A note from Prague

I'm sitting in a Prague Internet cafe right now reading some messages and musing about Kara's and my first week in Europe. The first thing that I have decided is, despite what was in the back of my mind, European countries are different from one another. No crap, huh. The change from Paris to Germany was marked by rougher accents and cleaner streets. Going down the Rhine was fun because we saw a number of towns and villages that fit the mold of small town Germany. We missed a train which meant a night in Assmanhausen (it was easy to remember that name for some reason) which turned out to be very enjoyable.



Now that we are in Prague it definitely feels closer to Moscow then London. I'm going to learn more about the history today. But from what I have read it used to be a communist country that is finding its way in a capitalist world. People are skinny and don't smile too much. My knack for being cheap or at least trying to save a few bucks on a hotel has put us right outside the tourist zone into what like to call real people. Nobody speaks Englsh, and I didn't exactly brush up on my Czech before I made it here. So I have been working a lot on my mime routine but it seems to be working. I realized that there were two types of european plugs. The power strip I brought to plug in all of my electronic gadgets only works in Germany, not France or the Czech Republic. I found an adapter after a lot of drawing and gesturing.



Right now I'm coping my latest batch of photos to my iPod. Can you believe I have taken over 400 so far? I'm sure most of you can. I even bought a travel tripod with me. I thought it might be a little too much but we have used it quite a bit when Kara and I were trying to get the perfect shot at the Eifel Tower.



On another note I was reading some of the forwards I recieve and found an interesting one about Ben Steins last column. I wasn't sure if it was real or not but after checking the ever faithful Snopes.com it turns out that it was. So take a look at it if you want to read something short and with some substance.



http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein.asp

Planes Trains and Automobiles plus Boats

A lot has happened these past 4 weeks but nothing terribly new or interesting. The most notable thing being pulled over by a Qatari police officer for the first time. It’s funny because this never happens. Never. But as I have acclimated to driving here I have learned to, lets say, bend the rules on occasion. If you are stuck in traffic it is not unheard of to go over a sidewalk or median and cut through a dirt field. I wouldn’t do this right in front of a police officer but I wouldn’t worry about one going out of their way to track me down either. Well as I was showing some friends of Kara and mine the way to the only restaurant that I could say “Hey I know a good place” about I was pulled over. The cop thought that I did an illegal U-turn when I actually just did a left hand turn into a parking lot. He laughed and said “No, you are just parked here until I leave then you will drive off.” After I convinced him that I really was going to eat at this restaurant he said “OK, but your registration is still out of date.” Doh, you got me there. The guy was actually very cordial and gave me his mobile number in case I had any problems taking care of the ticket.



Well we had dinner and the next Sunday I called my friendly mechanic friend and he took care of the registration. Well I called him on Sunday and when it was all said and done I got the registration on Thursday. I had until Thursday to turn it in or I would get a 700QR (~$180) fine. Well this was another adventure in finding something in Doha. Nobody uses street names and nobody speaks much English on that side of town or in government offices. My first shot was actually only off by about ½ a mile. But when I couldn’t find it we called a friend who pointed me to another station where I couldn’t pay my fine. They pointed me to another one that said I had to go to the one behind the fruit and vegetable market. I got to that area asked a few people after doing a little off roading and in the end it was right where the officer told me it was. Of course by this time is was closed and they said to come back on Sunday. One thing about bendable rules and mentality is sometimes it works in your favor. I got there the next Sunday and they said no problem. They shook their head I said halas (its finished) he said yes and I went on my way.



::: Warning Geek Talk :::



I also spent two weeks implementing this huge project that I have been working on ever since I started here. It was a professional accomplishment for me but work has been very hectic since I got back from the states. I just spent the last week getting C# and Java to talk with each other in a secure way. Love me some of that XML Kool-Aid. The hardest part was reaching back and relearning Java. It’s actually not such a bastard of a language after all. The biggest gripe I had with it is the lack of documentation. I get the whole open source free love idea but it’s not always economically feasible. Should you spend $50 an hour on somebody to untangle all the different pieces that all these open source types donate to the community or a few hundred bucks on something that runs out of the box? I think the open source idea works for students and when it’s cheaper to have an open source geek untangling everything because your systems are so huge that licensing would be cost prohibitive. But I’m in neither one of those positions.



I might end up writing this up someday but for now this is what I had to do. Encrypt a string with a username and password in it send it to our server that hosts a third party Java app. Decrypt the string and store it along with a guid in an XML file. Do a response.redirect to a .jsp page that then picked up the string from the XML and did a server.transfer type of function to the 3rd party’s default.jsp page. I promise it makes sense. I also had to get Tomcat and IIS working on the same port. Well not really I found some software that tunnels all jsp requests from IIS to Tomcat.



I know about 2 of you actually cared about what I wrote there but it’s my blog and this how I rant.



::: End Geek Talk :::



Now I’m preparing or have been preparing for Kara’s and my Europe 2005 vacation. We’ve been planning this for a while and I’m proud to say that we have done it without a travel agent, come in under budget and it should kick butt. I will give a better description when I get back. I’m posting the general areas will be in during the trip. If you need to call me just look up my parents phone number on yahoo. If you don’t know that call my office. Either one of them will have my mobile which can make and receive calls from all over the globe. Not that big of a deal, I just switched plans after not being able to make calls in Sri Lanka. If you don’t know either one, well just wait until I get back because I’m not putting it up here. I’m not being paranoid but after what happened in Sri Lanka I don’t mind giving a little bit of information out.



I also just heard about the bombs that went off in London. Small bombs but they were real. We had already planned on not taking the underground while we were there because a friend was going to drive he to and from the different airports. I wonder if I would if I didn’t have a friend to do that. Pay a huge amount for a taxi? Probably not.



Where we’ll be sleeping:



July 22 – 23 Paris, France

July 24 – 25 Koblenz, Germany

July 26 – 27 Munich, Germany

July 28 – 31 Prague, Czech Republic

August 1 – 4 Berlin, Germany

August 5 London, UK

August 6 Doha, Qatar