Saturday, March 31, 2012

More wind

Oh it's another great day to be in the water (apart from freezing finger tips).

From 13:00 until 16:00 it was really good, constant wind from North. Later it started to sometimes falter and then it just dropped to 14 knots or so. The water temperature was at around 8°C as was the air. So… slightly on the cold side.

This time I took a 5.6m² sail and everything was so much easier. It's also because I was not so thirsty for action. Thursday session had cured my aching for sailing, with sore muscles and overall tiredness. Today session was a lot more relaxed. As if now I could actually take the time to appreciate the feeling of the board, the sound of the wind on the sail, the pressure in the harness lines. Even so my favourite action when getting home after a windsurf session: shower, eat and sleep.

If on Thursday I though there were lots of sailors, today it was a crowd, with some 30 kiters and another equal number of sailors. Way kool to see so many people enjoying the wind.

I'm a happy camper. Lets see if tomorrow I get to sail with some people with which I already sailed before (check it here and here).

Friday, March 30, 2012

100th post = first 2012 windsurf session

Hundredth post and what a good post subject it is: my first windsurf session this year. And what a session!

Yesterday, as the wind finally decided that Netherlands also needs to be aired, I went to my playground to acertain the conditions. I wasn't expecting much. The wind forecast was not bad (16 knots, gusts of 20) so I decided to take only my 6.9m² sail (that was a mistake, as you'll understand in a moment).

At noon the wind was coming from North-West, at 15 knots and the big sail gave the enough lift for me to be planning most of the time. At around 14:30 the wind started to change direction more to North and to get stronger, getting closet to a constant 20 knots with gusts of 22/23 knots. That for a 6.9m² sail is really heavy stuff and I was feeling way over-powered.

Since I didn't sail since last year (on the same spot actually) I am terrible unused to the effort required to windsurf. Every move was done a bit harder, spending more energy, requiring more from muscles that are not used to the effort. Specially in the beginning of the session when tiredness had not settled in yet. In the end of the day I felt like I had caught a bad case of flue - all my muscles hurt - but I would not have it any other way.

I didn't take many photos (too busy for that) so I can't show you how great Muiderberg looked. Even if it was a cloudy day it was filled with colour. The colour of some fourteen windsurfers and around eight kitesurfers.

This are just some photos I took before getting in the water. I was one of the first ones to arrive there (yes, that's thirst for action) but already some other guys were getting ready to go in.

Wonderful day.

Today the wind seams to have taken leave… let's hope tomorrow it comes back for more fun.

Marken village, the photos

Wednesday we took advantage of the now longer day to go and visit Marken. I went there by bicycle on Tuesday but this time we just took the car.

It's a wonderful place and I bet that in Summer it will be full of tourists and it will lose some of its appeal. Right now it was like going back in time. Small streets where a car can't even fit, wooden houses, flowers in pots, cats and farm animals on the side.

I took some nice photos that I you can see in this PicasaWeb album or on the following slide show (requires Adobe Flash plugin, sorry for that).

All in all a very nice place where to go and spend a couple of hours walking about. Keep in mind that visitors are not allowed to drive the car to most of the peninsula and the parking close to the village costs 4.50€. If you keep driving until the village you'll be "stuck" in the park where you'll have to pay. Better park before you actually get in the village and save the money for a pint when you're back.

I challenge you to find the word "Saudade" on a house within the village. It exists (you can check the photo) but it's not a easy find. I wonder what's the story behind a Portuguese word in a traditional Dutch village…

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Update on coverage

Just a update on what area has been covered by my bicycle wheels

According to my records it's has come to a total of 366 km and I have every intention of keep adding to that number.

Today it's going to be something a bit less intensive than yesterday.

Marken peninsula

Yesterday I took the longest bicycle ride I ever took here in Netherlands, taking me to a beautiful and very picturesque Marken. I didn't see any girl dress in their traditional costumes but I did get to see the lighthouse and a small beach close to it.

Here are the stats for the ride:

distance
62.33 km
time
2:50
average speed
21.91 km/h
max speed
43.20 km/h
Not so bad for an fat old cat. Although I do admit that after the 50th km it was becoming a bit too uncomfortable. Still it was worth it. Both for the exercise as well as for the sights. The attentive reader will also notice that I broke my maximum speed record too. The north wind, blowing at what I guess were no more than 8 knots (±15 km/h), helped with that when heading south.

On the way to Marken and when coming back I saw this poor adventure fellow. His adventure was to ride the car almost to the Kinselmeer and get stuck in the soft mud. I wonder how long he had to wait there to get the car out, and how lucky he is that there are no tides in this inner seas.

Twenty six of March was also a very nice day due to some phone calls I received… Might be that the wind will change direction and the skipper will have to steer the boat in other direction.

Monday, March 26, 2012

'cycle coverage

For IT R&D the "coverage" is one of those super abused metrics on software code quality. I decided to just show a coverage of my latest bicycle trips. No asserts. Not even unit tests at all.

…and now it's time to get back on the saddle and expand the coverage. Be back in about two hours.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

6 knots. damn…

Another bicycle ride, this time with the wife for company. So a more relaxed pace, more sight seeing and taking advantage of the nice places where to stop. Trip stats:

distance
32.25 km
time
2:00
average speed
16.12
max speed
27.90
I think my better half is now regretting a big part of those 32 km but I think the important this is that she did it.

In the photos you can see a nice terrace and a nice place, both in Abcoude a really nice place.

After the bicycle ride we went to Muiderberg (my playground) to check the wind already knowing that it would be hardly more than 10 knots. When we got there it was even worse than that. A constant breeze of 6 knots blowing form the North. Not enough for making me go into the cold water (now at 7°C) but enough to steel the heat from your skin quite fast. Even if it's sunny the air temperature is still not warm but a mere 10 °C.

The guy you see in the photo above was obviously desperate to get in the water. Is trick was to walk on the shore, along the yellow grass in the photo, gaining some up wind space and then slowly make his way downwind to the shore. My guess is that it actually worked because the water is so shallow there that the board was dragging on the bottom sand.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Breaking records

While waiting for wind I'm getting better at riding bicycle… or at least in riding faster and for longer. Here are the stats for today ride:

distance
43.73 km
time
1:56
average speed
22.59 km/h
max speed
41.40 km/h
So I broke two personal records today: maximum speed (yeah) and distance.

Being new to the place I can enjoy the rides for both the exercise as for the sense of discovery. There is always something new: a new village, a new terrace, a different house and now, with spring, lots of new born lambs, calfs and cabritos (yes, that's a English word. You can use "kid" instead if you prefer).

I know I should take more photos of all this things I see while riding. At least to try to keep a memory of that feeling of discovery. But… I'm lazy. It's a pain to stop, take the phone out of the pocket, turn it on, load the camera application, point the photo, shoot, block the phone, put it back into the pocket and start riding again. Too much trouble. We need a visual cortex to SD card interface.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

How to keep track of exercise stats?

Today I went for a bicycle ride. It's actually a usual thing now that the Sun is shinning in North Holland. Beautiful Sun makes this land bright and warm.

Here are the stats for today exercise:

distance
39.35 km
time
1:47
average speed
21.97 km/h
max speed
35.10 km/h
I record this using my faithful android phone (with cyanogenmod) using My Tracks application. It works great, doesn't drain the battery even when using the GPS and 3G. It also provides some nice export functionality - to KML files, to a spreadsheet in google docs or to a map in google maps. All in all a very polished application and, until now at least, reliable and easy to use.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Hamburg, last episode

I told you in a previous post how Hamburg has some interesting street art but the official art is also present in the streets. From beautiful buildings to statues one can see about anything in the nice streets of this old but so vibrant city.

Copper statues, roofs, cupolas and other street fixings reminds us of how important the heavy industry of metal foundry and transformation is to the city and its history.

Industry is actually something that Germany seams not to have forgot and it might explain why it's such a economic power. While some other countries decided that industry was something to be done in the far east, Germany kept a healthy industrial layer. Other countries that focused on the finance markets are now getting a beating. Maybe I'm just old fashion and obtuse and don't get the wonders of the financial markets… or maybe a good balance between production, markets and laws is needed for it to work out for most people.

Downtown Hamburg is a network of commerce installation, channels and bridges. Hamburg is probably the media capital of Germany (or at least it's a very important hub). As such you can expect to find all the fancy, expensive and fashionable brands. If instead you prefer something less attention calling you can also find it among the huge amount of displays.

All in all a really nice city where I hope to visit again one of this days.

On another topic: wind forecast for the weekend was bogus. There were maybe 12 knots of wind with gusts of 15 knots. I'm am now in desperate windsurf deprivation and can hardly wait for May when I get to go to Moulay to learn how to do some proper wave sailing.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

What a good day!

What a great day here at north Holland. The Sun shines in a cloud free sky and temperature raised to a very comfortable 13°C. Enough to go cycling with shorts and a sweater. Which brought to my attention how pale my legs are. I need to get some serious stay in the sun soon or else I'll become a ghost...

It feels sweeeeet! (you have to picture in your mind Jeremy Clarkson saying sweet) Maybe spring is coming for real. There is even forecast for some wind during the Weekend. Oh yeah!

In every terrace there are people staying and enjoying the sun shine.
Now if only the wind would also show up...

So some stats on my cycling of today:

distance
22.14 km
time
57.15
average speed
23.21 km/h
max speed
31.50 km/h

Not very bad but I need to improve my stamina so that I'll be ready for the wave windsurf camp in Moulay.

Well, latter I'll go for a swim, so eventually my body will react and get used to exercise again. I hope…

Hamburg, part II: street art

Continuing the visit to Hamburg that I started on the previous post.

One of the things that I really enjoyed in Hamburg was the huge quantity and quality of street art. From sculptures to wall painting. Vivid colors, alive images and emotional effects. What more can you ask from art?

The style, inspiration, technic of what one can find in the streets varies a lot, although some things do have some resemblance of style. I wonder if the two next pieces are from the same artist.

It's hard for me to name this as graffiti, a word that is mostly used to describe the badly done inscriptions on walls with no real insight, no deep meaning, no relevance, no art. So I prefer to name this as frescoes or paintings.

Of course I am probably completely wrong and those two paintings and they are made by two very different artists.

In one of the wall a Die Die My Darling in a possible (?) reference to the punk horror band The Misfits. It's also a great music so do enjoy it.

After seeing that the music was in my mind for quite a while…

In the end all this art form is even more temporary than the usual painting and sculptures. Most of it is done in old and abandon buildings and a city with the such dynamism as Hamburg will feel the pressure to replace those building with even more office blocks. With luck maybe the facade of those new building could integrate the art presented in the existing ones but somehow I don't believe that will happen.

Sometimes you can also find interesting advertising. Here we can see a real estate agency asking the people in the street if their house is too small, inviting them to jump into their web site in search for something new. Then the site is well layed out and easy to use (well... I'm using google translation to actually understand the site as my German is too basic for more than getting food and drinks at a bar).

I'll just end with two more frescoes that I enjoyed for different reasons.

The first one I think portraits Mahalasa, one of the eight avatars of Vishnu, that I find really nice because of the feelings when watching the painting. It bring a certain sense of harmony and relaxation that were most welcome by me. I had after all been walking for some three or four hours and resting, even just by imagining it, was well deserved.

Polytheist or even monotheist where the deity has several facets somehow feel more open to accept other people as they are. Or so it seams to me while I try to understand how can the three biggest religions that currently exist on this small planet fight so much when, to my understanding, they all have the same god as central piece of their dogma and diverge only on the messengers from that deity.

The other painting is a question: "Should I?".

It's up to us, as observers, to try and figure out what is the action that should or should not be taken and by doing so we project our own uncertainties into the drawing.

Now… Should you?

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Visiting Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg

As a good friend of mine was going to present his final Engineering Diploma project at the Institut für Umwelttechnik und Energiewirtschaft, part of the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg, I just had to take the opportunity to pay him a visit, share a good (and I guess important) moment with him and see the second largest German city.

The drive to Hamburg (yes, I drove, I love to) was easy and relaxed. Good roads, interesting scenery (well, mostly flat fields), good music blasting in the radio and as soon as I arrived to Germany, a beautiful Sun shining in the sky. I can highlight how relevant seeing and feeling the Sun was to the general feeling of the trip. It has been months since I last saw a clear sky, totally devoid of clouds - sometimes in Amsterdam we do see a slit of blue sky, or the sun might shine for a couple of minutes, but that's it. I could actually drive without any heating and in a simple sweater. That felt sweet.

I stayed with my friends in the flat he shares with fellow students (if any of you ever reads this thanks for taking me in) and in the morning I couldn't wait to go out and walk about. We were staying in the south part of Hamburg named Harburg (Hamburg is a agglomeration of several smaller cities, a State City) and as my friend's presentation was in the afternoon I decided to stay around. Despite not being a super touristic place Harburg still has a nice feeling to it.

That evening and night were dedicated to celebrate the accomplished of my friend. Let's leave it at that…

The next day it was finally time to go and see the city of Hamburg. We (me, my friend and one of his flatmates) took the metro to the station Langungsbüken and started what would be something like a six or seven hours walking tour.

Right next to the mentioned station is a feat of beginning of XIX engineering: St. Pauli Elbe Tunnel, a tunnel bellow the Elbe river open to the public in 1911. Instead of the usual entrance and exit ramps this tunnel uses big elevators for vehicles to be lowered and raised from the tunnel. Pedestrians an bicycles can always use the stairs.

On today standards of engineering this almost 500m long and 24m beneath the surface doesn't sound like much but think about it: it was build more than one hundred years ago, when the technology and knowledge were a far distant ancestors of what they are now. The technic to build tunnels those days was by pressurising the under construction tunnel in order to prevent water from leaking in. Workers would be submitted to a high air pressure and then at the end of their shift would simple return to normal one atmosphere. This lead to some of the workers feeling sick by what we now know as the decompression sickness.

After walking the length of the tunnel, reaching the surface and walking around the tunnel entrance building one is greeted with a great view of the lower city. I took sometime to take a set of photos that latter at home a stitched as a panoramic view.

As you can see the weather had turn gray. Low clouds were blocking the Sun and in the end of the day it actually started to rain. Well… I wasn't complaining. The effects of the previous exposure to Sun light were still being felt. Or maybe it was the previous night partying. Or a mix or both.

Anyway, this is a already long post and my TODO list is calling. On a next post I'll continue with the story of visiting Hamburg and the reason why getting to Hamburg is a lot better than leaving it.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Traveling in South Holland: Delft

Long time without updates but so many thing to write about... several posts my be the best idea as it's easier to tag and keep the organization.

In the end of February I traveled to South Holland to visit the sea coast and the University of Delft. Let me start with this latest: the Technische Universiteit Delft one of the three universities in Netherlands that provide engineering degrees (the other two being TU Eindhoven and University of Twente). I cannot state much about the courses, teachers, students or studies but I can say that the campus looks really nice with inspiring buildings and open spaces that invite for casual fraternization (if the weather so permits).

Above is a picture of the Aula Congress Center reminds me of the Alpha Vehicles of the TV series Space 1999. For a old time science fiction addicted that just great.

The library is the piece de resistence. I don't have pictures from inside the building but google is at your service.

The conic shape you see above ground is actually a light cupola, providing natural light to the interior of the library. Inside the building is even nicer than outside. It's worth the visit just to see the library. Staying inside and working is a privileged and I wonder if the people that are working, studying or simply staying there realize that.

The Civil Engineering faculty looks like a extended Sand Crawler from Star Wars.

The Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (yes, they are all under the same roof. Must be interesting…) building is the tallest and imposing building of the campus. I wonder what message did they want to send?

There are several more faculties at the university, but this were the one that I remember.

Of course the university campus is worth the visit but so is the city. I'll share only a couple of photos taken with my phone on a gray dark day.

Photography value close to zero but at least it shows that Delft has more than just the University Campus.