A guided tour of Limburg by Marcel

Here are a few shots of me and my friend Marcel before we take off to cycle though the Dutch mountains in Limburg on the 25th of June. This was our first weekend on vacation and I had never been cycling in Limburg. When Marcel and his girlfriend dropped in for a visit over the weekend he offered to show around.

We ended up taking a 37 km ride and climbing the Gulperberg. He tells me he remembers a not too steep climb, but turned out to be a pretty vicious one that I almost did not make… thanks Marcel for kicking our butts!

Over the 1000km cycling!

I passed the 1000km distance on my bike yesterday. I had taken a few short 20-25 km rides over the last week due to the heat and lack of time for a longer ride.

Yesterday I whipped by the Van Tuyl bike shop to have my bike checked before I try climbing the Dutch mountains (Limburg). The plan is to try out the famous hills that one sees in the Amstel race here in the Netherlands each year. I am very curious as to how hard or easy I will find climbing mountains!

CJ moves out…

For awhile now we have been contemplating an offer by my brother-in-law to allow CJ to come and live with him and his girlfriend permanently. They have just moved in together, have their own place with enough room for a cat or two so decided it was a good idea. We are expecting our second child and CJ is a very intensive cat in that she loves attention. As anyone with kids can tell you, that attention that CJ used to have sole right to is now divided between kids and her.

She is getting the short end of the stick and we are absolutely sure that she will be getting mega attention from Robby and Tessa. As you can see from the pictures she is right at home within 24 hours!

The nice part is that we can visit her anytime we feel the need for a cat cuddle! ;-)

Morning ride Tuesday

Tuesday morning I cycled to work. It was lovely with 18 degrees at the start and climbing up to 23 degrees by the time I got to Nijmegen. I knew it would be too warm in the afternoon to bike home so took the train. Good thing too as it was 34,5 degrees when I left for home! I am not too sure if cycling home would have been much hotter than the train ride was…. horrible!

Total ride was 65 km’s.

Opensuse 10.1 upgrade woes, SMART to the rescue!

This last week I spent some time updating my AMD64 box from Opensuse 10.0 to 10.1. All seemed to go smoothly until one tries to use the package manager…

First off you expect to use YOU and YAST, the eternal SUSE tools that have always worked exceptionally well for me in the past. I was rather surprised to find that there was something called Zen on my machine and an .EXE file running in my process list! It seems that Opensuse 10.1 is in a transition to a new package manager and update system based on MONO code, for more details please see these sites for their detailed explanations: Desktoplinux, SuseDiary.

The only problem with these explanations is that for me they do not work. The YAST package manager seems to be partially working as if some components are no longer available or supported? The YOU updater is just gone. The Zen updater and Rug package manager are running but seem to have problems finishing any sort of update whether run by a user with superuser privileges or root itself. Rather a problem for me.

I did some research last night and stumbled on a new solution called Smart which seems to take care of all the problems everyone has been having. I spent some time reading about it and followed the great installation guide at Dev-Loki and I am once again updating my Opensuse 10.1 box without any problems. For this I am really grateful, as in the meantime I had almost abandoned Opensuse for some other distro. Thanks to the authors for saving my Opensuse box! ;-)

Short ride Saturday in the heat!

I took a short ride midday on Saturday when the temperature was hitting around 30 decrees Celsius. Boy was that a bit too much, therefore I kept the ride short (21 km’s). I just did a swing around ’s-Hertogenbosch and back home via Empel which takes me along the Mass river which is always a nice view. Even with the short length I drank two bottles of water, so next time I think I will only bike in the morning when it is still cool!

Finished up the new path in the backyard

Last week I finally got delivery on the 170 stones I thought would be enough to finish up the stone path in our backyard. As you can see in the first picture I calculated wrong. I used up way too much on the small filler pieces on the corner and ends. I ended up with about 50 more being needed as you can see in the second picture.

I jumped on the Internet and found 50 more available in a small village near by. I could pick them up for free! Last Saturday I did that and you see the final results in the last photo after I filled the groves with sand. You will notice the last 50 stones are a red color which differs from the rest of the pattern. I decided to take that for what it is worth and wait until the first winter hits to color them all with moss. Then you can’t see what the colors are of the stones anyway. Was good to get this finished, we have wanted to do this for some time now!