Of course, we are very proud of this little baby and happy that all is well with both mother and daughter. Also Marijn is very proud to be a big brother now and all he wants is to hold and cuddle his little sister and to cover her in kisses.

Check out some more photos on Picasaweb.

So, we too wanted to go ice skating, but I too had to buy new skates first. We finally went this Saturday.

Apart from the fun of ice skating, the cold weather also provides some beautiful natural winter scenes, and the opportunity to try to make a few nice photos.

Feel free to check out the first pictures on “his own website”!

I had quite a backlog of photos, some even 10 years old. We had all these photos, on a big pile, in what is now the baby room. So when we started clearing out this room a few months ago, we decided that we needed to get rid of this pile. So we spent lots of evenings and complete days sorting out the photos and putting them in the albums. We even took a bunch of them on our last holiday!

Well, yesterday evening we finally stuck the last of our pictures (of that same holiday) into our latest album, so we’re finished… for now, of course…

A rough estimate:

• 12 photo books and albums
• 820 pages
• 2300 photos
• 9000 adhesive photo corners

This is the result:

I had promised I would write some more about my PhD defence, so here it comes.

You may wonder why it took me so long, because, for sure, I’ve got a lot of free time, now that all this is over…?

Well, no, not really! Normal life continues, business as usual.

Anyway, about the day of my defence.
I must say I was pretty nervous that morning. But then again, everybody says you should be!

After getting dressed, it was time for my layman’s talk. No problems so far. But then, at 3 o’clock, the committee came in and it was time for the real thing. No way back, one very long hour of blood, sweat and tears ahead of me!

Well, ok, it wasn’t that bad. But the beginning was quite difficult, and did cost me a few drops of sweat! But after that, it just went better and better. Until, at 4 o’clock, madam beadle came in and spoke these two little words: “hora est!”. What a relief!

After that, of course, the rest of the day was just one big party. I did get the Big Red Round Thingy(tm), as you can see in the first picture, which, apparently, contained a piece of paper from the TU Delft, stating that I am now a doctor! Cool!

Directly after the defence, there was a reception and at around 6 we went for dinner with our family and some of the members of the committee, who turned out to be much nicer than they had seemed during the defence…
In the evening, there was a party in the same place we had had dinner. We had already been flabbergasted by the amount of people that had showed up during the day, but even more friends came by in the evening!

All in all, it was a wonderful day (especially the second half! ), and it was great that so many people showed up. Thank you all!

Well, anyway, because I haven’t been using my weblog very much in the past year, I decided that I would start a photoblog. So, the first picture is coming up right now, and hopefully, I can give you regular updates with new (or old) pictures.

All pictures made by me, of course, and with my Canon Powershot A620 digital camera, unless otherwise stated.

The last time we did that, we uploaded the photos via the website. Unfortunately, the user interface wasn’t very good. Certain selections you made were forgotten and you had to make them again. We only had about 10 photos that time, so it was not such a big problem. And the print quality turned out to be very good!

But this time, we wanted to upload 144 photos, so I didn’t feel like doing things two or three times. Therefore, I decided to try out the offline order software. Well, I’m not very enthusiastic about that either, but at least it remembers the selections you make.
When it finally came to uploading the pictures, I was quite surprised that it went so quick. I am pretty sure that my 256 kbps uplink cannot upload a 3 MB picture in about 10 seconds.

I noticed that the HEMA order software had made an “Upload” directory in its Album directory. All my original HiRes photos had been copied there, and they were disappearing one by one. But every time, the topmost picture was first replaced by a much smaller, low resolution version, before it was uploaded! I quickly copied one of those files as “evidence”. Apparently, the photos are resized to 1600 x 1200 before they are uploaded. OK, I didn’t say they could do that, but if the pictures really have to be resized before they can be printed, so be it. But the pictures were also compressed! And not just a little!

My original photo was 2724 kb, with a resolution of 3072 x 2304.
The uploaded picture was only 369 kb, with a resolution of 1600 x 1200.
Of course, I tried resizing the picture to the same resolution myself, (without compression!), and got a photo of 1658 kb. That’s 4.5 times larger!

I thought I would wait to see the result. So today we picked up the pictures, but they’re terrible. You can clearly see the JPEG compression artefacts on some of the pictures. So, I’m certainly going back tomorrow!

Update (Sep. 7): I went back to the HEMA with my pictures, and with a CD with the original HiRes photos. The woman behind the counter said they normally don’t take back digital photos because they don’t know the original quality. So I told her that I did, and that they didn’t use it! Well, she would send them back, but said she couldn’t guarantee anything.

Update (Sep. 16): Today, I went back to the HEMA and got all new prints of our photos. These photos are all ok, no visible compression artefacts or anything like that. So they can do it at the HEMA. If you just make sure that they get your HiRes pictures, for example on cd. But don’t use their offline order software!

It was a beautiful day.
There were so many people, the weather was really great, and everything was just perfect (a big “thank you” to our best man and woman!)… and we got lots of presents!

The photo shoot in the morning was a great deal of fun. And yesterday evening, only 3 weeks later, we got the photo album from the photographer. He did a great job! Another big “thank you” to Fotostudio Aster Oostkapelle.

The wedding ceremony was in Veere, Zeeland. A picturesque little town, with a beautiful old city hall. The old windmill and the harbour and lake side were very nice for the photo shoot.

The reception, dinner and party were in Rotterdam in the Zuiderparkrestaurant Meerzicht. A very good restaurant at a great location. Again a big “thank you” to them!

All in all it was just a perfect day! We are so happy that so many people came to celebrate our wedding together with us, and that so many of them spent enormous amounts of time to make this day to what it was.

We had a great time. We have walked le sentier Martel (14 kilometers, 6 hours), rented waterbikes, swum in the lake, visited Cannes. The last morning, we went canyoning! That is really very much fun to do (if you’re not afraid of heights!). It’s part walking and abseiling, and part swimming, wading through the river and jumping off waterfalls. Very spectacular!

On Provence Web there is some more info about the gorges, about the village of Moustiers and about the lake.
And take a look at this site, which has some nice pictures of the gorges and the lake.

Update (July 16): The photos are now available from photos.bvrolijk.net, if you have the correct username and password, that is.