Today I ran the 10km at the Haarlemmermeermarathon in Hoofddorp. This was the same place I ran my first 10km last year. Back then I finished in 58:11. I had a personal best of 56:22, that I did at the Laan van Meerdervoortloop in October of 2007.

Today the weather for running was great. The weather for the spectators was not that great but Caroline, Menno and my sister Lilian were there to support me. It was 17 °C, a bit windy and a light drizzle.

At the start it was dry. I ran this race together with Monique-Cecile of KekWek (who lives in that area) and a friend of hers. Well 'ran together'... We started together, but after 500m I left them both behind me. MC had broken her ankle this summer and she has subscribed for the New York Marathon this fall, so she was already glad that she could run and any time within an hour would be a great achievement.

The first 2km was the usual struggle, asking yourself "why do I do this", "will I make it to the finish in a decent time", "can I keep this pace", etc. But as always after the first quarter is done I start to get "in shape" and everything falls into it's place.

I reached the 5km after 26:34, which is a personal best at that distance. My best time at the 5km race is 27:04. This gives you confidence!

When I reached the 9km point, I checked my watch and saw that the time was just under 49 minutes. That was really a pleasant surprise. It all felt good, but this was the prove of that. A personal best would be achieved. I kept on pushing the last kilometer and finished in a personal best of 54:19!!! I took more then 2 minutes off my previous best time, and 4 minutes off my time of last year!

MC finished in 58:28. She was really pleased with that as well. Today Patty and Tim ran the half marathon. I haven't spoken them, because of the weather, but they finished in 1:50:41and 1:58:21, so I think they are happy with it as well.

But what a great day. 10km in 54:19!

I still have to decide what races I will be running this fall. I want to run some 10km races.

I think I will run in Haarlemmermeer. I ran my very first 10km there last year and some other members of Kèkwèk are planning to run there this year as well.

And I also want to the Zen Run 10K (the 10km variant of the World Wide Half, an idea of Steve Runner of the well known Phedippidations podcast), but then I would need to run a 10km in the weekend of 11 and 12 October. I will have to search for a 10km race in the neighborhood in that weekend.

The site of the Laan van Meerdervoortloop is down, but it seems it is being held on Sunday 23 November.

That would be three races. One every month, so that should not be a problem. I ran two 10km within one week this March. But as I said, I still have to decide. It is all subject to change.

I needed to make a descision about my future with Dorgem, which implies almost automatically the overal future of Dorgem, since I have always been the only developer.

In September of last year I wrote about my dilemma with Dorgem. On January 1th, I wrote that would try to make this a great year for Dorgem. And I did try. The first half of January I tried a few things (streaming webserver and some UI things), but nothing resulted in very useful stuff then. And after that I never took the time to start again.

The main problem are that very much work needs to do done to turn Dorgem 3 into a real product. And another thing is that I lost interest in the webcam thing in general. There hasn't been any real useful development done since the release of Dorgem 3 pre-alpha 1 in May 2007 and the last release of Dorgem 2 was in May 2005.

The competition didn't sit still during the last years. They continued to develop their product and Dorgem is way behind on them.

So my only conclusion can be that the Dorgem project is now officially discontinued. No more new realases are to be expected and the website will not be update anymore.

Know that all the sources, both Dorgem 2 and Dorgem3, are available so if someone wants to take over, feel free to do so. I gladly give you all the rights you need to have for the SourceForge site. But I don't think that will happen. During the lifetime of Dorgem a couple of people submitted patches, but a real developer never came.

I have enjoyed the period I really work on Dorgem as nice, fun and educational. I look back at it with much satisfaction. I want to thank everybody who has downloaded and used Dorgem, and probably still using it. And of course I want to thank the people who actively helped the development of Dorgem. Your patches really helped Dorgem!

Easter is early this year. And something quite unique happened this Easter. It snowed! I placed some photos in our album. Enjoy

As I told you before, we geocache. We only just started, but yesterday we had an ad hoc mini event. We did a special cache, that needs to done at two places at the same time. One team in Zoetermeer and the other in Prague.

That requires a bit of organisation. My collegue Petra sent a mail to the maintainer of the cache to ask for assistence and he told her where she should leave a message. Luckily someone in the Czech Republic reacted and a appointment was made for yesterday afternoon. A message was posted on the page of the Dutch cache and several teams reacted. Since this cache is not done that often, a lot of people have put this cache in their watchlist. At 14:00 eight teams were present at the starting point, a group of about 20 people and one dog.

The cache itself was a pleasant trip through a forest of about 7km. At every waypoint we had to SMS the answer to the Czechs and they send us the answers to the questions at their waypoints. With that answer we could calculate our next waypoint.

The weather in Zoetermeer was nice, a bit windy but in the forest we didn't notice much of it. In Prague the weather was not that pleasant. It rained when they started, so we were quite pleased that some people were there, because without each other it is not possible to do the cache.

After six waypoints we arrived at the location of the cache and when you search with such a large group, the ammo can was found very fast. Than began the big exchange. The traded their goodies and the adults traded the travel bug and geocoin numbers. That was a total of 21 numbers. Pictures were taken and the cache was put back in place.

At 16:30 we returned at the cars and it was time to say goodbye. All participatants, thanks for the nice day.

When this is published (not written, I have better things to do on New Years Eve ) 2008 has started here in The Netherlands. A good moment to look back at my previous Dillema post. Thanks a lot to everybody who read it (and many did according to the stats) and especially those who commented. Some people also sended in their comment via the email. As you can read yourself all comments were positive. It really helped me to realize that letting go with Dorgem would be a real shame.

Therefore I decided to try to make 2008 a good year for Dorgem!

To comment on some of the comments and emails.

• Dorgem is an open source program. Is has always been and will always be. In the help file of Dorgem2 is a explanation why and it is still valid.
• Therefore the C++ source of Dorgem are available, even of the current pre-alpha version. You can download it at http://dorgem.sourceforge.net/test/
• I know that time is valuable thing. Family time is, and will remain, important.

So, what's next. The first thing to do is to add threading. The FTP storage has to go in a separate thread and should not bother the GUI, like with Dorgem2. I think that is an important thing to do. And since I have not used threads that much, not the most easy task.

I will put the sources in the CVS or SVN at the sourceforge project page soon. People asked for this and hopefully this will encourage people to submit patches.

I need help from someone who wants to try to compile the Dorgem3 sources under Linux. Dorgem is written using the wxWidgets framework and the wxVidCap component I'm using has support (although limited) for Video4Linux. I have no specific experience to compile things with Linux. A automake scripts has to be written and v4l has to be tested and maybe the wxVidCap component has to be extended.

Other things like the DirectShow implementation and a streaming web server has to be done, but one step at the time. So watch this space for more updates.

The first two weekends of March 2008 there are two interesting runs. On Sunday the 9th of March the 20 van Alphen. This is were I ran my very first run ever last year, a 5km. And on Saturday 15th of March the CPC in my home town, where the world record on the half marathon was run last year.

Because of our move to the new house I didn't run much apart from the regular Saturday morning runs. I don't think I have enough time to prepare for my first 20km or a half marathon. I'm not even sure if I can do a 10km in a decent time right now. Yesterday my brother was with us to celebrate Christmas and he told me he didn't do much since our last run in Haarlemmermeer.

The 20 van Alphen is in his home town and so it is a event he want to participate in. The CPC is in my home town. Many members of KèkWèk will run a distance here. My niece Eveline recently joined us at KèkWèk and she wants to run her for the first time here as well. I would love to run a distance in the CPC.

Yesterday my brother and I decided to run the 10km run at both events.

So the first two runs for next year are already planned. I need to do the extra running to get ready for these events, but I'm looking forward to them. Luckily there is still enough time.