Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

The first new release of bash completion in more than six months is a reality.

This release features many new completion functions. Many others have been improved or optimised. In addition, a large number of bugs have been fixed, including all known compatibility issues with bash 3.1, the latest version of the shell.

An almost complete change log for this release follows:

• Completion for minicom(1), mtr(8), sysctl(8), smartctl(8), vncviewer(1), invoke-rc.d, update-rc.d and dpkg-source has been added.
• gdb completion of second parameter was broken when first parameter contained white space.
• gdb completion wasn't completing second parameter correctly when it was a file, rather than a PID.
• Ruby ri completion has been broken for some time. This is now fixed.
• Various fixes to work around change in how POSIX quoting is handled in bash 3.1.
• subversion completion has been reimplemented from scratch and integrated into the main file.
• iconv(1) completion has been improved.
• yum(8) completion has been updated for current version of yum.
• ant completion will now make use of complete-ant-cmd.pl, if available.
• cvs(1) completion has been improved with 'update' and 'stat' completion.
• 'aptitude show' now works in the same way as 'apt-cache show'.
• make(1) now also completes on file names.
• MPlayer will now also complete on .flac, .mpc and .3gp files.
• wine will now also complete on .exe.so files.
• unzip will now also complete on oowriter's .ott files.
• xine et al will now complete on .mng files.
• The list of programs completing on .dvi files has been expanded.
• The range of files on which timidity and evince complete has been expanded.
• mkisofs completion now defaults to treating results as file names.
• $DEBUG has been renamed $BASHCOMPLETIONDEBUG to avoid namespace clashes with other software.
• man(1) completion now works correctly on OpenBSD.
• svk and Mercurial completion have been added to contribs.
• Many other small optimisations and fixes.

The Audi dealer called today. Apparently, our new car has had its steering column replaced and is now ready for us to pick up. Since the salesman I like to deal with has a day off tomorrow, I'll be heading down there Friday afternoon to pick it up.

Hopefully, when I start trying out arbitrary features this time, some of them will actually work. Vorsprung durch Technik.

Well, that was a new experience.

Sarah and I had been along to De Zwaan, a Dutch auction house on the Keizersgracht, earlier this week, after our friends Felix and Bonnie suggested that we might find some things there that we liked. They were right.

The place was packed with good stuff, including a number of lovely paintings, a light or two that we fancied, grandfather clocks, bureaus, etc. The paintings, in particular, appealed to me, especially a really lovely painting of the Bloemenmarkt, Amsterdam's flower market along the Singel.

The lots are divided into different categories, each of which is being auctioned in its own sitting over the next two weeks. Tonight was the turn of the paintings and etchings.

I wasn't going to go, really. It was snowing hard and besides, art doesn't really do anything. It goes against the grain for me to consider spending a large sum of money on something that just sits or hangs there, fulfilling no practical function. I'm a practical and functional kind of bloke. I like to pay money for things that do something, that have a clearly defined purpose that they can be judged to have fulfilled or failed to fulfill. But a painting just hangs there. How do you measure whether you're getting your money's worth out of it, even if you like it a lot?

Anyway, I biked over to the auction house while Sarah was putting Eloïse to bed. I was the last person to arrive and there were only a few lots left to auction. I had to scout around to find someone to register me with a bidder number.

Once upstairs, I took a seat and proceeded to soak up the atmosphere of the place. It's this lovely old building with nice old chandeliers and all eyes were focused on the auctioneer. It was just like in the films, really, with a few people stood at the front on the telephone, taking bids from anonymous bidders. Each painting was placed in turn on an easel for convenient viewing.

The atmosphere was sedate, but nevertheless very exciting. This was not your detached, anonymous, remote eBay experience, but a packed public auction room where you look eye in eye with the person you're bidding against.

By the time the lot I was interested in came up, I had more or less decided to just watch and learn, but when I saw the painting elevated onto the easel, I fell for it once again. Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to put in my first live bid. And just like a player in one of those films, I flicked my wrist and marginally elevated by bidder number card each time the auctioneer's gaze returned to me.

Anyway, to cut a long story somewhat short, a little bit of a bidding war ensued. One lady clearly wanted this painting as much as I did, but determination (or was it foolhardiness?) won the day. I ended up paying considerably more than the guide price, but that seemed to be the nature of the evening, with many lots enjoying a similar fate.

Still, the important thing is that I got the painting I wanted. I paid at the office on the way out and enquired when I could come back and pick it up. It's going to look really great in the house when we figure out where to hang it.

Well, I've never taken part in a real live auction before; nor have I ever bought a piece of fine art. Me, the owner of an old oil-painting. Who'd have thought?

I could definitely develop a taste for this. It's easy to see how one could become addicted to hanging out at auction houses and trying to snap up literally unique items, especially when one is trying to furnish a new home and give it character.

I went back to troubleshooting my expensive box of dysfunctional hardware today, but I actually couldn't test any further. The next thing to check was the power supply, but I didn't have a spare ATX unit to pop in.

Sadly, I had to bite the bullet and take the thing into a trusted PC shop. There, the bloke tried a new power supply, but it made no difference. That leaves pretty much just the CPU and motherboard to test. I bet it ends up being the sodding motherboard. That'll give me another thing to send back to the place I purchased it. What a hassle. Buying hardware on-line is fine when everything works, but when it doesn't...

Anyway, they probably won't even start to look at it until early next week, so I'll forget about it for the next few days.

I went down to the Audi dealer today and was relieved to discover that the new steering-column has fixed the fault I found last week. The steering wheel position can now happily be adjusted vertically, not just horizontally.

The arrival of our new car meant that I was finally able to properly fit our Maxi-Cosi PrioriFix car-seat that we purchased in January. The PrioriFix seat is fitted using the ISOFIX system, so that it is anchored to the actual chassis of the car. Because there's no need to use seat belts any more, the seat is more firmly held in place and becomes virtually impossible to fit incorrectly. This latter point is important, when you consider that something like 60% of child car-seats are fitted incorrectly in some way or other, rendering them anything from less effective to downright useless. Eloïse should be able to use this seat for the next few years.

Anyway, apart from the ISOFIX system (which is still non-standard on Audis and so has to be ordered as an extra), some of the other features I've played around with so far are:

• the satellite navigation system, of course. The DVD is dated September 2005, so it should be up-to-date with all of the one-way systems and other nonsense that sometimes confused the navigator in our borrowed car. I noticed that this version also has an altimeter. That'll be handy in a country under sea level!
• the DAB radio tuner. Unfortunately, there are relatively few radio stations in The Netherlands broadcasting in DAB, but the publieke omroep (public broadcasting company) does. Coverage isn't national yet, though, I believe.
• the analogue/digital TV tuner. I had this fitted in case I want to get a paid DVB-T subscription later on. Right now, all I can get in this country are Nederland 2, Nederland 3 and a few local news channels, but it'll still be handy for when I'm parked somewhere, waiting for Sarah to return to the car. Nederland 2 is available as a free-to-air DVB-T channel, so the quality is consistently good. The tuner even includes teletext capability, which makes me feel really spoilt.
• the car phone. Rather than arse around with car-kits and cigarette lighter adapters, I opted for the built-in phone. I can dial numbers from my steering wheel and even read SMS messages. Yeah, I know; not exactly safe whilst driving. At least you need to pull over and pick up the handset to actually send an SMS. I have a DuoSim card, so I can share the same number between my mobile phone and the car phone.
• advanced key. This is Audi's name for not requiring that the key be inserted in the door to unlock it, nor be in the ignition in order to start the car. One need only have the key in one's pocket to gain entry to the vehicle and start it. It sounds like a gimmick, but one gets used to this convenience very quickly.
• voice recognition. I can talk to my car and tell it where I want to go and who I want to call on the telephone. It then obliges me by programming that destination into the navigation system or by calling that person. Next year's model will drive there on autopilot and hold the conversation for me, too.

The car contains much more cool gadgetry than just the above, but I've only driven a handful of kilometres so far, so I have a lot more to try out and become acquainted with in the coming weeks.

On the way home from the dealer, I stopped off briefly at PCH to transfer the parking permit from the borrowed car to the new one. Then, I headed home to show off the car to Sarah, who seems to like it. She'll like it a lot more, of course, when I pull my finger out and take her on a road trip in it.

It's a real luxury to have your own car, especially one that you ordered brand new from the factory after picking out all the specific features you wanted, then waited more than three months for it to be manufactured and delivered. Hopefully, it will provide us with many years of reliable service.

Sarah and I had ordered a new changing table for Eloïse a couple of weeks ago. It was delivered by Casa Luce yesterday afternoon and I finished putting it together this evening.

It's a Stokke Care. I really like Norwegian Stokke's line of baby furniture. The Tripp Trapp we bought a while ago has been great.

With the arrival of the Care, I no longer have to cripple myself, kneeling on the slate floor of our bathroom. The extra planks also give us a convenient place to store our stacks of cloth nappies, liners and covers.

Our prospective MythTV box is more or less ready for the software. The shop that was investigating the source of my problem had called to say that they had got to the bottom of it, so off I went in our new car (which still has fewer than 100 km on the clock) to collect it.

It turns out that some kind of short-circuit was the issue. They took everything out, put it back in and then the system worked. I had pulled out virtually everything, but had left the motherboard in place. I can't imagine what could have been causing a short-circuit, but I have to hand it to them: they found the problem and I didn't. The bloke who had actually investigated the problem wasn't present today, so I couldn't ask whether he had managed to trace the exact location of the problem.

Anyway, I said I'd talk about the hardware a little bit once I'd got the system built, so here we go. Let's start with a list of all the parts.

• The outer case was one of the most expensive parts for this DIY PVR adventure; in fact, the most expensive component (with the hard drive a close second). It's a black OrigenAE X11 box. It comes with a VFD on the front, with its own user guide. The VFD will be used to display time, channel and programme information. It also has an IR unit, so that the box can accept commands from a remote control. All of this is supposedly compatible with Linux. We'll see. The box also features front-panel USB and audio inputs, which could prove handy later on.
• The motherboard I chose is an Asus P5P800 SE, a Socket 775 board with on-board Gigabit LAN and sound. It can take 2 Serial ATA devices, plus the usual IDE ones. It appealed to me because it was quite cheap, had lots of PCI slots, no PCI-E slots (which I don't need), plus AGP for the video card. I read that Linux doesn't yet play well with some PCI-E video cards, so I decided to go with tried and trusted technology. This box doesn't need cutting-edge hardware, anyway. This motherboard is also lacking Firewire support, which would have been nice, since the X11 case has a front-panel Firewire port.
• For the CPU, I had originally chosen an Intel Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz unit. Unfortunately, this went out of stock at the on-line shop from which I was purchasing all of the parts, so I then chose the more expensive 2.8 Ghz model. Finally, I noticed that the 3 Ghz model was only €20 more and had an extra megabyte of Level 2 cache, so I changed the order again. This is the one I finally bought.
• Because this system will live in the living-room, it needs to be as quiet as possible. For this reason, I purchased an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro heatsink/fan unit to replace the standard Intel one. The fan's mounting system is particularly nice and should help to reduce a lot of the noise.
• The power supply is a Tagan TG480-U15. There's no point skimping on this part and it doesn't use any more electricty if the parts it's powering require less than its full capacity, so I went for a 480 watt unit. It's a nice-looking unit, as PSUs go.
• A gigabyte of Kingston RAM will provide volatile memory.
• The hard drive had to be beefy, because this PVR will be seeing a lot of work. Speed was important, as was capacity. I opted for a 500 Gb Seagate Barracuda. It's a 7200 RPM drive with an 8.2 ms seek time. I'm not sure how silently it will run, so we'll have to see.
• For playing DVDs and archiving to DVD, I chose a Plextor PX-755SA rewriter. It can handle DVD±RW, including the dual layer variants and is a SATA device, rather than IDE.
• The video card is an ASUS N6800XT/TD, a 128 Mb 8x AGP card with an NVIDIA chipset.
• The TV tuner card is a MythTV stalwart, the Hauppauge PVR-350, complete with IR unit and remote-control. I chose this, rather than the double tuner PVR-500, because UPC's digital TV offering allows only one single tuner set-top box per household. True, I could connect a second tuner to the analogue cable TV, but I'm going to wait and see how this works out for now. Even if I did that, the PVR-500 has only a single signal input, which it then splits internally. That would make it impossible to connect plain old analogue cable and digital cable to a single card, anyway. I'll need another DVR-350 if I want to take that route.
• Naturally, this box needs to be networked in order to pick up its programme guide, amongst other things. After careful consideration, I finally picked the Netgear WG311, primarily because it works with the MadWifi driver, with which I have had good results.
• Last but not least, the MythTV box will need to be able to change channels on the digital TV set-top box when it needs to record a programme starting on another channel. Many set-top boxes have an old-fashioned RS232 interface for this, but UPC's Thomson-made box of tricks doesn't. What to do? After some scouting around, my best bet seemed to be Mike over at irblaster.info. He makes IR transmitters that yoiu can connect at one end to the serial port of your PC, whilst at the other of the cable is an IR emitter. Basically, you drape the cable from behind over the front of the set-top box and then send IR signals down it. Essentially, you're glueing a remote-control to the receiving eye of the set-top box. It's a dirty hack and will be the least elegant part of the whole set-up, but at least it will work. This is the only piece of hardware purchased from outside The Netherlands. I paid by Paypal and the device arrived within just a few days: very prompt service, indeed.

I must confess that picking out the hardware wasn't much fun. A lot of research was required to avoid buying parts that would not (properly) function under Linux, would not work with each other, would not generate an excessive amount of noise, etc. Then there was the physical hassle of building the system, followed by the grief and delay when the whole combo refused to play ball. I'm just not a hardware guy at the end of the day. Give me a box with working hardware, but no operating system, and let me work my software magic on it.

Anyway, we're more or less at that stage now. I say more or less, because I had to send the broken TV tuner card back to be exchanged. I don't yet have the replacement and it's a pretty essential part, so I'm stuck for a few more days.

Furthermore, Fedora Core 5 will be released on 15th March and it would be nice if that could go straight onto the system without needing to upgrade from FC4 or FC5 test3. What's a few more days? That'll give me time to replace the TV card, anyway.

After putting the bits of our future MythTV box back together, the system now powers up, but the SATA hard drive is not detected by the motherboard. Yawn. The SATA DVD drive, on the other hand, is recognised, so I tried the hard drive with that device's cables, but to no avail.

With no other SATA computer in the house, I have no idea whether it's a duff drive or some other, more obscure problem. There are plenty of stories out there about the Seagate ST3500641AS not working with Macs, due to the use of Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC), but this isn't a Mac, of course.

It looks like I'm going to suffer another hardware-induced delay while I get this figured out.

The family took its first day-trip in the new car today. We drove across the country to Nijmegen to pay Jules and Bloem a visit. Linda was at work, so we didn't get to see her.

There were fewer than 100 km on the clock when we left, but there are now more than 300. Not a bad maiden voyage, in other words.

With all that motorway driving, I got to try out the adaptive cruise control. Normal cruise control sets a constant speed and requires driver intervention when deviation from this speed is required. The adaptive variant, on the other hand, senses the distance between your car and the one in front and, if necessary, slows down. Similarly, when circumstances permit, the car will automatically accelerate towards the preset speed.

I was sceptical about how well this feature would work in practice, but it turns out to be astonishingly intelligent. If someone overtakes you, for example, and then merges back into your lane, but continues to steam ahead, the adaptive cruise control doesn't suddenly take 'its foot' off the accelerator when it senses the sudden appearance of a vehicle at a short distance in front of you. If that car merges back in without continuing to pull ahead, however, the adaptive cruise control immediately adapts to keep your distance from that vehicle.

Thanks to this feature, there were long stretches on the way to Nijmegen and back that I didn't have to do a single thing except occasionally nudge the steering wheel to the left or right. The car accelerated and slowed at all the right moments. All I needed to do was keep a watchful eye on things with my foot hovering over the brake pedal.

I really enjoy driving this car. I can't wait to take it on a longer trip.

I had to get up early this morning to go back to De Zwaan and bid on an old light that we had seen and fancied for our vestibule. I won it for €90 and was surprised to find that the same lot came with a couple of other lights, neither of which is very attractive. Oh well; at least I got the one that I wanted.

A box of old light fittings, listed in the guide as worth between €20 and €40, went for over €1000. The auctioneer even made a comment that she wondered what was in there. A bloke in the front row was bidding like crazy against another bidder on the phone. No-one else was remotely interested. Had these two people seen a rare treasure in the box that the auction house had failed to recognise? I wonder.

We'll be picking up our lights, as well as the painting I recently won, this coming Saturday.

Country-wide elections were held today for the city councils and their individual boroughs. I voted for Groen Links (the green left), both for my local borough of Oud Zuid and the Amsterdam municipal council. They lost a couple of seats in Amsterdam, but didn't do at all badly compared to the CDA (Christian democrats) and some other parties.

The big winner, not just in Amsterdam, but across the country, is the PvdA (labour party). The SP (socialist party) is the other big winner, which means that city councils all over the country are now going to become left-wing alliances. This is great news, even though the party I actually voted for didn't do as well as I'd hoped.

This election result appears to be strong evidence of the populace punishing the national government at the municipal level for myopic and polarised policies. I, for one, think this bodes well for the next four years.

I've ordered a new hard drive to replace the useless article that I couldn't cajole into action yesterday. Let's hope the new one shows more signs of life. I hope it's not just a case of some obscure incompatibility between the drive and the motherboard, because I've ordered the exact same model of drive again.

I've also ordered a new TV tuner card to replace the broken one I had to send back.

The package has already been despatched, so I may be able to report more as early as tomorrow. Until then, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the new hard drive will actually spin up.

I wasn't planning another release of this package quite so quickly, but a user asked me how to restrict the number of results returned by the server, prompting me to ask myself, "Yeah, how do you do that?"

I quickly remembered how to set the number of results, but then discovered that this doesn't actually help with Ruby/LDAP. The reason is because the server will return the status of LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED along with the search results when its maximum number of results has been exceeded. Ruby/LDAP had the unfortunate property of throwing an exception to the status LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED, as it does with any status that isn't LDAP_SUCCESS. Any results obtained up until that point were discarded.

The 0.9.4 release corrects this problem in all search methods, to whit LDAP::Conn#search, LDAP::Conn#search2, LDAP::Conn#search_ext and LDAP::Conn#search_ext2. It's now up to the user to check the error status after performing a search. This can be done by invoking LDAP::Conn#err. If that returns LDAP::LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED instead of LDAP::LDAP_SUCCESS, then the results set was truncated by the server. This allows users to request a tiny subset of results, so as to spare the server from unnecessary work. Of course, if you know your modern LDAP, you'll know that the paged results control could be used to achieve the same goal, but fixing this issue makes for an easier alternative (and not all servers support the paged results control, anyway).

There are a couple of other minor changes in this release, but nothing user-visible.

You can obtain Ruby/LDAP via the project home page.

The new drive for the MythTV box arrived today and works! Well, let's not be hasty; the BIOS recognises it. I won't know whether it truly works until I actually try to put an operating system on it.

To that end, I thought I'd try to start the FC4 install from a bootable DVD. FC5 comes out next Wednesday, but this would at least tell me that the system was finally ready to go from a hardware perspective. I pressed on the eject button of the DVD player to open the tray and... nothing. The LED on the front of the drive blinked a few times, but that was it.

After searching the Internet, I came across a document describing Plextor's blink codes. It describes a different drive to the one I have, but Plextor's blink codes seem to be the same across all models.

First of all, I was getting three blinks, which means ejection or loading error.

After manually ejecting the tray, inserting a DVD and then closing the tray, I then get eight blinks, which means spindle failed. None of the suggestions on Plextor's site provided any relief.

Why me? Why me? I ask.

I've already had to send back the TV tuner card and order a replacement. That arrived today, together with the new hard drive. Tomorrow, I'll have to send back the first hard drive and now also the DVD drive. More bloody delays and frustration ahead. All of these hardware problems would be bad enough if I had bought the parts locally, but having to send stuff back through the post is very tedious and time-consuming.

I'm beginning to wonder whether a working MythTV box will ever see the light of day by way of my hands.

The new DVD player for the MythTV box turned up on Friday... and turned out to exhibit the same problem: blinking lights, but no action. After disconnecting the SATA cable and the power cable a hundred times, swapping those cables with those of the hard drive, and disconnecting and reconnecting random leads from the motherboard, I did get the DVD drive tray to slide open once. I put in the FC4 installer, rebooted and got a single line of the boot display to show up, after which the boot failed, citing the DVD drive once again.

A couple more attempts at booting the machine ensued, then the video card started to scream at me that its power cord wasn't connected. This was accompanied by a subtle, yet distinct air of electrical burning. Somehow -- I really have no idea why -- the video card has now decided to ally itself with the other rebellious hardware and turn to shit in my hands. It thinks it has no power, even though the cord is properly connected. A new cord and a different socket on the power supply fail to remedy the situation.

At this point, I have to suspect the motherboard after all. Things are breaking in such strange and unpredictable ways, and I'm really not that clumsy that I can realistically blame myself for each new problem that arises. But what next? Order a replacement motherboard and hope that everything magically just works? I've poured so much time, energy and money into this project already. It looks like I now need a new video card, too.

No, that's it for me, I think. The whole project has worn out my patience, so I'm shelving it for now. The working pieces of hardware will become spares for some future computer (since they're all either incompatible with or superfluous for my other machines), but essentially it's a lot of money down the drain at the moment.

The whole exercise has left a nasty taste in my mouth. This is the very last time I attempt to build a new PC from the ground up. Unless one has multiple spares of every part on hand with which to test and rule out causes, it's just not worth the potential grief.

I'm sticking to software from now on; it's what I'm good at.

The familly went for a day-trip to Antwerp today. The city is nicer than I had recalled. Not that my recollection of it wasn't good; it just wasn't quite as good as the reality.

We had lunch at this great little place called Kookaburra, which served up one of the best lasagnas I've eaten in years. Highly recommended.

It was bloody freezing -- literally -- and I'd forgotten to bring a jumper, so I was rather cold, to say the least. We walked around town, but didn't really have time for major excursions, such as the zoo. That's for another trip, I suppose.

By the end of the afternoon, the snow had started to come down in earnest, so we headed back to the car for the drive home, but not before we'd visited the spectacular Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, which dominates Antwerp's skyline.

Of course, no trip to Belgium is complete without loading up on epicurean chocolates, so we bought a couple of 500 g boxes at two different shops. Those will make our TV-filled evenings extra cosy.

The car feels like it's truly christened now. It has more than 500 km on the clock and has been abroad (having been manufactured and shipped from Germany didn't count). It performed admirably throughout. At the risk of sounding like one of those obnoxious men's men -- you know, the kind who bang on about male subjects like cars all the time -- I do really like driving this thing. I've never owned anything so expensive or luxurious. I must admit: it is a very pleasant experience.

After several years of occasional bidding, I finally managed to win an eBay auction for a rare complete copy of the Lemmings cartridge for my old Atari Lynx handheld console. The cartridge itself pops up from time to time, but it's much less common to find one still in its box, much less complete with manual and in excellent condition.

When the game arrived from England, I realised that I would be unable to play it (or any other in my collection), as my AC adapter is 110V only (bought whilst in the USA). Batteries aren't a realistic option, as the Lynx positively devours the things, so I would need a new adapter for use in Europe.

Even though the Lynx is now about 16 years old, it's still very easy to pick up an original Atari 110V US power supply (complete with box). The 3 pronged 240V UK adapter is a little harder to come by, with the 2 pronged 220V continental European model by far the hardest of the three to find. Consequently, it's a little pricier to purchase, but thanks to the power of Google, I did manage to locate one. It arrived a few days ago, so I'm back in Lynx-playing business.

We're not so much keeping busy these days as unavoidably being kept busy. Honestly, who would have thought that retirement could be so much work?

Sarah and I have been busy trying to prepare our Dutch and American taxes. Given the fact that we have both been resident in two countries during the last fiscal year, can no longer file a joint return in America as in previous years (due to my partial resident status for last year), liquidated lots of stock, have bank accounts in multiple currencies and places, purchased a house, etc., our taxes are really quite complicated this year.

Add to that the fact that we're missing or have incomplete documentation in some cases, especially around the period of our international move, and you have the basis for some very time-consuming and tedious work, e-mailing and phoning people for the missing data and trying to make sense of all manner of forms and statements.

Also, because our situation is no longer easily classified, none of the tax forms we have to fill in are fully applicable, so we keep having to annotate things and explain our unique circumstances. You end up wondering if the return you end up filing will make any sense or even be accurate.

In the midst of this, we're also trying to sort out our estate planning once and for all. Estate planning is the financial world's soothing euphemism for getting one's affairs in order before one pops one's clogs. Not that we're planning to shuffle off this mortal coil in the near future, but very few people do, which is precisely the reason one needs to spend time on this stuff while one is still of relatively sound mind and something approaching sound body.

Dealing with the estate planning is as tedious as dealing with the accountants, and as complicated, too. Marriage to a foreigner with lifelong tax obligations to the country from which she happens to hail can really complicate your life. And Eloïse, too, is an American citizen by dint of her mother's nationality, which further complicates our estate planning, as no money can be deposited in her name unless we're prepared to pay tax to the US on any interest it earns.

Want my advice? Don't marry a foreigner, especially an American, unless you're up for a shitload of hassle, trying to prevent a greedy foreign government from staking a claim to assets to which it has no moral right. Of course, even if Sarah and I hadn't been married, Eloïse would still be American, because she was born in the United States.

American citizenship is viral, you see. It's like a hereditary disease. As soon as you start to earn money abroad, the tumour begins to grow. The only known cure is the abandonment of one's citizenship, which still leaves you with a 10 year fiscal obligation. That's the price of freedom, folks; you pay for it the rest of your days, even if you're a dissident in some far flung part of the world. Well, you're obliged to pay it, that is; whether or not you actually do so depends on your stance and the amount of bone marrow in your spine.

Basically, though, you can't marry an American without marrying the American tax system.

Whilst fulfilling our financial and bureaucratic obligations, we've also been trying to enjoy the pleasanter side of life, playing with our daughter and looking for things to make our house feel more like a home.

An important part of this has been the quest for lighting. We still have multiple bare fittings in the house, with the ground floor being particularly poorly illuminated. Most of the lighting shops we've visited have carried lighting that is much too strikingly modern. Our house is about ninety years old and has its own distinct character. We have our own character, too, of course, and we obviously have to remain faithful to that also, or our surroundings won't feel warm to us.

For that reason, we're furnishing the house with a mixture of modern and old items. I like modern things for the practical comfort-based items, like the dining table and the sofa, but less tactile items like cabinets and such can be old and as ornamental as they are purposeful.

Lighting has been particularly hard to find, as taste plays a huge role in the decision. Dedicated trips to lighting shops have been frustrated and fruitless. Occasionally, one of us would find something we liked, but it has basically not been the case that we were ever both wild about the same item.

Happily, that changed this week, quite by chance, when we wandered past an antique shop whilst on the way to somewhere else. In fact, most of the things we have ended up purchasing were found by chance, rather than by hitting the home shopping centre and specifically looking for stuff.

Antiques are really quite frightening. First of all, they look stately and command respect, especially from one so ignorant as I. Much more problematic, though, is that they can also be very expensive. Developing a nasty coke habit would probably make more financial sense than acquiring a penchant for beautiful things from bygone eras. There's a bloody good reason why many antique shops are only open a few days per week or by appointment only.

Anyway, this week, we've managed to find no fewer than three lights for the house. For the foyer, we've found a nice lantern from 1880, which must at one time have been an oil-lamp. It has a lot of charm and will set the mood for the house as guests enter inside and doff their coats and scarves.

For the bedroom, we picked out a lovely Art Deco light from 1920. I choked on the price of the thing, but the glasswork is beautiful and it will set the tone of the bedroom, providing a warm yet distinguished ambience. I'm looking forward to lying in bed, looking up at the light passing through its cut-glass bowl.

For the downstairs hallway, we've opted to have a light made for us by a specialist in Aalsmeer. It looks old, but is actually brand new, so will fit in perfectly and serve to warm the mood of the marble in the hallway.

None of these lights are actually in the house yet, but I'll put up pictures once they're in place. With a bit of luck, we'll get them mounted before our friends Lauren, Brian and baby Max show up for a visit at the end of the month.

Finally, I picked up my painting from the auction house a few days ago and was saddened to find a small tear in the canvas that I hadn't noticed when I viewed the item prior to bidding. It's also quite loose in its frame, so I think I may need to get the thing restored before I hang it up. What I know about restoring paintings can be engraved on the head of a pin, so that's another thing for me to look into.

Taking a break? From what? you may ask. From our usual routine, I retort. No matter how you fill your days, deviation from the norm is the essential spice of life that keeps you feeling invigorated and alive.

With our tax paperwork all but finished (I'm still awaiting a form from Google in the US), tomorrow seems as good a time as any to head out for a few days. Sarah has Dutch lessons every Monday afternoon, so we can't really go for longer than a week. If we wait any longer, we'll hardly be able to get away at all, because we have guests coming at the end of this month, plus a family visit at the end of the next.

Picking a destination has been a little tricky, because many places lie in directions we want to go later this year for a longer period, so it would be foolish to travel a long way in one direction only to retrace our steps a few months from now.

Bearing that in mind, we're going to start by driving east to Köln (or Cologne, as it's oddly known in English), where we'll more than likely spend the night.

That's about as far as we've planned so far. Düsseldorf and Bonn are options, but I don't yet know much about them. Our Lonely Planet guide to Germany should help with that.

More than likely, though, I expect we'll head down to Luxembourg and then come back through Belgium, probably returning next Sunday.

Our short break away proved to be extremely relaxing and just what we needed.

As planned, we drove across the country into Germany to spend the first night in Cologne at the Eden Hotel. We had a splendid view, as our room was directly opposite Cologne's very impressive cathedral.

The next day, we spent some time properly exploring the city, including its many fabulous bakeries. In the afternoon, we decided to head south-west to Monschau.

Monschau turns out to have half-day closing on Wednesdays, so a lot of the curious little shops that line its streets were closed. It was also bitterly cold, with snow lining the ground of the park and the hillside. Nevertheless, we enjoyed looking around the town, the scene of one of our very first dates back in early 2000. We stopped for a quick bite to eat in a restaurant to debate whether to spend the night here or drive further.

Eventually, we decided to drive a bit further, so I programmed the navigation system to guide us to the town of Vianden in Luxembourg. Wanting to drive along only nice scenic roads, I told it to avoid motorways when planning the route and within seconds, we were underway.

Satellite navigation continues to impress me, every single time I use it. There I am, in a small town in Germany, wanting to drive to a small town in Luxembourg, and this funny box of tricks knows exactly how to get me there. It even speaks the route to me, telling me when to take each turn. Even though I know how this technology works, it still feels like magic when I use it.

Anyway, a couple of hours later, we crossed the border into Luxembourg and rolled into Vianden, which was shut. Pretty much every hotel we tried was either closed or in a half-demolished state as it underwent renovation for the coming tourist season. We quickly exhausted all of the suggestions in our guide book.

Eventually, we found a cosy looking inn along Grand Rue. I went in to check for the availability of rooms and, to our great relief, they had some available. Not only that, but we had a fantastic dinner there, too, even if the environment did ultimately become very smoky.

The next day, we decided to drive down the eastern side of Luxembourg to Echternach, but because that was only a few tens of kilometres, we had plenty of time to spend exploring other things.

We started with a visit to Vianden's magnificently impressive castle, which no visitor to the duchy should miss.

After that, we headed west in the car to explore some of that side of the country. Accordingly, we stopped off briefly in Esch-sur-Sûre and Wiltz. Mid-afternoon, we arrived in Echternach and soon found a hotel in the centre of town. In fact, it was very close to the youth hostel, where I once stayed about twelve years ago when on a biking trip through the Ardennes.

The next day was very drizzly, so we had a quick walk around Echternach before departing for the capital. Again, it was only a few tens of kilometres to the city, so we made it there very quickly. It took a bit of time to find a suitable hotel and park the car, but then we were free to start ambling around.

By the end of the day, we hadn't even made it down to the lower Grund neighbourhood, which is always worth a quiet walk around, so, with the lack of a destination in mind for the next day, we decided to spend a second night in the capital.

Sunday morning saw us rise late, as the clocks had gone forward during the night. We piled into the car around noon and began the 400 km drive home, which we completed in remarkably good time, despite many kilometres of single-lane roadworks as we passed into southern Belgium.

All in all, our first extended trip in the new car was a glowing success. We're already looking forward to making the next one. As always, we took a lot of photos.