The R&D day 2017

Today the complete R&D department of my work got together for the annual R&D-day. There were talks, workshops, activities and.... BBQ!

The activities were all outside, so we spent 2 hours in the cold wind and rain. I took this photo during our first activity: building a catapult. The best thing was that our team won with the furthest shot :-)

All in all it was a fun day :-)

My new rig

A colleague left yesterday and I was the first one to snatch his screens! It replaces my old crappy ones. I'm very pleased with them :-)

To increase my joy my new turn signal hardware arrived. Now I can replace the old one and indicate like a boss!

Silver was playing hide and seek in the kitchen but I found him ;-)

The meeting

I had to go to this meeting for work. We all know how much I love meetings, right? ;-)

The cupboard

I scored a cupboard at work. Our room is almost complete now! :-)

And here's our little Silver who got his first shot at the vet's this evening. He was a very good boy but now he's tired.

The ChipSoft tower

Walking to work from the bus stop I have this view of our office-tower. Grand.

My new office

My new office is nearing completion! :-)

The construction, day 2.

Ahhhh, the construction is moving forward pretty fast! The only downside is that they have made a make-shit construction area right next to my desk which gets pretty noisy at times... Small price to pay for future peace and quiet ;-)

This was made in the morning.

In the afternoon I had a workshop at the old office so I used to opportunity to photograph a ship from the neighbour's dock.

The construction, day 1.

A small helicopter flew by my window at work. No idea what it was doing and I wonder if they knew themselves...

And OH JOY! They have started working on the walls in my office. They're going to make us seperate office spaces. Thank fuck, soon I won't have to listen to a couple of colleagues that talk and talk and talk aaaaaaall the time!

In the evening I met up with Ruud again finally and we played a few games of chess which he both won, of course ;-)

Running the stairs

Now that my company owns that huge office tower it was time to have some fun with it! So my boss organised a little staircase marathon to see who could climb 54 flights of stairs (27 floors) in the least amount of time. It was fun to watch and cheer for my colleagues.

Here's my colleague Ernst giving his all to climb those stairs. He did survive and set not too bad a time ;-)

The boga del agua

At my work I want more plants. At home I need to get rid of plants in preparation of moving out.
So I packed the biggest two in a big fat IKEA bag and carried them to work. That was a bit harder than I thought but it went pretty OK.

And there is one of them, happily sitting on my desk. It felt very nice to have the plant there. Funny that I actually got this plant when it was only 4cm tall almost 20 years ago at my first ever job.

A parcel arrived for me today. Wonder what's in it! ;-)

Oh, it's a "boga del agua" and gasket and also a thermostat, exactly what I need! :-)

The view

Office view this morning.

Nice.

The rainbow cake

We had a great view from the tower today. There's is Haarlem in the distance and IJmuiden on the far right.

My colleague Martin has his birthday today and bought us cake. GIANT cake! GIANT RAINBOW cake!

The new year's dinner

Just as I was waking up a big fat truck stopped in front of my house to unload stuff for some neighbour somewhere. I have too many neighbours. I need less neighbours.

The morning was crystal (tower) clear, contrary to yesterday's morning. Beautiful.

Sun rise on the other side of the tower.

In the evening my work's new year's dinner was held in the restaurant at the first floor.

It was nice but more than half my floor wasn't there so that was a bit crap...

The fire / the train

There was a fire in the distance. I took this shot through a colleague's binoculars.

Looking down it's like a miniature world.

My wine!

The building I work in. I'm on the 17th and I'm going up using the stairs. Because it's good for me. Not because it's fun. Well, it's fun to be able to say that you walked the stairs ;-)

I walked up 34 of these. Yeah, I was sweaty and breathing heavily but I did it :-)

Rainbows came to celebrate! ;-)

During lunch we went for a walk but it started pouring down so we returned before we were even halfway.

A supermarket nearby is selling these wines. It's got my name on it!

The work views

The weather was great today which made for lovely views. I managed to fix all of yesterday's issues and I got to order free lunch which was pretty good!

I spotted my old office from when I worked at Furore. I had good times there too.

The view

Enjoying my work-view a bit today. It's pretty awesome!

Another incredibly exciting day.

Oh! I actually had my appraisal yesterday and it went quite well. None of last year's bullshit. This working year is really flying by which must be a good sign :-)

The tower

There are normal chocolate sprinkles and super mega kingsize chocolate sprinkles. I prefer the latter ;-)

This is the new taxi stand at Central Station. It's at the back now. They choose a good spot.

In the afternoon colleagues and I went to check out our soon-to-be new office.

It's got pretty big floors with nice kitchen areas.

However, the views are the absolute best about this new office!

There's also a lounge area with a bar and artifarty staircase.

The tower.

After visiting the tower (as we simply call it) we went to a place called "Escape room" with the whole financial team. Here are colleagues Tanja, Inanc and Hans.

Escape rooms are rooms you get locked in to for an hour with a team and you have to use clues to find the key that will open the door so you can leave again. Typically you have an hour. If you haven't made it by then, the door will be opened for you by staff. My team was in the Van Gogh-room. In the end it actually has 3 rooms which was fun and exciting. We managed to open the door with 1 minute left! It was a fun thing to do :-)

Afterwards we chatted a bit before moving on to our next stop: dinner!

Martin, Sylvester and Ernst.

JD, Nicolette, Sicco, Emma and Margie.