Alef Arendsen

I was having a drink with Arjen and Costin, both colleagues of mine at SpringSource tonight at the 21st floor of the Radisson SAS hotel in Oslo. The bar there is quite nice, not just for the cocktails they serve, but mostly for the view. You can look over entire Oslo and although the skyline is not that exciting, it’s still a very nice view.

Going down in the elevator reminded me of an article I read in The New Yorker a while ago about elevator consultants. Being an elevator consultant really changes the way you experience going from the 21st floor of the Radisson to the ground floor I suspect. I think it must be quite a bit the same at IT guys like me are experiencing interacting with systems they know are built with stuff like Spring, Java or anything else they’re familiar with.

An elevator consultant basically helps designing an efficient elevator system in a building. Now for a small building that’s probably not such a big deal, but for bigger buildings, apparently there a whole bunch of things to think about, such as amount of passengers the elevator system can transport per minute, the average amount of time the people have to wait for an elevator to come (there’s probably a trehshold after which it gets annoying to wait longer I would say), the amount of elevators (more elevators leaves less space to be used for real stuff, such as appartments or office space) and the types of elevators (express elevators or ‘local’ elevators).

Until I had read the article, I had never though about all of this. It’s a line of business that you don’t often think about…

Anyway, the Radisson SAS in Oslo has 5 or 6 elevators I believe and having stayed there, I can say they either had a good elevator consultant or just put in enough elevators, because I never had to wait for a long time to get up or down, even in the morning when everybody wants to get down to the breakfast room or back up to brush their teeth.

More on elevator consultants on Wikipedia.

Next time I’m on the plane and I don’t have anything to do. I don’t have to play Minesweeper anymore or any of those silly games that come with the Mac. Instead, I can travel in style (err, sort of) and play Commander Keen. I have played Commander Keen for hours and hours back in the days.

Today I had a great session at Slufter. I’d never been there before. This spot is close to the ports of Rotterdam, so has a pretty industrial feel to it. There are some waves, areas with chop and also some very shallow and butter flat water.

There’s also a small sandbar quite close by and with today’s wind we could go there. There I ran into a stupid kiter that didn’t speak any Dutch. He couldn’t even body-drag upwind, but had lost his board. Asked me if I could get it for him. I did it, but straight after he got up again, he crashed his kite again and lost his board again. Then he pulled his safety (depowering the kite, but still not completely without power). Relaunching the kite apparently was something he’d never learnt. The rescue brigade had to get him (and his kite) and bring him to safety. Pretty stupid, to go so far off shore if you can’t even body-drag upwind to recover your board.

Anyway, the progress on the jumps is quite okay. Lars was impressed seeing me make airs of at least 4 meters. I landed some of them, but was also quite happy that I had bought an impact vest; half of them I didn’t land and crashing into the water after having jumped 4 meter high can be quite painful.

Hoping for some more wind next weekend!

Some music I listened to this week. Mostly quite unknown, but also quite cool:

• CirKus (feat. Nene Cherry). New Trip Hop stuff by Burt Ford (prev. associated with Portishead and Masive Attack). Specifically: Laylow, Fail Safe and Time for the Whistle, all three from their album called Laylow.
• Dusted by Leftfield. I sometime tune into a Trip Hop radio station on Last.FM and this time CirKus showed up, but obviously also Leftfield. Still great stuff!!
• And my personal favorite this week: Ez3kiel! A French group producing music in the so-called magnet-Dub genre (didn’t have a clue magnet-Dub was a specific genre before I heard Ez3kiel and to be honest I’m still not sure about magnet-Dub as a genre ). Anyway there music is great. Especially the older album with title song Barb4ry. I like that album most, for example the song title Obssd or Phantom Land.

I guess you can see what kind of mood I’m in now

By the way, to see what I’m aiming for (in terms of kiteboarding), look at the following video: http://www.kiteboardpro.nl/?p=86.

The conference season is slowly getting started again. This is my schedule for the coming three to four months:

JavaZone: one of the biggest Java conference in the world is hosted in Oslo. I’m presenting a session provocatively titled ‘Spring == XML, XML == suck therefore Spring == sucks??’. That should be fun.

Straight after JavaZone I’m flying to Italy for a short weekend in Perloz. From there, I’m flying to Stockholm, to present at the SpringSource Seminar, co-hosted together with Jayway. I’m looking forward to meeting up with some old friends in Stockholm again!

October 8th, we’re hosting a similar SpringSource Seminar in Delft in the Netherlands. I’ll be presenting on the SpringSource Application Platform as well as the Spring Portfolio.

November 11th, we’ll probably be present at the NL-JUG fall gathering, probably hosted in ‘t Spant in Bussum again. I’m not sure if I’ll be presenting. Last time Iwein covered for me, so I might have to cover for him this time

The week thereafter, I’m in Malmø (if that’s how it’s spelled) for Øredev. I’ll be presenting on AOP there and am looking forward to meeting with Ben Alex again, who supposedly is going to be there too!

Then in the beginning of December I might have to go to Florida (ahhh, what a shame) for our bi-annual developer conference, the USA version this time. No details there yet.

Later in the month, I’ll also be traveling back to Israel (Tel Aviv) once more for JavaEdge, to which I’m really looking forward.