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.
Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
Sunny Stavanger
Friday, May 16th, 2008Holmenkollstafetten
Sunday, May 11th, 2008Over lunch at the IBM office one day I had managed to get myself on to the reserve list for the Software Group team for Holmenkollstafetten. This is an annual 15 person relay around the streets of Oslo which, with a total distance of just 18km, manages to attract a massive entry. If you live in Oslo and are not running yourself you almost certainly know someone who is. As predicted, the drop out rate in our team was pretty high and in the week beforehand I was called up.
Tuesday @ WSTC
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Woke every couple of hours in the night but otherwise didn’t sleep too badly and managed to stay in bed until a reasonable time. Perhaps just as well as I was re-presenting my WebSphere ESB pitch first thing. Thankfully I hadn’t been given quite such a large stage to stand on this time! Some good questions from the audience to keep me on my toes.
Return to Vegas
Monday, May 5th, 2008It’s that time of year when IBM’s WebSphere Services and Support organisation (plus a whole host of interlopers) descend on Las Vegas for our annual technical conference. As usual, I didn’t take up the opportunity of spending more time here than is absolutely necessary and flew out yesterday. Norway doesn’t have the luxury of direct flights so I flew Continental from Oslo to Newark and from there to Vegas. The first flight was probably only half full which was a nice luxury. Sadly, it arrived an hour early and the flight to Vegas departed over an hour late so I had over six hours to kill at Newark and didn’t arrive at the Rio in Vegas until about half eleven.
(more…)
Moving the family
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008We were up early (if not bright) on Monday morning with Eastleigh Area Cars arriving at seven to take us to the airport. (They would take our child seat back to their Chandler’s Ford office from where a friend would then pick it up.) They hadn’t taken the hint about the amount of luggage we would have and it took fifteen minutes to shoe-horn it in to the taxi. The M3 was pretty busy around Winchester as it always is at this time of day. The taxi driver, however, seemingly hadn’t noticed the warning sign for an accident at junction 3 and was surprised when we joined a slow moving queue around 4a. He then told us he didn’t really know the back roads and his road atlas was buried in the boot. Fortunately Christine managed to extract my sat-nav (review still to come) and that took us across to the M4 and in to Heathrow.
(more…)
Oslo arrival
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Well, I finally made it out to Norway yesterday. The journey itself was pretty uneventful – nobody blinked at the size of my bags and the only hold-up was whilst I worked out how to start the hire care (it seems you need to put the clutch right to the floor in a Yaris before the ignition will even turn). The sun was shining as I drove down to the IBM office and the temperature a positively balmy nine degrees. Although there was plenty of snow in the fields around the airport there was little in evidence in the city centre and none further south. Sadly the weather took a downturn today and the rain has removed the white coating from the hills surrounding the city centre.
(more…)
Norway bound
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Most of my friends and colleagues will by now be heartily sick of hearing the phrase “it depends… we may be in Norway by then” (but probably not as sick as I am of saying it!). For those who don’t know, I have, for the past year or so, been trying to arrange an assignment with IBM to the Nordics. Having settled on Norway about five months ago we (myself and the local management teams on either side) have been battling against the numerous internal processes involved. I’m therefore relieved to say that, as of yesterday, we finally have approval to proceed. Lest they change their mind, the current plan is that I head out to Oslo next week, with Christine and Emma following along once accommodation is sorted. We’ll then be out there until sometime around August, returning to the UK in time for Christine to restart lecturing for the new University year. Now there’s just the small matter of getting packed. Oh, and I should probably dust off those “Teach yourself Norwegian” books we bought months ago!!
Lack of connectivity
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008I’m staying in the Melia Galgos in Madrid this week. One of the reasons I selected it from the IBM approved list was because it promised internet connectivity. Sadly this hasn’t really proved to be the case. The wired connection in my room stays up just about long enough for me to accept the terms and conditions and what, at the time, seemed to be a very reasonable rate of 8€ for 24 hours. Unfortunately it then proceeds to go up and down randomly every minute or so before eventually giving up completely. The hotel sent someone up from “technical services” who proceeded to restart my browser and then my machine to no good effect. He then pulled the plug on the router which fixed things but only long enough for him to get out of the room. I then tried the wireless access available in the lobby which worked fine until I tried this evening when it failed to give me an IP address. I’ve now had to resort to using my 3G card. 🙁
RSS - Posts