| Picture | Also known as | Acknowledgement |
| Websmurf | Ben Zijlstra TCP/IP guru |
Ben generously offered shelter for one international member and helped in the preparations. If you find
back Ben in later pictures please keep in mind that he lost 10 pounds since these photo's were taken.
Without Ben, this would have ended very different. |
| Teaching smurf | Dirk Pickee educator now retired |
Dirk generously offered shelter for one international member and helped in the preparations. Matthias
stayed at Dirk's estate.
Without Dirk, this would have ended very different. |
| Soldersmurf | Jan de Beer model trains guru |
Unfortunately Jan had to work on Saturday, so he couldn't join in the fun. It's a tough jobe, being a
Miele mechanic!
In the picture you see Jan and his son. You figure out yourself who's Jan and who is the sun.... With Jan, this all would have ended very different. |
| Hatesmurf | San Bergmans microcontroller guru |
San generously offered transport facillities for three participants and helped in the preparations. San
was the guy that saved the saturday.
Without San, this would have ended very different. |
| TI-smurf | Maarten Blomme rocket scientist in the making |
Maarten is our youngest member and he's from Belgium which also makes him our youngest international
member.
Without Maarten, this would have ended very different. |
| Punksmurf | Robert Delien embedded processor professor |
Robert generously offered transportation facilities for several members and helped in the preparations.
Without Robert, this would have ended very different. |
| Fiffismurf | Matthias K QNX expert |
Matthias is our german member. He works in the field of industrial control and his favorit operating
system is QNX.
Without Matthias, this all would have ended very different. |
| Funsmurf | Jan Wagemakers Assembly and Debian guru |
Jan is our senior international member. He's cool. Supercool. Jan stayed at Ben's place during the IWM.
Without Jan, this would have ended very different. |
| Brilsmurf | Jan Verhoeven Modula-2 guru |
Jan generously offered shelter for one international member and helped in the preparations. The IWM HQ
was at his place.
Without me, this would have ended very different. Not necessarily for the worse... |
After 3 PM:
- get together in Tilburg, at Brillie's place. Address follows by private mail.
- eat and drink some. Rest a bit. Get used to eachothers faces.
- visit Brillie's dungeon.
- head for Downtown Tilburg. We can take the bus (10 minutes) or walk (half an hour). It's less than 2 miles.
- Visit a big company with lots of IT equipment and the most modern office in the world.
- around 10 PM go to Kandinsky for a pint (or two)
- around midnight go to the guest addresses
Morning:
- wake up, wash and shine
- breakfast at the guesthouse
- regroup at IWM HQ. Wherever that will be.
- go to the funpark called De Efteling: have fun and chat about the hobby while in the waitingqueues.
- De Efteling is then opened until midnight. We'll see how and when we get home.
Sunday 24th august 2003:
Morning:
- get out of bed and have breakfast.
- If desired: visit one or more smurf dungeons or perhaps a walk through the neighborhood.
- have lunch somewhere
- since some of our visitors come from quite a distance, we must allow them to reach home before dark. Therefore the closure will be not after 3 PM.
The bell rang. I went around the back and caught the bellboys redhandedly.
Fun: Mister Verhoeven, I presume.
A historic sentence. The voice didn't match my expectations. But voices never match any expectations. I saw
two friendly guys with their friendly language. Belgium speaks dutch, but with a very different tone. More
pleasant.
We all went round the back, made ourselves comfortable and phoned home to acknowledge a good arrival. I
don't recollect all the subjects, but it was good to actually SEE people with whom we had been writing for
so long.
Around 3 PM I decided to ask teach if Fiffi already arrived. Yes, he got there a long time ago but he thought he wouldn't be welcome before 5 o'clock. Wrong!
Around 5 PM, most members were in the backyard of the IWM HQ. Ben and I went for a chinese restaurant to get
some egg rolls. Luckily Fiffi didn't like egg-rolls so one of us had two. Our first evening meal. The
weather was good. The discussion was: shall we keep the schedule for this evening? We agreed on a "Yes"
here. So off we went to a big office in downtown Tilburg. We had a visit to what could be the future of
offices in times to come.
We must have arrived there around 7:30 PM and we left after 11 PM, so it must have been a good show.
We changed plans when we got back to the cars. Going to downtown Tilburg with this company would be possibly a problem, so we returned to HQ and did as if we were in a bar there. It was a lot cheaper and it ended in the same way.
On Saturday we went for the great exhibition called
'Game On!'
which dealt with 25 years of computerized gaming. For (old style) hackers like us there was some obsolete
hardware to gaze on, but the actual exhibition was not very stunning. There was this old PDP-1, with it's
hard disk unit the size of a big washing machine (and the same power consumption). The same storage capacity
too, for that matter.
The games were either rather old, demonstration games or games for dedicated game consoles and hence only playable for kids who had that particular game controller at home.
After a few hours, we just about saw it all and got bored. Punk expressed it best when he spoke the unforgettable words: "I've had more fun for 10 euro's, even without taking my pants off." and he was kind of right.
On the left you see an image of the admittance card for the exhib.
On the right, you see part of us outside the 'Game On' exhibition building. The rest is still inside,
looking for us to tell us that they wanted to leave...
Can you make a list of who's who? Send your answers to and the lucky winner will get a ticket.
So we headed for Kaatsheuvel to visit a large amusement park called
De Efteling.
Admission isn't quite cheap, but when inside all the rides are for free. As usual with kids, the first stop
was the fairywood. This is a big part of the fairywood, where Little Thumby is stealing the boots of the
giant to get home faster. Or something similar.
Can you see how many smurfs there are on this picture?
Now, what you see here is not a group of escaped convicts, but the 'fine fleur' of the international WISclub. On the left you see the websmurf. Then comes the punksmurf, fiffismurf and funsmurf. We're all sitting here in De Efteling (a funpark in Holland, it's better than Disney). I'm not on the picture. This side of the camera does not image.
We're waiting here for teachingsmurf to surface again. We kind of lost him in the fairywood and we last saw him at the sausagestand a few meters to the right. In the next picture you see what happened after Dirk and Maarten came back with some food. STAY OUT OF HIS FANGS UNDER ALL CONDITIONS!
After we regrouped we went for one of the far extremities of the park. Maarten definitely wanted to do some
testing, so he went for the ship-swing. Now, the Efteling has a GIANT ship-swing:
Are you man enough to find our test engineer back? If you do, send a mail to the TI smurf and he'll anounce
if you won the big prize. There's a hint: if you click on the image, it opens in a new window, but then a
lot bigger. That'll help.
By the time Maarten returned from his swing trip, teach and fiffi had left for home. Fiffi wanted to join his family and doceer was kind of not used to being in such a place. This would leave us with a problem since we came here with 8 persons in two cars. And now one car with two people left. Can you do the math?
Anyway, we had some serious fun after the group split. We took just about all the rides which were available. Some queues were L-O-N-G but good faith pulled us through. We acted as kids on their first visit to the fairground. I can't speak for the rest of us, but I enjoyed myself.
You should have seen the action-pictures taken in the 'Vogel Rock' which is a dark roller coaster ride. Some
guys were shitting their pants. I won't tell here who those people were since I don't want to ruin their
reputation among you long time readers of this stuff.
At 10 PM we called it quits (punksmurf had to take care of his pussies at home) and went home. Which brought
us back to the situation we were all keeping OUT of our minds since 2 PM: how do we do the math?
Now, if there are any law enforcement people around, reading this stuff: please keep in mind that PART of
all this is fictional. Any similarity with real people is based on coincidence. Anyway I hesitated
sacrificing myself: let me in the trunk so that the lot of you have more room. Headroom. Legroom. Bodyroom.
I should have done it. On the risk of being held in the trunk until early in the morning...
Anyway, after a sardine-ride we managed to reach home, without being stopped by a policecar. Maarten and I
got out of the car as soon as we entered the citylimits and walked back the rest.
The car-lot rode back to the IWM HQ and went straight on to the garden. They just waited for us to get
home where we had a short recap of that day. We drank some beer, some juice, ate some snacks and barked back
to Sjako the ever present guarddog (who might be the subject for a future project if he doesn't change his
attitude).
After midnight, Jan and Ben went their place. Maarten hit the sack in my livingroom. That was the end of a fun-day. Now came the sunday.
In the morning I woke up. Not by the alarmclock but by massive flapping of pages. I don't know if you saw
'Short Circuit', the film about an escaped robot which reads encyclopedia's as fast as you and me can flap
pages. Well, that was the sound alright. So it looked as if I had a small robot downstairs.
Not quite. It was Maarten who was speeding through 'Modula-2: a complete guide' by K.N. King. OK, it IS a good book, but can you really read that fast? Perhaps someone ought to ask Maarten some Modula-2 related question...
This was the last day of the IWM, so we had arranged to have a blunch at the house of Soldersmurf. We left
by the three of us around 10 AM to arrive in Udenhout by 10:05, a 6 mile stretch. And NO speeding involved.
At Soldersmurf we had some more laughs, some more cake some more coffee and some more other things. It was a
sunday morning local wisclub meeting, but now with some more members.
We stayed at the Beer's Lodge until 2 PM. It really was time to call it a day. Jan and Maarten stiull had
trips of 2 to 4 hours ahead and we wanted to enable them to do that relaxed.
In the next picture we see how San is explaining some things on a PC to Maarten. This is how the monthly
local meetings look like. All attributes are on the table...
But, no matter how hard it was, we had to split up. Robert took me and our two guests to IWM HQ where Jan and Maarten had their car parked. We made sure they didn't forget their gear, we donated some old equipment (never throw things away!) and that was that. Jan and Maarten drove away and I sent E-mails to both of them in order to get confirmations from them to be sure they got home safe.
If you come so far: here's the solution to the ship swing puzzle:
this
is where our test engineer is having the time of his life!
two cars
eight adults
that's 4 adults per car. Good enough.
One car and two adults leave. That leaves us:
one car
six adults
and what was Hatesmurfs reaction: "one car will do". Period. End of
discussion. We did get home.
And whatever you think of either of us:
By the way, who's the ugly duck on the right? Don't tell me!