I arrived in Amsterdam at 8:30, and made my way through the terminal, passport control, baggage claim, and customs in just an hour. Erno was waiting to pick me up, and he hauled a very tired Howard from Amsterdam down to The Hague, roughly 40km to the southwest.

I bathed, changed clothes, and took a quick nap, and then hooked up with Eric from BrainStorm, who has been to the store in Amsterdam that sells New Rock boots. Unfortunately, we were both far too tired for a shopping adventure, so we wandered around a tiny slice of The Hague for an hour.

I doubt there will be another chance to get into Amsterdam. Oh well. It looks like my next opportunity will be late September in Las Vegas. On THAT trip I’ll have my car, the address of the store, and a city I’m fairly familiar with — all good conditions for a shopping trip.

Anyway, that recounting pretty much takes us to now, because after wandering around I took another nap, learned wireless was working, and came down to get my internet fix.

–Howard

As promised in journal entries last week, I’m posting some before-and-after photos from the family vacation at Aspen Grove. This shows, among other things, why you don’t want to get caught on the mountain in a storm, even in summer.
take me to the pictures

Today I learned that Delta upgraded me from Silver Medallion to Gold Medallion. This means that on flights where there is a first-class seat available, I can have it at no charge. I’ve also got four coupons for free beer, wine, cocktails, or headphones. So it looks like Howard the Mormon will be scoring four sets of headphones, and sitting in Coach because First Class is always full.

In other news, I just got word that I’ve been officially upgraded from “Featured Guest” to “Guest of Honor” at Linucon this October. I’m not sure what that entails, but it MAY mean that I get my very own handler. Or perhaps access to the super-secret ConStash of GoH-Goodies. W007!!1!111.

(I’m sure they’ll revoke my GoH status as soon as they discover my 1337 exclamation. Sorry. I couldn’t h31p my531f).

Today I met the guy who invented the 2nd set of chains.

Dunno what I’m talking about? Don’t feel bad. I was at the local disc golf course, and there was this older guy (late 40s?) throwing some amazing putts on the last hole. We talked for a bit, and it came out that he’d been playing since 1975. Near as I can tell, that’s the year the sport was invented since that’s when the patent was issued on the disc golf “pole-hole” target. He went on to tell me that at one of the parks he set up, he decided to try a second ring of chains to see if the discs would stick in the baskets better. Turned out they did, so he went to the PDGA with the plans, and they adopted them. Nifty.

Anyway, it was cool talking to him. It made the truly crappy game I played a lot more bearable.