At this moment we (Krista and me) are planning a trip to Scotland to have a walking vacation of almost two weeks.
Currently the main plan is to take one of the daily flights to Copenhagen airport and from there take a jet to Scotland, Aberdeen.
There the walking holiday will start, we will take the train on some parts of the trip and we will be visiting Inverness and finally we will take the ferry to Belgium from Edinburgh and take the train from Belgium back to the Netherlands.
Just to give you a quick glimpse about the plans, when the will be more tangible I will update my weblog with a new posting about this trip.
If there by any change a lawyer reading my weblog? If so can he/she please inform me if I can sue a company for lying in there commercial?
The following is the case, I have used axe years and years but I have never heard anything the girls saying in the following commercial... what are my chances in front of court...?
Back in the old days,.... damn I can say that and I was really there, the first days of the Internet.... if you wanted to know something there where a lot less places to go. Most valuable place of information was Usenet (If you do not know what it is, try groups.google.com and it will give you a hint).
However there where also a lot of other places where you could refer to. Most people back in those days referred to the big corporations laboratories and this had a tremendous influence on the community.
When the cost of hosting a website became cheaper by the day people started to create there own sources of information and thereby the leading role of the computer laboratories of large companies and universities started to decline.
But they are still out there and they are still offering vast amounts of information to the public. Just to make sure that they will not be forgotten and to introduce some new sources of high quality information I like to mention some of them. If you feel I have missed just that single important website do not hesitate to send me a mail and I will create a post about it.
A good number of papers created by employees of Google can be found on a sub-page of Google labs. IBM is running some nice websites about there research and for developers. Sun Microsystems Laboratories is providing some nice work and on the developers site you can find a good deal of information. Microsoft is running there MSDN network where you can find a lot of information about how to use MS products and/or code for the MS platform. Cisco Systems is providing some very good papers on network topology which is actually a must read. On we can for sure not forget is AT&T laboratories and Bell Laboratories nowadays owned by Lucent Technologies.
I am sure I have not mentioned some very important sources but just send me a mail and I will do a follow-up on this subject.
By now people reading this weblog and people knowing me from day to day life know I am not a very big fan from Microsoft. Also some people know that it is still have the intention to change all my computers to Linux, UNIX or Mac OS by the end of this year.
However the stage of bashing Microsoft is over, I have to admit that they also produce some good products. Ok I am still convinced that there operating system should never be used as a server platform, you do not want to use there clustering options and you do not want to run anything on it you want to have really really secure but they make a nice and easy to understand tools.
And to be honest, running a company employing thousands and thousands of developers and steering those developers to deliver a product is a job most of us could never do. So I do have some respect for Microsoft and they way they are running a tight ship up there.
Looking at there channel9 page gives you a little insight on the way they do this and it is a very good source to obtain some insight information on what runs in the harts and minds of the Microsoft developers. So I can suggest to all of you to take a look and get some more insight on Microsoft.
Remember Ellen Feiss? Rings a bell he,.... still nothing? She was the girl promoting Apple a couple of years back. As I am the proud owner of a Mac Mini I have to do some catching up on Mac culture, or at least I like do some catching up on Mac culture and so I found Ellen again. It turns out she has become quite a lady of here own nowadays. She even has her own fan page.
These days she is somewhat out of the picture, Apple now uses two guys named Mac and PC and I have to admit they are quite funny. It is not like Ellen but, funny,.... yeah funny,... I think....
Dias Latinos, the Latin days…. A yearly festival which is in my current hometown Amersfoort Even do the weather was form time to time terrible the festival turned out be real good.
Was this is my first year in this city I can not compare this years festival with other years but based on what I have seen during this years festival I can only say that I will be for sure attend next year. One of the good things of Dias Latinos is that the ladies are behaving as can be expected from Latinos ladies having a party.
When the people of BOSH go on there world tour, the thing they mentioned a long long time ago they should make a stop during this festival in Amersfoort so we can enjoy all together this festival and have some beers and some fun together.
More than a week is passed after my last entry on my weblog. I think some people might wonder how flight back was on Friday. Despite all the good things on the news and the assurance on from British Airways that all should be fine my flight was canceled after four hours of waiting.
So after four hours of waiting on a airport, which could very well have been in a warzone according to the number of armed people, I found myself stuck in London again. Even do British Airways canceled my flight I could convince them to arrange me a hotel and a quick flight back. The first reaction of the BA people was that the first flight back available to me would be on Sunday morning.
I had some words like “the company policy of having British Airways as preferred carrier could change if I am not in Amsterdam tomorrow” and things like, “if you are not able to place me on a direct flight to Amsterdam than arrange a flight to Paris and from Paris to Amsterdam”. This however changed the BA policy in such a way that they where able to arrange in a timeframe of 2 minutes a room at the Hilton Hotel and a business class seat on the first flight the next morning. So I was able to make it home even do it took me a couple of hours more than normaly could have been expected.
In my next post I will go into some of the security things I encountered on the airport.
Well currently I am updating my weblog from the lobby of the other London office. As I do not have my own desk here I am stuck in the lobby. The person I am supposed to meet is currently still stuck in a other meeting and this is keeping me in the lobby. As we have a WiFi network in all the global offices we can access I am able to get online and check if I still have a flight back… and YES I do have a flight back until now!!
I am so sorry to all the people reading my weblog. I was unable to update my weblog yesterday as I was occupied trying to figure out a way to go home on Friday. As the British police arrested a couple of terrorist yesterday who where planning to bomb planes to America all flights where canceled and delayed.
At this moment I am booked at a BA this evening back to Amsterdam so I hope it will still fly when I arrive at the airport. I am still on the other side of London at this moment working on the go-life support for the UK sales organization and within a short while I have to take a cab to the other side of the city to have a meeting at one of the offices we have located in London and the go to Heathrow airport.
This all considering I feel quite tired due to the fact I have been visiting London city centre yesterday accompanied with some college’s. Taking the Gatwick express train from Gatwick airport to London Victoria station is a good experience I have to say. Anyone who is going to London I can advice to fly to Gatwick and then take the train to city centre.
Even do not all experiences in London where great, the food was very bad for example, I still did have a splendid time to be honest. I have seen a couple of things in London. I have seen Buckingham palace, been to Trafalgar square, paid a quick visited to the MI6 HQ, just did a quick check if the Big Ben was still located where it supposed to be and walked the London centre most of time enjoying the city.
Mind The Gap, a phrase found in the London underground, or the tube as they call it in London. Mind The Gap is a sign warning you for the gap between the platform and the carriage. And this is really a big gap indeed. If you do not know it is there the changes of you stepping into it is real.
As we see from time to time those kinds of phrases are picked up by public as a normal phrase and it is used on shirts or even Bikini Bottoms. As the “mind the gap” phrase is used on more than only the concrete of the platform there are more odd things about the London tube. During the second world war is was used as a bomb shelter for the public. Terrorists bombed it, it is used in hundreds of books and the story is it is used by spies to do all kinds of tricky things.
Blogs are devoted to it and, as for every form of public transportation around the world, there are fans collecting everything about the tube. You kind find website’s about the tube and there is a tube etiquette, unofficial, but I think a lot of the people using the tube stick to this.
Personally I have used the tube now to get around in London and I have to say I understand why people do love the London tube and I also understand why some people hate the London tube.
Real London busses, black London cabs, English tea and Sicilian pizza. Sicilian pizza was what I got in the evening, at least that was what the menu was telling me. I have been to Sicilia once, the picture shows exactly the view we hade from the Apartment, on a holiday with Krista and we hade pizza, the real Sicilian pizza in a little tavern with sea view and it was one of the best pizza’s I ever had.
So as this was a real Sicilian restaurant in the centre of London where the rent is high I was reasoning that the food must be great as they would like to stay in business. How disappointed I was. With a lot of good manners and some drinks I managed to finish my plate but the main problem was that British for sure influenced the Sicilian pizza. In my opinion the art of the British kitchen is to make everything taste exactly the same, make it taste as cardboard. So my pizza had the same taste as everything else in Brittan, as cardboard.
The problem is I like good food, I like flavors surprising me, tickle me to take the next bite. Food must be an adventure. Problem in England this is not the case. If someone knows a good affordable restaurant in London please do inform me.
Again a moment of rest, I just heard a champagne bottle opening on the other side of the office because a department was so happy that all the systems where working as could be expected. On the other side of the floor there are still some technicians working to find a strange problem in Oracle Advanced Pricing. Different worlds in one office, one world is celebrating a victory and one is trying to solve a hard to tackle problem.
Meanwhile in my area all is nice and quite except for some user errors and setup mistakes which are all under control. This gives me time to plan a trip from the Hotel just outside of London to the city center. My hotel is near the Gatwick airport and I just learned that there is a fast train going from the airport to the city centre so I will be checking this out later this evening.
This week I will be an expat. Currently I am located at the United Kingdom office of the company I work for, as they will go life with their new ERP system this week. This morning I woke up way to early to go to the airport and get a short flight from Schiphol airport to London. A quick taxi ride with some co workers and we are in business, open laptops, connect to the local network, open a VPN and ready to go…
This is the moment you learn to appreciate techniques like VPN. I already use it to connect from my home network to the office network but now I am using it cross country and I am able to share the same drives as my colleges, I am able to connect to all the servers in the datacenter and all in the same way as I would have done as I would be at my desk at the HQ.
So all is working out just fine, the only problem I have encountered so far is that the English are not a coffee drinking nation. I cannot live without coffee, I need it to keep me going true the day and now I am stuck in a office without a proper coffee machine. You can get hot water to make some tea and you can get instant coffee powder but it is not the real deal. For me this torture will only last for a week however there are several college’s who will have to spend the upcoming weeks at this location so the plan is there to get us a brand new, small, coffee machine to make our own coffee.
As I have from time to time some downtime moments, the moments the users are not reporting incidents; I will update this weblog true the day every time I have something to report.
Looking at the visitor reports I just found out that BOSH has a link to this weblog on their main page. Great news…. As you already might know I am a regular listener of BOSH and never skipping a show. For all those people who followed the link from the BOSH website and think this is a somewhat crappie weblog. I have to agree… but rest assured there is a complete new website on its way… I am tuning the last bits and pieces of it and I will release it somewhere in the upcoming weeks. When I do so I will send in a audio comment to BOSH. Just to tell them I still like the show, I am still listening and to promote my new website. For now you will have to do it with the content I offer there at this moment. Please have a look at http://www.terminalcult.org
Finally a seamlessly endless heatwave is over. In the past weeks I could not update my weblog because of the fact I was occupied with sitting outside, drinking cold beers and looking at nice girls in short skirts. Which is, at least in Holland, a very popular sport.
Now the heatwave has ended I will try and make it up to the readers and start blogging again. So sorry for the inconvenience it might have caused you that your where unable to read new articles but from now on you will have a regular update again.
