Kitchen

The kitchen on our floor didn’t look good at all when we bought the house. The colors were bad, the floor was bad and (what you fortunately can’t tell from the pictures) it smelled bad.It was something like this:

Since the kitchen is now close to being finished, I recently I got some sort of approval from the powers-that-be to make pictures. I personally thing it’s a huge improvement :-)Part of the kitchen:

Holidays

First of all, song of the year as chosen in the “A State of Trance” weekly show by Armin van Buuren. I can imagine trance is not everyone’s cup of tea but it’s a nice catchy tune: “Gaia – Tuvan” (click the Play icon to listen).

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As most people this time of the year, I am in vacation but not much relaxation so far. First week we had a little special somebody visiting and among other things we visited “Sensapolis” and I got the do a bit of ice skating.

“Sensapolis” is an interior entertainment park in a huge building somewhere near Stuttgart. It’s a lot of fun for kids of all ages and it features things like a giant spaceship, climbing wall, science center, a Fairytale castle, a pirate ship, tree house and many more. The picture gallery shows you a bit of the place.

During this time we are also working (again) at the house, doing remodeling and other things in the kitchen and bathroom. Freya’s brother is visiting and since he knows a lot more than us at this kind of job (he does this for a living) we kinda “abuse” the poor guy. The kitchen is one of the things we inherited from the creatures who lived here before and it was in dire need of renovation. When it’s done, the ugly brown will be gone and it will look “really pretty”, as Freya puts it. And I completely agree, will post some “before/after” pictures once it’s done.

And of course I am still studying for my Cisco CCIP certification. I am supposed to take one of the exams on the 31st of December, I just hope I will be done by then.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year! ;-)

Still alive

As I was saying earlier, last week I had vacation. We didn’t go anywhere, we stayed at home because my parents came visiting. We had a somewhat busy schedule, as can be seen from the pictures below:

The little one was the guest of honor, if I can say that, so we went to all kind of appropriate places. It was quite nice at Tripsdrill, an entertainment park near Stuttgart, the oldest in Germany. This year they celebrated 80 years since opening. It’s quite big, we spent a whole day there and we didn’t get to see everything.

We also spent two days in the Fairytale Garden, another theme park for kids which inside the huge gardens from the Ludwigsburg Palace. There we saw over 40 scenes from well known children stories such as “Hansel and Gretel“, “Little Red Riding Hood” and so on. It was very nice, we had good weather and Diana had a great time.

The holiday was a chance for my parents to finally see what The Cave (that’s our house) looks like, I hope they were not too scared. We would’ve liked to finish with the renovation before we have visitors but it’s too much work. That does not mean the house is a construction site but some things are just not done. Oh well, what can you do.

Tuesday I went together with a guy from work and two of his irish friends to see Terminator: Salvation:

What can I say, nice special effects but I was not overly impressed. The first two movies were a lot better, I would say. Maybe also because the rating was just PG-13 as opposed to R for the first two movies (strong sci-fi action and violence, and for language and brief nudity). Of course, the reason was money I guess, PG-13 means a larger target audience. But it’s like one of the irish dudes said: if you just shutdown your brain and want to see pretty colored lights, then the movie is quite good ;-)

Today and maybe tomorrow I can relax a little bit but after that there is more work to be done. Stuff to do in the house and the whole next week I have some training class for my next Cisco exam. At least I get to do that remotely from home so it’s not that bad.

Dinner

Grilled steak and hot wings, french fries, garlic sauce, tomatoes and onions salad, dark bread. Very yummy:

And in other news, a new towel holder for our bathroom with a little bit of Freya’s touch. Cute ;-)

Life update

I am still around and I did not forget the blog, it’s just that I’ve been a bit busy with other things lately. During the week not much special is happening, it’s just work as usual. Most of the time in München, some of the time in this shithole small town called Rheinbach on the other side of Germany. Which is where I will be next week, actually. I can hardly wait, I am trembling in anticipation. Umm .. no, not really. In any case, not much I can do about that right now so I have to go.

Otherwise we’ve been working on our house, which we nicknamed “The Cave”, don’t ask why. The Cave is starting to look better now. We are also trying to do something about what we call “city rats”. They are not actually rats, just pigeons. We don’t like them, they are all over the roof, they make weird sounds and they shit everywhere. Luckily Freya might’ve found a solution:

Yes, that’s a pump-action water gun with a pretty good range. We hunt them down now and I think they are learning that it’s not so safe anymore to sit anywhere they please.

At the beginning of June I finally have a week of vacation, which should be kinda nice. As it happens, my parents will also be visiting and they will also bring a very special little somebody, which I will very happy to see again. That’s also the reason we have accelerated a bit the renovation inside The Cave. It’s not yet ready to receive too many guests but hopefully we’ll get it ready in time ;-)

Professionally I am still kinda working towards my CCSP, I have two more exams left in which the Cisco ASA firewall plays a major part. That’s one thing I can’t practice with at home so I don’t have many choices. Either classes or I just get whatever books I can for self study and I do the practice online. Which is what I will do actually. Internetwork Expert is a well-known site for the candidates to the CCIE, the Holy Grail of the Cisco certifications. They also have rack rentals and I noticed that the security rack has all the equipment I need to practice for my ASA exam: 2 ASA’s, IPS sensor, ACS server and so on, just perfect.

So I just rented rack slots for one week and at the end of June and I will just stay home and practice. It’s actually not that expensive either, about $15 for a 5.5 hour slot. My boss agreed with the plan, probably the $90 price for one week  plus some books as opposed to many thousands of euros for a 4-day Cisco course plus travel expenses might’ve had something to do with it.

Last but not least, I am still trying to convince Freya to do a guest post on the blog but so far no success. I am still working on it, she has some funny stories to tell from her daily trips to work ;-) I even offered to translate it into romanian but I guess I need to offer more incentive. We’ll see.

My desk

We are about to finish our corner where we have our desks and computers. This is how my desk looks right now, tonight I finished mounting the shelves and I managed to make more space on the desk.

Lately I worked a lot with wood, since we have a lot of it in the house. Between living room and the bedroom there is a door which we don’t need so I removed the door, I put a wooden plate on the bedroom side and I built some shelves in the door frame:

This reminds me of a quote from  “Gone in 60 seconds“:

Metal. Steel. It’s cold. Ugly. Wood is warm. Clean. Provided by nature. To see a piece of furniture take shape it’s like watching a child grow.

Very true  ;-)

Online for good

After only three weeks ago I had murderous thoughts towards Deutsche Telekom, now I came back to more peaceful feelings. Finally the internet works decently at home. I still don’t have VDSL because it’s not yet available in my area but I do have 16 Mbps ADSL2 with the Telekom’s package Entertain Premium. A couple of the interesting features of this package:

• fixed telephony flatrate
• internet flatrate (of course!)
• decent actual speed, 12-13Mbps
• good upload for DSL: 1Mbps
• IPTV which works, good quality
• flatrate for all Telekom hotspots in Germany, 8000 of them or so

So I am kinda pleased so far. I am also in the process of setting up the multimedia system in the bedroom. After quite some searching we decided for a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo SL 3230T 23 inch monitor and a Zyxel DMA1000 digital media streamer. We’ll use this to watch the movies and episodes we have on the network server and for the TV part we’ll just get another receiver for Telekom’s IPTV. We don’t need a DVD player because we don’t really watch them but should the need arise, I can always just rip it and put it on the server.

I really hope the internet problems are gone, knock on wood!

No Internets!

What a shitty weekend, excuse my french. As I was saying earlier, Deutsche Telekom was kinda late in sending me the access information. To cut a long story short (not to mention that I get pissed off again if I think about it too much) on friday I manged to get a temporary DSL connection after a LOT of “discussions” with the people from the T-Punkts. The idea was that I can use this connection until the stuff that I ordered becomes available (16 Mbps Entertain package with IPTV and all kind of flatrates included). Surprise, surprise, they even activated it on friday afternoon. It worked fine until saturday before noon when it died again :evil:

It seems there was a bigger problem in our area and monday morning it was solved but we were left without internet access during the weekend. That was really bad. Anyway, we did all kind of things in the house, it’s not like we don’t have stuff to do. And I started to play again Mass Effect :oops: It’s an excellent game, I recommend it.

Still, in order to avoid such painful moments, I ordered a USB UMTS stick from Vodafone. From what I read it should even work with my Fritzbox. It’s a prepaid deal so access is not really cheap (4.95 € per 24h) but this is only for backup so it’s acceptable. What kind of speeds I will get, I don’t know yet. In theory we live in what Vodafone calls “UMTS Broadband” area so I should be getting speeds up to 3.6 Mbps but we’ll see.

In other news: Freya makes some delicious “Red Rice”. More details and pictures in a future post ;-)