Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
532The 17th May is yet another public holiday in Norway although sadly, this year, a Saturday. This time it is the National Constitution Day, celebrating Norway’s declaration as an independent state in 1814 (although still under Swedish rule). The day is very much targeted at the young and as we ate our breakfast we could see the local children gathering at the school for the raising of the flag. Unfortunately, it was to prove to be the coldest National Day for fifty years and at this point was actually snowing!
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Posted in Family, Food, Friends, Travel | Comments Off on Norwegian Constitution Day
Friday, May 16th, 2008
I’ve been in Stavanger the past two days for a meeting and, despite the city’s reputation for rain, mostly we’ve just had gorgeous sunshine. Both the meeting and our accommodation has been at the Hummeren Hotel. Hummeren translates as lobster which probably gives you a clue that it is located on the waterfront and, during breaks, we have enjoyed sitting outside on the sun soaked decking looking out over the bay, sheltered from both the wind and views of the local oil industry.
Posted in Travel, Work | Comments Off on Sunny Stavanger
Monday, May 12th, 2008
529Whit Monday is a public holiday in Norway and, as the weather was set to be fair, we decided to do some outdoors tourism at the Norwegian Folk Museum. This is an open-air museum with 150+ buildings from various different parts of Norwegian history transported to the site. Perhaps the most famous of this is the large wooden stave church.
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Posted in Travel | Comments Off on Norsk Folkemuseum
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
The first slot of the day was one of those rare occasions where I wasn’t quite sure what to attend. In the end I opted for Alex Polozoff’s "Large Topology Tactics and Tradeoffs" presentation as I have great respect for his opinions. The emphasis here was not so much on the technology but the processes and the people. Most of it seemed common sense (at least to me) but the presentation should be a useful resource for anyone embarking on large scale WebSphere topologies.
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Posted in DataPower, Food, Travel, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Process Server | Comments Off on Wednesday @ WSTC
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
As the weather showed no signs of settling down we decided to leave Cornwall a day early and spend a day at my parents, popping in to visit my Uncle in Devon on the way past. Cornwall to Hertfordshire isn’t a drive I’d normally like to make in a day but the Vectra’s cruise control meant the M5, M4, M25 and M1 all slide past without too much pain. It proved to be the right decision as we had a wonderfully sunny day at my parents. We were able to sit outside on the lawn and, after patting it experimentally for about twenty minutes, Emma eventually decided that grass was safe to crawl on! Emma also made the most of being back in a house and proceeded to ascend the stairs two or three times.
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Posted in Travel | Comments Off on Cornwall to Oslo
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
520After work on Tuesday we set off on the long journey from Oslo to Cornwall for the wedding of my brother in-law. Things didn’t get off to a good start when, on stopping to fill up our Norwegian hire car with petrol before returning it, I inserted my credit card in the first slot I came to, only milliseconds later to realise that it was where the receipt come out. About twenty minutes later, having tried everything from a coffee stirrer to a pair of cooking tongs to extract the card, the cashier eventually found the right key to unlock the compartment and free my card.
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Posted in Travel | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
514It was raining when we got up this morning so we decided to head in to town for a bit of shopping. We finally gave in and bought a English-Norwegian dictionary. Up until now I’ve been struggling along with InterTran via the FoxLingo Firefox add-on but it’s pretty useless failing to translate most of the words that tell you what any sentence is actually trying to tell you. Many of these are compound words which, if you try splitting them up in enough different ways, eventually yield some meaning. Someone that’s just much easier to do with dead-wood though.
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Posted in Running, Travel | Comments Off on Shopping, sights and snow
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
508The sun was out again yesterday evening for the first race of the Oslo City Cup, held at nearby Rikshospitalet. Emma had her dinner early and with split starts we both managed to get a run. The cup has an interesting format with everyone running the same course (3.1km yesterday). Start intervals of just 15 seconds meaning that the terrain was absolutely teeming with people, particularly as the course was squeezed in to a patch of woodland about 1km long by 300metres at the widest point.
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Posted in Orienteering, Travel | Comments Off on Oslo City Cup 1
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