Today I booked a ticket to Saint-Petersburg! I'll be there from the 20th until the 25th of June, to be at her birthday on the 21st. My good friend Jur is going with me, so I bet we're going to have a good time. Next to the time I will spend with her (of course), I think we will discover Piter's nightlife!
Archive for the 'english' Category Page 2 of 4
I feel, therefore I am. This is how I feel lately. Sometimes my life seems like a roller coaster that doesn't stop. 2007 wasn't a very nice year for me. Changed jobs twice, broke up with my girlfriend, got back together, bought a house and broke up again. When going to a new year party on December 31st, I twittered "Hope 2008 will be less rocky then last year". Back then I really hoped that 2008 would be less emotional than 2007. Things turned out not to be this way. I can't say that the last 4 months were rocky, but for some reason, I find myself in new or emotional situations quite often. Of course, things started with the real breakup between Amber and me. As I wrote before, it was the best thing to do, but it wasn't easy. In December, I started my own business and of course, this brings extra excitement; meeting new people, doing business, making decisions. Business is going great, but of course there are always tough customers, debtors that don't pay, the usual. Not that this is a bad thing and I really feel that I made the right decision to start my own thing. Especially because of this, I can do the things I really want. I love to travel and having my own business allows me to see a lot of the world. I went to Prague, planned a 3 week trip to NYC again and planning on more trips this year. Traveling is great, it gives me lots of nice memories of people, different cultures and really feeds my hunger for knowledge and experience. But traveling can also be pretty emotional for me. Not in a bad way, but it does something with me. After Prague for example, I really missed the people, the city, the parties, etc.
On top of this all, I met this great girl. Last year, I met her on a business trip abroad, just as a colleague and last December we started talking again after I switched on one of my IM clients that I hadn't used for 6 months. At first it was just normal chit-chat, but after my breakup with Amber, we started to talk more about life stuff. Finally we saw each other again during the easter weekend and we spent the last two week together. I don't want to go into too much detail, but I can say it was great. The only thing is that I'm here, and she's there. I don't know what's going to happen with this in the future, I will see, but of course this is something emotional again. "What am I doing? Didn't I want a less emotional 2008?", I asked myself multiple times of the last couple of weeks. But today, I realized I was wrong last new years eve. I don't want a dull life. I don't want the same thing every day. I want to progress. I need change, so I know I live.
A couple of days ago, OpenPanel, an open source control panel for web hosting has been released. The guys at PanelSix just released the beta version and their stuff looks very promising. I haven't had the chance to play with it, but what I hear from others, it's absolutely awesome. Plesk and other panels are usually a pain in the ass, because they are far from transparent. This stuff seems really promising, since it's open source and even has a CLI, which enables you to script hosting setups!
Anyway, check it out!
In regards to my last post about digital life, I have expanded my digital life a bit more over the last few weeks. It started with adding Jabber to my list, after EURUKO08 and last week I signed up for a del.icio.us account. Also, my old ICQ number popped-up in my head again, so I also started idling on that network again. It's nice that I was able to tie most of these things together. In jabber, I now have transports for jabber, MSN and ICQ and enabled twitter notification to my jabber account. My delicious network is now a feed in my Google Reader and in Firefox I installed the Google Reader notification plug-in. I know that more integration is possible, but for me, this is enough. Mail notification in my email client, IM stuff in jabber and slower media in my browser. And of course IRC. I know I can add this to jabber as well, but for me, irssi works best.
As written before, I wrote an article for the 2006 Hacker's Quarterly magazine, about an April Fools' joke I pulled on Wiard once. A couple of months ago, I got an email that said that the article would be published, but didn't say exactly when. Today, I checked the 2600.com website and found that my article is in the Spring 2008 issue!
It's sunny here, It's spring. But is this why I feel this way? Is it spring, or is it her?
It's almost done for me. Euruko08 was fantastic! I took a plane on Friday and was kind of lucky. Since the plane was apparently overbooked, there was already someone in my seat, so I had to sit somewhere else. The nice stewardess told me to sit in the front of the plane, where normally the people sit who get the special treatment. Because of this, I also had some extra services like a newspaper and great food. The flight only took 90 minutes and was comfortable. After customs and luggage claim, I took the bus and metro to my hostel. The hostel was pretty basic, but ok.
After strolling around the city center a bit, I took a tram to the opening party. On the way, I crossed one of Pragues many bridges and because of the great view over the river and the light (sun was just going down, which gave spectacular lighting), I stopped after the bridge, walked back and took some great pictures (I'll upload them later on). Afterwards I went on to the party.
Here, there were some people already and very quickly I started some conversations. In the end there were around a hundred people. I talked to so many people from so many different countries; awesome. After the party, I took a taxi to the city center with Thomas and Niklas (from Germany) and Alex from Greece. We had some food (midnight snack) and then I went back to the hostel.
Next day, I went to the conference and spent all day listening to talks, talking to people and so on. I had lunch with Thomas and Niklas and after the conference, we had dinner together at a nice pizza place. After that, party again. There were more people than the day before and again I had lots of conversations. After the party, I took a taxi back to the hostel again.
The following morning, I got up and walked to the conference, alongside the river. Beautiful view! The conference again had nice talks and we had lunch together. The conference ended with 2.5 hours of lightning talks, where I was speaking last. The talk went alright. When the conference was really over, I met Marek, a dutch guy with whom I worked with a couple of years ago, but hadn't seen him since. Together with him, some colleagues, Niklas and Alex, we went to a Mexican bar/restaurant to drink and eat. Here we talked a lot and even tried out some cool code Alex came up with. When the bar was closing we left. I walked back to my hostel through the city center. Prague is such a beautiful city, especially by night!
This morning, I woke up at 8:30 am, had breakfast and checked out of my hostel. Then I roamed the streets, looking at shops and so on. Now I'm in a small restaurant and will leave in a couple of minutes. I'll be doing the tourist thing a bit more and will go to the airport around 3 pm to get my flight back home at 5 pm.
All in all, the weekend was absolutely fantastic! I feel great, met so many nice and interesting people. The only thing is that my voice is absolute crap now, because of all the talking and liters of beer I drank, but that will be fine.. Anyway, I'll be at Euruko 09 next year! Definitely!
As written before, I'm currently in Prague for the Euruko 2008 Ruby congress. Yesterday evening, the congress was officially opened with a party at a very nice club. There I spoke with a lot of people, from all over Europe. I had expected that most talks would be about Ruby or Rails, but actually, this didn't happen. What I found very interesting is that most conversations I had (and overheard) were about spoken languages. Apparently, geeks have a fascination for spoken languages. I, myself sucked very badly at French and German in high school (as I did in multiple subjects), but this was mainly because of a lack of interest in learning in general. Since I started programming, I really developed an interest in languages in general; comparing languages and structures within a language. Maybe because of this, I looked for a real challenge and started to learn Russian somewhere last year.
The nice thing to notice is that it's not just me who's really fond of languages in general. I really wouldn't have guessed to find so many people with the same thing at a programming language congress.
Friday, I'll be flying to Prague for the EURUKO 2008 Ruby conference and will be doing a 10 minute "lightning talk" about Capistrano and Webistrano (stuff for deploying (Rails) applications in bigger environments).
Today, I booked my ticket to NYC! I'll fly from Amsterdam on the 11th of July and will be back in the Netherlands the 4th of August. Planning so far is to spend the first week in New York City, visit some friends and just hang around. At the end of this week, I'll be spending my time at the HOPE conference. After that, I still have 2 weeks left and I don't quite know what I'll do then. I'll probably travel to some cities in the eastern part of the US, like Boston and Chicago.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this!! Whoooo!!
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