I didn’t get to attend many sessions at the Tech Days, as I was mainly meeting with people, or at the PostgreSQL on Solaris booth (figures someone from MySQL should’ve been there too). I had plenty of interesting conversations with Tom Daly; we met by chance since I had a blue MySQL shirt and he figured he’d be cheeky and offer me a PostgreSQL one.

I was going to take a photo with him today, but he called me from the airport last night to say he had to go back. Oh well.

Laurie Wong, and me

Instead, you get a photo of Laurie and me (MySQL cap, PostgreSQL on Solaris t-shirt). I’ll blog later about the sessions that I did attend - I wish I could’ve done so earlier but staying at the Sheraton in Darling Harbour, meant that there was no in-room Internet access. …

I have not been at CeBit for quite a while, but this year I will be there as a regular visitor this Thursday (6th of March). If you would like to meet with me, please send me an email or ping me via IM/Skype! I look forward to walking around the hallways, visiting my new employer's booth and finding out what other Open Source presences and activities there will be.

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning …

After five days of powder skiing and mountain climbing on ski, I’m back in business. This is how I looked out-of-business:

My son and I did not meet with Ötzi the Iceman, but we got a few blisters, a lot of Alpine sun, plenty of powder skiing and the experience of climbing more than 1000 height metres to K2 (in Tirol, not its namesake in Karakorum). And we conquered Austria’s second highest peak, the Wildspitze at 3772 metres above sea level.

The group consisted of our Austrian mountain guide, four ladies and four gentlemen, all of which were German …

Long before I first got to know about Sun’s acquisition of MySQL, I had booked this year’s prime skiing holiday. That’s going to be the week right after the Integration Kickoff in Menlo Park, on 3-9 February 2008. And it’s a special type of skiing holiday: It’s Boys Only, i.e. I’m going with my 13 year old son Alexander to Pitztal in Austria.

We’re going to the Ötztaler Gletscher, the glacier where Ötzi the Iceman, a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC (53 centuries ago) was found in 1991.

Determined not to end up like Ötzi, Alexander and I will get extensive off-piste training under the direction of a certified Austrian mountain guide who according to his web profile has climbed “Cho Oyu, …

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!

I must be awake for about 24 hours now, things are getting a bit blurry. But I have arrived at our MySQL Staff Meeting here in Orlando safely! My flight with Northwest airlines from Frankfurt via Detroit was uneventful - the plane was pretty empty so I was happy to have two seats for myself! The board entertainment program was neat, I really prefer video on demand over scheduled movie broadcasts (I watched "The Nanny Diaries", which was quite funny, and "The Fantastic Four", which had some nice CG effects).

While standing in the immigration line in Detroit somebody in the line next to us waved to me - it was Tobias "Flupps" Asplund, one of our trainers! Quite a funny coincidence, he just had arrived via Amsterdam. We actually were on the same flight from Detroit …

While some colleagues have already arrived in Orlando to meet fellow MySQLers, my plane from FRA to MCO (via DTW) does not leave until 10:20am tomorrow. Currently I am staying at my parents' place in Heidelberg, from which I will be picked up by an airport shuttle service early tomorrow morning (5:40am, ugh!).

I am looking forward to meeting with the other members of my team as well as old and new colleagues from the different departments. There seems to be some kind of outdoor team building event taking place on Wednesday afternoon - we have been split up into mixed groups and were asked to bring comfortable clothes and a light sweater or jacket. I hope I am not too jetlagged by the end of the day...

This will be my fourth MySQL staff meeting - when I joined the company in 2002, I was lucky to attend the third staff meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia right during the first week when I started my new job. Back then, we …

Giuseppe Maxia had a stop-over yesterday on his way to the MySQL Staff Meeting. We met for community discussions, and rounded off with Weißbier and dinner in Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus.

What a fantastic feeling! The Bavarian spirit of joy and happiness has been decoupled from tobacco stench! I’ve always liked the first and hated the second.

So the German non-smoker protection legislation of 1 January 2008 is good news for anyone considering arranging meetings in Germany. You will no longer be “welcomed” at the airport by an offensive smell. Headaches in German …

MySQLers share many hobbies. One of them is running. After the holiday season, I allowed myself to do some statistics on last year’s running, and add some personal reflections, only marginally related to work and MySQL.

Running is often a social event at MySQL, where a sizable portion of my 108 runs last year were with other MySQLers: Six times with Zack Urlocker (EVP Products), six times with Patrik Backman (Dir SW Eng), twice each with Larry Stefonic (SVP APAC) and Clint Smith (Legal Counsel), and once each with Kristofer Pettersson (SW Eng), Saskia Schweitzer (Training coordinator), Mikael Ronstr?m (Principal Engineer/Senior MySQL Architect), and Nicolas Pujol (Sr Director, Alliances & Channels). Running can even be social time spent with non-runners (not just on the phone), as three of my runs were with …