A week that felt almost as normal as before All This. Even though it is a new normal, not a return (and being aware that we’re heading into the fall with rising numbers of cases again).

This week I

• Compared the vision document for upgrading the national geo-information infrastructure with the emerging EU legal framework and Green Deal to see where they align or not
• Presented to the geo information policy team at the Ministry for the Interior
• Did the monthly invoicing
• Had the weekly client meetings, this time in person, and spending half of my time at client offices
• Finished the first full iteration of a public client wiki. It contains information on the upcoming EU legal framework for digitisation and data. It is created directly from mark down notes in my personal collection, pushing them to a repository on Github, that using Respec gets turned into a website on github.io. That works really well.
• Spent an afternoon in the cinema, to see Dune. Now rereading the novel itself.
• Did a first detailed check of which elements in the EU framework on digitisation and data need to be incorporated or translated into the national reference architecture for (public sector) digital twins.
• Had a half day session with the reference architecture team to discuss that
• Drove Y to Haarlem for a sleep over with her nieces.
• Went out for (Thai food) dinner with E, and had a few beers together sitting at the bar of the oldest pub in town Onder de Linden (continuously since 1755 in a 1530 building). It’s the pub where E set her prize winning story about Amersfoort she wrote last year, but never visited before. It was very nice to just hang out with the two of us.
• On the way into town for dinner and beers, my bicycle broke down (so we walked back home and took public transport). Saturday morning was spent to select and buy a replacement bike. I thought to buy a second hand one, but ended up with a affordabel new one, which I will pick up Tuesday. I think this is the first new bike I bought in my life. The bicycle my parents bought me for secondary school lasted me through university, and since then I had 2 second hand ones each one lasting a little over a decade or so. I leave my bike at railway stations a lot, so having something that looks too fancy just gets stolen.
• Had coffee and lunch in town with E, before picking up Y again at her nieces’
• Drove to Enschede to visit friends. Cees is a (press) photographer and opened a small exhibition of some of his photos in Het Bolwerk, Enschede’s oldest continuously operating pub (this one 1904, so nowhere in the same league as the oldest Amersfoort one). We had lunch in and walked around our former home town a bit. Afterwards we went back to our friends’ place and chatted over food and drinks.
• Had a conversation with Andy Sylvester for his ‘tools for thought’ podcast, talking about my use of Obsidian and Tinderbox mostly.

In the Bolwerk café for the opening of Cees’ photo exhibit, in Enschede.