I have been spending quite a bit of time in recent years developing training materials and doing trainings for Simics. There is always a discussion on how best to do training, in particular between live sessions with actual trainers and offline video and other self-study resources. I am a firm believer in the value of live training, and during our recent winter vacation up in the Swedish mountains I made myself provide a perfect example of the value of a teacher. I took a skiing lesson.
Continue reading “The Benefit of Live Teachers (Applied to Myself)”Category: travel
Off-Topic: Vacation in Crete
This year’s family vacation was spent on the Greek island of Crete, in an all-inclusive resort close to Chania on the north coast. Overall we got nice weather and an enjoyable pool-and-sun holiday, mostly staying at the hotel with a few excursions. In the following, I will go through some of the most surprising or interesting observations I made in Crete. Greek letters are cool, but I do not think we will go back to Greece any time soon when there are higher-quality places available (such as Spain).
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Vacation in Crete”Off-Topic: Some Ice Cream Places
During this year’s vacation trips, we sampled an unusual number of ice cream places around Sweden & Europe. Here are some notes on a few places we visited and where I took the time to actually take some photographs…
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Experiencing Gamla Uppsala in the Year 650 using Virtual Reality
Last month, I (together with my family and some friends) tried the virtual reality (VR) experience that has been created for the museum in Gamla Uppsala. VR is used to let people explore the area around Gamla Uppsala, experiencing what it looked like back in the year 650 AD. 650 AD is in the middle of the Vendeltid era (before the Viking age which is typically considered to start around the year 800). At this point in time, Gamla Uppsala had been an important religious and political center for a long time. The big burial mounds that dominate the landscape to this day were already old by then, having built in the 500s.
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A Little Snow Sure Can’t Hurt?
I had the honor to have a scheduled talk at the Embedded World 2018 show in Nürnberg, right at the start of the show on Tuesday morning. Getting to Nürnberg for the Embedded World without paying a fortune for plane tickets is tricky due to all the other people flying down from Swedish embedded and tech firms at the same time. This year, I was lucky and I had managed to get a very convenient flight at a decent price. Leaving Stockholm in the afternoon around 14.00 on Monday, flying via Frankfurt and then on to Nürnberg, arriving in the early evening just in time for a nice Bavarian dinner. No stress, no late evenings on the U-Bahn into town. A good night’s sleep before getting up and getting to the show with plenty of time to set up for my talk. What could possibly go wrong?
Off-Topic: Loka Brunn
More travel notes. This time from Loka Brunn, a spa hotel and conference facility in the vicinity of Grythyttan in mid-west Sweden. The place dates back to around 1720, when an organized “Kurort” was founded. I spent a weekend there with my wife, and found the place to be very relaxing and professionally run.
Off-Topic: Playa Garden Hotel & Spa, and Mallorca
It is summertime, and time for another off-topic blog post about travel. This year, we took our family vacation on the island of Mallorca, at the Playa Garden Hotel & Spa. It is located in Playa de Muro, between Port d’Alcudia and Can Picafort on the east coast of Mallorca. The goal was to enjoy a bit of sun & sea, and that worked out very well. It looks like we were lucky in our hotel choice, too.
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Off-Topic: Nerja, Costa del Sol, Spain
I and my wife recently took a short vacation in Nerja in Spain, a tourist town on the Costa del Sol. Late February was definitely low season, which made for a rather relaxing experience without the huge crowds that would be expected to fill up the place later in the year.
Off-Topic: Cruising Holiday
The family and I spent last week on a cruise in the Mediterranean with Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCC). It was a wonderful vacation, and very family friendly. We did a number of shore excursions and got to see historical landmarks like the stadium at Olympia where the original Olympic games were held. Lounging by the pool on the ship was nice on our sea days, if a bit crowded. Service was fantastic, and you really do not need to think much at all about practical things while onboard. It just happens. Very relaxing. If I compare it to a typical all-inclusive hotel vacation, it is definitely higher quality with the added benefit of moving around and seeing multiple places in a week.
The Mary Rose, Victory, and Warrior
Today, I visited the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth, UK, together with my kids. Somewhat surprisingly maybe, the kids mostly loved it and I got to see and learn a lot of interesting history. I found it particularly usful to compare the three main ships on display: the 1510 Mary Rose, the 1765 HMS Victory, and the 1860 HMS Warrior. They show both the development and continuity of the Royal Navy over a very long period of time.
Off-Topic: Military History Tourism in Göteborg
This is another vacation-related post, of the kind that I do every once in a year or so. I recently came back from a family vacation to Gothenburg (Göteborg in Swedish), where I had some time to visit a few great museums dealing with history, and in particular with military history and the history of technology.
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Off-Topic: Sälen in the Summer (Vacation)
This Summer, our travel-away-from-home vacation was spent in Sälen, Sweden. Sälen is normally considered a winter destination, one of the biggest ski resorts in Sweden – but they are working on making it more of a year-round attraction. To be more precise, we went to Lindvallen, which is one of the seven or so separate “villages” that form the “Sälen” area. It was a nice and relaxed place, with little stress from having too many things to do, but enough to keep the kids happy. Seeing the mountains in the Summer was nice.
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Off-Topic: Lalandia Billund (Vacation)
Another Summer vacation has come around, and as usual that causes a blog post or two on Summer tips and comments on places where I have been. This year, we went down to Denmark to visit the city of Billund, home to Legoland and Lalandia. Lalandia is an interesting mix of indoors activity center and camping village. We rented a house there for our vacation, and are overall very pleased with the place.
Eyjafjallajökull is Showing us Something
Wow. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the resulting ashcloud has had an effect that I would never ever have expected. A near-total closing down of the European airspace is such a drastic thing to happen to nobody seems to have expected. It has certainly not been included in the list of worst-case scenarios to plan for in company and government contingency plans. Where does this leave us? In a very interesting situation indeed. Worst-case, we will have to do without air travel for months.
Off-Topic: Another Troubled Train
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post about an adventure with delayed trains getting from Uppsala to Stockholm. As I said then, I am a train fanboy, preferring trains to most alternatives for most travel. Trains do have one big disadvantage though: when something goes wrong, you are unusually powerless and stuck. That happened to me last Friday. I spent some five ours in a dark train in a dark winter evening in the middle of the forest south of Laxå. Here is the story of that journey, and an observation about the impact of technology on our lives.
It was on a Friday the 13th, by the way. Not that I believe in that bad luck happens more on certain days, this certainly was an unlucky Friday (and very early Saturday).