Jan's Adventures
from summer to winter
Wednesday 14th December 2005
It's been over 3 months now that I have posted anything.
Time is flying by quickly and it is not making any stops.
I can still see Kate and me walking around in Hampstead Heath on a beatiful summerday.
That was September. In early october Kate turned 27. It was a fun birthday. We started it with cake and presents, met up with one of Kaet's friends for lunch and went to the Aqarium in the afternoon.
SVGOpen 2005
Thursday 25th August 2005
I had the great opportunity to go to the annual SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) conference [http://www.svgopen.org/ SVGOpen], this year held in Enschede, Netherlands.
This is my second time presenting at the SVGOpen. I gave a course on building WebApplications and presented a couple papers on networking interfaces in SVG and a "HTML-Forms" implementation in SVG + sXBL.
Besides giving and attending presentations the conference truly is about meeting people and having a good time. And we surely did have a good time during the 4 days in Enschede. So much that, when I came home on friday, I went to bed at 1:00pm and only woke up the next morning at 10:00am and pretty much just resting for the rest of the weekend.
I guess thats what happens if one parties till 5:00 in the morning and gets up at 10:00 to give a presentation. But hey, we don't live twice!
dear blog ...
Friday 19th August 2005
I have been neglecting yo .. I am sorry!
For the first time I drove an english car just a couple weekends ago. It was a little trip I took with Kate form London to Burmingham.
So, right after picking up the car from the rental place I drove a bit too close to the left and gone was my passenger side plastic mirrow covering. Other than that and that Kate was not quite sure if she really wanted to have me drive her it went really well.
Another month has passed
Wednesday 20th July 2005
Time is flying by at an incredible speed.
It's been an eventfull month: I got 2:30 hours late to work just a couple weeks ago for the very first time. Not that it realy mattererd, others were late too and left early that thursday to make it home. I did not even know what happend, they just stoped the tube. The people left the Bakerstreet station and waited outside for buses, hundreds it must have been. No one seemed to have known what happened. I called up my girlfriend to tell her she had to find another way to get into town as the tube was closed indefinetly supposedly due to some power failure.
London, my new home
Monday 20th June 2005
I am here in London now for three weeks. A big thanks to Jim who let me use his apartment until I had found a houseshare and another thank-you-jim for reccomending me for the new job. Sometimes things just seem to work out magically.
The overnight busride was, well, quite long. Not much legroom and not very comfortable. I heard it was supposed to be quite hot in London, fortunatly it was not. Rather cool an windy at the time I arrived.
The next days I spent online, searching for houseshares in London.
I had no clue what to look for except that I knew I wanted to live with at least 3 more people and I did not want to live too far away from work. Alot of the offers where taken or I just got a mailbox to talk to. On sunday I was able to have a look at on of the houses. Of course I had no clue of how long it would take me to makie my way around town, I am just not used to theses distances here, but I am getting there :).
Being almost an hour late I finally got there, had a nice chat and was shown around the house. The room was not too great, kindof small and a bit worn out. But the housemates seemed great. The living room was nice and there was a little(large for London I heard) garden and a large kitchen... We had tea and chatted for about 4h... Well, I would have taken the room right away but since I had not looked at any other apartements I figured I should keep looking around to have something to compare. And so I did. Two more I looked at, which were much closer to work but (quite) a bit more expensive. The rooms themselfes where nicer and larger too but I did not get the right feelings torwards the housemates. That was pretty much it. I called up the first place to tell them that I wanted to be their new housemate.
I would move in on the following monday, so I crashed at Jim's place for the rest of the week.
Work started on wednesday, company meeting on thursday with champange and after work pub on friday ... what a start.
On saturday I was invited to a party in my new place.
