on Marnixstraat, but I was hoping for something closer. I currently park in a garage on Govert Flinkstraat that you would never find normally because it is unmarked. I am hoping one of you know of something like that in my area. So if you know of a garage in Oud West, preferably in the red zone below, but also in the blue zone, please let me know. If you know how to get a monthly pass at Staringplein, I would be interested in that too.

So I am updating the theme on this site. Its not done, but there are already a lot of changes I am pretty excited about. Its still not perfect, but I have a bit of time on my hands right now.

Whats working and is pretty cool:

• Current Twitter Status - ok that was there before
• Upcoming Travel from 30Boxes - Its grabbing my future travel schedule from 30B. When a date goes past, it will no longer show up on the page...automatically
• Recent Del.icio.us Tags - Its grabbing the last 5 or 6 days worth of links I have tagged.
• Captaris Developer Program Posts - I also occasionally post to the Captaris Developer Program. This is a list of all of those posts. As with the above items, this is dynamic.
• Blog Flare - Took a while to figure this out. Each post can be added to Digg, Facebook, Technorati....ok, they won't, but they could.
• Full vs Excerpts - The most recent 3 posts are the full post. Then there are a bunch more that are just excerpts.
• Cool icons from FamFamFam: Silk
• Simile Timeline - This is one of the coolest new features. Rather than a traditional calendar of previous items, I am now showing an interactive timeline of all blog posts here.

Whats not working...yet:

• Photo gallery - yeah, I know, thats pretty important
• Other bits - I have a single page for all the other stuff...files, bundles, etc

Here is the video for week four. The big changes are the electrics, and the walls are mostly plastered. Enjoy!