We knew before we went that this was going to be mostly a wide angle trip. That was going to make it a bit different from our usual trips, as Julie and I both like macro. The area was visually stunning, and Carl’s Ultimate was probably the most beautiful dive site I’ve ever seen. When the current picks up, the amount of life on that reef is so overwhelming you don’t know where to start. But a lot of this lushness was hard to photograph, and more suited to video. At some point I just stopped taking photo’s and watched the splendor in action.

Nevertheless we did take a lot of images, and even managed to take some macro shots.

One of the new geocaches is not that far from the house we rent. Or at least, not when measured in a direct line. Walking it is quite a different matter, as it includes two very steep hills that are pretty difficult to walk in the full sun. But we decided to do it anyways, and had a very nice afternoon. It took us three hours to complete the hike, find the cache, and walk back, but it was well worth it as the views during this hike are spectacular. Now on to the next cache!

So today I switched my blog over to SVN, and it all went without a hitch. I checked out the latest version 2.9.1, and copied over my own theme and some plugins, and it all worked immediately. Hopefully this will make updating easier in the future.

After that month we’ll be back in Amsterdam for the holidays and then off again to visit Julie’s mother in the Virgin Islands.

Unfortunately there was no space left, but I was in luck. This year the organization added a second run the evening before to commemorate the 25th anniversary of this run. The night run still had spots left, so I signed up and continued training.

The run was last saturday, and I’m really happy with my result. I finished the 16K run in 1 hour 29 minutes and I took my iPhone/GPS running app with me.

When I booted up, I noticed it took a lot of time for the machine to go through it’s initial BIOS/POST phase. I remembered my friend Eric had a similar problem, so I asked him how he fixed that. Turns out all you have to do is set the new drive as your startup disk in Preferences. Now it boots in less than 30 seconds, and that includes starting up a dozen or so tools.

As you can read in my previous post, HAR2009 is the 6th in a series of events organized by the dutch (and german) hacker movement. And this time it almost didn’t happen. The organizer of all the previous events, Rop Gonggrijp,  told us a year ago that he couldn’t do it. After a few months of silent shock, Aldert Hazenberg stood up and took charge. Quite a few people were a little skeptical, but this turned out to be unfounded. He and his team of over 100 volunteers pulled off one of the best events that I’ve been to. A new generation of enthusiasts has entered the scene with a loud bang.

This is the first year that I’m not really involved in the organization of this event. In previous years I was deeply involved with the technical setup of the event, and the last 2 events I was part of the board of the foundation that oversees the budget. This year I plan to just be a visitor (ok, not quite, another 2 foundations I’m a board member of are the principal sponsors of the event) and I hope to see as many talks as possible.

• 1989 – The Galactic Hacker Party
• 1993 – Hacking at the End of the Universe
• 1997 – Hacking in Progress
• 2001 – Hackers at Large
• 2005 – What The Hack
• 2009 – Hacking at Random

I’ve been looking at getting some sort of GPS device to aid in keeping distance/speed records. That is, until I remembered I’ve got an iPhone, and surely there must be some running app. Indeed there is, and it’s a winner. The app is called RunKeeper, and it’s everything I want in a running app. It keeps distance, speed, history, integrates with Google Maps, and has a ton of social website connectors. And what’s even better, it’s free! There is a paid version, but so far I haven’t found anything I’m missing. I may buy it though, to support the programmer.

I just did a 6K, within my time limit, and it wasn’t even that much of a problem. I’m adding about 10% distance a week, which is what most running schedules seem to recommend. Between this and horse riding (which is actually a very high-intensity sport) I’m definitely getting my exercise in.

Julie and I want different things out of a horse. She wants to ride in the adjacent forest, and dressage comes second. I like to learn to fine tune the horse, which is not going to happen in the forest, although I do like riding there.  Actually, this is great for Rumba, as now he gets to do different things. Even better, we have another rider who likes jumping, so he gets to do that as well.

Today we had another dressage test at the stable. This is just a stable contest, as opposed to the national level contests (which we also have at our stable, but I don’t do those). It’s mostly a personal thing. You perform a test, and if you succeed you can continue to the next level. The test consists of a bunch of manoeuvres you have to show, and you get graded for each one. On top of that you get graded for overall appearance, style, etc.

I was kinda nervous about this test as Rumba has been difficult last week. Monday during a private lesson he was very stiff, didn’t listen at all, felt sluggish, and just balked at everything I wanted to do. This then turned into a vicious circle, as I got frustrated for nothing working as planned. This continued for the rest of the week, and only on saturday afternoon I got a bit of cooperation from him. But today, it all disappeared. He shined, both during preparation (it takes hours to make him and me presentable!) and during the test. Even before finishing I knew I was going to get enough points to continue.

This reminds me. We also got a saddle fitted last week. This was supposedly a really exciting event, as Rumba has thrown off 2 experienced riders during previous fittings. So everyone was telling us we were going to fly off the horse. We asked one of our instructors (the one that rides him once a week) to ride him first with each new saddle, and she agreed. So when the moment was there, we were ready for a rodeo. It all went up in smoke. There was no rodeo. It was a non-event. He took every saddle without problems, and after 2 saddles we even stopped having the instructor ride. So next week we have a brand new saddle.

So anyways, back to the test. I finished first in my level. Unfortunately more than half the riders did not get enough points. I personally think the judges were a little bit too strict. These are stable competitions, and we were being graded like national competition riders. Silly if you ask me.  So for all my colleagues, this is the only time you’ll even see me in a suit like that!