Vacations time - Greece
Posted by Pébé in SELECT RAND(X); on 05 27th, 2009Yep… tonight start my first real holiday since… well as long I can remember… may be Xmass… but that is not really vacations, is it? It is more family time… Well as for tonight, the real thing starts. Tomorrow morning I am flying out from Geneva to Athens Greece. I will be my first trip since end of July 2006, almost 3 years now. It is crazy to see how time is flying!
So the schedule, well 3 days in Athens to meet all my friends there and one day playing rugby for the XV de Gaule’s team. I do not know how I will feel to be back in Athens airport, will see… Then I will be in Paros for 3 days, before heading back to Athens and to France the very next day.
From many aspects I had a great great time in Athens during 5 years, so I am sure everything will be awesome…
read comments (1)Jetlag and news…
Posted by Pébé in Travel on 04 20th, 2009Well I arrived yesterday’s evening. Time to get to Santa Clara, I met couple of friends in the lobby and then headed to the MySQL/Sun’s party by the pool. By 9pm I was in bed and woke around 5am when a journalist called me to get my thoughts about Oracle/Sun deal. The “WHAT??”, I said. Yes this is to me and to many others a quite big surprises. After the rumors about IBM, even HP,… Oracle comes in and get the whole package.
The conference is not even started, today being tutorials’ day, that it is going to be very promising.
Other than that, well everything is pretty smooth under sunny California. It is really hot out here.
MySQL conference 2009
Posted by Pébé in Travel on 04 18th, 2009Next week will start the MySQL conference 2009. I am flying out to San Francisco in a couple of hours from now. I have joined Yahoo! in Feb 2006. Back then, It was too early or too late to plan such a trip. Since then, I went to every conference. If you have the change to come one day, do not hesitate. I have meet fantastic people over the years that I am proud to call friends. The following week will be very busy and I will keep updating my blog on databases. Sorry it is in French.
This blog was meant to be place to write about my trip. I missed a couple of them:
- 3 days in California at the end of May
- 1 week in Paris for the Solution Linux conference
- and couple of ski trip
Once again, well every time I update the wordpress version… I decide to start writing a post and promise to continue to do so. Hope this time it is the good one.
I have to start packing my luggage, the taxi will pick me up in 8 hours. More to come soon.
Snow snow snow :)
Posted by Pébé in SELECT RAND(X); on 01 22nd, 20092009 is not looking very well on many aspects but one is simply awesome.
Which one? Well it has been already 3 years I moved from Greece back to France, in the Alps to be more accurate, and this year the snow is just great!
After no ski for 5 years, I started again in Grenoble obviously and I can tell you the first attempt was quite painful… now it is back to normal. The more time go by, the more snow we have it seems. May be all this is due to my friend Eric moving to Sunnyvale 
the more he is gone, the more snow we get? Interesting concept… or I am just trying to make him mad!
Well, so the snow is there, the snow is great.. and I do enjoy it so much!
Happy New Year!
Posted by Pébé in SELECT RAND(X); on 01 9th, 2009Happy New Year 2009 to everyone, and best wishes! My last post was quite long ago, end of August 2008.
Many things happened in the last 3 months some good ones, some bad on
es… and one good that ended badly…”alla ti na kanoume”… but now I am back baby yeah! This year started very well, lots of snow and friends to party, what more to ask for? 2009 is supposed to be the year of the so called “crisis” Let’s enjoy life while we can. Correct?
As for this year resolution? well once again, try to update this blog more than once every 6 months… will I make it this time?
Grenoble - Day 1
Posted by Pébé in Travel on 08 31st, 2008
Back home The plane was over a hour delayed…something wrong with one brake. I did not complained and prefered let them fix it. I arrived in London this morning around 7am then after passing again the control, I was able to get my second flight to Lyon. The fact I am not flying directly from HK to Lyon forbid me to get anything from the HK duty free. This less then 200ml policy stopped me getting sake… I would be able to carry it from HK to London but would not be able to board from London to Lyon. How weird is that? knowing that I did not leave at any time the airport…
So back in Grenoble, tomorrow back in the new office, all the guys will be already used to them but not me. I started already washing all my clothes, a rough estimation, between 4 to 5 machines…
What can I say to sum up this trip? Well it was fantastic, I saw 3 countries completly different, meet lots of great people,… I love being able to combine my job with my passion of travel and discover different cultures. That is it for now, next destination California, end september.
Hong Kong - Day 4 - Final Day
Posted by Pébé in Asia on 08 31st, 2008
Today was my last day in Hong Kong and last overall in Asia. I am heading back to Grenoble in a couple of minutes after spending over 6 hours in the airport. I left the hotel around noon went to central station and register my suitcases. You can directly leave everything downtown and they take care of everything. You just need to show up for boarding. This done, I finally end up going to the airport by train and took from there the bus. I wanted to visit Lantau Island and mainly see the Tian Tan Buddha.
I took the cable car and 30 min later you end up in the Ngong Ping village. I saw 2 shot movies, well more animation movies, on Buddah and one about a monkey tale. You have then 10 minutes walk to get at the bottom of the stairs. Humm I did not count but under the 2pm sun and the heat, it seems a lot, a lot!!!
After visiting I went back the same way to the airport and since then I have been waiting…
Hong Kong - Day 2/3
Posted by Pébé in Asia on 08 30th, 2008
HK was the last stop of this trip. We spend 2 days in the office for architecture training and review on 2 ongoing projects. The office is located in one builing split between different floors. The guys sit on the 21st while most of our meeting were on 12th floor… and to go from one to the other you have to go down and change elevator. That is so weird, well, this is HK. Not a city really spread but quite high!
Even when you are looking for a restaurant, you have picture on the first floor and you have to pic where to go. From there it could be any floor, and you got to use the elevator. Do not count on stairs. 
As you can see they use it to store goods. You better not be in a building if a fire starts! This is so secure :)
Hong Kong - Day 1
Posted by Pébé in Asia on 08 28th, 2008OK! Hong Kong is really amazing! I have never seen such a city. When I passed through 2 weeks and a half ago I was not impressed. Is that the city everybody told me about? Well what I had seen was nothing.
Imagine hills and huge building! Every thing is build on top! Up to now I have only been to places where you had couple of buildings but s
pread in a huge city. Seoul is impressive as well as you do not see an end but here… everything is concentrated and high so high. My room was on level 43. I took less than 30 seconds to go from the lobby to my floor. This view was taken from that room. In Hong Kong, well it is hot. But because you live in skyscrappers you have air conditionning everywhere…
Also in HK, you can smell the money! Cars, fashions,… everything is there!!
Seoul - Day 5/6
Posted by Pébé in Asia on 08 25th, 2008“Time flies”… this is such a cliché but it’s true. Tomorrow I am already leaving Se
oul for Hong Kong. I had once again a great time with the guys. The target if this trips is to give some classes, answer some questions, do some project reviews but also meet people. We work a lot over phone, emails, IM so it is really great to once in a while see the guys face to face. I had the change as well to finally meet Keith, another architect from my group, chief architect for APAC ( Asia, Pasific ). He came a bit less than 2 years in London for the International Architect conference but I was in California at that time. How could I miss the MySQL conference?
I think the almost only had Korean BBQ… famous… yes… for a reason! 
Finally I would like to present my buddy Mic All the training I gave were recorded. I had to carry a wireless mic but for the big meeting room we wanted to be sure that everybody could hear me properly. So…
Yes! I use lot of them in Seoul, for karaoke, for training,… it is quite difficult to have to both to give training with all this equipement on you. You are aware that everything you said is taped… is like being on watch… I feel much more confortable when it is not as I can more focus on the audience.
That’s all! Let’s get ready to leave again!
