Medieval Programming

Hey, I am back from US for the weekend, getting fresh clothes and my pictures from the camera. I either should take the cable with me or get a USB card reader.

Forgive about the quality, It seems that I had bad luck this time. More pictures are planned for next visit. Then I try to complete the list which is also in Wikipedia .

Thats it for today, I am too tired for more writing

I enjoyed my weekend in Bay Area. I have been to Mystery Spot yesterday morning. This is really a strange thing. I am still thinking about it. Luckily the Wikipedia proves my assumption, but still, when being there it is really magical. Afterwards I have been in the Big Basin State Park, trying to hug a redwood tree. Pictures of that attempt will come when I am back home, or bought a card reader at Frys. By the way, am I the only one that feels treated like a thief at Frys?

In the afternoon I continued my IT tourism tour. With two highlights. One was eBay, where apparently a lot of people work on Sunday. I was caught by the security guy, but he was friendly (and there were no “no photo” signs as at Intel) and took a picture of me, hope it is good.

The other one was Oracle in Reedwood Shores. Boy, what an architecture. Oval glass facade skyscrapers (at least for this area they are pretty tall) small lakes and fountains. I hope the picture I took was able to capture it all.
ah found that someone on flicker also took pictures. I take the freedom to link em:

Oracle Campus Album on Flickr
here my Favorite

Thats all for today, I got some work to do.

12:23 local time San Francisco. LH 454 flight the 747 called Dresden touched ground in San Francisco Airport. The approach was quite bumpy, and the passengers thought the pilot deserved an applause. I don’t know where this comes from, but I didn’t applaud ButI expressed my gratitude by forgetting my Eclipse RCP book in the seat pocket. So In case any of you sits in 50C of that jet please have a look

The immigration officer was asking why I have a new passport, which suprises me a bit because I used that one to enter Israel and USA already before, I don’t know if he wasn’t convinced of my claim that this is my first passport. He scribbled quite a lot on my customs form, which the customs officer studied a few seconds before he decided to let me in without inspection.

A rental car and a short ride later I dropped my stuff at the nice Hampton Inn in Mountain View. Now I am at my “customers” office and feel a bit left alone, because everybody went off after the initial meeting. Well I do not care for today, anyway a bit tired. Perhaps Ill go directly to FRYs to shop a NintendoDS

Tomorrow morning goes my flight to San Francisco. Since weeks German railwaycrews of the major, de facto only railway company (Deutsch Bahn) are fighting for more money. I personally find 30% more money for a total unrealistic demand, but they claim that it only would be fair. Up to today I thought they will be on strike tomorrow already, but it seems that I am lucky and can take the 5:00 early train to Frankfurt.

Boy, that was a long ride. 1000 kilometers later we arrived this night. It was a great event. The restoration of the ruins produced a small wooden building, which perfectly was contributing to the historic atmosphere. The good things with the ruin walls is: they keep everything modern out of sight. The visitors were, as already known from Puchberg very interested and came in masses. It is nice to seem that this kind of event is successful and earns also some money for further restoration & conservation. Even more amazing was how people expressed their appreciation. There was no entrance fee for the grounds, but a donation of any amount was appreciated. There were people that donated 2 Euros when they came in, and when the leyt 3 hours later they put in another 10 Euros. I think there couldn’t be a better compliment for our work.

For those curious: Sure I did finish my pennon. Thanks for the Austrian winds and sun I did this picture.

As always: On every event you break something. This time my new sword scabbard broke. Medieval scabbards were lined with fur. But it seems that one fur went loose and now is stuck near the lower end, so my sword is currently stuck. Ill have to open the leather cover and somehow the wooden parts to reattach it.

And one word to all truckers out there:
Yes, I know that construction lanes are always quite narrow, but if I want to over take, please move from the mid of both lanes back to the right lane and let me pass. Thank you!

Up to now our homepage was only available in German. I never really liked that but never really had pressing demands for English. But as I get to know more and more people not able to speak German the time to translate is now. The content of the pages is in DB row, so this shouldn’t be a big issue, but I was a bit unsure how to organize it. I ended up in introducing a flag field per row, indicating the language the page is in. Actually this duplicates a bit of structural information (where which picture is) but that is not that big deal as it might be required to reposition images as a result of textual differences. So lets see. I guess I start with some easy work and build a nice language selector first