Interactive Blog

Vanaf afgelopen maandag heeft het bedrijf waar ik werk, Interactive Studios, een bedrijfs-blog.

Op dit blog zullen we vooral dingen zetten die, volgens ons, ook interessant zijn voor de buitenwereld, zoals je er ook kan lezen.

Werken om 0:40

Dat is niet iets waar ik op zit te wachten, maar het is even niet anders. Om deze tijd morgen moeten een aantal dingen af zijn die ik niet helemaal goed heb ingeschat.

In dit geval gaat het om het importeren van een enorme berg data, wat een soort ijsberg effect heeft. Elke keer als ik het een af heb, blijkt dat daar nog een hoop andere data gekoppeld zit.

Om een obscure en onidentificeerbare reden kreeg de server waarop het stukje software staat waar het in dit geval om draait ook nog wat kuren zojuist, dus er ging ook nog een en ander verloren van mijn code. Die moest dus opnieuw gemaakt worden.

Al met al zit ik dus, om kwart voor 1 in de nacht voor oud & nieuw nog actief te wachten. Dat is het grote nadeel van data importeren. In dit geval moet ik erbij blijven, anders gaat het mis en komt het niet af. Aan de andere kant kan je niet veel doen dan om de 5 tot 20 minuten op een knop drukken.

Wat doe je op zo’n moment? Je zet Tom Waits op en schenkt een glas whisky in, terwijl je een beetje gaat zitten lezen. Al met al nog niet zo’n straf, al had ik liever in mijn bed gelegen.

Tot nu toe heb ik drie nog niet eerder geproefde whisky’s ingeschonken, en één oude bekende:

Bruichladdich Black Art, 1989, 51,1%
Aparte roze (!) whisky. Heeft erg lang in een wijnvat gelegen, en heeft daar flink wat kleur van gekregen. Erg zoet, maar helemaal geen verkeerde whisky. De zoetigheid van Rosé komt erg terug in de neus en smaak. Meer alcohol natuurlijk, maar al met al veel rood fruit (aardbei, framboos, bessen).

Pittyvaich 20, 1989, 57,5% (Diageo special release 2009)
Evenals op het festival in Leiden vind ik dit een enorm verrassende whisky. Een lichte frisse neus, en een erg verrassende smaak. Erg blij met zulke dingen. Mint, dennen, wat hout.

Old Potrero Single Malt Rye Spirit, 2 jaar en 1 maand oud
Dit is eigenlijk geen whisky, maar Moonshine / Mountain Dew of hoe je het ook wilt noemen. Gestookt op de manier waarop ze 250 jaar geleden illegaal stookten en het komt enorm overeen met het vuurwater wat ik ooit in een openlucht museum in Belarus geproefd heb. Nu wil het feit dat ze in Wit-Rusland ook enorme bergen rogge hebben, dus daar zal de overeenkomst vandaan komen. ‘Vuile’ whisky, waarbij veel olien en dingen die normaal gefilterd worden er nog in zitten. Bijzonder. Rogge, rogge, rogge en vanille in de neus en smaak. Zelfs met water knalt dit als een 500 ponder.

Amrut Peated Cask Strength
Lekkere Indiase knaller met een goeie berg turf. Niks op aan te merken, zoals alle Amrut bottelingen die ik ken. Hier ga ik nu eens aan beginnen.

Al met al toch weer zeker 5 cc whisky gedronken (om de zorgenmakers gerust te stellen :-) )

Thuiswerken

Vandaag is de 2e dag dat ik thuis werk, en ik moet zeggen dat het me goed bevalt.

Niet zozeer de reistijd die me veel interesseerd, want autorijden (buiten de files) vind ik nog steeds leuk om te doen. Wat me voornamelijk enorm goed bevalt is dat niet de godganse dag de telefoon staat te rammelen met mensen die niet voor mij bellen.

Oftewel, ik kan me iets beter concentreren, wat in mijn geval een enorm pluspunt is gezien ik normaalgesproken een concentratiespanne van ongeveer 15 seconde heb, net iets beter als dat van een goudvis.

Tot nu toe zijn er echter ook een paar kleine nadelen. De eerste is dat je de hele dag in je eentje zit, zonder de slappe klets die Interactive Studios zo leuk maakt. Tweede nadeel is dat ik veel meer moeite moet doen voor een kop koffie, en dat de kwaliteit dan alsnog niet zo goed is…

Maar goed, wel lekker dat ik 10 minuten na uit bed te stappen aan de gang kan. En ook dat ik niet de hele dag met een koptelefoon op hoef te zitten. En geen Pink Floyd de hele dag ;-)

New Site live!

Since my good friend Thomas and I have been organizing some Whisky Tastings over the last couple of months (for friends, customers, and co-workers) we decided to take this to the next level.

From now on, we are bookable!!! People can hire us for whisky tastings, in which we will organize everything, from the whiskies, the glasses, to everything you can imagine (whisky related that is).

We call ourselves MaltFascination, since we are both quite fascinated by Single Malt whisky and it seemed like the best name for a couple of guys organizing whisky tastings.

For more details, like prices and options, please refer to our website. We hope to hear from you soon!!!

Interactive whisky

Last Friday a small whisky tasting was organized by me and my boss for some of our customers at Interactive Studios.

We had the option to do this at the Philips stadium, where PSV resides, in the Skybox of Thomas' dad. Very nice, good atmosphere and ambiance.

We planned this shortly ahead, mostly. The guests were invited pretty early on, but the presentation was made only hours prior to the event. It was a novice tasting, with interesting whiskies (according to us) and some information about a lot of aspects of single malt whiskies.

Finishes, maturations, single malt, blend, blended malt, single cask, wood types, requirements and more came by in the presentation we held and most people there found it very cool to have two whisky enthousiasts tell them stuff about the water of life. We even made gift packs to hand out, specially bottled by Interactive Studios. Well wicked!

After more than a week...

I have been working at Interactive Studios I must say that I enjoy it very much. PHP is pretty ok and it has many options it lacked in earlier versions; options that I like, like (techtalk) objects, classes, and more.

Another thing that made it easier to start working here is the fact that I already knew all the guys in the office privately.

I am already working on a project, so that is coming on pretty quickly. I really enjoy going to work on my bicycle, instead of always sitting in traffic jams in my car. I just have to hope that someone doesn't think my car is abandoned when it is parked somewhere for more than a week...

Interactive Studios

Today will be my first day at Interactive Studios. I am quite excited about that!

I will be getting back into programming, with  good friends of mine, closer to home and no longer just writing document and be an intermediate between Minsk and the support department.

I will, however, be working with PHP. Although that programming language has gone through some serious development the last few years, I have always considered it a scripting language and not a full-grown programming language as C# and Java.

Working with PHP will most likely be quite different from what I am used to, so that is going to be at least a little challenge.

No more LECTRIC

Yesterday was my last day at Lectric in Zaltbommel. It was very strange, because on one hand you are happy to be done with transferring projects to collegues and having to explain why you are leaving, on the other hand I felt quite strange to be leaving and pulling the door shut behind me for the last time (professionally, I will most likely be showing my face every now and then).

I am looking forward to work at Interactive Studios, but for some reason it still seemed a bit careless and casual until it was yesterday afternoon and I had to start deinstalling my laptop and making back-ups. A final chat with the guys in Minsk was a strange thing to do too.

Today and tomorrow are my last two days off, in which I have some time to prepare the whisky tasting I organized at LECTRIC for my ex colleagues tomorrow. That will be fun to do, and a first self-organized tasting. I hope to be doing such things more often in the future.

Whisky?

Last Friday, because I am leaving LECTRIC, the company organized a party after work. A lot of colleagues were there and they had a small speech for me, mostly regarding some situations in clubs in Minsk (no details...).

After the speech they also had some gifts for me:

• Whisky cake
• Whisky coffee
• Whisky fudge
• One mini blended whisky
• Three mini Bruichladdich Single malts!!!
• and, to finish it all, whisky condoms.

Of course, all whisky related things, since I only talk about whisky, apparently. Do I really?

But anyway, I love it! The cake was incredible and didn't even make it through the weekend. The whiskies are going to be great, but since I have been away this weekend, I have not had the time to open them up. The condoms are going to something different, I guess... Too bad Anneke is not too fond of whisky :D

Thanks a lot guys! I really appreciate it.

Saying goodbye

From September 1st, I will no longer be working at Lectric. I have accepted a job offer from good friends of mine. I will start next Monday at Interactive Studios, in Den Bosch.

A bit closer to home, working on their products. This means several things, like no more visits to Minsk, Belarus. No more vodka with my colleagues there, no more visits to dubious clubs and hotel bars.

It does also mean that I will be programming again. In my current position I am mostly coordinating the guys in Minsk and making sure the projects keep running more or less on track. Programming is something that I really like doing, at least now I do. It might be that I would prefer the coordination part of my current job in a few years, but that is something for the future.

Exciting times! I am looking forward to my new job, but I do regret having to leave Lectric and the guys there.

Whisky tasting

No, I have been to a whisky tasting before, quite a lot actually. But at the end of August, I am going to organize one for the first time. I will organize the tasting at work, since I know some people there that can appreciate a dram every now and then.

This is somewhat more complicated than I imagined, since there are all kinds of things to take in account.

• The amount of people
• The type of people
• The season (only heavily peated whiskies will not do in summer)
• The whisky knowledge of the attendants
• and so on...

This all means that I have been looking around for some (hopefully) good ideas. The plan now is to taste a blend for starters, and then switch to single malt to know the difference in blends and single malts.

After the blend I will do three pairs of whiskies, all of them the same brand. The differences will be in age (e.g. Highland Park 12 and 25), then in finish (Glenmorangie Original and Lasanta) and peat and no peat (Caol Ila Cask Strength and Unpeated, this one is just a guess).

After that, my guess is to make the fat lady sing with a kick-ass independent bottle (Blackadder Raw Cask or something like that).

Looking forward to it, and if reactions are good, I might try do organize tastings more often...

Minsk

Last week I spent another week in Minsk. For a change, this week was not planned full of boring project evaluations and process discussions.

For a change we actually did some real work there by going through all kinds of functional definitions and front-end code for one of Lectric's big customers.

We are creating a blueprint project on which to base all subsequent sites. I found it very useful to use some of the money made on the project to go to Minsk, mostly because now we have tackled about a month of regular communication and even more of issue fixing because some things were misinterpreted.

Of course, there were some nights of clubbing involved, but that is just something you cannot skip in Belarus. And I can tell you, to be in a discussion for 10 hours per day, about definitions, descriptions and work, after about four hours of sleep is quite hard :)

A busy week...

This week has been a rush all along. Except Monday. Monday was 2nd Whitsunday (we have 2 in the Netherlands). After that everything was over in a couple of minutes, that is how it feels at least.

On Tuesday I worked till about 9.30 to finish a massive functional design for a big customer (not just me, but the team).

Wednesday we went to see CocoRosie in Eindhoven (again). We tried to skip the support acts, since they suck. We still had to see the last 20 minutes of Quinn Walker. Boring as hell, but the CocoRosie show afterwards was very good. A couple of new songs, a solo by the beat boxer and many good songs. Lovely!

Thursday I went out for dinner with a couple of guys from work. Good food and a couple of beers afterwards. We had a very good time.

Yesterday we went to see Angus & Julia Stone in Amsterdam. That was the highlight of the week. It was a short but very good show. Even the support act was quite all right.

They played many songs that I more or less know by heart. A couple of new and unreleased songs too. Really good. It was fun to watch too, since they tend to be a bit too innocent / naive in their behavior apparently. Nice crowd too, not too busy.

Today our masters of ceremony (for the wedding) are visiting to talk everything through a final time. Tomorrow is day of rest and barbeque at the butcher where Anneke used to work. After that another week in Minsk, Belarus.

When I get home I get married in less than 20 days, so those two weeks will, most likely, be incredibly busy too. At work as well as at home.

Back home again

Minsk was great. We had a fantastic time, in which I never slept more than four hours per night. We went clubbing every night, till at least 3.30. Our daily meetings started at ten o'clock. Short nights and long days.

The 'team night' we had on Wednesday was really cool. Went out for dinner first, and clubbing after, with everybody there. Nice to get to know everyone a bit better out of a work setting.

On Tuesday we went to see the new office for ByLectric, which is a major improvement from the cave where our guys are now. Lots of light, and the construction is also a bit less scary.

Our flight home was uneventful, which is nice.

Of course, I was happy to be home again. It is always nice to go to Minsk, but after four exhausting days I really like going home. Not in the least because I missed Anneke.

In Minsk again

After the first full day in Minsk, it is like I come here all the time. The country advances fast, but certain things seem never to change. There are still Volgas on the streets, there are still people crowding clubs on weekdays, and meetings are still being held at Belhard.

Today we had several meetings with the entire Minsk team and we visited the new office. The office is just that, an office. But the new team members that ByLectric hired a couple of weeks ago are nice guys and it is nice to see that we are moving forward fast.

The new team structure at Lectric Zaltbommel has been introduced here and the new project manager, Marcel is having a very good time. Especially last night, at Max Show...

Of course, the program is filled with actual work, meetings, evaluations, planning, discussing and writing documents for all kinds of projects. Issue fixing for running projects is being done between acts, so it is a full week for all of us. Just to keep things interesting ;)

Another step ahead

At my job, we have been working with a team of nice dudes in Minsk for little over a year now.

Next week have planned another visit to do some reviewing of past projects, discuss and fine tune our standards and agreements.

There are two new guys working for ByLectric as well, so it is a nice way to get to know them just after they started at Lectric, and to introduce the new internal structure.

The site for our branch in Minsk has been live for a couple of days now and things are looking fine.

Since a little while it is official that we have our own company in Belarus, instead of using a couple of guys from a big IT club in Minsk. Another step for Lectric, one in the right direction, in my opinion.

A lot of stuff is planned for next week, lots of meetings and full day schedules, since things always take more time than we plan.

Looking forward to catching up in person with the guys I already know and meeting the two new guys!

Blackout

Wednesday night the Dutch aiforce had an exercise near my work. They were flying their appaches in the dark, and low to the ground. With all the gear and high tech stuff stacked in an apache, it would be hard to have accidents, but they managed to do exactly that.

The helicopter flew through some powerlines that were hanging over the river Waal. This caused an enormous blackout in the adjacent areas. There are 50.000 houses without electricity since Wednesday evening, which also means no heating.

The power company is putting up an emergency solution, but expectations are that power will come back on this afternoon. Almost 48 hours of darkness.

Lectric has been without power since Wednesday too, which means it is incredibly hard to work now. All files that I was working on are on a computer at Lectric, and my laptop is mostly used to connect with that.

Yesterday I was able to do some off line work by typing several documents. Today I don't have a clue what to do. Not too bad, since I only had half a day today anyway, but I can imagine that it sucks for my boss :)

Looking for new collegues

The company I work at is looking for lots of new people. So, I try to help out by putting this post on my blog. Someone might actually read it...

We have the following list of vacancies:

Junior .net developer
Medior .net developer
Senior .net developer
Project manager
Account manager
Front-end developer (xHTML)

We also have lots of available internships!

So, if you are interested, you can leave a comment, or send an email to Hans van Leuken. We have an office in Zaltbommel (the Netherlands), and another one in Geleen (the Netherlands). We are working with a couple of collegues in Minsk, Belarus too.

The line of work we are in is mostly site construction and web development. We have built sites for some medium to large companies in the Netherlands.

For more information, you can always look at the site of The Lectric Group.

Second visit to Minsk (2/2)

After our second night in Minsk, a night that included some heavy clubbing and way too much cheap vodka, my phone battery died, which included my alarm clock. So no waking up at nine o'clock for me. I didn't wake until it was noon, so I was way too late for the 10.30 meeting.

Fortunately the meeting was about time management and the monitoring of activities by project management, so not that interesting for me. In the afternoon we had an in depth project evaluation which was quite useful and interesting.

In the evening we had to rush to be at the stadium for the Belarus - Holland soccer match. The atmosphere was really great at the stadium, although it was quite cold for us. We had to stand still for almost 2 hours, which is not great for your fingers and toes. The match was quite bad. The Dutch team didn't care since they already had qualified. Belarus was quite enthousiastic though, and since they won 2 to 1, the atmosphere was even better.

After the match we went for dinner, since we hadn't had time before. So we ate around 10 o'clock, of course with a couple of beer and some good vodka. We had 'Rulka', which is actually nothing more than a pig's leg, prepared in a very good way. Lots of meat, very tender, and very tasty.

For some reason, I thought it was smart to not go clubbing after that, so I turned in after a couple of beers at the hotel bar.

Thursday was a long day. We had nothing planned for the day except visiting Khatyn. A very impressing war monument, to remember the atrocities by the Nazis to the Belarusian people. Since only the projectmanager and me had time that afternoon it was cancelled and we had time to do some regular work.

In the afternoon one of Lectric's contacts in Belarus took us to a tech convention in town. It was nice to see how that kind of things happen in Belarus. It looked a bit like a regular convention, but somewhat smaller and more 'Belarusian'. Which more or less means that there are lots of good looking women present to spread flyers and present all kinds of products.


At night we went for dinner at Ptich. A nice restaurant 5 kilometers out of Minsk. The restaurant had a bit of a 'christmas' look and feel, since it consisted of several wooden cabins with tables, it was lit with all kinds of small lights and it was a bit snowy. There we had a nice dinner with more vodka and beer, and shaslik again. The best meal of the week...

After eating we went to a club that one of the team members in Minsk had looked up. There was supposed to be a 'Sexy Style Party'. When we got there it was a bit early, and since the club had a bowling alley, we threw some balls. I really suck at bowling...

The party afterwards was very very good. I think that this was the best night of clubbing in Minsk that I have been involved in. The music was very good. The atmosphere was even better. And since it was a sexy style party, there were male and female dancers around. There were some striptease acts as well. For some reason that is far more regular than it is in the Netherlands. The women were looking really really good and the entire team enjoyed themselves.

Friday was a day of wrapping up. Packing bags, buying souvenirs, going to the airport and finally home. Unlike the flight to Minsk, this one went very well and I was home more early than I expected. It was very good to see Anneke again after 5 days. I think this was the longest time that we didn't see each other since we started dating 4 years and a bit ago.

Second visit to Minsk (1/2)

Last week we went to Minsk for work, evaluation and, of course, serious 'getting to know each other a bit better'.

We left on Monday morning, and had to work our way through rush hour to get to Schiphol in time. We were not flying via Frankfurt this time, but Prague. Before we departed from Amsterdam we already had a delay of about 50 minutes. That seems pretty OK, but not if you only have 45 minutes to transfer in Prague. We got to Prague at the same time our next plane was leaving. Off to a good start.

The transfer desk booked us to Minsk via Vienna, a flight which didn't leave until the end of the afternoon, with us waiting in Prague for five hours. So, instead of wandering aimlessly through the airport, we decided to have a meeting and evaluate things that are happening in the company with a small focus towards working with the guys in Minsk. Our flight to Vienna was not with a trusted Airbus, or a solid Boeing. No, this was in some old Russian propellor plane..

The flight to Vienna took only 45 minutes, and after waiting there for another 90 minutes or so, our flight to Minsk was finally going to happen. The pilot informed us that there were heavy mists in Belarus, so the chance existed that we had to turn back to Vienna if we were not able to land. Good news... not.
So, instead of arriving around 2.30 pm, we arrived around midnight. We went to the hotel bar and had a couple of beers before turning in.

The next day was planned full with meetings. We started off with an overall evaluation of the projects of the last six months. After that we decided to delve into procedural issues in the afternoon. This was an interesting meeting, because both the Dutch and the Belarusians had a chance to speak their minds and get something going again.

In the evening a contact of Lectric in Minsk took us to a restaurant where we had some Belarusian food. Blinis and caviar as a starter, and Shaslik for our main course. Of course, we wouldn't be interested in the culture if we passed the vodka, so about 4 toasts later things were really getting nice :)

That night we went clubbing at the most sleazy place we know in Minsk called Max Show. It is something between a club and a bar, with bad music (the same tape they had on in June) and about half the women there are hookers. We had some rounds of cheap vodka there, and I had a couple too many, since I don't remember everything from the end of the night. All of a sudden I was outside, next I am in a cab, and then I wake up way too late on Wednesday...

CocoRosie

Last Thursday we went to see CocoRosie live. They played two shows in the Netherlands, and one of them was in Groningen, the other one in Rotterdam. Rotterdam is about 200 kilometers closer to home, but since I had already made other plans for yesterday evening, I had to go to Groningen to see them.

We made a day of it, and went to Gronigen early, to walk around in the city and do some shopping. Groningen is a pretty okay city, with lots of students to lower the average age a bit. They have nice shops on lots of locations, but nothing really extraordinary.

Two of our friends came to Groningen later and we met for dinner. After that we went to see the concert. The opening act was, as usual, quite crappy. Couldn't really enjoy it, since he tried too much to be the new Devendra Banhart, which is quite hard, and not necessary (one is enough).


CocoRosie's show started at about 10.30 PM and took only an hour. They did play all their cool songs, but still I think it was a bit short. It was not too expensive, but an hour could have easily been stretched into 90 minutes with a couple of extra songs.

I really enjoyed seeing them live, and will definetely go again if they turn up in the Netherlands on their next tour. We bought a vinyl LP of them. Not that we have a pick-up, but they were signing records, and we already own their three cds. This will be on display in our living room for a while. I always like this kind of gimmicks.

The bed and breakfast we booked was pretty okay. Nice breakfast, clean rooms, but a bit expensive... The strangest thing was that the price was calculated per person and not per room. So, if I went alone I would have spent half as much money on the room, since they cannot let someone rent half a bed. So, for a second breakfast you pay the same amount of money as for the room and the first breakfast. Weird.

Now I am preparing for my second trip to Minsk. We are leaving on Monday morning and have planned a week full of meetings, cultural trips and lots of fun. The temperature is about 15 degress (celcius) lower than it is here, so that will be a shocker.


We are going to see the European Championship qualification match between the Netherlands and Belarus on Wednesday. I usually don't like soccer at all, but these kinds of event tend to be fun anyway.

It has already been snowing, so the beautiful Belarusian women will probably be wearing a lot more clothes than they were last summer... Too bad.

Busy busy busy

Everything is going fast, it seems. Our wedding plans have just been announced, and already we have to take care of heaps of things, like I said in my previous post.

At work I am getting swamped bit by bit. Many things that have to happen at the same time, for various reasons. Because of the pressure I tend to lose focus, which causes all kinds of small delays. Since I work with my collegues in Minks all the time the language barrier is not very small as well. I have to translate our customers' and project managers' wishes to English, the Minsk team has to translate back to Russian.

I am thinking about taking a course in Russian, to cut back on the translation difficulties. Apart from that, Russian always sounds impressive and looks even cooler because of the Cyrillic characters used.

At home I have been working on my Whisky Cabinet. I blogged about it a while back, and since then not much has happened. I have sanded it, cut it into pieces so it would fit in our house. I already have reassembled it in our living room. Anneke and I have to start painting it now, at the first opportunity. We want to do it in the daytime, because we don't want artificial light to change the way the cupboard looks. Can't wait until it is finished!

I have surprised myself when I was working on the thing, because I really liked doing handywork like that. Never liked it very much before and always shied away from it.

I might even start working on something else after it... Probably not though, since I don't have much room and our entire living room looks like a pig's den because of the tools lying around, and all kinds of stuff that had to be moved to make some room.

But anyway, I am more relaxed than I have been in a long time. Anneke has finished school about 5 weeks ago, which has caused a lot of peace in the house. Not that we fought a lot, but it is much less stressed. We have a weekend of two days in which we can do what we want. We have a bit more cash coming in (two wages now!), we have less things that have to be done. We have more time to see our friends.

Lots of good stuff going on. Now let's hope for this to keep up and we finally might get somewhere... Still so much to do. The list of things to do I posted a couple of months ago has only grown I think.

O, and by the way. Coming Friday I am going to see a band called "God is an Astronaut". I really like them a lot. Looking forward to that too.

Lectric Decade Party

Since the company I work at exists for ten years this year, there was ample reason to have a party. That party was last 23rd of June. For the first time (since I work here) partners were welcomed as well, so Anneke joined me to see if the big stories I always tell are anywhere near the truth.

We were welcomed in a very official way, red carpet, official photographer (paparazzi Joop van Tellingen), and some sort of champagne. After that there was a speech by Jan Hein, the big man behind Lectric, and that was it for the official part. Drinks were on the house, and there was a good cocktail bar. Guess where I spent most of the evening...

The party was a huge success, I might upload some pictures later, if there are any that show me from my better side =).

Minsk report (3/3)

Day 4:

The fourth day consisted entirely of the trip home. We had to get up around 10 (tops) to get to the airport in time, and we went to bed after six, so that was hard. Of course, as I am used to, I woke up around 8.30, took a long long shower and packed my bags. I took a couple of pictures of the view from my room.

After that, I was 5 minutes too late for breakfast, so I only had a cup of coffee. After that, I still had not found any of my collegues, so I walked around the hotel like a ghost for a bit. After an hour I met Max, and we just sat around the lobby for a while. Alexei (one of the Belarusian guys) was at the hotel around 11.00 and still Max and I were the only ones there.

Everyone was downstaires and checked out at around 12 o'clock, and we went to the airport then. We should fly around 14.30, and it was a 45 minute drive. Just enough time to check in, see the Tax Free shop, and go airborne.

Of course, when we got to Minsk Airport, and the guys that dropped us off left, we noticed that we had a three hour delay. Bad weather at Frankfurt. Shit...
Especially shit, since Minsk Airport has not much entertainment, only one little restaurant, so we sat there for a while.

The menu came along, someone noticed Shashlik, we'll have six. Coffee? Make it six. Bottle of water? Six as well. So we had a very good lunch and then we waited some more.

After hours, we were allowed to check in, which took very very long, and after customs, there was the tax-free shop. Since I already had a bottle of Kryshtal Vodka (the best of belarusian vodka) I went out for something else. In the shop I found a 10 years old Bushmills (Irish Whiskey) and a bottle of Becherovka (Czechian liquor).
Compared to regular shops, the whiskey had a 42% discount, and Becherovka was cheaper than it is in the Czech Republic.

After all was said and done, the airplane left with a 3.5 hour delay. The flight was easy, but Frankfurt was still catching up on delays. So we missed our transfer, the next flight to Amsterdam was cancelled and there were about 500 people in line at the ticketbox. Flight to Schiphol had four tickets available, but we were with six.
So, we (the boss, Jan Hein) decided to rent 2 cars and drove to Den Bosch from Frankfurt. Best solution, because it would take us home faster than flying and the two who got left behind didn't have to wait till the next day and then hope for an early flight.
We raced home, and just hit the 190 km/h with the two Ford Focusses we rented.

We got home around one o'clock. Tired, but satisfied and happy, I just crashed in my bed. Finally, with Anneke next to me.

The best thing about this day? The fact that waiting in Minsk for almost four hours, waiting for luggage that didn't show up for 90 minutes and missing our flight (with only 3 hours of sleep), we were still having fun, joking around and making fun about everything.

All in all, we had a lovely time, it was useful for connecting with the Minsk Team, useful as evaluation of the first three months of cooperation, and clubbing.

Thanks boss!

Minsk report (2/3)

Day 3:

Although clubbing till morning light is quite hard if you have to work next day, we did just exactly that. On day 3 we had plans to finish the evaluation of our cooperation with the Lectric Minsk team. Max (a collegue) and I were awake reasonably early, and when we wanted to go to the meeting, Frank (the project leader) was still in a booze coma. So we went without him to Belhard.

The meeting went reasonably quickly, since we had saved the shortest points of the agenda for this morning, and the bulk of the work was already done. After a couple of hours we were done, so we had a 'quick' lunch. At least, that was the plan. The waiter at the restaurant told us he could give us four steaks in 20 minutes, but after 35 minutes, the table was still empty. All of a sudden he didn't understand English as well as he did before...

When we got our steaks, we ate them in 3 minutes, and went to the bus to go to Dudutki (an open air museum). Dudutki shows the way of life in Belarus in the days of yore. This meant manual labor, a baker, a potter, a smith and so on. The funny thing was that the things Belarusians did are not that different from the way things went on here. Making butter, woodcutting, pottery, blacksmithing, more or less the same. They even had a windmill. The strange thing about this was that it all looked older than it was. Not to be disrespectful, but things industrialized a bit slower in Belarus. An example:

A dutch windmill of 1740 and a Belarusian windmill of about 1800.

At Dudutki, the museum, the showed us how they made their Moonshine long ago (moonshine being the illegal drink that almost every farmer made a couple of decades ago). It smelled like a running engine, but I thought it didn't taste like much, except alcohol. The custom is to eat something after drinking Samagon(ka), but the options were limited. At the first stop we could eat a rye sandwich with honey and pickle, and the second stop offered rye sandwich with onions and pork fat. Not my cup of tea, but I had a couple of Samagons nonetheless.

After the tour we ate at the museam and had some traditional farmers food. Potato 'pancakes', sausages, and regular pancakes, with beer. That was very ok. We had a very good time there, and talked to all the guys from Belhard for a while, as well as their managers. Good to get to know eachother.

We left for the city after dinner, and agreed to go clubbing with the Minsk team. They would take us to a different club than we were at the nights before. They took us to The White Tower or Belaya vezha (spelling differs). The club was awesome! Really good looking interior, good music with a live DJ. The only drawback was that it was Wednesday night, so not too many people there. We had a lot of fun, especially when the bottles of vodka came out!
Of course, I had way too much to drink, and after several hours we went out to go to the Max Show club again. The Minsk team was not too fond of that, because the club has a bit of a reputation.
We had lots of wodka again, danced till morning light, and paid a cabby way too much to take us to a MacDonalds, since we all were hungry like a horse. After that, we went to the hotel for a well deserved sleep (for a few hours).

Minsk report (1/3)

So, I have been back for a couple of days already, but I have not found the time to blog about my trip to Minsk, so here it goes.

Day 1:

On Monday, my manager picked me up in Den Bosch at 4.30 AM to go the Schiphol Airport. From there we went to Frankfurt Airport, to transfer to Minsk from there. Flying was boring, but nothing special. Time to read a book...

We were picked up at the hotel by the managers from Belhard, that is the company from which we hire 4 developers. Minsk Airport is about 50 kilometers outside the city, in the middle of nowhere. It is one of those 'communist' buildings, big, impressive, but not functional and almost entire empty and deteriorating.

We drove to the city, and on the road you see some of the apparant contradictions that make the country. We drove a normal car, but sometimes you saw a Porsche Cayenne, and the next thing you saw was a horse and carriadge on the highway.

When we got to the hotel we dropped off our luggage and had a couple of beers at the hotel bar. We stayed in a business hotel with very basic rooms, but with 3 bars, shops, a restaurant and a striptease club.

At about 5 o'clock we went to the company there and met up with the developers. I already knew 2 of them in person, and the other 2 from email and skype, but seeing each other always does something for connecting with them. We had pizza on top of the building and stepped out on the roof for some views of Minsk.

The look of the city is hard to compare with anything I have ever been to, since it looks like eastern Berlin, but even more grey, and without billboards and neon.
After pizzas and beer we went into a bar next door, for some coffee, and to a club after that. We had fun, beers, vodkas and danced until about 4 in the morning. The club is inside a cinema, and had loads of good looking women in there (we learned that a lot of them were prostitutes from our belarusian collegues).

Day 2:

After about 4 hours of sleep, a couple of coffees and breakfast I was up and running again, to go into a meeting with our collegues. The two meetings we had that day took from 10 in the morning to 5.30 PM, so that war hard for all us.

After the meetings, which were very effective and have a very positive outcome, we went to Raubichi, for shashlik. Very good food, lots of beer (although the first was warm...) and some toasts with vodka (about five or six).

Raubichi is one of the only places in Belarus where you can ski. It has some ski jumping ramps, but they are not in use anymore, and are just standing there until they fall apart. The shashlik place belonged to a hotel that has something to do with Dynamo Minsk.

We stayed there till (I guess) around midnight, and went clubbing again after that. Same place, same situation.

The contact Lectric has in Belarus joined us in the club, but (since he is 66) fell a sleep on a chair, and didn't see the strip show that was performed on the dancefloor... too bad for him.

I was a bit more drunk than the night before, so my collegue Max and I went to the hotel a bit more early. When we got to the hotel (after getting ripped off by a cabby, it cost us $4 instead of the expected $2) we were sobered up a little bit and decided to check out the striptease club I mentioned earlier. Nice...

Minsk

Tomorrow morning I will be picked up by my boss to go to the airport. Since we have a department in Minsk (Belarus) we are going there for meetings, evaluation of the first couple of months. Thursday evening we will already be back, so no company holiday in it.


We have 2 days of work and one day of being tourist. Visits to the National Museum and the National Library (above) are planned.



I have had a lot of communication with the developers there, because I did the technical 'guidance' for four projects already. So they promised me some wodkas, and beers. Hope I don't get alcohol poisoning :-)
Really looking forward to go there and see a bit of the city. It is not a city I would normally go to for a holiday, so the opportunity is really great.