Barcelona

I travelled to Barcelona with Mrs L. and on my return went up to London and travelled by Tube to deliver a presentation to Kable’s “Open Source in the Public Sector”, which reminded me of the weekend in Barcelona, both the prices and experience were better in Spain, although I didn’t travel on the Metro during a rush hour. As I landed, the day before, I received a message that Oracle had bid for Sun Microsystems, I also reflect on the helpful people at Heathrow. This post includes a slide show of my Barcelona pictures. …

Hong Kong …

I have never been to Hong Kong before but have just returned from a trip there to meet up with my new colleagues, the Chief Technologist for the Asia-Pacific region, his country Chief Technologists and their management peers and bosses. It was great to meet such a diverse yet energetic team together with the conversations and social events. I visited one of the restaurants on the peak for the evening and had one of the largest meals I have ever eaten, or at least one with the most courses …

Midnight in the oasis

I went to Dubai for a business meeting, a get together of Sun’s EMEA pre-sales leadership. The business agenda is confidential but I reflect on the experience. Dubai’s airport is only open at night, and for those that don’t know an important hub. While there, I went on a motorised desert safari, and rode a camel, all of 15 yards. …

Brussels: business & pleasure

I have visited Brussels twice on NESSI business and on holiday with Mrs. L. These trips were originally blogged on my sun/oracle blog as series of article, I have brought the articles across here, and presented them as two articles, This article chronicles the social visit, including the European Parliament meeting, the “Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts” and the Comics museum. …

Sailing

Sailing

Down to Poole in Dorset very early this morning. I have finally got my act together to take the RYA Day Skipper course and spent the day learning to navigate using charts, pencil and paper. The maths reminds me of the boys’ A-Level homework and although despite being geeky enough to look up the cosine rule, drawing scale models of the “triangles of velocity” is probably quicker . 😉 …

Project Blackbox, it’s real you know

Yesterday, Sun’s Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun’s UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and ‘kick the tyres’, and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers. …

Knowing me, knowing you in Zurich

Knowing me, knowing you in Zurich

I travelled to Zurich for a workshop on social media. It was a requirements gathering exercise and I originally published two articles, on the sun/oracle blog, one on Zurich and one on some ideas which became the social graph. These ideas were presented by Bertolt Meyer of Humbolt University, Berlin, who has recently published research into the fact that Knowledge Repositories don’t work.  …