Photos… lots and lots of them

In the past months, we have been very busy sticking all our photos into albums. No, not digitally, but the old-fashioned, analog ones, you know – on paper!

I had quite a backlog of photos, some even 10 years old. We had all these photos, on a big pile, in what is now the baby room. So when we started clearing out this room a few months ago, we decided that we needed to get rid of this pile. So we spent lots of evenings and complete days sorting out the photos and putting them in the albums. We even took a bunch of them on our last holiday!

Well, yesterday evening we finally stuck the last of our pictures (of that same holiday) into our latest album, so we’re finished… for now, of course…

A rough estimate:

• 12 photo books and albums
• 820 pages
• 2300 photos
• 9000 adhesive photo corners

Lightning

At the end of our holiday, last week, we had two nights with heavy rain and thunderstorms. Secretly, I had hoped for that to happen, because I wanted to try out my new camera (and toys)!

This is the result:

Champoussin

We arrived home from our two-week holiday in Champoussin, Switzerland, yesterday evening.

Why are holidays always too short?

Champoussin is a little village near Val-d’Illiez within the skiing area of Portes du Soleil.

We didn’t do any skiing of course, but for walking the area is very nice as well. We made some beautiful tours of three to four hours, almost every day. The weather was perfect, except for the first two days, and sometimes even a bit too warm.

The two (and-a-half) of us stayed in a luxurious 6-person appartment with two bathrooms, three toilets and three bedrooms! We had a magnificent view on the Dents du Midi, which we enjoyed from our balcony during breakfast and dinner (and in-between):

dr.

As of yesterday afternoon, about 16:15, I can put these two letters in front of my name! Almost six years of work… finally finished now.

PhD thesis has arrived

Today, a bunch of boxes were delivered at the TU Delft for me. My PhD thesis has arrived! Finally! Another giant leap in the whole PhD process. Only one big hurdle still to take: the defence on June 12th.

See my publications for a pdf version of the thesis.

Medical visualisation

is not exactly my specialisation, but is sure is nice!

PhD Thesis

The fact that I haven’t updated my weblog very much lately, doesn’t mean that nothing interesting has happened here these past months. In fact, it has been quite busy at times, for both of us – a lot has happened both on a personal level, but also at work.

The last few weeks have been especially hectic for me, but now I can sit down for a moment and take a breath: the final text for my PhD thesis is off to the printer! A few more weeks and I will have my own book! I still don’t want to think too much about the defence, though…

Anyway, this was one of the reasons it’s been somewhat quiet on my blog (to say the least). I’ll do my best to liven things up a bit around here… starting today.

Netherlands? Holland!

Do you know how “Netherlands” should be pronounced?
You may think you do, but maybe you should check out Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, just to be sure!

Sunset in Vlissingen

In the past months I have been doing a course in photography. It was very nice and I learnt a lot – and made a lot of pictures! A hundred to a hundred and fifty a week! And we could only show 3 or 4 of those!

Well, anyway, because I haven’t been using my weblog very much in the past year, I decided that I would start a photoblog. So, the first picture is coming up right now, and hopefully, I can give you regular updates with new (or old) pictures.

All pictures made by me, of course, and with my Canon Powershot A620 digital camera, unless otherwise stated.

Locales and date format in SQL

I am working on a VB.NET project. The program is a Windows service that connects to an MS Access database. Everything worked fine on my own pc, but on another pc, we ran into some problems. It appeared to be related to regional settings. By default, the service ran as the LocalSystem account. I don’t know how to change the settings for that account, (anyone?) so for testing we ran the service under different user accounts. And indeed, for a user with “en-US”-settings, everything worked fine, but for a user with “nl-NL”-settings, we got weird results.