We just received our first personal Geocoin and are about to set it free onto the world. A Geocoin is an item that travels from Geocache to Geocache. People are supposed to take it from a cache, and place it into another one. Through the geocaching.com website you can track the progress of the coin, and see where it ends up.

In november/december 2009 Julie and I visited the Eastern Fields area in Papua New Guinea, joining a Wetpixel.com expedition with Eric Cheng and Tony Wu. We did two back to back trips on the Golden Dawn, the only liveaboard that visits the area. The Eastern Fields is a pretty remote atoll between Papua New Guinea and Australia, 450 nautical miles wide, consisting solely of submerged reefs. Nearest land is half a day’s travel away.

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.

read on to view our gallery

We’re back in St Croix and noticed there are at least 10 new geocaches this year. For those that don’t know, a geocache is sort of a treasure hunt using a GPS. You get a GPS location and get there any way you can to find the treasure. Then you take something from the treasure box, and leave something of your own. It’s great fun.

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!

Read on for some images..

On a recent trip to Papua New Guinea my friend Eric Cheng suggested (on advice from his friend Alex King) I use SVN to maintain my wordpress installation that runs this blog. I used to just download the latest version, and unzip it right into my blog directory. Works fine. Only problem is that you lag behind as wordpress releases a new version only every few months, while svn updates happen daily. I’m already very familiar with SVN, as we use it extensively in our office for coding projects, and I use it myself as well for some plugins I made for Roundcube.

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.

I recently started running, primarily so I could do the “Dam tot Dam” race, a 10M race between Amsterdam and neighboring town Zaandam. I enjoyed it so much that the day after the race I entered the Amsterdam Half Marathon race. This is a 21K (13 mile) race through the center of amsterdam. The race was yesterday, and Im really happy with my results. I finished in 1:57:03, which is pretty much average looking at all the runners. Not bad for someone that only started running a few months ago. I’m now contemplating training for a full Marathon next year, something I never thought I would actually even think about.

We haven’t done a lot of diving this year, but at least in November we’re going all out again. We’ll be traveling to Papua New Guinea to dive the Eastern Fields area. This isn’t a regular destination due to the conditions, but we’re hoping for the best. We’re joining Eric Cheng and Tony Wu for 2 trips on the Golden Dawn, a boat we’ve seen before near Kimbe in PNG.

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.

My whole life I’ve been into sports. From many years of soccer, basketball, tabletennis and other assorted sports as a child, to racketball, diving, martial arts and horseback riding as an adult. One thing I’ve never been good at though is long distance running. I was fine at sprints, but don’t ask me to run more than a few kilometers cause I would just collapse before the end. So it came as a real surprise to me that when I started running a few months ago, I suddenly was able to push past the 5K, 10K, and even 15K limit. After I finished my first 15K leisure run, I decide to see if there was any space left in the Dam tot Dam run. This is a 10 mile/16K run from Amsterdam to Zaandam, which happens to go right past our house. I always watch it, but this year I wanted to run myself.

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.

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For a long time I’ve been meaning to put an SSD in my Macbook Pro. Julie’s Thinkpad X200 already has one, but I couldn’t decide which one I wanted. The Intel X-25 was high on the list for a long time, but in the end I bought the Samsung 256GB mainly because I wanted more than the 128GB the X-25 gives me. The 2009 model of the Macbook Pro makes changing your boot drive really easy. All you do is open the battery compartment, remove 1 screw, and out comes the drive. A lot easier than previous models I’ve opened up. It took all of 5 minutes, most of which was spent removing some spacers from the old HD and putting them on the new SSD.

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.

The last 5 days I’ve had more fun than I’ve had in months, maybe years. Being a geek at heart, the HAR2009 conference was a truly magical event. Not only was the weather perfect, but the talks were of a very high quality. Most importantly, I was able to meet up with many many old friends. People I hadn’t seen in years, or sometimes even longer. It’s kind of strange to see people that you used to hang with, suddenly have 2 kids that can not only walk, but swim.

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.

Read on for more images and video..

In may of 2009 we went to Indonesia with Eric Cheng for a total of 45 days. We did over 130 dives, and went from Lembeh to Raja Ampat, Halmahera, Ambon and finally Flores. It was one of the best trips we’ve ever done, with a really nice group of people. It took a few months, but I finally managed to upload a gallery of the images. You can also read our tripreport.

Every four years a large outdoor hacker conference is held in The Netherlands. This year the 6th edition is being organized near the tiny town of Vierhouten. Like previous years there will be an amazing conference track consisting of a wide range of talks covering topics like engineering, hacking, ethics, politics and much more. But it’s also a great place to meet like-minded people. People that are not only technologically adept and privacy minded, but also critical of where technology is headed.

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

In the last few months I’ve picked up running again. It’s not that difficult for me to do a 5K a few times a week, but building up to 10K has always been hard. What tends to happen is that Julie and I go on a long trip, and I lose everything I’ve achieved and have to start over. Since we won’t be traveling until November, I figured it’s now or never. I want to reach 10K, within 1 hour. Ultimately I’d like to run the Dam tot Dam loop, a 16K run that passes by our house every year, but that’s a long term goal.

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.

For about 2 years now I’ve been using Smugmug for parts of our website. The people running Smugmug remind me of my own company and the way it started more than 15 years ago. A close nit group of people with a real passion for what they’re doing. I recently noticed they now allow you to embed slideshows of galleries in any website that accepts them so I thought I’d give it a go and embed a sampling of our underwater photos. In the not too distant future I also hope to replace most of our current Gallery2 based galleries with Smugmug galleries.

I suppose it’s telling that lately we’ve had more posts about horses than about diving. Then again, a horse takes out a huge chunk of your time. We have to take care of him every day, to make sure he gets enough exercise. Luckily the stable we house him at performs all the heavy work of cleaning the stables, feeding and keeping an eye out for him (and 100 or so other horses).

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!

When Julie and I first got together, whenever we went out to the city center of Amsterdam a guy would be playing music on the Leidseplein. Every time we saw him, we stayed and listened, even though he only ever played one song as far as we know. That song was “Stand by Me”. The song got utterly stuck in our head for a long time, and even till this day, if one of us gets something stuck in our head the other hums “Stand By Me” as a joke. So when I saw this video, it really brought back memories. Very cool project, “Playing for Change” . Make sure you watch the whole thing.