Last Friday I finally managed (been too busy lately) to visit Rotterdam’s super bookstore, Donner, to pick up a copy of Programming Ruby. I will easily spend an hour or two roaming Donner’s eight or nine floors, browsing through all their new books, discovering old ones I hadn’t seen before, sitting down for a while to read through the contents of some books to see if I should really spend the small fortune they sometimes cost these days… Usually I start by going straight to the third floor (computer books), then slowly all the way up (passing the cd department, books on art, design, movies, music etc.; top floor has books on sale); and finally I go back down again (law, economics, philosophy, magazines, gardening, food, photography, and the huge basement with fiction, Dutch & English). Anyway, there I was on the third floor, only one copy of Programming Ruby left (is it that popular or doesn’t it sell at all?)… and I didn’t buy it! Instead I took home Agile Web Development with Rails, in the true Ruby spirit: I want to create something right away, build a web site now, with Ruby. I know myself, eventually I will buy the other book and meticulously read about all the language intricacies. But for now, it’s Rails.

Last Friday, Holland was surprised by heavy snowfall. The result was chaos on the roads, people being stuck in their car until late in the evening, people stuck in train stations… And all this because of 10 centimeters of snow. I shot (in my car, hands-free of course!) this rather dramatic-looking photo yesterday, on my way over from the office (which is located directly in the heart of the snow area), when it was still snowing continuously:

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if this first snow of the season will also be the last. I’m sure I was born for a warmer climate than this. Snow is great–for one week a year maximum, and provided I’m in a little hotel somewhere in France or Switzerland, sitting by the fire, with a book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, knowing there’ll be a good meal on the table later on… in that scenario, I don’t mind looking out the window seeing some snow flakes falling.
Our last winter vacation came close to this perfection. M. and I and some friends drove down to the tiny village of Bois Barbu, in the French Vercors region. We stayed in the Ferme du Bois Barbu, a small hotel with friendly owners. We made some great walks through the snowy landscape, and we even tried cross-country skiing (which was fun… for a day). This is a picture (actually two photos combined) from one of our walks:

Thanks to an entry in Simon Ritter’s blog, I now find myself completely addicted to a game which is as simple as it is catching: Sudoku. Its objective is to fill in a matrix with numbers, so that each row, column and submatrix contains only unique numbers (1 through 9). This is an example of a game in progress (from WikiPedia):

As you can see, the bottom left quadrant has already been filled with unique numbers. Trough logic and sheer cunning the player must complete the rest of the grid. Of course there are numerous computerized versions of the game available, and even some for my phone, which is great for playing on the train.

I have always liked simple games the most; when everyone else was playing Doom and Quake, I stuck obsessively to Tetris and Solitaire. In more recent times, I spent quite some time on games like Bejewelled and Zuma. And on my phone, I’m still not bored with One For All FreeCell. So I guess Sudoku is just the logical next step…

(I met Simon last August, when he came to Holland to do a workshop for our company’s “Java Summer Camp”, on Java 5. People are still talking about it. Fortunately they seem to have forgotten the mix-up that got Simon on the wrong train to our location. Our office manager Rietje and I had to race through the Dutch countryside to pick him up at the next train station. But all was well in the end, Simon delivered a truly inspiring presentation.)