I arrived at AMS, and was impressed with the airport.  Clean, open, fresh; unlike say LHR, LGW etc.  My bag was out by the time I got the baggage reclaim belt. Cool.  Then onto the train to Amsterdam Centraal.  Apart from waiting for over 5 minutes for someone to find the English button my transition to the next link in the transport chain went really well.

I opted for fairly short 10 minute walk down the canal to the hotel, and then was given my room upon checkin, shortly after 10:30. Again, cool.

This morning, Nick and I did our TAC bits and welcomed the applicants who arrived today.

My week is going to be hectic, but fun.

And, as if by magic joes3 appeared like a babe from a stalk,
No one knows what happened to joes3, we think he went for a walk.

Now we have joes4, we hope he is here to stay
But who knows, he might just one day
Decide to get up and walk away.
Stay. joes4, I cant imagine my life without you in it each day.

We know joes4 is not a java weenie,
But we all imagine you sitting there in your beanie.

You are the distributor of a fine t-shirt,
I just need to keep mine free of dirt.

This website is work of a friend who lives in my village.  She is a personal trainer, and is looking for new clients.

(sorry Shane, not your Cambridge )

There was a man named Joe
Who always wanted two answers before you could pass go.

He was a sweet man, who always seems to be having a smoke.
Lest this not be to bad, else he might just choke.

He is the holder of all that is sacred
I just hope he doesn’t work whilst he is naked.

There was a man named Joe…

We then went for dinner in Covent Garden, oddly enough at the same resturaunt as I went too when Bill was over here. Crazy.

I think we started to bore his brother towards the end of the night, but his mother was right in there discussing Apache with us.

Great company, nice food and drink. Best of all – putting a face to the name. It’s not quite the same just looking at photo’s it’s good to get out and meet these folks.

Whilst there we met up with niq for dinner at a local pub - The food was great, as was the venue.  Down some winding little roads, into what felt like an abyss.  It wasn’t far off at one point where a foreign driver decided to try and do his level best to write off the back end of my lovely car.  Thankfully he missed.

Alice and I took a walk through the grounds of the castle, and then through into north Bovey and back right around one side of the estate. Lovely.  I’m sure we’ll go back one day. Don’t know when, but I’m sure we will.

Alice and I are just back from a friends wedding, at Northbourne Park School, Kent.

It was a lovely day, Hannah and Chris are quite possibly the most suited couple you are ever likely to find. They have a great deal in common, given that they teach at the same school this is a miracle. The venue, the school where the grooms father is headmaster, was truly stunning. There is a little quaint church in the grounds of the school.

I am not a great believer of religion, but I must say the service was lovely. At the front of the church stood the very Reverand Dean of Canterbury, he performed a wonderful ceremony which everyone seemed to enjoy immensely.

Then there were the speeches during the wedding breakfast. The Best Man lived up the expectations of the gathered guests, as did the Groom, Bride and father of the bride.

There was then, of course, the usual merriment that typically follows weddings. No family fights to report on. Shame, we all love a good story, right?

All my photos are currently uploading to flickr, I’ll edit the post with a link to the set once it has completed.

Congratulations Hannah and Chris, all the best from Alice and I. Have a lovely trip in Geneva, save yourselves for your real honeymoon later this year.

Following on from Rich’s post about grey-listing I ran off to the website and downloaded a copy of greyfix.

I quickly installed it, and setup postfix. I immediately noticed a difference in /var/log/mail I now receive about 20 spam messages a day, rather than over 900 a day. What an improvement.

Like Rich, I had been looking at grey listing but caved in when trying to set it up. This is so easy I’m sure most anyone could get it working. My only change from the default install is to lower the retry time from 3480 secs (58 minutes) to a lower threshold. As of yet I am still to receive a mail from an IPV6 host so I am not too worried about that limitation just yet.

On Friday night (last week now) I met up with Bill Rowe. He was in London before flying home on Sunday.

Actually getting him out of the tube station was the first problem, apparently it was too cold to wait outside.
Then when he finally came topside I dragged him off to a nice drinking establishment on High Holborn, called the Cittie Of York. They only serve ‘homebrew’ beers in here, none of your main brand lagers or ales. Thanks for the reminder Dan

After a few drinks in here we opted to go and get some food. It wasn’t getting any quieter in the pub, what with it being Friday night and all, so we decided to go and find somewhere to sit down and eat.

We eventually ended up in a little restaurant called Tuttons which is to be found in Covent Garden. The food was superb, and the barman suggested a bottle of Rioja Blanco, which was surprisingly tasty. I was also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the service staff, most effecient. It’s one of those places that could quite easily go either way, in so much that it is quite probably popular with theatre-goers, as well as those looking for a nice place to eat, it is a typical brasserie in that sense, but it seemed to have everything just right, so I am sure I will be back.

As for the company, well, what can I say? The conversation (some might say) predictably turned technical, or ASF focused. BUt a good time was had. So, Bill if you’re ever passing through again (or anyone else for that matter) give me a shout.