At this very hour I am supposed to be up in the sky, 30.000 feet, on my way to India, but I am not…
"Can I have your visa please?" struck me by lightning. @#*%!
For almost three years now, my company Qelp has been working closely with one, subsequently two business partners in India. For some people it’s hard to believe that we work together successfully, while we have never met in person. We do meet in cyberspace, some weeks even on a daily basis including weekends. We email, we chat through GTalk, we conference call, development work is delivered through workflows in our software platform, on test and live servers, JIRA issues fired back and forth, invoices sent and paid. Week after week, month after month. For a range of reasons I never went to India to meet Kalpa, Rashmi, Rabiya, Ravi, Swetha and their colleagues in person. Today I was supposed to go there for the first time, for a full program of meetings in Mumbai and Pune until Thursday. It just did not occur to me anymore, that I would need a visa until (not) checking in. Stupid of course, embarrassing even ;-) Having worked so closely together, my brain apparently felt the Indian embassy in The Hague implicitly granted permission to finally meet these people in person. At Qelp I think we practise Thomas Friedman’s, The world is flat to a significant extent. Offshoring, software-as-a-service for our customers, teleworking, virtual teams, operating internationally. Yet, we still live in a bricks and mortar society - one that does require a visa every now and then, for quite different reasons. Travelling in the European region, to the US, various countries in North Africa and the Middle East does not require ordering a visa in advance. There is either an EU treaty in place, you fill out a form in the plane or pay some duties upon arrival.
Hold on friends, sorry about this, I’ll plan for a new trip.
On Friday evening we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Erik & Hillie’s place. Only two weeks left before they will move to their new house with a view something like this. There’s no reason to expect Friday’s strawberries dessert will be our last course together, hopefully :-) We’ll continue “Demmeren” every first Thursday of the month with the other guys. “Next time Demmeren in Brussels?” Erik suggested on our way out. Be careful Erik, your quotes now become public…
There’s a saying in Dutch “Better a good neighbour, than a remote friend”. We are going to prove this saying to be wrong. And, we’re sort of still neighbours at 15 kilometers distance only.
We did not meet in cyberspace, but in zoo Dierenpark Amersfoort this Sunday, sort of in the middle between the villages where we each live. 
We met through the Internet since we are both holding a domain containing our last name: www.deelman.net (Bert) and www.deelman.com (me). It was quite funny to meet another Deelman as it’s quite a small family and we do did not have any direct ties. Sort of like the excitement of an Internet date I guess? Well, we each brought our kids to the zoo as ice breakers. We both share an interest in blogging, anything related to technology and Internet, we both measure approximately 2 meters and we are both interested in acquiring www.deelman.nl which is still unused. Perhaps we should create a Deelman foundation (or business ;-) for that domain, offering each Deelman in the Netherlands to have his or her own email address and blog space…
Last night I took my son Koen to the Champions League match AJAX - Arsenal. It was a birthday present we still owed him. After we had settled ourselves in the ArenA stadium for the match to start, SMS messages started to come in, from daughters Merel and Fleur and good friend Ronald. In fact Ronald was the one who introduced me to this mass hysteria last year for the first time, when he kindly invited me to the annual AJAX - Feyenoord match. It was fun watching the game with Koen, while at the same time exchanging SMSs with 3 people. By messages going back and forth, we actually found out more about players since we lacked the technology couch-potato-watchers at home have. So halfway the match I thought it would be fun to send a MMS of Koen with his live comments from my Treo. Shooting the picture and preparing the MMS went well, sending it not quite. After several attempts I got error messages saying that delivery could not be completed ("but we’ll continue trying"), I guess due to either missing handset settings of the receiving phones or compatibility issues between the different mobile networks. So I decided to send the picture as an email attachment from my phone. It took several minutes before it arrived with Merel and Ronald, but it worked fine. MMS-Email: 0-2. Despite all the camera phones, MMS has not come off the ground. I think mobile operators are probably better off investing money in getting email accepted as a mobile application than MMS. The Blackberry success illustrates the potential market. True, the tariffs are not at a premium like MMS. Here in the Netherlands MMS is offered at something like 40 Euro cents per message, while email is billed per KB. However, faster end-user adoption of email is quite likely to make up for the lower tariffs. Uhh…and what about AJAX - Arsenal? AJAX was defeated with 1-2, due to sleepy players in the first two minutes of the match, an unfair penalty and last but not least an arbiter who needs some basic football education This last piece of opinion comes from still famous Johan Cruyff, who watched the game instead of his mobile phone.
Reading just this blog, you almost would think we’re on a castle tour. After visiting Chateau Coulon Laurensac near Bordeaux in July, we visited today Kasteel Sterkenburg in Driebergen, the Netherlands. It has recently become the property of friends who are now making efforts to return some of its original glory. Which does not come easy…. We spent a sunny day at the castle as part of our quarterly get-together with longtime friends Jelle & Claudine -hosting us at their premises- and Hans & Angela from Delft. 
The kids of our three families were around as well and enjoyed discovering the castle and surroundings. When asked to help clean a chimney, the boys found an egg from a crow’s nest. A wonderful day at a piece of cultural heritage that deserves to be taken care of.
What does the picture below tell you?
It’s a 9 year old boy waiting with his father just outside a fashion shop until his mother and two teenage sisters have finished shopping. Sometimes, that’s what visiting a city during holidays seems to come down to. The shops are apparently irresistible compared to culture and street life attractions. This picture was taken (with my Treo of course) in Santander, capital of Cantabria in north-western Spain. Like Oviedo, capital of Asturias, these are nice cities to wander around - and do some shopping… (Koen and I ended op crossing the street waiting on a bench for about 30 minutes until this single shop was conquered by the ladies, meanwhile sending SMSs to daughter Merel about how long it was going to take!).
Well, actually we were going North on August 6 again, after two very enjoyable weeks. 
We were explicitly warned for the 400,000 people coming to watch the annual Arriondas-Ribadesella kayak race, as they normally create chaos with tents all over the place, excessive alcohol etc. 
So we avoided the shortest route and drove further south before entering the highway. If not I was running out of gas and the single nearest gas station was in the centre of Ribadesella! It was tight with the gas left, but we made it and got a preview of the race…not every family member in the car enjoyed the adventure…After visiting Riba, we moved further north for Bilbao. I did not want to miss the opportunity to admire the great architecture of the Guggenhein museum. It’s designed by architect Frank Gehry and entirely made out of titanium. Seeing it in reality is even more impressive than the pictures of course. I took some pictures with my Treo 650 and bought a book about the museum.