Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

I'm in Providence now, having arrived here in the early evening of New Year's Eve, weary and under the weather from some mysterious bug that had me feeling light-headed and suffering from diarrhoea. I was almost delirious on the bus from Boston to Providence, but I was mostly recovered after a single good night's sleep, which was good.

My New Year was, therefore, completely uneventful. I was asleep as 2006 rolled in. It's good to be back with the missus and the small one, of course.

The KPN has completely failed to move my DSL line from the old house to the new, so I was off-line until arriving here. That was still the status quo as of the 31-12, so I have no idea whether I'll finally have DSL when we get back to Amsterdam on the 13th. Since they should have had me up and running on 21-12, you'd think so, but you daren't make that assumption with the KPN.

Tomorrow morning, Sarah, Eloïse and I fly down to Maryland to spend a few days with Tim, Fenella and their children, Cameron and Willow. It's close to a year since we last saw them, so that will be a lot of fun. Needless to say, they'll be meeting Eloïse for the first time, which should be quite exciting.

For my own purposes, I kept some notes on the goings on over the immediate post-move period. I hereby force them on you.

Wednesday 21st December

Another long day.

We awoke early, thanks to yesterday's alarm not having been reset, so it went off today, too. Unlike yesterday, however, we awoke for the first time in our new house. We've really moved!

Our Hästens 2000T is comfortable beyond belief. One has to spend a night in one of these things to appreciate how well made it really is. I didn't want to get out of it this morning, but we had another busy day ahead of us.

This morning was a bit of a rush. Sarah had forgotten some essential items from the old place, so I jumped on the bike and headed over there to pick them up.

Stopping at the bakery on the way back, we had our first makeshift breakfast at our borrowed dining-room table. There wasn't enough time to really enjoy it; it was more a question of stuffing down some nourishment while we had the chance.

We had decided that it would be too crazy for me to take Sarah to the airport in a Greenwheels car, so we had booked her a taxi. Just before it arrived, the KPN engineer turned up to install an analogue line here. While he was in the cellar, I said goodbye to Sarah and Eloïse outside.

The KPN engineer eventually got the line up and running and asked me to sign his paperwork, so he could be off. I decided to test the line before doing so and discovered that it had the wrong phone number. It turns out that the two lines belonging to the previous occupant are still active. What's more bizarre is that the KPN cannot cancel a line based on the say-so of the person trying to have a new line installed, even if that person can prove he owns the house. Luckily, the box of wires downstairs has enough capacity that I don't care if the previous owner wants to continue to pay for a couple of lines.

Eventually, after speaking to the office, he reconnected the wires for our new line and left, informing me that he had opened a ticket to have a switch thrown in the telephone exchange.

Unforunately, our ground floor turns out not to be cabled, so I had to install the cordless phone's base station on the first floor. Since it will be annoying to have to go upstairs to see if there's a message on the digital answerphone, I've made a new appointment with the KPN to install another analogue socket on the ground floor in the new year.

A couple of hours later, the line still wasn't working, so I called in to check on its progress. It was being worked on, I was told.

A few minutes later, another KPN engineer turned up at the door. He informed me he was here to test the line at this address, so I told him there was no working line yet. Oddly, he hadn't been sent in connection with the open ticket to fix the line.

After verifying that it did, indeed, not work, he headed out to the wiring box in the street to fix the problem there. Before he left, I laughingly asked him if I could soon expect a third engineer to show up.

Ten minutes after that guy had left the house, a third engineer did, indeed, turn up. He also knew nothing of the visits by the previous two engineers. He, too, went downstairs and verified that my line did not work; then he, too, left.

A few minutes later, the phone rang and the line was working. Hallelujah.

Of course, that was just the telephone line: what about DSL?

To cut a long story short, DSL doesn't work yet. After two calls to the KPN, lots of harsh language and threatening to claim damages against them, I finally got someone to admit that my DSL wouldn't be moved to this address until 28th December; this in spite of the fact that I have a letter from the KPN, stating that it would be moved on the same day as the telephone.

What crappy service. Cable Internet from UPC is looking more attractive all the time. UPC's another large company, however, which I'm sure still has its fair share of customer service issues. It certainly did a few years ago when I last dealt with them in a significant way.

In the midst of the telephone adventure, the electrician had also turned up. He knew exactly what to do and had pulled cable within half an hour from the point of cable TV entry to the point where the internal house TV cabling converges. I turned on the portable TV I'd borrowed to test the result of this work and was delighted to see that the house now had cable TV.

Knowing that cable TV was now a reality -- we had been worried that it might be difficult to realise in this house, because there was some doubt as to whether there was internal TV cabling -- I was now free to upgrade the service, so I biked over to the UPC shop on the Ceintuurbaan and ordered digital TV, including their extra channels package. In addition to the BBC1 and BBC2 that we currently enjoy, that will give us BBC3, BBC4 and BBC Prime. It'll probably take a couple of weeks for the decoder to turn up in the post.

After that, I went to Cambodja City for the first time since moving back to The Netherlands. Cambodja City used to be my favourite restaurant when I lived here in the nineties and I knew the owner quite well. The food was still good, but I discovered that the restaurant had been remodelled and the owner no longer works there. It's not clear if she's even still the owner, part-owner or whatever. Nothing stays the same.

I then biked back to the old house, where I discovered I had forgotten my screwdrivers, so I had to bike back to the new house, then back to the old again.

There, I disassembled our heavy flatscreen TV and lugged it downstairs. I called to reserve a Greenwheels car, then drove the TV over here in it. I spent ages sitting in the car at this end, waiting for the rain that had started after I got underway, to stop. Eventually, I had to give up and use a blanket to shield the TV while I hauled it inside.

As I went to reassemble things at this end, I realised I had now left my screwdrivers at the other house, but that wasn't as annoying, because I had to go back there anyway to return the car to its spot and return home on the bike.

Finally, I made it back to the new house, where I put the TV on its motorised stand and settled down to watch The Sopranos.

Not a bad day in all: the telephone line was successfully moved and we now have cable TV here; DSL to follow.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, the alarm people are coming to connect the alarm to the telephone system. Then, in the afternoon, the guest bed will be delivered. Apart from that, there should be no-one else coming tomorrow, so it's hopefully going to be a relatively quiet day after the chaos of the last few.

The house seems very big, now that I'm the only one in it. Sarah called to say that she and Eloïse made it to Providence in one piece.

Thursday 22nd December

Still no DSL.

Somewhat predictably, I had to get up early again today to receive the man from the alarm company, who was coming to connect the alarm.

He was a little late, but eventually turned up and connected the system to the telephone line. It's only a burglar alarm, however, so I'm having his company send me a quote for putting in some smoke detectors and connecting these to the alarm system.

In the afternoon, I was woken from an unplanned forty winks on the settee by the delivery of our guest bed. The guest room now has its most important piece of furniture in place, so we could, at a push, already receive visitors, but it would be nice to add a couple more items of furniture first.

With that, the last official visitor to the house for this week has been and gone. What a long week.

In the afternoon, I took a Greenwheels car down to Media Markt and bought a Dyson DC08 Animal Pro vacuum-cleaner. I had been planning to get a high-end Miele, but the Dyson has two major advantages: it doesn't need bags and its filters don't need to be replaced.

After dinner at the old house and another run of stuff to the new house, I was back home, where I unpacked a bunch of the kitchen boxes. Hurray! We now have our own cutlery and crockery again! Mugs! Glasses! What more could I want? How about DSL?

Friday 23rd December

Still no DSL. I rang the KPN again to complain. A very nice woman listened to me vent and then told me she agreed with me, but couldn't do anything for me. And you pay 10 cents p/m to hear that. Pathetic.

I prepared our Senseo coffee machine for use today and had my first cup of coffee from it in our new home. Mmm...

Later in the afternoon, I assembled our new Dyson vacuum-cleaner and gave it a test drive around the kitchen. Very impressive. The manual for the thing, however, is atrociously unclear and awkward.

I spent the rest of the day reading the dishwasher's manual. Let me tell you how exciting that was. Now I know how to use all of its features. Like our washing-machine and dryer, it has a timer, so you can schedule it to start at night, when electricity rates are cheaper.

Dinner with Jo at Cambodja City finished off a completely uneventful day.

Saturday 24th December

Still no DSL.

I treated myself to a Hästens dressing-gown today, as I'd noticed them when we were looking for a bed. They just looked so cosy and warm that I wanted to be able to step into one when exiting from the shower in our new bathroom.

In the afternoon, I biked over to Koos and Yvonne's house, dropping by to surprise them. I no longer had an e-mail address for Koos, so this seemed like a good way to get back in touch with him. They were, indeed, quite surprised to see me. We chatted for a couple of hours about Inter/View, the company where I had once worked and where Koos and Yvonne both still do work.

At the end of the afternoon, I went to see King Kong with Jo at the Tuschinsky. I can't remember the last time I went to the cinema. Three years ago? Maybe longer. I see more films on planes these days than at the cinema.

It was very a very entertaining film. The special effects were amazing, even when they didn't appear realistic. The island's natives were especially frightening looking.

The pacing, however, was a little off. The film began very slowly and jerked around a lot in places. They also skipped from the scene where they drugged Kong to the opening night of the Kong show in New York. I, for one, was left wondering how they got Kong off the island and into the hold of the ship, clearly moored off the island at quite some distance.

Sunday 25th December

Still no DSL.

I went over to Jo's place to play Settlers of Catan and have dinner. Her friend, Rose, was there, too.

That's a fun game. Before we knew it, it was 23:00 and time to go home.

Monday 26th December

Still no DSL.

I wrote a letter to the Immigratie en Naturalisatie Dienst to attest to the fact that I can financially support my wife.

They sent her a request for further documentation on 21st December and gave her two weeks to reply. Since, by definition, they're dealing with foreigners, you'd think they'd give you more than two weeks over the Christmas period in which to assemble and return information to them. If I'd got on the same plane as Sarah, the two week period would have expired and her application for a residence period would probably have been rejected.

Wankers. This seems like sheer bloody-mindedness to me.

Tuesday 27th December

Still no DSL.

I rang the KPN for the Nth time and politely but very firmly expressed my utter despair at their total lack of customer-oriented service provision.

My DSL should have worked on 21st December at the new address, but still doesn't. No-one has called me to apologise or give me an idea of when it will work. Even a complaint, registered on the 21st, has not received a response within the 72 hour period I was told was the maximum term before I could expect a reaction. Disgraceful.

Phone companies the world over are complete and utter shite, especially those that are or were at one time a state monopoly.

Why can't I find a bloody component RGB/YPbPr video cable in this town?

I want to hook up our American DVD player to our European TV. Problem? Three of our TV's four video-in channels is for a SCART connector, a standard unknown in the US, so missing from our DVD player's video-out options. Our DVD player offers S-Video, but our TV does not.

In short, the only connection they have in common is for a component RGB/YPbPr cable, but I can't find a suitable cable anywhere in Amsterdam. In truth, I have found two five metre cables, but I need a cable of a metre or less. This is very annoying. Perhaps I'll have to buy one in the US next week.

Wednesday 28th December

Still no DSL. Very sad.

It's freezing cold here now, as it was yesterday. The temperature throughout the entire country is sub-zero at the moment and I can't seem to coax the central heating in this house to get up above 19°C. It's just not quite warm enough in the evening and I'm not sure how to fix this, apart from building a fire in the hearth. I'd really like to be able to do this with central-heating alone, of course.

More bad news: the delivery of our new car has been delayed. We don't expect to have it now until the end of February. It will be manufactured in week six of 2006.

Thursday 29th December

Still no DSL. Rang the KPN again. Must be at least six times now. Useless. Hopeless. Worthless.

I finally got our American DVD player up and running this afternoon. Unfortunately, it's not all that good at converting an NTSC disc to a PAL signal; the picture is quite jerky. For that matter, even PAL discs don't look as good as they might.

Our TV can display an NTSC signal, so for the time being we'll just switch the DVD player to NTSC when we want to watch an NTSC disc. Ultimately, though, I think we're going to want to replace this faithful device with something that does a better job of displaying the large number of American region one NTSC discs that we have in our collection. Since we have no VCR or TiVo any more, it would be nice to have a DVR with DVD recording capability, but the need for a region-free machine restricts our choice.

One thing that is nice is finally being able to see my widescreen DVDs displayed on a widescreen television.

Friday 30th December

Still no DSL.

I ordered an S-Video + dual RCA to SCART cable today, so that I can connect our DVD player in a way that will give us better picture quality. The component cable I eventually found wouldn't work, because our TV expects that to be used in conjunction with digital audio inputs, which our DVD player can't provide.

After that, I went for a haircut and a shave at the barber. Oliebollen (literally oil balls, a kind of spherical doughnut, traditionally eaten around New Year) and coffee.

Finally, I went looking for belated Christmas presents for Eloïse and Sarah. Well, they don't know the difference, right? They were in America for Christmas, so what does it matter that I bought their presents after Christmas. Eloïse 's I will leave here; Sarah's I will take with me when I fly out to Boston tomorrow.

The cleaning company came back to re-shampoo some of the carpets they had previously done on Tuesday. When they had dried the first time, there were some large, faint stains, so I wasn't happy and called the cleaners back in to redo the job.

It was snowing so hard as I biked home this evening that I was barely able to keep my eyes open. It's stopped now, however.

As I mentiond, I fly to Boston tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully, the snow and predicted rain won't cause me any major problems. Once in Boston, I have to take the bus to Providence.

Tall Timbers, Maryland: that's where we are now. It's so peaceful and relaxing here, due in no small part to the tranquil atmosphere of Fenella, Tim, Cameron and Willow's household. After just a few days here, I find myself not wanting to leave. Fenella even cooked mince pies this evening. Mince pies, I tell you!

Wiesje has been so happy since we arrived here. Her cousins love her very much and are always kissing her and attempting to engage her in their play. It does me a lot of good to see her smile and giggle so much.

Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, the KPN is still dicking around, doing sod all to get my DSL line up and running. My ISP, XS4ALL, has an ADSL status page for tracking new orders, but, as I discovered today, it can also be used to track line moves. There. I can read that the KPN acknowledged receipt of the request to move my line on 3rd January, more than one month after I notified them of my forthcoming change of address. That was the last change on my account, so the DSL line has apparently still not been reconnected. One can only hope this will be fixed before we return home on Friday.

The house numbering is strange around here. Regardless of the street in this particular town, virtually all houses seem to be numbered in the 20xxx or 44xxx area. In fact, the same is true of the adjacent towns. Weird. Why is a road with about seven houses numbered in the forty-thousands?

Equally weird are some of the street names around these parts: Shangri La Road, Kill Deer Road, Mom And Pop Road and even Walk This Way. I kid you not. It's like living in a children's book.

With those unassuming words, the KPN claims (via XS4ALL) to have moved my DSL line to the new house. If true, it took them only 22 days longer than they claimed would be necessary.

We fly home in less than 24 hours, so we'll be able to check on Friday whether they really have managed to pull off the seemingly impossible. Needless to say, I'm sceptical. Seeing is believing, etc.

Once I've verified that it does, in fact, work, the slow process of obtaining a credit for the period in which it didn't will begin. I also want to get my money back for all the times I called their useless yet expensive 0900 number.

Thanks to the Oatleymobile, we and all of our luggage made it intact to Washington Dulles airport and onto the plane. It was very hard to say goodbye; even harder to say it to the children earlier in the day as they left for school.

Sarah, Eloïse and I had the most fantastic time in Tall Timbers, in the cosy and easy-going Oatley household. There's nothing quite like being amongst like-minded people, people of whom you have no expectations, people who expect nothing of you. You just relax, hang out together, talk, eat, love each other's children and then -- as if by magic -- all is right with the world. I don't think the three McKenna-Macdonalds have been that relaxed since, well, perhaps our visit to the Oatleys in San Diego back in January of 2005.

Eloïse behaved quite well on the plane. She slept for at least half of the flight, requiring just intermittent breast-feeding and the occasional walk around the aisles and the galleys. She was asleep for the landing, then remained asleep during taxiing.

Rather astonishingly, she remained asleep after we got off the plane and went through passport control, then still at baggage reclamation. Finally, we headed outside into the fresh morning air (it was about 07:00 by now) and got into a taxi. We were stunned that she made it all the way off the plane and to the front door without stirring even once.

Back home, Sarah and Eloïse went to bed. After a shower, I joined them. We slept till noon (about four hours) and then got up and started running through the mountain of post that had accumulated in our absence.

Apart from that, we didn't do much else today. I connected our digital TV set-top box to the television; we'll be playing with that this evening. Sarah did some unpacking in the kitchen. Now it's time to grab some dinner.

Oh, and will wonders never cease? As I came in the door, I tried to pick up my e-mail over the WLAN and it just worked. In other words, DSL is finally working in the new house. Thank you, KPN.

Having had UPC's digital cable TV up and running for a few days now, I feel able to make a few comments about it.

Plus points:

• Cheap: the first six months of basic digital service are free. After that, the basic digital package costs only €2.16 more per month than the basic analogue service, but has a few interesting channels, such as the Travel Channel, that are missing from the analogue package.
• Interesting extra channel pack: BBC3 and BBC4, BBC Prime, Disovery Travel & Living, Discovery Civilisation, Discovery Science, obscurities like /Geschiedenis and Holland Doc, plus a large number of news stations, ranging from the loathesome Fox News to the unintelligible but intriguing Al Jazeera. This package gives one approximately 40 further channels for just €2 extra per month.
• Canal+ free for first month: Canal+ Red, Blue and Yellow are all free for the first month. That'd be a handy way to quickly record some porn if I had a VCR or a DVR connected.
• The decoder is supplied free of charge, but remains the property of UPC.

Minus points:

• The EPG (Electronic Program Guide) is inflexible and lacking power. One can search only 8 days ahead in the programming, but more importantly, it's impossible to pull up the guide for just the channel that one is watching. Instead, you have to choose either all channels or choose by programme genre. If one chooses the latter, only the channels currently showing a programme from that genre will be listed. Regardless of which option one chooses, the list of channels will be shown, together with the programme each is currently broadcasting. Unfortunately, it's not possible to page through chronologically to see what will be on each channel an hour or a day from now. Instead, one must select a channel and then page through only that channel's programmes. Paging from day to day is not seamless, either. One must press a coloured button to move from day to day. This should obviously offer contiguous paging.
• Poor user interface: this complaint is really an extension of the last one. There are many problems with the software's operating in an illogical or inconvenient way. For example, if one pages through a given channel's programming to a programme that will be broadcast three days from now and then hits OK on the remote control, the decoder will immediately switch to that channel. It would be more logical for OK to do nothing here or to act as the info key and display information about that programme.
• Poor picture quality: some channels are encoded at an embarrassingly low bit-rate. It's like watching an Internet video fragment encoded for analogue modem users. Blocking and mosquito noise are abundant.
• No way to automatically change channel or issue a reminder at a pre-set time. It would be nice if the decoder could remind one when an interesting programme is about to start on another channel.
• Single tuner: one cannot send a different channel to the DVR, VCR or whatever than the one being watched. Similarly, since one has only one decoder, any other televisions elsewhere in the house will still have only the analogue signal.
• Bugs: sometimes the channel guide is empty. Sometimes after performing several disparate operations in a row, the picture drops out, necessitating the pulling of the plug. This happened to me multiple times on the first day of use. In fact, as I write this, I see that the image has frozen without my doing anything. Sure enough, pulling the plug does the trick again.
• No way to remove channels that one does not pay for and receive from the EPG.
• The teletext button on the remote doesn't call up teletext via the decoder; it works only if one first changes the mode of the remote from the decoder to the television. Of course, that causes the TV to change video input from the decoder back to the analogue signal. In short, to view the teletext of a digital-only channel, one must use the teletext button of the TV's remote control, not that of the decoder.
• Sticking with teletext, the service regularly drops out on various channels. AT5, for example, has had no teletext since I rigged up the decoder. If I want to view it, I have to switch to viewing the channel via the analogue signal.
• No ability to compile a list of favourite channels or reorder the channels. One must remember each three digit channel number and the channels are not consecutively numbered.

In conclusion, UPC's digital TV product falls quite a way short of, say, DirecTV and drastically short of a DirecTiVo. That device is a DVR as well as a decoder, so a direct comparison is somewhat unfair, but at the end of the day, I do want those extra features: the dual tuner, the built-in DVR, the ability to search the programme guide and record programmes based on content (keywords, actors' names, etc.) rather than time of day, the intelligence to record programmes I haven't asked for, based on past viewing habits, etc.

TiVo has spoilt me. I didn't even watch American television apart from the Tour de France and a few things on HBO until we got our TiVo. That box of tricks managed to sift a couple of nuggets a week from thousands of hours of mindless dross, often finding them on channels whose existence I was scarcely aware of.

Whilst the selection of channels offered by UPC is vastly better than what is available in the US (which is actually more my European bias coming into play than an objective judgement), there is no way to find the stuff worth watching without manually reading through the EPG, something UPC has made painfully awkward to do.

Still, as an improvement over UPC's analogue offering, it's great. It's barely any more expensive, provides generally better picture quality and offers some worthwhile extra channels.

The 93rd Tour de France is coming to The Netherlands in 2006. The fourth stage will see the riders travel from the very northern tip of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, to Valkenburg in the province of Limburg. It's a flat 216 km stage, but all the same; it will be an excellent opportunity to see the tour caravan close to home.

This is the first time the Tour has come to The Netherlands since 1996, when it started in Den Bosch. I had seats at the finish for the prologue and remember shivering and quaking in the freezing cold as the rain bucketed down on us.

With no Lance Armstrong this year, it'll be a strange Tour, but perhaps all the more exciting for his absence. Being back in Europe and equipped with a car by then, it'll be hard not to find a reason to head down south for L'Alpe d'Huez and other joyous moments.

Audi Centrum Amsterdam have been kind enough to arrange a loan car for us whilst we await the manufacture and administration of our own. I took two trams and the metro down to station Bijlmer today to pick it up. Ernst, the salesman I've been dealing with, came and picked me up from the station, served me coffee, then handed me the key to a very nice 4.2 litre 2005 A6 Avant in Mauritius blue. We'll basically get to keep this until the delivery of our own car, which should take place somewhere around the end of February.

What a nice car it is, too. It has a number of options on board, such as satellite navigation, rear-parking assistance, left and right climate control, hands-free car telephone and who knows what else?

It's a fast car, that's for sure, but I've driven only a few kilometres in it so far. I drove straight over to PCH, the company to whom my part of Amsterdam has tendered out its issuing and administration of parking permits. Audi Centrum Amsterdam had written me a letter to hand over to PCH, explaining that this car, whose paperwork was obviously not in my name, was a loan car in advance of my own.

It was surprisingly easy to get the permit. Thankfully, there's no waiting list in this part of Amsterdam, so I was in and out of PCH's office within a few minutes.

Interestingly, I met a Surinamese woman working at PCH, whose surname is Macdonald. You don't meet many Macdonalds in this country, much less black Surinamese ones.

Anyway, I came straight home after that. The satellite navigation was fun to use on the two legs of my trip. When I got home, I was able to park the car right in front of the door, something that's easy to do around here. Parking in Amsterdam is so much grief, it's nice to know we'll be able to easily park in front of the house.

Later in the day, I went to Primafoon to obtain a SIM DuoCard for my mobile phone. This will enable me to have the same telephone number in my normal mobile phone as in the car phone. Unfortunately, you have to turn one phone off before turning the other one on (otherwise things can behave unpredictably), which gives you the issue of receiving SMS messages on one phone that you then try to recall in vain on the other, but that's as far as the technology goes at present.

Interestingly once again, the girl who helped me in Primafoon turned out to have the same birthday as me. Another strange coincidence. Two in one day. Life is exciting.

Now I have to dream up some excuses to take this car out for a spin. I like it so much already, however, that I'm almost tempted to change our order for the 3.2 litre engine to the 4.2, but I can temper my boyish inclination with the knowledge that the 4.2 is expensive to run and environmentally harsher. In addition, it would almost certainly incur higher road tax and insurance costs. You see? I've talked myself out of it already.

OK, it's a rhetorical question, but after my recent trials and tribulations with the moving of my DSL line, I wonder if the collective neurons of the entire administrative staff could raise a glimmer from a twenty watt light-bulb.

What's happened now? you ask. Well, I'll tell you.

When the KPN moved my analogue phone line on 21st December, I made an appointment with them by telephone to come back in January and install a second wall socket for me. The engineer who had installed the line had been unable to connect the downstairs socket, instead connecting the one in the front room on the first floor. This was inconvenient, however, because the base station and thus answerphone was then located upstairs, making it awkward to check for messages as one entered the house.

So, as I said, I made an appointment to remedy the situation. The first engineer had told me that his colleagues would be able to pull cable to allow the downstairs socket to be connected.

Well, come the day of the appointment, what happens? The KPN sends the engineer to our old address, the address from which the phone line in question had already been moved when the appointment was made. Go and stand in the corner with the dunce's hat on.

Now, fair is fair, so I must admit that when I received voice mail from the engineer, saying that he had not found me at home (yeah, mate, I don't live there), and I then called to ask if the situation could be rectified, I was put through to a very helpful woman who listened to my story, then called the works department of the KPN, then called me back to say they would still try to fit me in the same day at the new address. Grand.

A couple of hours later, the KPN engineer shows up with a second engineer, who he was clearly training. To cut a long story short, this new engineer was able to connect the second socket downstairs without pulling any cable at all. It was already wired.

In other words, the first engineer hadn't done his job properly and had connected the upstairs socket needlessly. The supply of the first working socket is free, because that's a prerequisite to be able to use a phone, but the connection of second and subsequent sockets is a paid service. Hence I am now expected to pay for the privilege of having the KPN enable me to use the phone where I wanted it put in the first place.

Doh!

Last weekend was a lot of fun. My friend Peter ventured up here for the weekend at short notice. Peter who?

I shared an office with Peter at Google in Mountain View for about three years between 2002 and 2005. We listened to each other's CDs, watched episodes of The Office and Ali G, shared company gossip, discussed our post-IPO plans, reviewed the day's Tour de France stage... shit, we were even known to work on the same project together. Rarely did we piss each other off.

Yes, I could have done a lot worse for an office mate, and so it was with a broad smile that I headed towards Schiphol airport Friday evening to pick him up. Peter lives in Zürich now, having moved there from Mountain View just a month ago to work in Google's Swiss office.

Peter's still very much a Google employee in heart and soul, whereas I have only token Googler status these days. He's probably more motivated in his job now than at any time during the period in which we shared an office (a causal relationship?). For me, on the other hand, Google feels very much a part of a bygone era. I harbour vaguely romantic feelings for that phase of my life, but it's all wistful nostalgia and doesn't feel real any more.

Anyway, apart from talking about the good old days, we spent the weekend walking around Amsterdam and drinking plenty of good coffee.

On Monday, we drove to Zandvoort and went for a walk on the beach. In spite of the freezing temperature, it felt relatively mild, as there was very little wind. Later in the day, we drove to Haarlem and had a look around the city before dropping Peter off at the airport on the way home.

It was nice to have a visitor for a few days, especially since we know so few people in Amsterdam these days. Human contact rarely goes beyond interaction in shops and cafés. Sad, but true; we need to put some effort into changing that.

God, I love our bed. I really must devote a paragraph or two to our lovely Hästens 2000T.

Yes, I know it's only a bed, but still; you just can't imagine how comfortable this thing is. The television adverts joke that it's impossible to stay awake in one and it's really true. I've never enjoyed having to get out of bed in the morning, but it's a particularly arduous endeavour to emerge from this slumberer's heaven.

Peter, too, when he was here, remarked on how comfortable the Naturally in the guest room is.

I heartily recommend a Hästens bed to anyone in the market for a new sleep sanctuary. Nothing else that I've ever slept on comes even close.

Well, it had to be done sooner or later and today was the day that we chose to bite the bullet. I'm talking about cleaning the old house, as next Tuesday is 31st January, the day our six month lease officially expires and the keys have to be handed back to the owner.

I dropped off Sarah and Eloïse on my way down to the Audi dealer. I had to go down there to lend their own car back to them. Apparently, a friend of the director of the firm wants to test-drive an A6 with a petrol engine, so the customer had been promised this car for the weekend. I therefore had to temporarily hand back the 4.2 litre A6 I've been driving around in exchange for a 3.2 litre Avant (which is just the estate version of the A6). I'll be in possession of the this car until Monday, at which time we'll swap vehicles again. How will I cope for three whole days without those heated seats? Life is hard.

Anyway, after buying a permit so that I can park this temporary car outside the house on Saturday, I drove over to the Elandsgracht to join Sarah in the cleaning. We blitzed the place in about five hours. I hoovered all four storeys, cleaned the toilets and threw out piles of rubbish. Sarah cleaned out the kitchen, packed stuff into boxes and sorted through the remaining odds and ends.

By six o'clock, we were ready to leave with a car packed full of the last possessions remaining at the old house. All that remains for me to do is hand back the keys on Tuesday and read the gas and electric meters. With that, we'll be able to close the book on Elandsgracht 33, its shoddily renovated interior, rickety and uncomfortable furniture, awkward layout, ineffective lighting, tacky waterbed, dodgy boiler, feeble shower, etc., etc.

All of our friends who spent a night there know the problem. Sorry Florence; sorry Mike. Sorry Daniel, Nicole, Geoff, Jules, Linda and anyone else who suffered the manifold frustrations of that property. We can assure you that you'll be much more comfortable in our new domicile.

Anyway, after five hours of €3.40 per hour parking, we headed back home with a full car, feeling proud of ourselves for having made such a thorough job of what was quite an unpleasant task. All desire to re-enter that property and spend any amount of time there had completely ebbed away over Christmas and New Year. The thought of having to clean the place was not a pleasing one, but we knuckled down, sacrificed a day to it, and now it's done.

How I wish we could tackle similarly necessary and unpleasant tasks with such commendable resolve.

What wouldn't I give for Fry's right now?

Media Markt is a big disappointment. They carry no gigabit Ethernet hubs or switches whatsoever. How is one supposed to build a modern network with nothing but plain old 8 port Fast Ethernet switches? Bah.

Similarly, the only PC power supplies I could find were 650 watt units, which is much more than I need. I started to unpack the computers today and discovered that the power supply of one of them is non-switchable, which almost certainly means it will go up in smoke if I dare to plug it into a 240 volt socket. Better to just buy and fit a new power supply.

What I did manage to find, however, were a few European power cords. That will save me from having to use plug adapters with the original American cords.

Afterwards, I went to IKEA and bought a basic Galant desk for around €150. Well, there's no point spending good money on something more expensive than that, when it'll serve the purpose perfectly well. I just need a simple desk for when I'm hacking code and ripping CDs.

I'll probably still need a small filing cabinet, but that can come later; probably from IKEA, too. I'm not a snob, so IKEA still has its place in my life. I wouldn't use it for my bed, my couch or even my dining room table, but for the desk at which I will sit and idle away hours on end, it's fine. It wasn't just a coincidence I had a Jerker in the States.

Dear, oh dear. My favourite Dutch TV series at the moment is Keyzer & De Boer Advocaten. It takes place in a solicitors' office, somewhere in Amsterdam Zuid. But where exactly?

Each week, I have been trying to figure out from the outdoor scenes where the office is supposed to be. I knew it must be somewhere within sight of the Koninginneweg or Willemsparkweg, because you can always see tram 2 hammering down the road about 100 metres away. Try as I might, though, I just couldn't pin down the side street containing the big office with the balcony on the first floor.

I asked Sarah to watch the start of episode 15, which has a nice pan shot of the crossroads by the office. Imagine my shock when Sarah announced after a couple of seconds that the area on film was, in fact, the Emmalaan. Nothing meaningful there, perhaps, until I tell you that the house in question is a sixty second walk (if that) from our house. I pass the building that plays the part of Keyzer & De Boer's business premises virtually every day and yet I still couldn't recognise it from the generous, wide-angle shots on TV. That's how bad my observational skills really are.

The clues were there, of course. Every time there's a scene in the Vondelpark, we see the characters entering the park via the Emmalaan entrance. As I considered where the location of the office might be, I had dismissed the use of this entrance as a bit of artistic licence on the part of the production team. After all, if they were really using an office that close to our own house, I would obviously recognise the location. Niet dus.

I knew my powers of observation were severely lacking, but this signals a new low in my visual perception.