Happenings

Still no internet yet. I ordered this end of December and it is taking 4 weeks instead of the promised 2 weeks. At least the connection is confirmed working. As soon as I get the modem, I can start putting things in place.

Yesterday I picked up my car, a Honda Civic Hybrid. You'll see a lot of these in Holland because of two tax cuts (a steep discount on the catalogue value when you buy and other discounts on a monthly basis that is the reduction on lease price). Cars are heavily taxed in Holland nowadays. When you buy one, you may actually pay some 40% of taxes on top of the selling value. What they don't really tell you is that when the taxes are determined on the monthly basis, they don't use the value "out-of-factory", but use the value with the taxes applied. So you pay tax-on-tax basically. Anyway, I don't have too much of that.

I'll be doing a CISSP course soon, the book arrived. It's huge, 1100 pages on general computer security. That includes everything basically, including physical security and so on. That's a good investment to do.

There's a team that does business development at Sogeti with regards to security. I'm part of the architects that find entry-points there. I'll be more of a focus from IT risk management / security considerations and how this applies to architecture. This also includes reading books on SOX, reading general books on IT security management, the CISSP book and finally some insights from the insurance industry (risk management) for some theories and models I am developing. Eventually it won't just be theory of course, I'll need to convert it into practical methods and examples and perhaps test it against previous cases to see if it could have changed decisions.

I'm driving around the country today with family. Tomorrow just an easy day.

All gone quiet

It's been very quiet on this blog, since I need to arrange a number of things and will be starting a new assignment tomorrow. I only worked very sporadically on the Dune project, managed to implement some meeting and customer email stuff.

I'm also deciding on a new car for lease purposes. So far, I checked all brands and I think I found the car I'm going to take. I'll make one more test drive, then I'll definitely go for it or not. The Netherlands have a very "well" thought out fiscal system, nobody escapes from it. One of the taxed items are lease-cars, since they are income. So the higher the price, the higher the taxation on it.

My car is probably going to be a Honda Civic Hybrid. It's cheap in the lease on a monthly basis, has sufficient power, is very friendly for the environment, doesn't break, is very quiet so that music is good to listen to, sufficiently safe, enough room for my purposes, very low "bijtelling" (addition of some value for the purpose of taxation) and the car has many luxury features standard built-in, like climate-control, seat-warming and so on. Actually, the only thing you can get for accessory extras are leather seats.

Some negative points about the car is that the back seats have a low ceiling because it's a sedan and the back seat cannot flip forward because of the batteries. Also, the internal design of controls is a bit tacky, a bit like a cheap hi-fi system with lots of dials and LED's to make the car look nice. I personally prefer cleaner design, more like the Volvo.