Alef Arendsen

I just realized that when you travel that much, your own house also turns into a hotel. You’re hardly ever there, when the cleaning lady still refreshes the sheets every time, it’s just like a hotel bed…

The bad thing though is, that although my house is a bit more spacious than a hotel room (nope, no Presidential Marriott rooms at SpringSource), the service is terrible. There is no minibar (my fridge is empty), if you dial zero on the phone, there’s one to answer your questions such as ‘could you bring me some shaving creem, I forgot mine’, and above all, there’s no room service!

I just came back from Copenhagen. I spent the week there and had a lot of fun. I took the 6.10pm flight out, just as last week, when I spent almost all the week in Malmø. Next Sunday I’m flying to Miami to meet up with a group of colleagues from SpringSource to treat our attendees at SpringOne with a great show. I’m returning Monday morning, the week thereafter and then I’ll spend one night at home again. Then it’s off to Antwerp where I’ll stay until Friday. Then Wednesday thereafter, I’m flying out to Tel Aviv, to travel back some time the week thereafter…

Then it’s time for Christmas and I’ll be able to restock my fridge again and turn this place into a real house for some time. January is looking quite on the travel, so it should be great spending some time at home.

Some interesting places I went to in Copenhagen this week:

• Nørrebro Bryghus – restaurant and brewery. I didn’t know CPH had such a great beer tradition
• Famo 51 – great Italian restaurant… Probably one of the better ones I’ve ever eaten, outside of Italy
• House of Souls – (great) Cajun food and good atmosphere in the centre of town

The kite community in Holland is pretty big and very vibrant. We have a pretty big crew of pro riders. Kevin Langeree came in 2nd in this year’s PKRA (the world cup for kiteboarders) freestyle competition. Then we have Ruben Lenten, who’s the mega-kite-loop guru. Together with the guys from Kitecinema he’s produced some amazing material of the most scary kiteloops ever. If you’re interested in looking what that’s all about, go and have a look at Stormsjees 2.0 @ YouTube. There’s also a high-quality version of the movie, which is awesome to watch. At the moment however, it’s not possible to get to the movies, because the site is down…

Online, the kite community in Holland mainly gets together in two places: hanglos.nl and kitehigh.nl. The former has been down for the last few days (they’re experiences a failure of the power supply of one of their servers–I guess they don’t have such a good SLA ).

Anyway, fortunately Kitehigh is still up and I just discovered this little movie of Kevin Langeree. As I said, he came in second in the PKRA freestyle competition, but as you can see in the movie he also likes to rip the waves pretty hard (with and without a kite). Great material to look at when there’s no wind…

Other than that, this weekend wasn’t all that special. I came home Friday night from a trip to Antwerp, had dinner with @maggievie, a few drinks after that with Giorgio in town. On Saturday I had drinks at Jack’s place and today I finally finished all the preparations for the accountant to start filing my tax report (both business and personal) over 2007.

I’m looking forward to the next windy day. In my absence, I asked my dad to get me a little camera from a local shop (they came only came in very limited supply). It’s shock- and waterproof up until 3 meter, uses SD cards to store the footage and has a pretty decent resolution for such a small cam I’ve heard people say. So that means that pretty soon, you’ll be able to see some real action instead of only still photographs. I haven’t picked it up yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it. Going to drop by at my parents tomorrow or so I guess… Oh, if you’re interested to know which brand it is: it’s an ATC2000.

In the meantime I’ve kind of finalized my schedule for the next 7 weeks, which involves 5 weeks of travel. I’m going to be at home for the next two weeks (although I might have to go to Brussels somewhere next week). Then I’m heading Aalborg for a session at a client, followed by Copenhagen for a few customer visits. Then on to Malmø for Øredev. All this in one week by the way. Next up is a full week of Copenhagen (I will be home for the weekend though) for a course and a SpringSource seminar. Then on to Miami for SpringOne. The week thereafter I’ll be in Antwerp, for Devoxx where I’ll be co-presenting on Spring 3.0 alongside friend and colleague Arjen Poutsma. Finally, I’m wrapping up this tour with a week’s worth of Israel, where I’m presenting at JavaEdge, a conference hosting by our friends from AlphaCSP. I hope to stay there for a few days. I’ve heard and seen Haifa has some strong winds in December, so I might be taking my kite gear.

All the conferences should be great. If you’re in the neighborhood and have a chance to make it to one of them drop me a line and we’ll meet up.

I didn’t know Denmark had that much of a beer culture. People looked very weird at me when I told them I had been in Copenhagen for the past four days and I hadn’t visited a beer pub yet. The immediately started pointing me in all kinds of directions to what in their opinions were the better pubs.

I also didn’t know Denmark had that much of a Christmas culture either. Christmas beer, Christmas lighting, Christmas everywhere (at least, more than in Holland that is).

I like the city (haven’t been here since I was 5 or so). Too bad it’s raining and getting dark very early. Oh well, I have three books with me, I won’t get bored

Which books am I reading now? Well, I’m just starting in Mad Dogs, from James Grady. I’ll let you know if I like it or not.