Alef Arendsen

I’m in Oslo for the week and I fly there straight from Italy after having been skiing there for a few days. It has been snowing here as well for quite a bit and and about half an hour driving from Oslo, there are quite a few nice slopes.

Since I had my gear with me (all except a board), we went skiing yesterday night after work. I’d love to live here, being able to ski after work is such a luxury. Funnily enough, I could use the Monte Rosa Ski pass after having bought a ticket, the systems are interoperable. I rented a snowboard and off we went…

The slopes (at Varingskollen were a bit icy and there were only a few slopes, but it was still a lot of fun.

In the picture: carving master Kristoffer, working for a partner of ours in Oslo.

When we drove back to town, I saw the temperature gauge drop to -21˚C, the coldest I’ve seen for a long time. On the slopes, it wasn’t all that cold, since I had put on a lot of clothes (thermo-underwear, woolen shirts, et cetera).

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.

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.

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!

I just got back from Oslo. Together with Kaare Nilsen, I did a Core Spring training there. We had good fun; not only during the training days, but also in the social events after that. We went out to a couple of bars on Tuesday and Thursday and I also did a presentation on Spring 2.0 for somewhat more than 100 people at the Oslo Java User Group (javaBin).

I didn’t exactly think about this beforehand, but there’s a lot of snow in Norway. I could have known of course but simply forgot. Half a meter snow everywhere! That really sucks when you don’t have a chance to put on some skis.

So now I’m back in Utrecht and for a change, I actually like the weather .

I do have to buy new shoes though, because the shoes I took to Oslo are completely ruined by all the salt on the streets that is supposed to let the snow melt (and I can tell you, it didn’t exactly work all that well).

After two days of work in Oslo for a client of mine I spend one night and a day walking, eating, drinking and driving in Oslo (hmmm, I didn’t do the last two on the same day by the way, I know the Norwegian fines). The last time I actually visited Oslo was about ten years ago (I’m not counting times I visited the Gardemoen airport, about one hour from Oslo). I was actually positively surprised about it. I didn’t remember all of it and what amazed me was the fact that it’s a really hip and trendy city with lots of cool design building and other freaky design things.

A friend of mine from Sweden came over for a night and we had a good laugh, great food right next to the harbor in a a place called Food and Wine (can’t remember the Norwegian translation). After having finished our dinner we went to a couple of bars (Mr. John or something like that and a couple of other ones, of which I can’t remember the name).

The day after was really cool. With my friend’s car we drove through what he called the Beverly Hills of Oslo. I knew there were all kinds of little Islands in the Oslo Fjord, but I didn’t know they had built really nice summer houses there with excellent views. In between the islands, the sea is filled with lots of boats. Definitely a place I could spend some time later…

All-in-all, a really cool city to spend some time during a weekend!