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Saturday, March 22. 2008
Berlin trip: Dance of the Vampires
Last weekend my girlfriend and me tripped to Berlin, primarily to see the musical Dance of the Vampires. I seized the chance and tried out Kores Nikon D70s camera to finally decide if I would also buy a digital single-lense reflex (DSLR) camera. Best thing first: My D80 is already ordered and will hopefully arrive next Tuesday. :)
| www.flickr.com |
The trip was really nice. We drove just 4 hours and had a really nice and not really expensive hotel in Charlottenburg, which is almost the very center of Berlin and just a few walk minutes away from the Theatre of the west (German) where Dance of the Vampires is still located until end of March. After a very short city trip we got ready for a very good italian dinner and enjoyed the musical afterwards. I like the music quite much (and already did before), but seeing the play was even more amazing. A very nice mixture of classical and modern theatre and very good music. Dramatic, exciting and funny at the same time. I can only recommend this, if you like theatre or especially musicals.
On Sunday we took the chance and did some sightseeing in Berlin, although the weather was cloudy and rainy. Still it was a nice walk through downtown Berlin and using the D70s was even fun under that circumstances. If you are interessted you can see some of my very first "real" photo shots on Flickr.
Wednesday, December 20. 2006
We found Bielefeld! Did we?
As posted before, Kore and me went to a the "Christmas Cookie Baking" event of the PHP Usergroup Bielefeld last Saturday, organized by Carola (Sammy). We were quite suprised, that we found Bielefeld so easily, although the internet told us about the great Bielefeld Conspiracy before. Anyway, we found Sammies home and had a great time with brunching and baking cookies, together with her husband and Arne from Hamburg. Afterwards we went to the Christmas Market of Hamelin, the town which is famous in Germany for its story about The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was really a great event and I want to thank Sammy for this!
When we left Bielefeld, we had to take some evidence photo, to proof that we really found Bielefeld. Sammy brought us to a Bielefeld town sign, so we could take a photo in front of it. But... see what happened:
The sign is clearly visible, but Kore and me seem really fake on this picture (click to enlarge). Beside that, you can see a really weird license plate in the background, which has the mysterious number 1337 on it... I'm kinda scared about these happenings, because we actually took 5 pictures and all have the same strange artifacts... Is it possible, that we've never really been to Bielefeld? I guess we will never really know...
Anyway, using this little mysterious blog entry, I want to thank the whole PHP community for another great year and want to wish you all a merry and reflective Christmas time! Enjoy some silent days with your families, take a deep breath and gather some energy for the upcoming 2007!
Thursday, June 22. 2006
Greetings from Norway!
Today was the first day of the eZ publish conference here in Skien, Norway, where the eZ systems headquarter is located. Before today we had 3 days of eZ crew activities, since the complete eZ systems team from over the world is currently in Norway.
But before I start with my little roundup, I'd like to announce some stuff that we (eZ) presented during this conference:
1. The eZ publish online editor (a WYSIWYG web interface) changed it's license. From now on, it is not commercial any more, but released under the GPL and will be shipped with the next eZ publish release.
2. We are starting to develop the "eZ platform", which is an enterprise level platform for PHP development and will be the basis for a future eZ publish release. eZ platform will consist of the eZ application server, which is based on the eZ components. eZ publish will be build on top of that.
But now, let's talk about some social stuff. ;)
On Monday (where we left Dortmund at 2:00 and I did not sleep before that), we arrived in Skien around 11:00, had lunch all together and I went to bed afterwards. That night we spent with pizza and beer at the "eZ bar" (the office).
On Tuesday morning we splitted up into task related groups (developers and management) and had some internal education talks, e.g. Derick about the usage of Xdebug. After lunch we went to a "wild-life"park, where we took some team-building activities. This was amazingly great and lasted from clay pigeon shooting over climbing to canu driving. Absolutly cool and much fun. After that, we went for some "wild-life" dinner (deer).
Wednesday was the eZ partner day, which already belonged to the eZ publish conference. The development teams seized the chance for a discussion phase. We (the eZ components team) planned the upcoming components release 2006.2 (formally known as 1.2), which will probably include a lot of cool new components and features. For example eZ Feed (for reading and writing Atom/RSS feeds), eZ Graph (for rendering charts) and many more.
Today was finally the first day of the official part of the eZ conference. After Derick gave an overview on the current status of our enterprise PHP library, the eZ components, I continued with a 2 hours entrance workshop. The number of attendees was really large and everyone seemed to be quite amazed. At least, that was what they told me. A nice quote I heard from someone was "this is the cleanest piece of PHP code I've ever seen", which does not really sound bad, does it? Later today we will have the eZ Awards dinner, which also sounds quite promising.
Finally, tomorrow, Kore and me will leave Skien again around 10:00 to catch our plane at 13:00 in Oslo Torp. I expect to be home around 19:00 then, where I'm pretty much looking forward to see my sweet girl friend Carmen again. Sadly only until Saturday morning, around 7:00, when we again leave direction Bonn, for the FrOSCon.
Anyway, another great evening here in Norway is waiting. Stay tuned.
Sunday, May 21. 2006
Way back from Bari
Sitting at the Malpensa airport in Milano and waiting for my connection flight to D?sseldorf I seize the chance to work a bit. The conference in Bari was really great. I meat a lot of interesting and especially very nice people. My talk about the our enterprise PHP platform eZ components went quite well and I received a lot of feedback. Since I don't know much italien (as the attendees of my talk will probably have noticed), I skipped the afternoon talks at the phpDay (sorry Zeev ;-P) and used the chance to lay down on the beach for a bit. I even managed to go swimming in the sea. Really great. What I enjoyed most in Bari was actually the food. Italians really know how to make really good dinners. In my whole life I did not have that much anti pasti... ;)
So, all in all, I really enjoyed my trip to Bari and hope I can come back to the phpDay next year, to see another part of Italy. Thanks to all you guys for bringing me there!
Sunday, January 22. 2006
Back from Norway
Norway is a somewhat strange country. When I got there - 2 weeks ago to work with Amos, Derick, Fred and Ray on the eZ components - it had the expected amount of snow. A few days later, there was nothing anymore. We had positive celsius values and the weather was really crappy... until Monday. Since then it has been snowing all the time and yesterday we left when it looked like this:
Nice to watch, but not real fun to walk onto. :) Anyway, it's been another great stay in Skien, where the eZ headquarter is and I'm pretty much looking forward to our summer conference, where we plan to have the complete eZ team there and lots of people from the PHP world. Thanks for the great time, folks!
Friday, August 19. 2005
Leaving Norway again...
Sadly I'll leave the eZ Systems headquarters in Norway tomorrow direction Dortmund again. It really was an amazing time for me in all aspects: Work, people, country and whatever else matters.
We almost finished the work we planned to do during my stay here (some small peaces will follow on Monday, but that's all) and it was really amazing teamwork. By now, we designed the most important eZ Publish Enterprise Components and discussed every single bit of the design in a 5 people team. The work was amazing fun, since all of us joined the team with a completly different background (like Derick, with the C- and PHP-core-background, Amos, who already dealt with the migration of eZ Publish from version 2 to 3, and me with a PHP library background - meaning PEAR). We sometimes seemed to get lost in endless discussions on sense & nonsense, habits and techniques. But after all it's a very good feeling, if really all of us agreed with the picked solution. You will definitly read more on that, next week, wenn eZ Systems publishes a Community Report on what we did in the past 3 weeks.
Beside that I enjoyed Norway pretty much from a non-tourist perspective, which was really cool, too. I got to see the exciting natural environment here (like I went to watch & try to photograph shooting stars with Derick) and learnt to know many original and choice Norwegians which are all really nice people. We went out for lots of party on the weekend (although alcohol is very expensive here and bars close at 3, people know how to make great party) or for the beach when weather was ok (I never saw a one-time-grill before...*g*).
All in all i really enjoyed the time here and would definitly like to come back for some weeks in the nearer future (if managable). When time fits I'll write some more on this topic later on here. So, stay tuned and remember to visit Norway once in your life! It's an amazing country. So far, have a nice weekend! :)