Travelmap

Wednesday : 31 Oct '07 - 20:17 | damen default Only one comment |

This site of Travelmap shows the countries in the world I've been to.
Quite nice to do



Just to compare, below the map of my father. But that is because he visited most of them professionally

Travel Schedule

Saturday : 27 Oct '07 - 19:53 | damen default, Thailand three comments, already |

For those of you who want to have a general idea on the trip we take in Thailand, here is a basic idea of what we want to do:

11/02/2007
We'll leave from Frankfurt Airport at 22h10 on Friday evening with Ethihad Airways flight EY8. For the trip from Nürnberg to the Airport we have a Rail-and-Fly ticket, but this could become a problem as the German train drivers are currently on strike. So we also made a reservation for a car, just to be sure :(

11/03/2007
We have one stop in Abu Dhabi (airport site), were we will arrive at 07h10. There we fly out again two ours later at 09h10 to Thailand with Ethihad Airways flight EY408.
We'll arrive at the new Bangkok International Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) at 18h25. Due to the timezones we'll then be traveling over 18 hours. The time difference is 6 hours.

We take the Airport Express Bus to Koh San Road, where our hotel (Hotel Royal) is just around the corner. We will probably be very tired, so no long nights in Bangkok .

11/04/2007
We spend the day in Bangkok:

• Cycling Tour (Link1, Link 2
  
• Visit to the Banyan Tree Hotel Restaurant on top of the Hotel with a view over Bangkok
  

11/05/2007
We spend the day in Bangkok, doing the stuff we did not do the day before. If we are ready for it we'll take the train to Ayutthaya, a word heritage with lots of old dynasty temples.
Because we arrive in the evening we have to find a hotel or guest house in Ayutthaya.

11/06/2007
We will spend the day in Ayutthaya and hopefully see a lot of cool stuff (Info, Info on storing luggage).

In the evening we'll take the night train further to Chiang Mai, where we'll arrive in the morning

11/07/2007 - 11/08/2007
We'll spend the time in Chiang Mai, enjoying the local markets and perhaps take cooking classes.

11/09/2007 - 11/11/2007
We want to take a hiking tour in the Mountains around Chiang Mai, there should be a lot of tours offered from Chiang Mai.
Site of Wayfarers Hiking
Real Travel Chiang Mai - Things to do
Chiang Dao Nest Tours & Trekking, very interesting tour 3 days 2 nights

11/12/2007
We have to take the night train back to Bangkok and from there the plane to the south - Krabi.
We will arrive in Krabi somewhere in the evening and have to take the ferry to the island of Koh Lanta

11/13/2007 - 11/20/2007
We'll spend some relaxing time in Koh Lanta, enjoying good food, the beach, snorkeling and of course some dives for Martijn

11/20/2007
We have to take the flight back to Bangkok and spend the last two days in Bangkok (shopping).

11/23/2007
Our Ethihad Airways flight EY407 will leave the airport at 08h40 in the morning, which means we have to be at the airport very early :(. Then we'll arrive in Abu Dhaibi at 12h15 and leave again at 14h00. We'll arrive in Frankfurt at 17h50 and hopefully we can take the train home and be home at midnight. Too soon!

Packing List

Saturday : 27 Oct '07 - 18:52 | damen default, Thailand No comments yet |

Less than a week to go and we'll be in Bangkok, somehow the vacation is now really close. In order to ensure that we bring everything we need and especially nothing too much we are going through lots of packing lists. Luckily with this again the Internet is your friend and we found several good places with tips:

The unofficial Thailand FAQ
Has some good tips on what to bring and what to remember on Thailand

Some lists of fellow travellers:

• Tips on Thorntree 1


• Beaumonde.net List
  
• List of www.Oneback.com


• Tips on Thorntree 2
  
• TravelPod.com
  
• WeltReiseForum (German)

The Universal Package List Generator
interesting help for generating packing lists for different kind of travels

Business Trip to Budapest

Tuesday : 23 Oct '07 - 16:45 | damen default No comments yet |

Tonight I'll fly to Budapest again, to visit our offshore company. We will spend two days with the developers and architects over there to get into a lot of questions on our current development, and hopefully we can use tomorrow evening to enjoy the city of Budapest a bit

New monitor

Monday : 22 Oct '07 - 20:56 | damen default Only one comment |

Today I received my new monitor for my home system. I got the same one I already bought, but this time there are no dead pixels so I am very happy. One interesting thing I discovered was that my video cart (Nvidia FX5200) does not support a resolution of 1680x1050 on the DVI port. This is quite annoying, as that is the native 16x9 resolution for the screen.

So now I'm really thinking about upgrading my system completely to a new one... but that is something to be discussed after the vacation to Thailand

Useless links

Thursday : 18 Oct '07 - 18:26 | damen default No comments yet |

Just check this out, make sure you are on headphone though

Rights on SQL Express

Tuesday : 16 Oct '07 - 08:21 | damen default Only one comment |

IF you have problems with the rights on the sql express 2005 server when running a local IIS try this:

Add the rights for the following user: \ASPNET and give it rights to the database you need.

Update: still fighting with it, somehow it does not accept the settings. Now I just used a test/test user and had to change the authentication mode as described here

Vista problems

Sunday : 14 Oct '07 - 08:21 | damen default No comments yet |

Strange thing happened today, as I logged in onto my home machine vista started to complain that my profile could not be loaded. And the worst thing was, it was not loaded! So I ended up with a default temp profile, where I had none of my settings etc.

Some searching on the web brought me closer to a solution, they suggested to have a look at the registry entries at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\. So I went there with the tool regedit (Start, run, regedit) and found out that my original profile had a .bak behind it (somehow that did not change since the good old dos times ) and there was a new profile with exactly the same key, which was the new temporary profile I had.

So I removed the profile Vista added and renamed my old profile back (just removed the .bak) entry, and then it worked again.

But I still do not know why this happened.... some websites talk about it having to do with a missing network connection due to Microsofts new TCP stack, but that sounds very out of order..

Then I solved another problem I had, somehow Firefox caused my system to not understand the .xps (the Microsoft document format) anymore. Each time it would open firefox and then complain it could not load the file.

To solve this I installed the standalone XPS Viewer that can be downloaded from Microsoft.

Auto broken again

Saturday : 13 Oct '07 - 16:33 | damen default three comments, already |

Yesterday we went to visit our data center in the city of Karlsruhe, about 2,5 hour drive (without traffic jams) from Nuremberg. Due to the distance we took a rental, but as we left early in the morning I already noticed that my car did not respond to the remote transponder anymore. So I expected the worst as we came back around 10pm. And yes, the remote control would not open the car anymore, and with that also did not allow me to start the engine (there is a circuit breaker controlled by the remote control in the car).

So I went back home with public transport and this morning I went back to the office to have the ADAC check on the car. They could not help me and towed the car to the nearest KIA shop, where they can have a look first thing on Monday. sigh.... never KIA again

BLTV-Ausbildertagung (dive instructor seminar)

Monday : 08 Oct '07 - 07:58 | damen default No comments yet |

This weekend I spent most of my time in a seminar on diving. Each year the BLTV Landesverband is having their annual meeting for diving instructors, the so-called BLTV-Ausbildertagung. That is a two day seminar which we have to do a minimum of every five years to ensure we keep our instructor license. There was of course a lot of official talk on the strategy, new regulations and laws etc. But one of the talks was really good, here a pilot who was also a diving instructor discussed the issues with decompression sickness in a plane and what could be done there.

This can happen if somebody is dumm enough to go flying within 24h after their last dive, and in that case they have double trouble, because next to the sickness they are also responsible for the accident, something airlines like to sue over.

All together a very good weekend and I learned a lot of stuff. Also I met one of the instructors that took the exam with me in Teneriffa, and we agreed to look deeper into taken our TL2 next year (next level of diving instructor)

Oktoberfest and few weeks until vacation

Friday : 05 Oct '07 - 11:41 | damen default Only one comment |

Yesterday I was on the Oktoberfest for the first time in my life. Even though I was prepared for the worst, the sheer size of it blew me away. We were invited by one of our suppliers and had a table in one of the "Festzelts". Starting at 6 the band played different kind of music (thank got not only hoempapa music) and everybody started dancing on the beerbanken.

Because I still had to drive back to Nürnberg I wasn't able to drink any beer, which was definitely not a good idea. Somehow I really have the feeling this fest is better when drinking a lot, because that would make the fest bearable. Somehow it was not something I have to go to again, next time I prefer the berg

Further I am currently really ready for vacation, but this Dilbert of Today did not help

Night diving manual

Wednesday : 03 Oct '07 - 09:36 | damen default No comments yet |

I kind of specialized on the diving specialty night diving, in the last year I had a couple of people who got their specialty course with me. In order to do that I put together a small manual for night diving, which can be used by my students. For those that are interested and are able to read German it can be found here.

Please let me know if you have any comments or ideas for this document.

Weekend

Monday : 01 Oct '07 - 08:18 | damen default three comments, already |

This was again a very nice weekend
It started a bit rainy as I went to Erlangen for the kids diving class, this time we had about 10 children eager to dive. The Saturday afternoon was spend with a wine tasting event, with four friends and little Sarah we drove to the city of Sommerarch, where we walked a bit through the winery and then enjoyed a typical franconian 'Brotzeit' and some of the local wines.

After about 4 hours it was enough and we went home, of course packed with some wines

Then on Sunday we drove to Manu's parents where we were invited for a great meal, they has fresh roasted duck with potato dumplings, just awesome. After that I helped here mother with the wine making. A couple of weeks ago I gave all of my wine making stuff to her parents and they are currently making different wines, and Sunday was the first pressing day. I was really a very long time ago since I've been doing this wine making, we used to do it a lot during university, but somehow the time and room (you really need a garden) was not there anymore.
But this time it was really fun, and much easier/better than doing it in my kitchen

Then we drove to their weekend house nearby to plant a tree. This was the tree which was actually meant for Jeroen and Anja and their wedding, but I forgot it due to the early rise last week. So we decided to plant it here at the weekend house, and with that I have fulfilled one of my three tasks as man.

Because we were active in the garden anyway we decided to finish a task that was due anyhow, cutting down a tree. So we planted one tree and cut down another. That was a cherry tree which somehow did not bear fruit, and therefore had to go.

So as summary, wine tasting, wine making, planting a tree and cutting a tree, all combined with great food. That is what I call a good weekend