When I started my studies and moved to Enschede, nearly 7 years ago, I needed furniture of my own. One of the things I have spent quite some time on selecting, was my office chair. Seeing that I spent a lot of time behind my desk and computer, both for hobby and my education, I wanted a good chair, with enough knobs and levers to make me both comfortable and give me ergonomical working place.

After some consideration, I settled on the Ataros A122, produced by Interstuhl. It has shown to be a very comfortable chair and so far I've not regretted buying it (even though it has cost my just under four hundred euros).

However, recently the chair started breaking down. The knob that keeps the back of the chair up broke, leaving the back always in the downmost position (while I want it in the topmost one!). So, after some fruitless searching for a shop that stocked spare parts for my chair, I contacted Interstuhl directly, to see if they could help me.

I was pleasantly surprised by their swift and helpful response, including the advice to replace a second part that was probably also damaged and instructions on how the part could be replaced. The best part, however, was that they sent me the the spare parts for free! I didn't even pay shipping costs. Considering that the 5-year warranty on the chair has already expired a while ago, I consider this superb service. After my previous woes with MSI service, I'm relieved that there still are decent companies with competent staff in this world.

Since last weekend I have yet another hobby to add to my ever growing stack of hobbies and projects (I'm still looking for extra time to fit them all in, so if you got some spare time lying around...): Geocaching.

As always around New Year, there are these things called good intentions. I usually don't really care about those, but this year Brenda was intent on losing weight. Now I don't really need to lose weight (I have only a bit of a belly), but the main idea was to eat healthier food and get more exercise. Healthy food is always a good idea, and since I'm not doing any sports currently, I welcome some extra exercise (at least in theory :-p).

So to get some exercise we thought of taking a long walk (And no, not with those funny sticks. It's cold enough outside to burn quite some energy). However, to make things a bit more interesting than just a boring walk around the neighborhood, we decided to go Geocaching.

Geocaching, in its simplest form, is using a GPS device to find a cache with hidden treasure on coordinates published on the Internet by the person who hid the cache there.

Coincidentally, I bought a Bluetooth GPS device to use with my phone last year (initially just for Pandora, so I'm glad to be able to use it more often). So, we set out to find the cache "Aan de rand van de wildernis", which is a so-called "Multi-cache", meaning you get the coordinates of the first point and using some numbers you find there (from a traffic sign, for example) you can calculate the coordinates of the next waypoint, where you'll find some more numbers, etc.

After four waypoints (including a nice detour through the denser part of the forest due to a minor calculation error) we found the cache, hidden in the ground! As is usual with caches, it contained some "trade", mostly children's toys. We took a small packet of eau de toilette and replaced it with an "Eco-button".

So, let's see which cache in the neighborhood we'll plunder next...