Honeymoon in Mexico

Yep, me and my wife were travelling 3 weeks in Mexico, from August 17th to September 7th.

Mexico City

We flew into Mexico City and stayed there for a bunch of days. This megacity is of course a must-see! What I remember most is the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, where you have the astonishing view below. Also unforgettable was a Sunday we spent with a friendly Mexican family who served us blue Tortillas (yes, there is blue corn in this world!).

Guanajuato

Next, we travelled by bus to Guanajuato, which is a huge contrast compared to Mexico City with its tiny winding roads, many beautiful old buildings and the atmosphere of a student’s town. If you ever make it to Guanajuato, don’t miss “El Bar”, should you love to watch fabulous Salsa dance. (Of course, you are free to dance as well …)

Querétaro

After 3 days in Guanajuato, we headed over to Querétaro, which was again a contrast to the two other places we have seen: long and straight streets, very clean, lots of Taxis everywhere – I almost felt like in Europe 😉 What I liked most about Querétaro, was in fact the beautiful “Hotel Hidalgo” we stayed in, which had a marvelous inner court. Oh yes, and there was this wonderful sunset at the church where we simply enjoyed the relaxed Mexican after work atmoshphere:

Playa del Carmen

We did not want to miss the Caribeans, so we flew from Mexico City to Cancun and travelled by bus to Playa del Carmen. There we stayed in a very nice hotel at the beach. Yeah, 10 days of laziness … not if you have a wife who wants to see the ancient pyramides in the heat of the afternoon (36C and more…). Anyway, just the right thing to relax before we went back home and back to work. Here you see three Mariachis on their way back home, at 6:30 in the morning, after a long night, right in front of our hotel:

Hasta luego

This was the smoothest journey I every experienced. We never really had any big troubles, even busses were never late, but reliable. Also, we never met any strange people. Maybe we just behaved the right way or were simply lucky – you never know. It was in fact very nice, to speak some Spanish again, but I am sure that the locals were sometimes laughing about me in my back 😉

Mexico? I’d do it again, just great!

PS: All pictures made by my wife.

Colleagues showing their mountaines

End of October/beginning of November is the best hiking season here, so we went at Oct 30th to some mountains, about 1,5h from where I live. With my dear eZ colleagues Terje and Melissa, I exchanged some mountain pictures – isn’t it nice to be in an international company?

Neunerk�?�?�?¶pfle (Tannheimer Tal), Austria
Neunerköpfle (Tannheimer Tal)/Austria
Santa Maria, Brazil
Melissa, in Santa Maria/Brazil
Close to Skien/Norway, where the eZ office is

Funky ABBA by Nils Landgren

Got this CD for one year now and it is still one of my favourites: Funky ABBA by Nils Landgren and the Funk Unit. This is intelligent feel good music of high quality!

Landgren and his band rearranged some of the ABBA chartbreakers in a very creative manner, thus providing unique standalone interpretations which sound fresh as fresh can be. These are the kind of song covers which I like, with the musicians putting all their heart and soul into the rearrangements and interpretation.

Some of the songs have the initial lyrics and melody almost entirely preserved, while others can almost not be recognized by the ABBA song which formed the basis for the new song version.

You can listen to some sample songs here: http://www.actmusic.com/act9430.htm

John Scofield plays Ray Charles

Groovy autumn Jazz: Guitarist John Scofield plays Ray Charles. I listen to this CD up and down since I bought it a week ago. Some songs are purely instrumental, others with excellent vocals.

Although I already got some of his other CDs and also like them, I was sceptical first whether I should by it. My friend and guitar genius Jürgen does not like Scofield, he thinks that Scofield does not play with feeling. Nevertheless, I have to admit that Scofield has managed to transport a unique spirit in each of the songs on the CD.

Just listen to the quiet and beautiful “Cryin Time” or the vivid “Sticks and Stones”. MP3s are available here:
http://www.johnscofield.com/music.html

In fact, Scofields typical style which makes his melodies sound edgy and chiselled, very much matches with Ray Charles’ crying voice which the songs played by Scofield remind us of.

"Sandro Zic" is now "Sandro Groganz"

My family name changed: I am not anymore called “Sandro Zic”, but “Sandro Groganz”. The reason is that I got married this year and took the name of my wife.

Well, my biggest concern was of course my Google ranking, but it’s getting better. The very nice thing about the name change is that groganz.com was available. After I grabbed the domain, I agreed with my wife on having her name 🙂

So, please update your bookmarks to sandro.groganz.com! Old links using sandrozic.de will continue to work for quite some time.

Keep-it-fresh Cups

During LOTS , I came up with an innovation: I was looking for a solution to safely transport a delicious nuts croissant in my notebook bag. Thus, I grabbed two paper cups and a napkin:

Brian named this revolutionary new product the “Keep-it-fresh Cups” and made the above picture. Now, we only need to apply for a patent … 😉

The Freedom of Open Source Employees

The getting fired for blogging discussion is highly interesting when seen from the Open Source perspective. The basic question then is: Does the Open Source collaborative model lead to a more sound relationship between Open Source companies and their employees?

I can whole heartedly answer with yes.

Independence

The key to a sound relationship between a company and its employees is independence – not only in the Open Source business. In general, any relationship between humans can only work if all parties can keep their independence.

The term independence, as I understand it, includes the ability for mutually beneficial consensus. Only individuals or organisations who are able to act independently, can find healthy solutions in a conflict situation.

Such an understanding of independence includes, paradoxically enough, that you are very much aware of your dependence. You simply know that nothing great can be achieved in life, if you are doing it solely on your own.

Freedom

The freedom of an individual or an organization to shape its future, leads to the afore described independence. Because freedom implies that the executing party is responsible for failures and successes. This inevitably leads to understanding independence as a result of responsibility and freedom, with the awareness of dependence.

Pride

From here on, it is simple to put together the pieces: When working in an Open Source project that appreciates your contributions, you gain self-confidence. Even if you’d never become a core-developer of the project, even little success can make you feel proud and aware of your abilities. This makes you more independent from others, because with knowing what you can achieve, you can better achieve what you want.

Respect

Business organizations who employ an Open Source developer, always have to respect that this person is being respected by the Open Source project’s community. The employee’s self-confidence is fueled by a community, not necessarily by the company that pays his salary. Although working in a company, especially if it is an Open Source company, can be very rewarding.

Open Relationships

Now ask yourself, how big problems with blogging can really become in an Open Source company like MySQL or eZ systems? I’d say that they tend towards zero, because any Open Source undertaking is based on the kind of independence and mutual respect laid out here.

LOTS of Workshops and Talks

Soon, there will be LOTS of workshops and talks on Open Source in Switzerland. For the second time, this event takes place in Bern/Switzerland, from Feb 17-19.

This is my first time representing eZ systems at an Open Source event and I am looking forward to that.

I am going to do several presentation on the eZ publish CMS: a workshop, a talk, and a demo. You can grab the first eZ publish Live-CDs there, I am going to bring them with me. They are bootable CDs, based on Mandrake Move and having a ready-made eZ publish pre-installed.

At the end of LOTS, I will moderate a panel discussion on Open Events – The Open Source Bazaar. Basically, we will try to identify differences and similarities between Open Source and typical business events, the way how knowledge is shared at “Bazaars” like LOTS, etc.

Fixed Links

External links on my Website were broken, they were all going to “/”. The problem was easy to fix, I simply forgot to run a new upgrade script that adjusts recently added changes to the development version of eZ publish.

Yes, I run the dev version of eZ publish, currently the code that is going to be 3.6alpha. Living on the edge is cool, but requires thorough upgrading, dear Sandro, otherwise you’ll end up with broken links 😉