Alef Arendsen

2008 has been a great year. A few highlights, both personal and from the business. The main them for me this year (just as last year by the way) was travel. I’ve been to lots of places. Most of the visits were really cool, others were more of the same. But more of the same is something also good to get to know a place better.

January

This was a great month for kiting. I did many sessions. 2007 I started kiteboarding and last winter was the first winter I actually was out on the water. Apart from one scare incident (where my satefy least broke and my chicken loop failed on my–meaning I lost my kite and had to swim back to shore in water of about 8 degrees Celcius) the winter was really for kiteboarding.

I also traveled quite a bit in January. I went to Luxembourg (where I had to hand in my car(!!) because of speeding and not having my driver’s license with me–thanks dad for driving 5 hours back and forth to get it to me) and Poland.

In January, at SpringSource we announced that we had just acquired Covalent, the provider of support for Tomcat, Apache HTTPd and more Apache products.

February

In February I had to travel to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Malta. The Copenhagen got canceled as I fell ill… I always like going to Stockholm. It’s a great city with wonderful people and some really good vibes. The Malta trip was definitely a nice one too. I played poker with some of the Maltese guys and had great fun overall. I also had a cupboard made at home.

March

In March I traveled quite a bit. First I traveled to Malmø, followed by Egypt, Israel and Italy. The renovations in the house are by now slowly progressing. Over the weekend we had meetings with the electrician and the plumber. I also had a break-in in my house. Fortunately I wasn’t there and thanks to the neighbors and my parents, everything was (almost) back to normal when I got back home from Israel.

April

In April, I went to Italy again, for the Salone del Mobile. Other than that, it was a quiet month for a change.

May

Italy seems to be a recurring thing this year. I spent two weeks traveling back and forth between Milan and the house in Perloz. We did a lot of renovations. Installed electricity and some of the plumbing. The progress is clearly showing by now. I also went to Greece this month with the family. We rented two boats and spent a week sailing in the Lefkada area. This was simply wonderful. I believe May was also the month we closed our Series B round of financing at SpringSource.

June

The biggest thing in June was obviously my birthday. I turned 30 this year which I definitely felt. The most important change: everybody started saying ‘U’ (the formal form of you in Dutch) to me instead of ‘je’ (the informal form). Not that I notice it all that much: I’m never in the Netherlands anyway It was also the month in which I spent time in Italy again. And it was the month in which we beat the Italians with 3 to nil!

July

In July I was in Israel and Southampton. Nothing fancy happened here, although both trips were for sure very nice. Ah yeah, a friend of mine and me hosted a party in Amsterdam which was nice.

August

August lots of kiteboarding and a bit of travel (UK and Oslo).

September

This month again had quite a bit of travel with Brussels, Oslo and Stockholm (although Brussels was only one day). There was also a fair bit of kiteboarding again and a trip to Italy, to fix the bathroom.

October

In October, again there was lots of kiteboarding and we also had the closing party at Wijk aan Zee which was cool!! This month I went to Helsink and to Antwerp for business trips.

November

This month, the big end-of-year travel stint started again. First there was Aarhus, followed by Øredev in Malmø. At SpringSource we also announced we had acquired G2One, the company developing the Groovy and Grails technologies.

December

While I’m writing this, I’m in Haifa. The end of the year is fast approaching and the only trip I have left is the one to Italy, starting December 28th. I’m spending time there until the beginning of 2009, so closing the year in style. This months I saw the airports of CPH (for a week in the wonderful city of Copenhagen), JFK, ATL and MIA (all for a trip to SpringOne and the Design Miami) and TLV (for a trip to Tel Aviv and other parts of Israel). There was also a small driving trip to Antwerp for Devoxx. I’m looking forward to finally spending a week or two at home, although I definitely don’t want to miss the skiing trip to Italy!

Well, I’m signing out for the year. I wish you all a very happy 2009!

Almost a month ago, I posted on my experiences with MyC4. This post gives a short update on things. The summary is that basically, things are not going all that well… It’s not that I’m going to care a lot about it, for me it’s an experiment, but still…

First of all, it’s impossible to get an insight into the expected ROI anymore, since the outstanding interest has been removed from the My Account page. I spent a few minutes searching on the MyC4 forums a while ago, but couldn’t find anything that explains why this happened. Other than that 12 instead of 5 loans are now late with their repayments. There are no defaults yet, but this is definitely something that would not come as a surprise to me if it started happening soon.

Here’s the hard numbers:

Uploaded since March 08	€2,417.02
Available in account	€191.36
Pending bids	€0.00
Outstanding principal	€2,301.18
Outstanding interest	UNKNOWN
~ projected ROI	UNKNOWN (due to missing outstanding interest number)
Total investments	45
Late / defaulted	12 / 0

I have decided to leave the repayments in my account for a little while. I believe MyC4 charges a few euros to transfer the money back to your original account. This basically provides an incentive to not transfer any money back, but still I’m going to do this. I’ll just have to wait a little while more for the balance to accrue a little bit, otherwise the transfer costs outweigh the money that I made on the loans.

Why transfering back? Well, because I haven’t seen almost any improvements in the communication in the last month. On top of that, the amount of insight I’m getting is decreasing and the amount of late repayments too.

[update] apparently, after questions on the forums, MyC4 clarified the removal of the outstanding interest numbers. Because of things like ‘early payments’, ‘currency exchange benefits/losses’ it’s pretty much impossible to calculate outstanding interest, at least that’s what the clarification is. Well, that makes sense, although right now, if you don’t plot your investments in a spreadsheet (as somebody on the forums says), like me, you do not have any insight into the projected revenue anymore. This is bad. And what’s worse is that there’s no communication about it whatsoever. To prove the point I looked in my INBOX to see if any emails arrived from the MyC4 team lately. Unless everything is eaten by my Google spam filter (which I doubt, because the automailer does get through), there hasn’t been any (human) communication from MyC4 by email since April 9 (that’s 3/4 of a year). Like I said in my previous post: I’m more than happy to contribute back in one form or another, if the MyC4 organization would be willing to allow me (and others) to do so. So far, this call has been left unanswered tho’.

As I write this, I just finished an amazing trip to Jerusalem, Israel. I have been to Israel twice before this year, but never managed to get see anything else than Tel Aviv. Thanks to the wonderful AlphaCSP guys, I am here again and this time I made a trip to Jerusalem. In short: I don’t think there is a more photogenic city I’ve ever been to before. Normally I don’t take my camera on business trips, but this time I did do that, and I’m really glad I took that decision.

We (Stephen Colebourne and I) spent about 5 hours in the old city of Jerusalem and pretty much covered all quarters. I’m not a tourist that spends hours and hours in one church or site, but Jerusalem is a place in which 5 hours only gives you a very rough glance of everything; spending more time is definitely recommended.

We started by walking into the Muslim quarter. Next, we walked into the Christian quarters with its churches. We crossed into the Jewish quarter by passing by the wailing wall and finally we went to the Arminian quarter. I never knew Jerusalem was split up this way and that each quarter has its very own unique feel to it.

The Muslim quarter is essentially almost like one big bazar, with its in door shops. It’s really crowded there and I liked the atmosphere there a lot. Later in the day, we even walked on the rooftops above the markets, which offered some great views on this same markets from above. The Christian quarter is filled with churches, monestaries and other niceties. The Jewish quarter is very peaceful and quiet. This probably also had to do with the fact that it was almost Sabbat. We ate a hummus out on a square and walked through the narrow streets close by the wall. The Arminian quarter also is very peaceful and quiet, with similar narrow streets.

We saw the wailing wall, which was impressive, not because of the size of the wall or the architecture or anything, but just because of the meaning it has for Jewish people.

I called up my grandma while there. She’s been there a long time ago and is desperately trying to convince my parents to also go there. I think they should definitely go and take grandma with them. She’d really like that!

The first picture is in the Muslim quarter, looking at one of the in door markets. The second picture is taken from the inside looking up into one of the domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, supposedly located over Christ’s tomb. The building of the church was begun in 326 A.D. Note that the pictures were uploaded straight from the camera to my blog and have not been modified in any way (I didn’t even do the white balance, as I only have iPhoto here while still in Tel Aviv).

I’ll spend some more time at home post-processing some of the pictures and uploading them to Picasa. Other than that, Jerusalem is a place that I’ definitely planning on visiting again some day.

Stephen Colebourne did his Future of the Java Language talk again at JavaEdge here in Israel. It’s a two-part talk where in the first part he higlights the current status of the Java language and how its development is progressing. In the second part he highlights 10 different features that might all classify as small language changes category Sun announced there are going to be for Java 7.

The list includes things as a loop status control construct, string interpolation, a construct similar to the C# using statement, an easier way to iterate over maps using the foreach statement and more.

Then he has people vote on the different changes highlighted during the session. This is interesting, because it allows people to express their opinion on things directly and of course, Stephen is publishing the results. Here at JavaEdge, I think several hundred people voted. I’ll leave the publication of the results from the vote here at JavaEdge in Tel Aviv to Mr. Colebourne himself. In the meantime, you can find the results from the vote at Devoxx here.

Stephen also mentioned that he’s happy to help out any user group or other gathering do the same vote. I guess that probably means sharing slides and so on. I think this is a good initiative as it helps Sun / the JCP decide which features to put in.

I’m speaking at the JavaDay in Rome early next year. The event takes places on the 24th of January. I came across their website just now and this ad struck me as typical Italian.

Also, Andrea del Bene ha scritto: are you planning to give your talk (”Spring == XML therefore Spring == Sucks??”) in Italian?

Andrea: ahhhh, parlare di Spring in Italiano?? Penso di no … Come se dice Dependency Injection in Italiano, iniezione di dependenze? Hmmm, I don’t think it’s gonna work .

Anyway, looking forward to seeing all of you in Roma!

Femke recently advised me to look at LiveMocha for language lessons. I had a look at it and it works out quite alright! People help you correct spelling mistakes, et cetera. It’s a true Web 2.0 collaborative experience. I wonder how they ever will make money though .

Anyway, I came across this nice little picture during the course. Typical Italian, to speak about French fries and calamari fritti as cibo economico (cheap food).

By the way, I’m probably going to Italy between Christmas and New Year’s for a few days of skiing. I heard the Valle d’Aosta is completely snowed under right now (or at least, at 500m and higher, there’s snow). So there will be no way I can ever reach our house by car. I’m thinking of doing it on foot, although I left my hiking shoes in the house, so that’s going to be a little hard then I guess. Anyway, I’ll probably book a hotel for the first night and then see what happens after that.

If anybody is in the region after Christmas, let me know.

Music I have been listening to the last few weeks:

• Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s – nice and easy indie pop. There are some good concerts a emporter over at the Blogotheque from this Indianapolis band
• Several Arrows Later by Matt Pond PA
• Mend (To Fix, To Repair) by Elsiane – trip-hop for a lazy Sunday afternoon
• The ever impressive Heligoland by Overseer, a 23 minute piece with about a phone ringing for about 19 minutes

Last year I wrote a piece on the amount travel I did and whether or not CO2 compensation for this is something that’s worthwhile. This year, we implemented a CO2 compensation policy at SpringSource, so I can now expense the compensation I do for all business-related travel.

This year, I’ve been on the road for about a total of 160 days to locations ranging from places such as Miami, Manila, Tel Aviv and Cairo, to places closer to home including Luxembourg and Antwerp.

I mostly travel by plane, but also do the occasional travel by car. Dopplr (dopplr.com) keeps track of my travel quite neatly, so I don’t have to do the manual calculation anymore. In total it’s about 14,000 kg of CO2 this year, which amounts of a few hundred euros of compensation I need to do. The question now is: where to do it. Last year, I entered all my stuff manually into the calculator GreenSeat.nl offers and then compensated, but I don’t feel like doing this again. So: does anybody know a service where I can simply compensate for a set amount without having to enter all my travels first?

There is a discrepancy by the way between what I have to compensate according to our Dopplr and what GreenSeat.nl calculated for me last year. Don’t know why…