Just a few days before I will leave for some sightseeing in Spain and Maroc.

The weather is looking good,  arriving next week!

A real snowman in the style of Johan, my oldest son

While it is pouring rain here in Weesp, and I am hoping it will be dry soon to have a not too bad walk to the railway station, the weather in Amman is looking good. Not too hot, a week ago it was 35 degrees all days, but at least dry and sunny and not so depressing as in the Netherlands. 

See you in a week!

In about a week I am off to Jordan, sightseeing and enjoying some fine weather:

It is finally summer in the Netherlands. Which means a lot of sunshine, high humidity, it feels quite warm. And it is typical dutch, also lots of rain and at the end of a warm day a good thunderstorm.

Yesterday was such a day. I heard the thunder rolling all afternoon, and slowly it came close and closer. At 17:50 it was very close, light and sound at the same time, so this was too close! And quite loud!

So close, it did affect my systems:
- no more cable, so no more internet, no televison, no more telephone.just when the time trial of the Tour de France had to run for the final five minutes and it was a close finish, or so I discovered this morning when the cable came back alive. Good job by UPC, the cable company.
- two network ports of the 8-port switch in the top room are destroyed. Took some time to find out where all wires are going, so this time they got a label!. Enough spare ports, so no big deal.
- the power supply of the Soundbridge (I saw other reports of that being a flaky design) blew out. Luckily I have a similar power supply (in fact, I have a large collection of power supplies…) , just cut and connect the connector to get the Soundbridge playing again.

It seems I have been lucky. One neighbour had a PC destroyed, but luckily the hard disks survived (we tested with my IDE/SAT to USB adapter). The other neighbour had the ADSL modem fried (it really smelled), television destroyed and some more devices out of order. Since I normally switch off all unused device such disasters do not affect me. At this time much was switched on, and i was too slow switching all off. Next time a thunderstorm comes close: SWITCH OFF POWER!

(photo found on Internet, not mine!)

Been a cold weekend, Easter is a strange event this year. When I woke up and looked outside, the world was white!