Alef Arendsen

I’m in Norway at the moment, certifying ProgramUtvikling as a SpringSource training partner. Kaare and Kristoffer (the two trainers) are excellent trainers and as we speak, Kristoffer is explaining the group of attendees how Spring MVC works.

The training center and my hotel are located in a pretty nice neighborhood (at least, nature-wise). A little South-West of the center of Oslo, we’re on an IT campus (Fornebu) where Telenor has its offices, but also various other Norwegian and international companies.

This morning I walked from the hotel to the training location alongside the Oslo fjord. The view I had today was better than 14 years ago. I can still remember being on a ferry from Frederikshavn (Denmark) to Oslo when in the morning (it was a night ferry I believe) the only thing we saw was rain rain and more rain… Back then, the rain continued for two more days, before the weather cleared up. We had 4 weeks of sun and 25 degrees for the remainder of the holiday.

Well, I’m back (not for the first time since my holiday 14 years ago), but this time for work (although, it’s a big pleasure actually).

This morning also, I stumbled across a collection of bikes Norwegian people take to work. They’re a lot different from the bikes Dutch people would use. I don’t think you’d ever see such a big collection of mountain bikes, hybrids and road bikes together in any particular location (apart from the store of course). They’d immediately be stolen. In Holland it’s just old rusty city bikes…

Yesterday we had a few beers at the bi-weekly JavaPilsen: the gathering for Java developers in Norway. It’s fun to see how such a vibrant community gets together every two weeks to share war stories…

Which reminds me: I’m organizing another Amsterdam Java Meetup in about 20 days. Next Friday September 12, at the Jaren in Amsterdam there’s free beers for all (if you can speak a few words of Java). Hope to see you there.

Anyway, I’m almost done here in Oslo. Flying back tomorrow night. I’ll be back in Norway quite soon though. In September the guys from javaBin are organizing JavaZone and I’m speaking there about (obviously) Spring. I just heard today there are only 20 tickets left. So it’ll be a packed show again I guess. If you want to join, you’d better be quick!

Deze website verdient een blog post. In het Nederlands nog wel. Op www.stopdetelefoongids.nl kun je een petitie tekenen waarmee je aangeeft geen Telefoon Gids meer te willen ontvangen (en ook geen Gouden Gids). Nou dat ding gaat bij mij al jaren meteen de prullenbak in, dus ik vind dit een super initiatief. Nu nog genoeg aandacht zodat de telefoon-gids-goden de gids daadwerkelijk niet meer gaan sturen…

Inmiddels 0.19 bomen bespaart… Dat moet omhoog! Inschrijven dus!

I’m in Oslo at the moment, sitting in on a Core Spring class. A friend of mine just send me the following. After reading for about twenty minutes, I’ve decided to put a trip like this on my wish list…

http://www.offshoreodysseys.com/owners/log.php?log_id=53…

I saw Factory Girl yesterday. For some reason the movie is almost two years old, but has never been released in the Netherlands yet. This weekend it went on display in the Louis Hartlooper cinema in Utrecht. The movie tells the story of Edie Sedgwick who travels from Cambridge to New York and ends up being one of the girls doing their thing in The Factory, Andy Warhols studio.

Edie died age 28 after having lived a pretty wild life. The pictures I know from Edie show a very charismatic, radiant woman. Sienna Miller in the movie however doesn’t really know how to convey Edie’s personality and charisma at all. When she’s first introduced to Andy, the scene even gets a little childish as opposed to what people tell about the first encounter between Edie and Andy. Sienna’s lack of being able to personify Edie shows throughout the movie and really has a negative impact on the movie.

All-and-all, I don’t think the movie was very good. It doesn’t get boring, so it was entertaining, but it wasn’t a movie I would not want to have missed or so.

Some music:

• Simian Mobile Disco on the FABRICLIVE no.41 I bought this weekend
• Moongazer by Invasion, whom I saw in London a few weeks ago
• A Little Bit of Feel Good by Jamie Lidell’s new album

I finally found some time to make some pictures of my two Gaastra Jekyll bars. People frequently emailed me asking what modifications I had made to one of the bars to make the depower straps work a little better. Without the modification (I explained in a previous post) the depower strap doesn’t work at all in the sense that you have to fully power in order to be able to depower the kite. Weird stuff…

Anyway, I found the time to make some pictures, so here they are.

The first series of pictures is from the bar I haven’t modified yet. My finder in the first picture is pointing at the blue depower strap. As you can see, it’s fixed to the power and safety lines (that go the chicken loop) using a metal ring. The fundamental issue here is that the blue depower strap is fixed to the lines above the stopper ball (the black triangle on the far right). This means that if you’d like to depower, you first have to pull down the stopper ball, essentially first powering the kite. You can see the same in the second picture.

In the second series, you’ll I have removed the fixing of the blue depower strap from the power and safety lines. This essentially allows you to freely pull the depower strap, without having to first pull down the stopper ball (hence powering the kite).

There is one drawback to doing this: if you depower the kite (and you can see this in the second picture), you’ll end up with a quite a long strap that’s just dangling around a bit. Yesterday it got in the way a little bit when I was out on the water with a fully depowered 14sqm. But well, it’s a lot safer than with the strap still fixed to the power lines. Now I can power and depower the kite whenever I want, even when I’m riding…

I hope this helps… Let me know if you have any questions.

I updated the firmware of my camera (Pentax K10D) yesterday night. All of a sudden, the AF of my new lens was about 4 times as fast. I wondered why that was and after searching for a bit, I found out: only the 1.30 firmware supports the fast AF drive my new lense has. So, if you have a Pentax K10D and have bought a Pentax DA lens, update your firmware!

In the meantime, I’m listening to Cake as I’m writing this. I got a recommendation for this song through Last.FM and I hadn’t heard this song for a long time. What occurred to me is that the lyrics of this song are pretty weird. So, here goes, the lyrics for Frank Sinatra, performed by Cake.

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations
A faintly glimmering radio station
While Frank Sinatra sings “Stormy Weather”
The flies and spiders get along together
Cobwebs fall on an old skipping record
Beyond the suns that guard this roof
Beyond your flowers of flaming truths
Beyond your latest ad campaigns
An old man sits collecting stamps
In a room all filled with Chinese lamps
He saves what others throw away
He says that he’ll be rich someday
We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations
A faintly glimmering radio station
We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations
A faintly glimmering radio station
While Frank Sinatra sings “Stormy Weather”
The flies and spiders get along together
Cobwebs fall on an old skipping record

I was out on the water myself yesterday for a little bit again. The injury is doing fine, although it’s not totally done and over with yet. I took it easy, especially because the winds were quite strong (in the 25 knots range).

I also took some pictures again. They’re up on my Picasa Web Gallery…

Unfortunately I only discovered yesterday that I had forgotten to put back my ISO settings to something lower than 400… All the pictures are a bit grainy because of this. More luck next time… Tomorrow in the early evening I’ll probably be heading to the beach again, ‘coz then it’s going to be a bit stormy again. Hope to get some good shots then.

Today I bought a new lens for my camera. It’s a Pentax DA*300mm. I took some pictures with it today at Wijk aan Zee where it was blowing quite intensely (about 25 knots near the end of the day right before we left). It was too bad I couldn’t be in the water myself, but spending some time with the camera was great too!!

Here’s one of the pictures I took. All the others are available in my online album.

I just had a great week this week. Last Monday I travelled to London. I had to be there for a training session with SkillsMatter, our partner in the UK. SkillsMatter’s office is in the Islington area (I think that’s what you call it), right in between Exmouth Market and Farringdon tube station.

I did the training together with Ben Corrie, our newly joined UK consultant. UK joined us from IBM where he did some fairly advanced stuff on their J9 JVM.

On Tuesday evening, I went to the theatre. Every time I am in London, I try to at least go to the theatre once. This time I didn’t want something too heavy or intensive, so I went to Avenue Q which was simply the best! I had a great laugh for about 2 hours! Every time I go to the theatre in London, I wish we had such an abundance of theatres in Holland, it’s nice to be able to go out and just pick a show you’d like to see…

On Wednesday we went out for drinks with the SkillsMatter people and had some food in the Easton, which was nice.

On Thursday, Ben and I went to see some live bands in the Camden area. Camden I had never been before… It’s a great area. Very vibrant and lots of great bars and restaurants. We went to see Chrome Hoof, which was surprisingly enough very very cool! Before we went to Camden, we first had dinner in Pho, where (duh), they serve Pho. I recommend it, although it’s not the best Vietnamese I’ve ever had…

All in all a great week!

Then on Friday, I was looking at the weather prediction for the weekend and I saw we have some great winds coming this Sunday. 25 knots or so, simply great. The problem is that I’m still suffering from my injury in the groin area so that means no kiting for me this weekend…

Now the injury didn’t get any better. I’m walking like an old men now and getting to the train station took me twice as long today.

I do have some pictures now that might explain the injury a little bit. First, there’s me kiting, like I never done anything else in my life (errrr…).

But then there’s my lying on the ground in a very strange position :S Not sure what happened here, but this isn’t how things are supposed to be.