Wow! Norway is cold!

Actually, it isn't that bad. And Bergen is famous for being rainy, supposedly. But there has been a nice, warm sun at my back in the rooms I had been working in for both days so far.

Random observations:

- It's clean here. There isn't trash all over the place, or graffiti covering every surface.

- As with everywhere else that I have visited, there are a lot of American-isms about – I bought Pepsi at a 7-11, and I've seen a lot of big ol' American pickup trucks (Silverado!). A lot of signs are in English.

- I flew from Amsterdam to Bergen via KLM and on the plane, we had Ben and Jerry's Vanilla Toffee Crunch ice cream.

- There seems to be a lot of stone walls and fences and the like, but most of the houses I can see appear to be wood.

- There isn't a lot of snow, but there were slight snow showers overnight.

- Pizza is the international crisis-situation-means-working-late food, but Norwegian pizza isn't very good.

- The folks in the office seem to have their boots for outside, then office shoes like Birkenstocks or Tevas or some other type of sandal.

- Coffee is as readily available (maybe even more so) than tea in the UK. You can get coffee in the UK, but it's instant. Here, it's brewed/filtered coffee. And they have these really neat coffee machines. No pots or anything – just stick your cup under and get a fresh cup of coffee. And it's really good coffee.

I was supposed to fly out at noon today (Wed, 12 Dec) but had to reschedule so that I am flying out at 6:30AM!! I guess I shouldn't really complain – It's not as if I haven't been randomly waking up somewhere between 3-5 in the morning anyway.

Hopefully today I will get to see something. I intend to get some debugging done this morning, based on our discovery over night. Then, rerun a complete new discovery, which will take some time. During that time, maybe I will get to do something interesting.

There are other things I was going to say, but I need to go meet my colleague for breakfast.

And now, I am off to Bergen!

Joy!

The worst part is that it is already starting out to be "one of those days"… Ray couldn't sleep, and was up half the night, but apparently, I forgot to mention that he needed to put my clothes in the dryer, once the washer was done. So I am STILL not packed. And then, I broke my carafe on my French press… Luckily I have another one, though it is a big, 4 cup sized one. I can still make coffee in it, so that's all that matters. Then there are always those other dozen or so bits of minutia that work together to just make it "one of those days"…

The good thing is that, despite the fact that the sun will rise at 9:30 and set at 15:30, it appears that the temperatures hold right around freezing. Between 30 and 38F or -1 to 3C. Not great, but not as bitterly cold as it sounded at first.

Yet another cyclist has been killed in London because yet another truck driver wasn't looking into the cycle lane when he made a left turn. Every cyclist I know has, at some point, been tagged by an unwary bus or truck or other large vehicle because the driver wasn't paying attention. I guess you could say that it's just because of the sheer number of people and the amount of traffic, etc. But that doesn't really make it any better, does it? All of Ken Livingstone's talk of London improving conditions for cyclist, yet this happens far too often.

Well, I need to wrap up now. Ray is finally awake and grumpy for lack of sleep. One final, quick note about Ray, though: He is going to do the half-Ironman in Switzerland next year! Cool, huh?!

sleep deprived

3AM

And I wake up

Again….

I am getting really frustrated with this. I am sleeping so little that it's starting to affect my life. Not only did I actually fall asleep on the train, I got kicked because I was snoring.

I've given up staring at the ceiling for the evening and decided to update my blog.

So, Austria was quite pretty. I did work 8 consecutive days for very long hours, but Saturday, I was waiting for things to run, and was able to actually see some stuff. One of my colleagues who is French, but lives in Austria, and speaks the Austrian dialect of German, took me around to see some stuff. Without her, I would have probably just wandered around lost. So, that was great. Dealing with the customer situation there was pretty tough. But, I think things are stable there now. And folks seem to be fairly happy with me. I hope so – I missed Thanksgiving for that! (Though my colleague got me goose for my Thanksgiving dinner, which was righteously cool.)

Of course, I forgot my camera. And my camera phone really is crap. So, no pics…

The thing that sucks worse is that, upon returning, I had to drop by work on the way home this past Monday afternoon. Then, I was supposed to work from home Tuesday, and take Wednesday and Thursday off to make up for the weekend I'd worked through. Of course, half way through Wednesday I was asked to do something else, which took up most of those two days. So, I really didn't get any time off to recover.

Oh, and I am doing this on my laptop because my desktop died Wednesday as well.

Yeah, things kinda suck right now. But, at least I don't have to go to Norway on this upcoming Monday. :-) (I almost got sent there for another customer.)