Yesterday I went to Munich for a one day business trip. At first I was a bit sceptical about it. Fridays we have our product day where we sit down and discuss all that’s happened in the passed week and respectively what our aims for the coming week are. Most people working on the project are from Mannheim, so we usually do this in our office here in Mannheim. But last week 2 guys were in Munich (one of them lives near Munich and joins us in Mannheim for the meetings) so decided to have the meeting in the so called firms LogCenter in Munich.

I was quite unhappy as we had to catch the train at 7:30 AM and I’m not used to have such an early start. After some complications we caught the train to the airport (where the LogCenter was). Turned out that only half the train was going to the airport and the other half went to some suburb. Guess in which part we were Finally after travelling about half a day we reached our destination.

I must say - it was like entering a whole new worlds. It was insane what high-end things they showed us there. Like the packaging box that remembers every time it is opened and logs date, time and how long it’s been open. Or the medicine drops packaging that notices every time you take out a drop and asks you how you slept!Insane!

After having our meeting, we went to the airport and rented a car (since it was way cheaper to go by car, as only my ticket from Mannheim to Munich was like 80 Euro and the rental fee was something like 100 Euro…). So we got a BMW 5er series - yay! A great car indeed! A since we don’t have speed limits on our high ways, it’s no wonder that Christian had to drive 240 km/h whenever there was no traffic to slow him down

So I’ve been receiving all kind of messages from different Facebook apps a la `Find a Valentine’s day date`, `Will you be my Valentine`, `Beer!` (ok - this one isn’t very valentine-ish, but anyway), `You have a dating request`, etc… etc… etc… The best part was as I opened Google Docs this morning, to seek for nothing, when I saw their great design for today! At least the day is almost over

If you are not that much into YouTube as I am, you probably won’t get this. But anyway - there is not much to get - it’s just r-r-r-random!

Today was my first workday at Movilitas! Yay for me! As I arrived there at 10 a.m. (they wanted me to come this late!) a new laptop was waiting for me to set it up. So my first task, which basically took me about 10 hours, was to set up ubuntu and all the software I’ll be needing, like Eclipse with 1434235 plug-ins, MySQL, Tomcat, Skype, etc. Skype in particular was a real challenge But it was not a complete loss for them… I described all the problems I encountered and how to fix them in their wiki, so maybe it will save some time to the next person, trying to set-up a Tomcat 6.0 server on Eclipse

First impressions I got:

• It seems you don’t have a fixed work place / desk + chair. If you want a good place, you’ll need to get there early. As they say - the early bird catches the worm :)  But I don’t think this will be an issue, as there are not so many people in the office at the same time.
• Drinks are for free. You just go to the water/cola/bionade crates, take what you want and drink as much you want! Brilliant! There is also coffee for free, but who cares about that - coffee is gross!
• I haven’t played table football for too long! I got beaten up badly today
• I’m definitely coming home for lunch! Today I joined the crew and ordered a Pizza… It was 8 Euro!!! Can you imagine that!!!

Recently Daft Punk have gained a lot of popularity around here. You see more and more people joining Daft Punk groups in StudiVZ (= German Facebook alternative) and it’s no exception that you’ll see people go mad in the club when a Daft Punk song is played. And to avoid some misunderstanding - it’s not songs from their last albums, which are played, but the really old stuff that is now like 14 years old or something. (more…)