Finally Authenticity Again!

After all this plastic fake stuff in Vegas it’s nice to come to Britain, especially here to Winchester where you are surrounded by all this genuine authentic buildings and things. I love it! OK, I have to admit the round table is in fact a fake from the 14th century, BUT this fake is older than the discovery of America and this makes it authentic again, somehow. At least for people from the US it should be very genuine then…

I think authenticity is something we should strive for, not only for buildings and stuff we do, even for how we act and how we are. More wood – less plastic.

Off to Sin City!

Some guys from work and me are attending to this years IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas. This will be my first time in Sin City and I’m quite excited about the trip. I’ll try to keep up blogging about both the interesting technical stuff from the conference and my personal impressions about the city.

(insider) I have already ordered some drivers gloves which I have to pick up at the local Bimmer dealer - so what could go wrong? (/insider)

Down to Vienna

Yepp, it’s time again for the IBM Transaction and Messaging Technical Conference 2007 this year in Vienna, Austria. Last year we were in Atlanta this year it’s Vienna. Hopefully we will meet up with all the friends from IBM in Hursley and with the guys from our partner company X-INTEGRATE.
We’re going to have our own booth their as well so feel free to drop by for a chat if you’re there.

Back from the far north

Finally I’m back from my excursion to the far north of Sweden. This time I went on a business trip to Kiruna for an educational assignment. Due to the somewhat crappy travel times up to Kiruna I had some spare time which could be used for some sightseeing. Now the pics are available at my Picasa web album.

Pictures from Kiruna/Lappland

Pictures from the LKAB mine at Kiruna

Enjoy!

You recognize that you are in Lapland…

…when you see this kind of signs:

Sorry for the poor quality, I took the picture today at Kiruna Airport with the phone.

Unfortunately there was no snow yet…

Zystems-Ed in Edinburgh!

Last weekend our whole company went over to Edinburgh, Scotland for our yearly educational event. Friday was the educational day, the rest of the weekend was just pure fun in exploring town and learning about how to produce whisky.

My goals for the weekend before this journey:

- try out some fried mars bars
- explore the old town of Edinburgh by feet (including Mary King’s Close)
- by some bottles of single malt
- do some distillery sightseeing
- have a really good time with ALL of my co-workers

I’m very satisfied with this weekend as I managed to reach all of my objectives for the weekend and yeah we had a whole lot of fun. I didn’t only try some fried mars, I tasted as well a fried snickers, bounty and a lion-bar. All of them tasted just as unhealthy as food can taste but just wonderful at the same time.

The exploration was interesting and Mary King’s Close was a real stunner, be sure to do the tour if you are in Edinburgh.

Single malt was bought directly at the Glenkinchie distillery directly after the guided tour. I bought a Teaninich and a Strathmill as the tour guide told us that these will be exported and are only available in Scotland, may be just a myth but as a stupid tourist you have your responsibilities. After a lot of testing and examining of the two whisky’s the decision was much easier to buy them, thank god that testing didn’t get extended otherwise I would’ve come home with many more bottles…

That could have been the whole scotch harvest of the trip if there wouldn’t have been a well sorted duty-free shop at Edinburgh airport. They had this well known always wanted to buy one whisky which I couldn’t resist to buy; the “Cellar 13” of the Glenmorangie distillery.

After all I would like to recommend you to go to Edinburgh if you like whisky, stone buildings, nice people, unhealthy food, and perhaps rain, I hope that this was not the last time for me. But actually next time I would prefer to hire a car and do some more countryside exploration, involving many more distilleries.

I created a small web-album for some of the pictures I took, check it out here!