Jethro Borsje

During the cold weather period at the end of January I went ice skating at De Rotte twice. First on Thursday the 24th of January and the second time the next on Friday the 25th of January. I had never ice skated at De Rotte before, so for me it was really cool to be able to ice skate so close to home. Along the De Rotte river and lake there are several typical dutch windmills, together with the atmosphere on the ice it gave a special dutch feeling.

The local ice club removed the snow from the river and lake making a path of approximately 8,7 km. This track was in excellent condition so we used it multiple times on both days. The first day we skated two laps, amounting up to 17,4 km. On the second day we stayed a lot longer and ended up skating 42,4 km. On both days the weather was very nice, the sun was out and it was about -5 degrees.

These are some pictures of the first day, on this day the weather was at its best.

Bellow are some pictures of the second day:

Bellow you'll find a GPS track log of the track we skated at De Rotte:

View 2013-01-25 - Rotte in a larger map

On Sunday the 20th of January it was finally possible to go ice skating on real ice! Although the ice was not overly strong (approximately 5 centimeters thick) we decided to go ahead and give it a try on the Bergse Achterplas in Rotterdam. There were more people ice skating there on this small lake so it looked safe enough. Once we were on the ice I felt a bit uncomfortable, because the ice made several cracking noises. Because we're going ice skating at De Uithof every week I am used to more stable and safe ice, so it took a while for me to get used to real ice again. However, after thirty minutes I felt more comfortable and relaxed. The ice itself was from superb quality, pitch black and completely smooth. The snow fell before this lake froze so it had no negative effect on the quality of the ice. It was a great opportunity to test my new skates for the first time on real ice and I must say I am quite pleased with them.
After about an hour or two it started to snow quite heavily and the wind made it very cold so we decided to call it a day after having skated a little over 30 kilometers. We had a great first day on the ice!

Bellow you'll find some pictures and a GPS track log of this trip. Although the GPS log is incomplete it gives an indication of what we did.



View 2013-01-20 - Bergse Achterplas in a larger map

During the first weekend of January we went to Winterberg (Germany) with my family for my fathers sixtieth birthday. The idea was to go skiing there for a couple of days on the various small slopes they have over there. The ski area isn't very large and quite low with a maximum elevation of approximately 660 meters. Winterberg is only a three hour drive, so it's a convenient location to go skiing for a day or two. However we were out of luck, because the weather was quite bad during our entire weekend. It was raining most of the time and the snow was almost completely disappeared so skiing on the slopes of Winterberg wasn't an option. We decided to go to Alpincenter Bottrop instead on the way back from Winterberg so at least we got some skiing done during the weekend.

During our stay in Winterberg we went for a hike in the Orketal because there wasn't enough snow to go alpine skiing or cross country skiing. Along the hike we picked up two geocaches and stopped at the Hubertushütte for a short while to enjoy the scenery. It was a nice hike through the forest near Medelon, just a short drive from Winterberg. We ended up hiking a little over 9,6 kilometers. Bellow you'll find some pictures and a GPS track log of this hike.



View 2013-01-06 - Hiking @ Winterberg, Germany in a larger map

Although we ended up hiking instead of skiing we enjoyed ourselves this weekend and will probably be back here some day, hopefully with better weather.

In the middle of December I went to a JSF 2.0 (JSF 314) training together with two of my colleagues. The training was being held at Vijfhart in Nieuwegein which is a nice facility for IT training sessions. The trainer prepared the course quite well. There was a nice mixture between theory and hands-on exercises. I've been working with JSF 1.2 (JSR 252 for a couple of years now so I know most of its ins and outs, but I didn't have the pleasure of working with JSF 2.0 yet. I'm pleased to see that JSF 2.0 fixes lots of the common pitfalls and annoyances of JSF 1.2. For example: there is no more need for declaring your beans, validators and converters in the verbose faces-config.xml, annotations are provided instead! Another major improvement is the Ajax support which comes from the framework itself instead of having to use an external library such as Ajax4JSF when you want to perform some basic Ajax operations. Furthermore the Facelets library is incorporated into the standard which also is a huge improvement. During the course I also got to play around with the beans validation framework (JSR 303) which I liked a lot. I enjoyed the three day course a lot and am looking forward to start using JSF 2.0 on our production systems.

The year 2012 is coming to an end so I thought it would be a nice time to compile some data from my website regarding ice skating. I ice skated over 700 km the last year, both indoors and outdoors. These ice skating trips in the outdoors are amongst the most memorable days of 2012.

For us recording these trips and blogging about them is a nice way to keep reliving our days in the outdoors and a way to share them with all of you.