I’m back from Amsterdam and a visit to a Customer. I’m glad to be back – I still feel slightly knackered by the whole experience – but it was both fun and educational.

The Dutch are a refreshingly, if slightly scarily, blunt nation.

After a 90minute flight delay at Heathrow, myself, Casper Joep and Dennis went out for beer on the Monday night; we didn’t get blitzed, but actually spent most of the time guessing at scenarios of what the customer might want. a few hours later, I was introduced to a typically Amsterdam sandwich bar, which offered glasses of milk and a variety of:

• warm flesh sandwiches — ie: hot roast pork
• river fish liver sandwiches — ie: fish pat´e
• filet americane — ie: raw meat paste

…and (staying at Joep’s) my choice at breakfast of warm rolls with old cheese, or new cheese; these also were excellent, but when you’re used to a culture that dances around descriptions of food (cheese which is “mature” or “mild” or “sharp”…) – the notion of simply referring to cheese as new/old is rather incongruous.

Dead good, though.

I’ve been told before that I look Dutch, and this was probably at least part of the reason that the KLM checkin-attendant kept falling into Dutch when talking to me. The airport was equipped with a wireless LAN, but in the end I didn’t use it because there was no guarantee that I’d manage to work out how to connect into Sun from my iBook during the 10-minute quantum they were billing you by.

Maybe I could have done a VPN tunnel using fake DNS packets, since DNS was working but all other services were TCP-redirected to a payment server. One day I will get a broadband home base – then I can try and cheat, purely as an intellectual exercise, you understand. 😎

The flight back from Eindhoven was bumpy but fun – an hour in a turboprop, flying low over Holland and the channel.

The visibility was good – I think I saw a house on fire, which looks like some sort of hell’s mouth from the air – and the actual Channel-crossing was over so quickly that I barely noticed it. I was only sure that I was back over the UK when the ground traffic started to be on the left side of the road.

Back home, feed cats, realise that I had neglected to collect the security-training video from Casper, and collapse.

Now, for the mail backlog.