I know, I should no longer say Happy New Year! But as I have not talk to you in a long time, I really want to wish you a great year ahead, especially on this blue monday, which got us stuck in front of a broken down bridge on the big deik in the north of Holland, waiting in the car for 2.5 hours :P Blue it was :) When coming home I felt like writing:
Viggo in the 2018 alley
Great good day Steemians! It's been a bit silent on my end after SteemFest. One reason, as some of you know an event at such scale always brings kind of 'a black gap' of dispair and uselessness with it: working many stressful days leading up to the event, then just getting lived by the event and then all of a sudden.... BAM. It all stops. Over & done. (Come to think about it, you can kinda compare it to the Bitcoin/Crypto Boom which all of a sudden ended (huh??? nahhhh.... LOLLL :P )).
After Lisbon however I could immediately drive back to the south of Portugal for a week of decompressing (and paying the bills) before heading back to Amsterdam. After winding down the event, btw you still owe an after movie by 
Then for Xmas we did the complete tour of Holland, visiting Heleen's parents in the North, even going to an island (Vlieland) and then for the final season days back down south to my parents place which was a trip of 5 hours in the car and on the ferry back from the island.
Our digital Xmas card, made by my creative GF :P
In between I managed to do 1 kitesurf session in the kinda FREEEEEZING cold, as I was really longing for a surf, because the last one was about 1 month before steemfest. As it was so cold, we started looking for a great 'summerish' location to break the winter... 2 years ago I went with a kitebuddy to the Cabo Verde (island of Sal) but this year we are going to.....
.... Cape Town, South Africa in february!
We'll be heading down there from the end of January for 3 weeks with Heleen and Viggo (oh, oh, 11 hour flight with baby :P) and my kitebuddy will join in for about 10 days. We have a nice place (in Blouberg area, for those who know) next to the kitesurf beaches and will spent our days enjoying the weather, the surf+wind (which is supposed to be epic), great food and most of all, the beautiful nature.
View from Kitesurf Mekka - Blouberg area- to Table Mountain & Cape Town Downtown
I am really anxious / curious however a bit, on how it will all work out, on one hand Cape Town is suffering from a severe drought crisis (only 1 minute a day showering, it's ok, I'll be showering in the sea anyhow) but I think I will be totally at unease with the apparent inequality between people in the city... Which also has some effects on the crime rate. It will be interesting to say the least and I hope and guess we'll be having a wonderful time, and somehow I am also looking forward to the confrontation of uncomfortable moments as I hope it will sting my gut feelings for change in the world. I can't of course (imho) be held responsible for Dutch / western society's history with the southern Cape and Africa, so on one hand going there to enjoy the fruits of the land: beautiful nature, great food and a superb surf condition, and on the other hand being confronted with this inequality is good I think for my vision. Not sure if I can express what I want to say. I really don't know how it will be ofcourse, because I have never been there. Come to think about it, it is the first time I am crossing the Equator in my life!
Of course I will be up & running with local sim-card and with my computer with me as always for witness duties and server management / dev ops.
If you have great ideas & tips for Cape Town, especially half-day trips (our son Viggo still sleeps in afternoons), great food & other things to do, we are all ears! Also in the last week we are planning for a little roadtrip, but have nothing set in stone yet.
.... Conference / other travel plans, and SteemFest³ ?
This year I'll be going to Consensus in NYC and right after that 
Then SteemFest³ will most probably be around the same dates as last 2 editions, but, .... nothing confirmed yet! But I will carefully monitor some other main crypto conf's around those dates as I would hope to not have interference with people's travel plans to other conferences. The what, when and especially where are not yet set in stone, so bear with me, stay tuned, and feel free to subscribe to the newsletter on steemfest.com if you want to know the latest as soon as the news breaks. (Will be a while tho, the last edition is only 2 month's ago - although it seems like ages already :P)
.... Witness updates
I think I've been a witness for just over a full year now, and I am really happy with your support and votes. I am happy to see my failover script worked out pretty nicely and saved my ass once I was in a plane flying to Greece for attending a wedding.
Also, as some of you might know I am a sucker for this, I am quite proud of having only 15 missed blocks (don't jinx it dude!) in total seeing the time of signing blocks / witnessing. It is my internal competition with myself of keeping the missed blocks low and ultimately it serves the Steem blockchain best to be super reliable. However, missing a block is not the worst thing that can happen ofcourse, but it is just me :) Every missed block hurts, upon receiving the notification :)
In the very near future I will be upgrading my main & backup node to support the ever growing blockchain as we get towards 300+ mb daily growth (according to fellow Steemian, Wizard of DevOps 
I have a little script on all my servers which report me a daily status of their well being via Telegram (you can copy & get it yourself here: https://gist.github.com/roelandp/6b03e873d206ed5c5ac862d14d4d550c). This script could be extended with temperature monitoring. I always check this report with my morning coffee and have the reports come in at 10 AM sharp via cronjob. - pling, pling, pling, pling, pling.
a blunt call for your witness - vote: if you like what I do and see me as a trustworthy witness for the Steem Blockchain (I run steem p2p nodes in France, Canada, Netherlands and Germany at the moment)
please cast your vote for @roelandp via https://steemit.com/~witnessesPs. did you already hear the great news about the upcoming ViceToken airdrop on Steem holders (snapshotted on block 18,500,000 - 29 Dec 2017) and the Scorum Steem Bounty? Two new promising projects paying back you being right here on Steem!