Preparing for depature

Please fasten your seat belts... because I am going to Germany! I am having finally some sort of vacation and am flying back home to the old world and try to visit as much friends as possible (and my great family of course!). I am going to Warendorf, Iserlohn, Paderborn and Munich so far and I planned to blog from over there from time to time.

Weekend in the Big Apple

UPDATE: Fotos are uploaded here.

After a long day in the airport, we finally arrived in Manhattan. We thought flying would be the most stressless way of getting there, but Murphy's law stroke back again. Our first flight got after a nearly two hour delay canceled and we were send back through Canadian customs to get our bags. While waiting for our bags (yes, even bags that are never delivered to an airplane can get lost for a while) I called from my cell Air Canada and got promptly another flight to La Guardia a couple of hours later. Bad part was that we had to go trough US immigration and security screening again and when we finally arrived, the flight was again delayed by an hour :-). However then we finally left the ground after another 2o minute wait on the runway because of the high volume of air traffic and we finally arrived in the Big Apple. 

The next day was really impressive. We left our really nice "Hilton New York" pretty early to discover Brooklyn and have a nice view of Manhattan. After that we discovered the central park and the Museum of Natural History. Later on we took a long stroll down the Broadway/Times Square and the 5th Avenue back. After a refreshing dinner we moved out again this time to stay with a lot of cranky Germans in line for the "Top of the Rock" and had finally a really nice view over the City from the Rockefeller Tower. Since I don't have on my Macbook Aperture all the fancy shots have to wait until I am back home.

Today we were hit by a shopping frenzy and discovered some really cool stores in New Yorks SoHo district. Since we were kinda dead from the last day we just wandered around a bit more after that. Oh and 6th avenue was closed for a huge cultural festival. You could eat food and buy a lot of weird things there.

More news to come...

Short Trip to Ottawa

As an already half Canadian I have to visit of course the capital of this wonderful country. Well, that wasn't really the purpose of this trip, but it sounds so cheesy. I was driving my girlfriend here so that she could give two talks at a conference at the University of Ottawa. Since I don't have vacation I spent most of the time in the very nice hotel room working. However I managed to leave for a stroll the Hotel and have to say: Ottawa is great! I never seen such a nice, clean, beautiful city.


Go Canada! More cities like this one!

Concert Time

Believe it or not, but I've been to my first indoor concert in my life. Unbelievable, but if I tell you where I went you might declare me brainwashed (at least if you know me). I've been with my girlfriend to "Britney Spears" in the Bell Centre. I actually have to admin, that I really enjoyed the whole experience. It wasn't my music, but the show was still amazing. There were a lot of really good artists who followed the theme "circus" and "freakshop" and did some amazing acrobatic trics even under the ceiling of the center.

For this kind of occasions I wished that I would have another smaller camera (not my Nikon D40) to make some pix and vidz. Well, maybe soon!

Oh, and I bought right after the concert some more tickets. Next month I'll go and see No Doubt.

Wonderful color scheme

I just have to tell you all, I fell in love with a color scheme:

Now I have to do something with it :)

[Update] 

Oh, and something else quite interesting for some open source folks: I found a pretty accurate description on how the open source workflow these days works. There might be some bits here and there missing (they don't mention git and lighthouse for instance) but all in all a good start.

Where is the spring?

I have to say that Montreal is sometimes weird. In one minute it is -35 degrees Celsius and two weeks later we have 28... It is still not green outside and I have to see already half naked men running through the streets. Well, at least it is getting summer...

Besides that it was quite busy the last weeks. There is a lot going on at work and I am planning my trip home. I also did my first income tax report and I am pretty happy about the tax refund. It is very nice that I payed this ridiculous amount of tuition fees after all. Now I am already planning what I could do with all this nice money. I'd like to have a 17" Macbook Pro, but since Apple just replaced my Macbook's faceplate including my German keyboard with a shiny new English one, I do not have the need of any new Mac. It is very funny that I can't write properly on a German keyboard anymore. I can't understand how I could code on it in the first place, it really is horrible!

Some short ruby news in the end:

• RubyGems 1.3.2 was released last week
  
• I tried the "e texteditor" on Windows, and still am impressed how close it is to Textmate.
  However, there are some things that I haven't found out how to configure, or the option is just not there. For instance I can't get "e" to open more than one window. I can't open multiple projects with it at the same time...

What I am craving for...

I am soo so so so looking forward to my Germany visit. So that I can get a real, non self made "Pommes Currywurst, with Mayo"!

For the northern american reader: It's a grilled sausage, cut in chunks and drained in curry ketchup. As a side dish you would get crispy fries with a large amount of mayonnaise over it. It's the german poutine, but better.

Oh I forgot: As another side dish, you would get a very sweet non toasted toast bread.