Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Yesterday, I made the unpleasant journey by road to Rotterdam to see Lisa Gerrard at the Schouwburg on the opening night of her latest European tour. It's only about 75km to Rotterdam from here, but the traffic makes it feel like a lot more. Still, having a nice car with TV, music and arse-warming seats goes a long way towards numbing the pain.

We hadn't managed to come up with someone who could perform the bedtime duties with Eloïse , so I went without Sarah and met up with my ex, Jo, to attend the gig.

Lisa played a good selection of old and new, including some unreleased material that will hopefully find its way onto a future release. The set had been rearranged, with a few new pieces added, since Lisa was last here in the spring (when she played in The Hague).

High points were Host Of The Seraphim, Sacrifice, Sanvean and the Michael Edwards rendered piano version of Dreams Made Flesh. Yes, I do prefer the older material, but I like the new stuff, too. Music is like wine and cheese, you see. It gets better as it gets older, because the listener no longer just hears a piece of music, but attaches memories and feelings to it over time. New music can never evoke the same feelings, but that new music will, of course, also start to age. That's how it works for me, anyway.

After the concert, we went for a Greek meal just outside the Schouwburg. I was ravenous, as I'd had no dinner prior to she show.

The concert was so good that I risked Sarah's wrath by purchasing a tour T-shirt. There's a wife-imposed ban on T-shirt purchases in this household, because I have so many already, but I couldn't resist having the wearable souvenir of this concert.

Sarah still hasn't seen Lisa Gerrard perform live, but she'll get her chance a couple of weeks from now, when we head down to Antwerp for an overnight trip with the in-laws. Sarah's folks get the questionable honour of babysitting the smallest, most demanding member of the family, while her parents make merry to the dulcet tones of Lisa at the Koningin Elisabethzaal.

Speaking of Sarah's folks, they turn up here Saturday morning.

I keep forgetting to mention that we took Eloïse during autumn half-term to see the children's musical, Nijntje Op Vakantie at the Meervaart.

I think I enjoyed it only slightly less than Eloïse , for whom I purchased a copy of the CD containing the songs. Unfortunately, every time I try to break the silence in the home by turning on some music via the Sonos, Eloïse demands that I play Nijntje Op Vakantie instead of whatever I was planning to play. And she's really quite insistent in that convincing way that only a two-year old can be, sending one running straight down the path of least resistance.

Anyway, if you're in The Netherlands and Nijntje Op Vakantie is coming to a venue near you in the next six months, you could do worse than to take your toddler along. We all had a very good time and it was fun to expose Eloïse to a live performance.

An archaeological dig is what it felt like to go to my lock-up yesterday and browse through my old stuff.

All of my Dutch possessions were transferred from my flat to this lock-up when I first went to America in March 2000. In 2001, all of the stuff that had been in my ex-girlfriend's parents' loft in London since 1991 arrived in Amsterdam to be added to the contents of the lock-up. I was still in America, of course.

At this point, all of my worldly goods were now in storage in Amsterdam, except for the few boxes I had had sent to America when it had become apparent that I wouldn't be returning to Europe any time soon.

So, it came as something of a shock when, some months later, word reached me that the storage facility where my belongings were being held, had (been) burned down. As I walked down Market Street in San Francisco, past people pushing all of their material possessions out in front of them in a shopping trolley, it occurred to me that some of these tramps now had more tangible items to their name than did I.

Some time later, it transpired that not all of the storage units had been lost in the fire. Some had survived the fire, only to be severely damaged by the efforts to extinguish the blaze. Perhaps some stuff had even survived the water.

My ex-girlfriend inspected the damage in my absence and reported that a lot of stuff was smoke- and/or water-damaged, but some stuff had also survived relatively or, in some cases, completely intact.

Once we had bought a new house and settled into it last year, there was really no excuse not to go to the lock-up and sort out the stuff there, but I couldn't bring myself to go and behold the scene of destruction that I knew would be waiting for me.

You see, in the intervening years I had forgotten much of what I owned, so I wasn't in a position to miss it. I knew, however, that if I were to become reacquainted with it, it would bring memories flooding back, so I was in no hurry to be reminded of things that had once occupied a place in my life, but which were now either destroyed or severely damaged.

With the move to the new house, I've decided that I need to finally get my act together and clear out the lock-up. That process started a few weeks ago with a couple of boxes of my old comics, which, thanks to my having religiously bagged every one of them in protective plastic sleeves, had survived their ordeal very well. A few had been ruined by moisture, but most were intact.

Yesterday, I went there again, spurred on by the half-empty state of our recently purchased antique bookcase, which somehow suggested an air of contempt on the part of its owners. The bookcase deserved to be filled; and what better way to fill it than with one's own books?

And so I brought back a lot of my old books, still packed in the Titan Distributors (a dreadful place and the last one I worked before leaving England) boxes that I placed them in back in, what, 1991? These are books that I hadn't set eyes on in sixteen years. Amongst their ranks are many obscure titles and limited editions, in many cases signed by the authors. It was cool to see them again after so many years, especially since they had survived the experience of trial by fire and water intact. Indeed, the only damage is slight indentation in the slipcases, due to the weight of the books having been stored horizontally for many years.

I went back today again, as I haven't yet managed to find all of my books. There's so much debris to sort through, however, that the full car-load I came back with today was almost entirely rubbish that I just dumped outside for the bin-men. Only one of the boxes in the car contained stuff that was actually salvageable.

Even after emptying this new box, there are still titles that I'm missing. I'm hoping that one or two more boxes are still in the lock-up, hidden behind all of the boxes containing mouldering, soot-coated clothing and other decomposing belongings. That stuff has been festering away for six years. Ugh.

Anyway, the bookcase looks nice now and is almost filled to capacity.

I remember packing this stuff in '91 and thinking to myself, 'One day, maybe a long time from now, maybe I'll be lucky enough to have the time and the environment in which to sit down and read through all of that stuff.' Perhaps that day has finally arrived or perhaps, with one young daughter and another child on the way, I'm actually further away from my dream than ever before.

After 57 days without a working ADSL connection, Internet access has finally been restored by my ISP, XS4ALL; as of midnight on 3rd November, to be precise.

Our new ADSL modem kit (a Thomson Speedtouch 780WL(i) turned up on Thursday afternoon and was installed by me late Friday evening.

In stark contrast to every other aspect of the Herculean effort exerted to obtain DSL in the new home over the last 57 days, this final hurdle was leapt without incident and the DSL light on the modem illuminated unassumingly within a minute of connecting it to the phone line and powering the device on. Even the fact we have ISDN here, not an analogue phone line, didn't throw soot over the proceedings.

There should have been rumbling from the skies, quaking of the house and choirs of angels singing hosannas, but the simple anti-climactic fact of the matter is that the system just worked; and that's all I ever wanted.

So, it was with great gratitude that I moved all of our networked devices over to the new network and said goodbye to the mystery neighbour, through whose open WLAN all of our traffic had been routed over the last couple of months. Mystery neighbour, I salute you for your community spirit!

I must just give a plug for the Afrika! Afrika! circus, currently stationed in Amsterdam after successful runs in Germany and Austria. This animal-free, mostly African circus is well worth the price of admission and guarantees you a night out that won't soon be forgotten.

Everything's there, from acrobats to unicycling basketballers, from contortionists to jugglers. The live music, too, is excellent and will have you swinging in your seat.

Sarah and I had a great time, while Eloïse fell asleep on the couch at home with Oma and Opa. It was an experience to savour, a night out together as a twosome, essentially our first since Eloïse entered into our life.

After a few months of patiently waiting for production problems to be remedied, I have finally got my hands on a new mobile phone, a Nokia E90 Communicator. This phone is the logical successor to my trusty 9500 Communicator, which I've been using for the last couple of years.

The new phone is both a logical progression and a quantum leap from its predecessor. The basic facility of a vibrating alert is thankfully now available. That was possibly the most glaring omission on the 9500. On the other hand, the fax functionality is gone on the E90 and, for the life of me, I can't imagine why Nokia might have removed it.

The only guess I have is that they didn't consider it worth porting to the E90's new Symbian S60 3rd Edition platform. The 9500 was an S80 series phone. On the few occasions I had reason to use my mobile phone's fax facility, I was very happy to have it, so I lament its passing. As far as I can tell, it's the only application the 9500 had that the E90 doesn't.

The E90 remains an incredibly difficult phone to locate. I first spotted one at the end of July, at which time Nokia had made it available in extremely small quantities. Soon after that sighting, the E90 was beset with production problems, including a keypad that scratched the inner screen and the fitting of an inferior microphone. Those problems, together with very high demand, made the phone almost impossible to lay one's hands on; and not just in this country, but worldwide, too.

None of the shops in Amsterdam have the phone, but I found a retailer in Rotterdam with some new stock, so I drove over there yesterday to pick up a unit, together with a 4Gb MicroSD HC card.

Nokia has changed the bloody AC adapter pin yet again, so that necessitated a new car charger, too. A Noreve case to protect my new gadget completed the package.

The phone is bursting with functionality, which makes it quite a heavy unit (210 g) for its size, which is considerably smaller than the 9500. Apart from quad-band GSM, it also offers the much-vaunted 3G functionality, which means that it can be used on UMTS/HSDPA networks. In addition, there's a GPS, Bluetooth, (E)GPRS, 802.11b/g WLAN, a SIP client for VoIP calls, voice-dialling, spoken menus, a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash and even an FM radio. In actual fact, there are two cameras; there's an extra one on the inside for making video calls.

The SIP client was a bit tricky to configure for XS4ALL, but after a few minutes I had it working. Now, wherever I am in the world, all I need is an open wireless network to enable me to make VoIP calls against local Dutch tariffs. I've made a couple such calls already over the home WLAN and am impressed with how well it works.

The Web browser and mail client are vastly improved over those on the 9500. They're fast and don't appear to choke went confronted with large amounts of data.

New firmware for the E90 came out at the end of October, so I flashed my device with the new version (was 7.38.0.2, now 07.40.1.2). Doing so erases all data on the phone, so it makes sense to do this as soon as you take possession of it, before you've spent any time configuring it and amassing data. Otherwise, you'll need to perform a back-up and restore operation.

Once that was done, I used Bluetooth to copy over my telephone directory from the 9500, plus a few custom MP3 ringtones that I had added myself. With PuTTY installed, I now have everything in my arsenal that I need.

In my opinion, this is the absolute top end of the mobile phone market at the moment. Absolutely nothing else can compare, especially the de rigeur fashion accessory of the moment, the Apple iPhone.

Here are just a few things conspicuously missing from the iPhone: 3G capability, a removable/replaceable battery, GPS, expandable storage, a real keyboard, instant-messaging clients, and browser Flash support. The iPhone's camera is a 2 megapixel model with no flash and there's no built-in SIP client for VoIP calls.

I also take exception to the fact that Apple is SIM-locking these very expensive phones. This is not a free phone whose true cost price needs to be recouped by tying the customer to the offering carrier's network, so there's really no acceptable excuse for locking people into a single carrier like this. Thinking consumers like choice and Apple is all about taking that away.

OK, you can unofficially unlock the iPhone these days, but do you really want to be lining the coffers of a company that actively tries to prevent you from using the device that you purchased with your own hard-earned money in the way that you see fit?

Apparently, unlocking the iPhone is a risky business, too, as Apple states that future firmware upgrades may render unlocked devices inoperable. Nice. This could just be a ploy to scare people off, but either way, it seems to me that the interests of Apple are once again diametrically opposed to those of their customers.

One thing that I can't take away from the iPhone is that it is a great-looking gadget. A lot of people have spent a lot of time perfecting that UI. The screen is also razor-sharp and a pleasure to behold. With that comment, however, everything good about the iPhone has been stated.

Will any of this (significantly) injure sales? Of course not. Apple has managed to capture the imagination of a generation of technologically enabled fashion victims, who will happily purchase overpriced, inferior technology as long as it looks good. Apple is to the electronics industry what Rolex is to the world of wristwatches.

We can expect to see more pocket-sized monuments to form over functionality for as long as Apple's thoroughly undeserved customer loyalty endures. It certainly shows no sign of abating in the near future.

Meanwhile, if you want a phone that does just about everything (except fax) and you can afford the purchase, get an E90.

Since my last posting, I've started to get e-mail asking me how to configure the E90 to work with XS4ALL's VoIP. The following settings work for me with firmware 7.40.1.2 and should work for other types of Nokia phone that offer Internet calling.

Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> SIP settings:

Name: Default
SIP profiles: XS4ALL

Once you've configured the phone, type in the number you want to call, then select:

Options -> Call -> Internet call.

Yesterday, we all drove down to the Flemish capital, Antwerp. The reason was Lisa Gerrard's concert at the Koningin Elisabethzaal. We'd rented two hotel rooms for the night, one for us and one for Sarah's folks, who would be performing babysitting duties during the concert.

Unfortunately, the rain had set in by the time we arrived and, apart from a couple of dry spells, it pretty much continued throughout the afternoon.

Even more unfortunately, I somehow managed to leave our concert tickets on my desk in Amsterdam. Don't ask me how, because I'd laid out a pile of things, including the tickets, the night before; precisely so that no essentials would be forgotten the next morning. Somehow, I managed to bring all but the tickets: no minor detail.

Luckily for us, I'd bought the tickets directly from the venue with a credit card, so after calling them in a rather panicked state, I was relieved to discover that they would be reissued to us at the door. Phew.

We spent the afternoon walking around Antwerp, stopping for delicious friet and later hot chocolate. Dinner was at some Catalan place, after a couple of others we tried turned out to be closed. That turned out to be a good decision, as they had delicious tapas and some nice colouring materials to keep Eloïse happy.

And then to Lisa.

What can I say? Of the three times I've seen her this year, this was the best; and that wasn't just thanks to the front row tickets I had managed to score from the box office, although they definitely did help.

'Dreams Made Flesh' was positively stunning and Lisa imbued the piece with more emotion than I can remember seeing from her in many, many years. The set was completely rearranged from the order of performance at Rotterdam a couple of weeks ago; to its credit, I might add. If I'm not much mistaken, a new piece had been inserted and one other new piece removed.

Very unusually, Lisa spoke to the audience during the encore about the sad state of the planet's environment. She urged us all to do what we can to improve the situation and invited us to pray with her during 'Host Of The Seraphim', which closed the show.

I was left with a warm glow by the performance. Lisa had seemed completely at ease on stage, her efforts to gain poise at the microphone stand notwithstanding. Having Sarah with me to see Lisa for the first time was nice, too. She enjoyed herself, but it wasn't the near-religious experience that it always is for me.

Outside, it was no longer raining. We walked back to our hotel, pausing to look through the windows of the numerous antique shops and art galleries in the Wolstraat.

Back at the hotel, Eloïse had refused to go to sleep for Oma and Opa. We ushered her back to our own room and went to bed soon afterwards.

All in all, this was a very successful overnight trip to Belgium.

Fresh back from Belgium, tomorrow we board the plane to Iceland, where we'll spend the next seven days, most of which together with Sarah's folks as we celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary and show them around our favourite holiday destination.

There's a fair bit of rain forecast, but we'll try not to let that get us down as we amble around and take in the main tourist sights, such as those on the Golden Circle tour. Me, I'll be happy enough to hang out in Reykjavík, drinking coffee. If I manage to see the Northern Lights, too, the trip will be complete, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, here we are in Iceland again, our fourth time here and the second this year alone.

The plane touched down late and it took a long time to get into town, so we didn't roll into our hotel until about 18:30. The rain had stopped during the bus ride from Keflavík and it has mercifully remained dry all evening. The temperature is quite mild, around 10 - 11°C, so there are no complaints there.

Dinner was at Þrir Frakkar and, as expected, did not disappoint. Mike and Florence (Sarah's folks) enjoyed the experience, too, so we evidently picked a good introduction to Iceland for them.

After walking back to the hotel and putting Eloïse to bed, we left Mike and Florence with the baby monitor and went for a walk around town. We ended up at Hressingarskálinn for drinks and carrot cake, plus live music provided by a strange book recital ensemble, consisting of a cellist, a keyboard player and a bloke reading from some Icelandic book. It was peculiar and not terribly good, but I was happy enough to just gaze and listen in silent admiration of the ubiquitous Icelandic passion for the arts.

Anyway, time for bed now, as there'll be much walking on the agenda tomorrow.

The rúntur is firmly underway as I write this and beautiful Icelandic girls (and presumably handsome Icelandic men, although I don't notice them as much) are roaming the streets.

We made it out of the hotel today just in time for sunrise at 09:59. It was hardly noticeable, however, as the sky was so overcast that the city remained shrouded in dim light until well after 11 o'clock.

After a brief stroll around the harbour, we went for breakfast at Grái Kötturinn on Hverfisgata. This is a charming old place, packed with old paperbacks and serving some tasty bread and bagel breakfasts along with more American-influenced egg and bacon offerings.

The rain that started the day had subsided by the time we emerged and strolled up Ingólfsstræti towards Laugavegur. As soon as we turned onto Laugavegur, Sarah spotted a nice men's belt in a shop window and, since I was in dire need of one, I popped inside to purchase it.

We then turned right onto Skólavörðustígur and stopped to browse in a gallery with some work by present day Icelandic artists. Some of it is very good and we're considered making a purchase to have sent back home.

Onward up Skólavörðustígur, the sky began to clear and reveal its hidden blue hue. Halgrimskirkja. loomed up ahead fortuitously, as now was the ideal moment to ascend its tower and take in the panoramic views of the city. Even Esja, across the water, was quite visible, its stop still shrouded in a veil of mist.

Back down below, we ambled back down Skólavörðustígur to an organic supermarket, where Sarah bought a few provisions.

From there, we needed sustenance, so a sojourn at Mokka was in order. This is a regular haunt of ours when in Reykjavík, but now it has the added bonus of being entirely smoke-free. That goes for all cafés, by the way, even ones previously too smokey for us to venture inside, as the new no-smoking legislation went into effect in Iceland on 1st June 2007.

Mokka serves up delicious coffee, hot chocolate and cakes. They also do a good line in toasties, which we took full advantage of.

With sufficient fuel in the furnace to take on the afternoon, we walked back to Laugavegur for a visit to 66° North, where we purchased several pairs of mittens and gloves.

Afterwards, the others went to a museum, while I went back up Skólavörðustígur for the ever indispensable visit to the 12 Tónar record shop. 12 Tónar doesn't actually sell vinyl records, just CDs, but I feel silly calling it a CD shop; I suppose that betrays my age and generation.

12 Tónar is how all record shops should be. You get to pull out a stack of CDs and then listen to them one by one on a personal CD player with headphones, whilst lolling on a comfortable couch, drinking espresso brewed for you by one of the staff. Talk about the added value of a physical shop over just buying on-line.

The visit turned out to be more fruitful than usual, too. I scored a copy of the limited edition Sigur Rós DVD/CD pack, Hlemmur, plus Eivør Pálsdóttir's latest album, Human Child. Her records are still a bit tricky to find outside of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, but check out her Myspace page for an introduction to her music.

Other CDs I picked up were albums by Jakobinarina, Emiliana Torrini, Hafdis Huld and Mammút, all of which I got to listen to before I bought them. Thanks again to 12 Tónar for running a record shop the old-fashioned way. Not only that, but most of these artists also release their CDs on the 12 Tónar record label, so they're also providing an outlet for music that otherwise wouldn't reach a very wide audience (and some of it still doesn't, of course).

By this time, the others were back at the hotel, enjoying a rest, so I returned for a few minutes, but then had to leave again in a taxi to go to the local Hertz office and pick up our hire car. I had to upgrade to a Toyota Voyager diesel, just to get enough boot space to be able to fit the large volume of suitcases the four adults are carrying. Don't forget that all of Sarah's folks' Amsterdam luggage is with us, too, so it's a fair old pile of bags.

I got lost on the dark, rainy Reykjavíkian roads on the way home, but luckily didn't stray too far. Eventually I saw signs for Miðbær and knew I was heading back into the centre. I eventually parked the car on Tryggvagata, right across the road from the hotel.

Dinner this evening was at Tveir Fiskar. As with yesterday evening's choice of Þrir Frakkar, we knew from experience that we could expect a high standard of cuisine, and that was certainly served to us. An absolutely delicious meal was enjoyed by all.

Tomorrow, we'll leave before sunrise and head out towards Þingvellir national park, then later to Geysir and Gullfoss; the Golden Circle tour, in other words. We'll overnight in Hvolsvöllur.

My new Nokia E90 phone proved to be more than just a pretty face today. When I needed to call Hertz and to delay our restaurant reservation by half an hour, both calls were made using the phone's SIP client to route them via VoIP through my ISP, XS4ALL, back in the Netherlands.

The upshot of this is that I got to use my Dutch mobile phone in Iceland to make international calls to Iceland at just over two cents per minute. That's less than our hotel would have charged me to make the calls via the phone in the room. Fantastic!

It's been a busy couple of days.

On Saturday, we rose bright and early for the first of our two driving days. In order to get an early start, we forwent a formal breakfast, packed the suitcases into the car and headed for Þingvellir. I'd bought some skyr and muffins the evening before, so the passengers tucked into those, whilst the poor drive (yeah, moi) had none.

After leaving Reykjavík, we headed down road 36 for an equal number of kilometres until we reached Þingvellir. It was ice-cold at the Alþingi, the site of the ancient parliament. The temperature was down around zero anyway, but with the raging wind that was blasting through there, the wind-chilled temperature was much, much colder.

My hands were burning after removing gloves to take a couple of photos, but they only take a moment and last a lifetime, so obviously it has to be done.

We walked down the slope to the Lögrétta (Law Rock), where matters of importance used to be delivered, and then on to the Öxarárfoss waterfall.

After taking the requisite photos, we returned to the car and then drove on to Geysir, where we paused for a burger lunch before wandering up the path to witness Strokkur spout gloriously into the chilled air. Mercifully, there was much less wind at Geysir, so we were able to comfortably stand around, watch the geysers and take photos.

From there, it was a short drive to Gullfoss, where the wind was gusting again in earnest. It was very, very cold, but we were more or less wearing the right gear for the conditions, so it wasn't too bad. Nevertheless, it was just too inclement to hang around for long, so we soon returned to the car and continued on our way.

It was quite a long drive down road 30 and then south along road 1 to our final resting place for the day, Country Hotel Anna at Moldnúpur, between Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss. Some sources say this place is located at Hvolsvöllur, but it's actually about 35 km south of there on road 1. In total, we covered more than 240km this day.

Country Hotel Anna was a breath of fresh air. It's a cosy little inn in peaceful, quiet surroundings. Our hosts were Eyja Þóra Einarsdóttir and Jóhann Frímannsson, who did a splendid job of looking after us. Dinner was delicious and the main room of the hotel had a big box of toys that Eloïse took delight in.

We'd hoped to see the Northern Lights down here, but it wasn't to be. We did get to listen to the wind, however, as it tormented the house, howling around and over it at loud volume.

The next day, we had breakfast, packed up and headed on our way. It was a beautiful day: the sun was shining, there was very little wind and the temperature was pleasantly mild. It was unbelievably lucky to have such a glorious day in November for our trip.

We drove further along road 1 to Dyrhólaey and then out to the black sand beach at Reynisdrangar, where Eloïse had a lot of fun, running up and down the beach and throwing stones in the water.

Mike and Florence, too, got a big kick out of the black sand beach. We were all reluctant to leave, but there were other stops on our itinerary today.

From Reynisdrangar, we continued on road 1 to Vík, where we filled up with diesel and food. Then, we turned the car around and started to head back along road 1.

The first afternoon stop was the Sólheimajökull outlet glacier, where one can walk right up to the glacier's edge (and even onto it, if one so chooses). It was Mike and Florence's first time at a glacier and they were rather surprised at how it looked, set as it was against a glorious background of verdant mountain walls. When many people hear the word glacier, their minds immediately conjure images of Antarctica.

The next stop was Skógafoss. At first Eloïse didn't want to leave the car, so Florence stayed behind to look after her, while the rest of us visited the waterfall and then made the long climb up the steps running alongside it. Once we were finally up on top, we were rewarded with grand views down onto the falls and enticing glimpses of the highlands in the distance.

As we came back down, Florence appeared with Eloïse and then it was Florence's turn to ascend the steps to the top of the falls.

That left us very little time to get to Skógasafn (Skógar Museum), which is still run by its 86 year old founder, Þórður Tómasson. The museum is a treasure trove of Icelandic culture and relics and has been lovingly put together by Þórður. Although the museum officially closes at 16:00, he kindly stayed behind for a while to allow us a chance to view the exhibits. Sarah and I had been there before, but for Mike and Florence, it was the first time, of course.

By the time we left the museum, it was sunset, so we began the drive back along road 1. A glorious sunset followed us on our journey, with Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands) poking up out of the cloud, just across the water. It was an otherworldly sight, but very beautiful, and a bright cascade of rich orange and umber hues accompanied our drive.

It was with the last vestiges of daylight in the sky that we arrived at Seljalandsfoss, where we stopped for just a moment to admire the falls in the almost extinguished light of day.

That was the last intermediate stop of the day, leaving only the long drive along road 1 to Reykjavík, where we turned off onto road 41 and headed towards Keflavík, eventually turning left towards Bláa Lonið (Blue Lagoon) before finally turning off yet again, this time into the parking area of the Northern Light Inn, our final stop for the day. With that, over 300km had been covered.

Dinner was excellent and the staff were very friendly. The only complaint was the poor water pressure in the shower, all the sillier for the fact that geothermal plant powering Bláa Lonið was right behind the hotel.

Again, we had hoped to see the Northern Lights here, but again, we were to be disappointed.

This morning, we rose at our leisure and enjoyed a slow breakfast, after which we drove the final kilometre to Bláa Lonið. There were only four other cars in the car park, so we had the place virtually to ourselves.

Florence, Mike and Eloïse all had a blast in the warm pool. We all smeared silica mud onto our bodies and languished in the hot waters. After a while, I went to the bar and came back with a Cola Light for myself, a beer for Mike and Florence, and a mint Magnum for Sarah. What a decadent pleasure!

After a couple of hours spent soaking in the pool, it was time to get out and have a spot of lunch. Then came the sad goodbye, as Florence and Mike took the hotel shuttle to Keflavík airport for the long haul back to Providence, via Boston.

Sarah, Eloïse and I got back into the car and returned to Reykjavík, where we'll spend Tuesday and Wednesday before returning to Amsterdam on Thursday.

Hótel Borg has been renovated since we were here in January. Gone is its quaint revolving wooden door, which I would aways get stuck in with our large suitcases. It's been replaced by a sliding glass equivalent, much more practical, but somehow still less appealing. Its old lift has also been replaced with a gleaming modern specimen.

Dinner was at the ultra-hip Sjávarkjallarinn restaurant, where we were lucky to be able to reserve a table at short notice. Although it's a Monday in November, the restaurant was very busy.

Sjávarkjallarinn was an amazing gastronomic experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who can afford its shockingly expensive dishes. This was easily the most expensive meal we've ever eaten, beating even those at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai earlier this year. By way of contrition, we'll be eating rather more modestly over the next couple of days.

Mike and Florence's time with us in Iceland was a grand success. We had no rain at all over the last three days; only our first couple of days in Reykjavík were dampened by the weather, but even those were only mildly wet occasions and weren't washed out by any means.

Anyway, we hope their time here was memorable and that they enjoyed it at least half as much as we did. It was a little cold for them on Saturday, but they soldiered on regardless. Sunday, though, was perhaps the most special day, bathed as we were the entire day in glorious late autumn sunshine.

There's nothing much on the agenda for tomorrow. I've returned the hire car and there's rain forecast, so we'll probably just amble about, hang around in the city's many cafés and do a bit of shopping.

As always, I find myself asking the question, 'Why is it we don't live here?'

I must give a quick plug to Grapevine, the excellent free English language newspaper for people interested in what's going on in Reykjavík.

I always read Grapevine when I'm in Iceland. It used to be published only over the summer months, but it appears to have gone to publication all year round. Anyway, the articles within are well-written and insightful, providing non-Icelandic speakers a valuable source of information regarding what's going both musically and politically in this great city.

Iceland is an extremely civilised country, its whaling policy notwithstanding. Reykjavík is the hub of that civilisation.

Unlike Amsterdam, Reykjavík has a mesh of random cafés and bookshops that offer free, open 802.11b/g WLAN access. The net effect is that one can have a stroll from Ausurstræti, across to Bankastræti and up Laugavegur, hopping from network to network as one goes.

Not only can one therefore pick up one's e-mail on the go, but the wonders of VoIP mean that I can make a phone-call over the Internet for negligible cost. One only has to make use of this facility a few times before one becomes very used to it.

In Amsterdam, open networks are few and far between. Cafés tend to offer hotspot access from one or other of the various overpriced network operators, such as T-Mobile. No thanks. What a shame people aren't more public-spirited back home.

Various mobile phone providers, such as KPN, offer an unlimited Internet access package these days, over GSM (GPRS) or UMTS (HSDPA). KPN's offering is called Surf & Mail. For just €10 per month, one can access the Internet to pick up e-mail, browse the Web, etc. from anywhere in the country with network coverage.

What about VoIP? Aha, there's a clause in the contract that explicitly forbids you from using KPN's data network for conducting voice calls. KPN doesn't want you using their data network to circumvent their voice network. What a cynical move. If their voice tariff was at all competitive, we wouldn't care about using their data network to conduct VoIP calls.

As the sun in Iceland rises later and later each day, so, too, do we. After hauling ourselves out of the hotel at 10:30, we headed for Kaffi Hljómalind and had a modest breakfast of toast and macchiato. Eloïse played with the toys available in the café.

After that, we visited various baby shops, purchasing, amongst other things, a new pair of purple boots for Eloïse . She first tried size 24 and liked them so much, that she wasn't about to take them off at our insistence she try a size 25, lest we whip them out from under her and she lose them!

For lunch, we stopped for soup in a bread bowl at Svarta Kaffið, now blissfully smoke-free. This formed a welcome top-up after breakfast.

Outside, it was still dry in spite of the rain forecast; the temperature was pleasantly mild, too. We continued our baby shopping and then piled into Mokka on Skólavörðustígur for the obligatory coffee and chocolate cake. We really love this place and it's been our favourite coffee shop since Kaffitár turned into a kind of Icelandic Starbucks.

Refreshed and refuelled, we next went to the Blue Lagoon shop, because Sarah wanted to buy a few lotions.

At that point, Sarah returned to the hotel and I ended up back at 12 Tónar, where I bought albums by Ólöf Arnalds, Múm and the debut album by Rökkurró.

Rökkurró's album, Pað kólnar í kvöld..., was playing when I entered the shop, and it was instantly likeable. I soon discovered that the band would be playing that evening to celebrate the launch of the album, so I made a mental note to attend.

Dinner was at Café Oliver, which served me a huge and extremely tasty burger. Perhaps this establishment could serve as a future venue for a Lunchops burger, as long as I can persuade my fellow ex-Google colleagues to make the trip. It's closer for them than Amsterdam, after all.

After dinner, Sarah went back to the hotel to put Eloïse down for the night and I walked down to Organ on Naustin for the Rökkurró gig. Support was from My Summer As A Salvation Soldier, which was a fair bit better than the artist's stage name.

500 Kronur and a support band later, Rökkurró took to the stage. They're an interesting outfit, a five-piece whose lead singer appeared to be invisible until I realised she was sitting down on stage at her cello. Apart from the strings, there's an accordion and the familiar mix of bass, guitar and drums, plus the occasional use of a xylophone.

Rökkurró make a very pleasant noise indeed. Do catch them at home or abroad if you get the chance.

We returned home to the Netherlands today.

It was a rude awakening; literally. Icelandair have this repugnant policy of making their Amsterdam flights -- all of them -- take off at 07:50. There's simply no other option.

Keflavík airport is a good long way from Reykjavík and would be prohibitively expensive by taxi, so that necessitates taking the bus. It's never that simple, of course. One is first picked up at one's hotel by a minibus, which takes you to the BSI bus terminal. From there, you and your luggage are offloaded onto a coach, which makes the trip to Keflavík via Hafnarfjöður.

The upshot of all of this is a 04:30 wake-up call for a 05:00 minibus pick-up. You can only imagine how much fun this is, especially with a dozy toddler who -- like the rest of us -- wants nothing better than to keep sleeping.

Seriously, if there were a reason to boycott Iceland, the national airline's inhumane timetable is a compelling one.

But enough of that.

Our last day in Reykjavík was spent very lazily. The weather was lovely, more of the clarity and sunshine we'd enjoyed on Sunday. I can't believe how little rain we had on this trip. It all came on the first two days in the capital at the very start of the trip.

After breakfast in the deserted nightclub ambience of Café Oliver, we completed the considerable bureaucracy of filling in our tax refund forms and collecting the monies due to us.

The rest of the day is already somewhat of a blur. Sarah and Eloïse went back to the hotel at one point and I went on a whistle-stop tour of my favourite 101 areas to take some photographs.

After picking the girls up at the hotel, we went to Kaffitár for coffee and cake and ended up killing a lot of time there. I've been a bit mean about Kaffitár recently, calling it a bit like Starbucks, but the coffee is 1000% better. Their Da Vinci and Jöklakaffi coffees are especially good and the cakes are tasty, too, but not as good as at Mokka.

We then spent some time at the hotel before enjoying a simple dinner at Hressó. Afterwards, I went to buy a final couple of CDs, plus a photography book by Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson, an Icelandic photographer whose work I really admire.

Sarah had done most of the packing, so there wasn't much else left to do except try to get a few hours of sleep before the dreaded early morning haul back to Amsterdam.

We made it back to the house around 13:00, with just enough time to dump the bags and get Eloïse ready for peuterspeelzaal. Amsterdam is a balmy 12° and feels very warm after Reykjavík.

It's nice to be home, in the sense that we have a lovely home and it's full of familiar things. However, transport that same home to Reykjavík and I'd have been happy to stay. With its vibrant music and café scene, absence of crowding, beautiful women and beautiful nature just beyond one's doorstep, it's a uniquely appealing place.

I really must dig in and learn some Icelandic. I can understand more written Icelandic after every trip, but decoding the verbal language is still a non-starter. I watch acrobats and contortionists with the same admiration I have for native speakers of the Icelandic language. They make sounds with their mouth that just don't sound possible for a normal human-being.

It's intriguing to ponder what might have happened if I'd been able to afford a trip to Iceland back in my early twenties, instead of a trip to Amsterdam. I might easily have ended up falling in love with the country, staying, finding a job, meeting a girl, etc. One small decision that I might easily have made would have sent my life down a completely different path to the one I actually took.

It's disconcerting to realise how much of one's life is due to chance. Most of everything I hold dear today is the result of mostly arbitrary decisions with far-reaching, but unforeseen consequences. It makes one stop to ponder the infinite number of alternate scenarios one could so easily, yet equally unwittingly, have set in motion.

Given that knowledge, that life could have had a million different faces, how can one ever know that the path one chose was the right one? Belief in such a concept is flawed, of course. Just as I am today unaware of other blissful or agonising futures that I could have catalysed, transposed into those futures, I would be equally ignorant of the things I hold dear to me in the life I lead today.

The freedom to ponder such things is perhaps what sets apart my generation and those after mine from those of our predecessors. Not so long ago, most people didn't question the purpose or destination of their life; they simply fell in line with what was mapped out for them by their family, environment, social status, etc.

Today, however, we have more freedom than ever before to create the life we want for ourselves. From my perspective, it just takes imagination, courage, a sense of romance (with life as well as people), a certain amount of recklessness, an appreciation of the poetry and beauty in things, the absence of a close family and circle of friends, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the inability to attain a lasting sense of purpose.

Given those ingredients, drifting and dreaming is a natural state of existence. It makes for an interesting life, though at times an anything but enviable one. Sometimes I envy the boys and girls from the village who went to school, became postmen and shop assistants, married each other, bought a house in the village and had children that they sent to the village school.

Clarity of purpose is an enviable quality for one who has rarely sensed any, though in some ways I am perhaps now closer than at any other point in the last 20 years.

Still, it continues to prickle my senses to fantasise about just one of my other lives in those innumerable parallel universes, where I speak fluent Icelandic to my Icelandic children, girlfriend and friends, play in a couple of bands, write for the local newspaper, pen fiction for a hobby, etc.

It could have happened, I tell you.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how to solve the problem of the Nokia 9500 complaining about an untrusted (self-signed) certificate when picking up one's mail over SSL/TLS.

Well, the E90 suffers from the same problem and, again, there's no way to elect to permanently (until its expiry) trust the untrusted certificate at the time it is presented.

As with the 9500, there is a solution, but it's rather more convoluted. You can't just add a new certificate as you could with the 9500. Instead, you have to create a certificate authority (CA) and use that to sign your mail server's certificate. Then, instead of registering the mail server certificate with the phone, you register the CA's certificate. The phone will then trust any certificate that has been signed by the CA.

The procedure is more or less the same for any Symbian S60-based phone and, happily, someone else has done all the legwork.

Follow this procedure and, once again, untrusted certificate warnings will be a thing of the past.

If you have a Nokia N95, see Jules' comment below for how to add the CA's certificate after transferring it to your phone.

After purchasing my new mobile phone on 9th November, it finally rang for the first time on Friday, 23rd November; that's a full two weeks later.

Oh yeah, it was a telemarketer on the line.

I mentioned the other day that the KPN explicitly forbids the use of its flat-fee Surf & Mail mobile Internet package for VoIP services in its fair use policy.

Nevertheless, I've put it to the test and can reveal that they've currently taken no technical measures to stop you from using VoIP. It remains to be seen how long I can continue to use their 3G UMTS data network to conduct my voice calls, but until they ask me to stop, I'm going to arrogantly flout their terms and conditions.

What's the advantage of doing this?

Well, calls are much cheaper this way. Using my Internet provider, XS4ALL, I can make calls from my mobile phone against XS4ALL's VoIP tariff. I then pay KPN's flat-fee €9.95 per month for Surf & Mail, plus whatever XS4ALL charges for the VoIP call. That effectively means I can use my mobile phone anywhere in the Netherlands to call any number within the EU or the US for next to nothing, just one or two cents a minute.

It gets better, though. By requesting a second (free) VoIP phone number from XS4ALL, I can now get free calls from our home phone to my mobile and vice versa, because XS4ALL charges nothing for calls between its subscribers, which also includes one subscriber's calls to himself using multiple phone numbers.

Normal calls to mobile phones, however, are still around 15 cents per minute, whether or not I use my KPN Mobiel subscription. In fact, they're still slightly cheaper if I use my standard voice subscription, so VoIP doesn't help here. The same applies, obviously, if I need to check my standard voicemail or call KPN's customer service.

The only disadvantage (apart from the fact that I'm breaking the rules laid down by the supplier of my data network, the KPN), is that I have to maintain an open data connection to be able to receive VoIP calls on my mobile phone. That's not good for the battery, but it's a small inconvenience compared to the benefits.

Obviously, as VoIP grows in popularity and more mobile phones become capable of conducting VoIP calls (either over GPRS, UMTS or WiFi), more people are going to see the advantages and the KPN is going to have to take active steps to stop people from using its data network to conduct voice calls.

Until then, however, I don't feel obligated to comply with a clearly anti-competitive clause in the fair use policy.

Photos of our recent trip to Iceland with Sarah's folks to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary are now on-line.

One thing that doesn't come across in the Þingvellir and Gullfoss photos is just how cold it was that day. The harsh wind made for a bone-numbing wind-chill factor that had to be experienced to be appreciated.

It's a shame the camera doesn't have a temperature sensor, because then it could write that detail into the EXIF header of the photos.

On Monday, we had the 20 week ultrasound of our slowly ripening little geezer or geezette. A DVD was made of the event, which I have dutifully ripped and uploaded to the Internet.

The full nineteen minute version silent film is available in our gallery, but for those with less patience, the seven and a half minute embedded version below represents the first foray of a McKenna-Macdonald into the world of DIY YouTube flicks. Not bad for someone who hasn't even been born yet.

For anyone who cares, the YouTube version of the DVD (comprising just the first two chapters) was encoded to Xvid, using mencoder as follows:

mencoder /media/SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB /media/SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_2.VOB \
    -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -oac copy -o /dev/null
mencoder /media/SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB /media/SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_2.VOB \
    -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=256 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o tmp.avi
ogg123 -d wav -f sr.wav /media/audio/sigur_rós/takk/06_sæglópur.ogg
mencoder tmp.avi -o echo.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -audiofile sr.wav

The final two commands were necessary to convert the file I wanted to use as the soundtrack from Ogg Vorbis format to WAV, and then to encode it into the video using variable bit rate MP3.