First of all: it’s almost Christmas! Last week we bought a nice tree. Not too big this time, as Stijn’s playpen takes up a lot of space. I also bought some red, foam things for Koen to put up in the tree before we put in the lights and such. That sort of got us in the Christmas spirit finally. Personally I hate it that you can buy Christmas stuff everywhere as early as November. Oh well…
Friday I took a day off to visit the Bob de Wit from Strategy Works in Rotterdam. We had a very interesting and inspiring discussion on several topics, including (Enterprise) Architecture (EA), Strategy, Leadership and so on. There are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the mentioned fields but it requires a bit more thought before I can describe them here with confidence. I was also lucky to get a copy of his book called Strategy Synthesis – concise version. Having read only a few chapters, I already like this book. The style is refreshing and stimulates thinking about the topic of Strategy. The funny thing is that I had several related courses at the University of Tilburg when I studied there and it feels like “being back on the old nest”.
Today we bought a new monitor. Finally. Our old CRT was really giving in. We went to “MediaMarkt” to pick up a 20″ widescreen from LG. The screen is incredible and a relief after having spent so much time behind a crummy old CRT. Since Eva is usually the one to use the PC (I tend to use my laptop when we’re both at home), I expect her to be online more frequently 
. I really like the new widescrees. It feels more natural to look at a widescreen. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the dimensions are more similar to standard A4 type paper. Anyway, some screenshots of my desktop layout can be found here and here.
Last but not least, looks like this Christmas will be both interesting and educational as I’m going to (a) read a bit in the book that I mentioned in this post, (b) make some slides for the ADW course that I’m going to teach, (c) review a book chapter for Martin / Erik, and (d) review Martin’s dissertation. And … spend time with Eva ‘n the kids of course
P.S. just uploaded some new pictures!