Auschwitz-Birkenau is a dark and gloomy place of remembrance on the most beautiful of days but on an overcast cold November day you get the extra layer of chills and goosebumps thinking of the atrocities that have taken place there some 80 years ago. Phil and I traveled there early in the morning to catch…
Phil’s Visit
Last November I had the pleasure of entertaining an old friend of mine, if only for a couple of days. Phil Lee was my boss, twice, back in my southern California life. First, he hired me for the position of Document Control Specialist for Energy Innovations, an Idealab startup located in Pasadena, CA. It was…
Turkey Time
I figured since it’s almost that turkey time of the year in the U.S., I’d recap our never-before-written-about short vacation to the country of Turkey back in October of 2020. The trip in 2020 wasn’t our first visit to Turkey, it was our third to be exact, but this one was the one we were…
The Dilemma
Every year around this mid-November time frame I get the annual WordPress blog renewal e-mails, and every year I’m faced with a dilemma of do I continue paying (around $65) for the renewal or not. It is at that time that I also come up with new ideas of what to write, what to post,…
Maker’s Mark, I’m Getting Old
I’ve never been much of a Whisky person. The idea of drinking Whisky straight was beyond comprehension to me just a year or so ago. I would occasionally have some bottom-of-the-barrel stuff called Whisky (I’m looking at you Johnnie Walker Red Label) with Coke and ice at a party or some gathering, but never as…
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer – a Book Review
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer was a book I decided to read during my very brief stint working for Nokia in the summer of 2020. It was there that I witnessed the widest array of cultures and nationalities coming together. From east to west, coworkers from China, India, Poland, Germany, France, and the United…
It’s a ThinkPad Life For Us
I tried my best to come up with some clever and witty ThinkPad lyrics to this classic 1982 Annie soundtrack, but a catchy title is as far as I got. However, I’ve caught a ThinkPad bug some time ago and I just wanted to share my findings about these awesome computers. I’ve had an on…
Winter Wonderland
Winters in Poland have been rather calm and warm over the past few years. In fact, I do believe we only had a day or two of snow last year, and while the temps have been known to dip below freezing, there’s been little to no snow fall in my home town of Wroclaw over…
Czech Hiking
Špindlerův Mlýn is a ski resort town in the northern Czech Republic. It is also only a 3-hour drive from Wroclaw making it an ideal ski town come winter or a great weekend hike destination anytime there isn’t snow on the ground. Ania managed to get a full weekend off from work so we made…
Ten Years Ago Today
It was exactly 10 years ago to the day that I finalized the second biggest change in my life and the biggest change yet of my own volition. On March 19th, 2010 I boarded a Poland-bound plane with a one-way ticket in hand ready for change, landing in Wrocław a full day later on the…
The Measure of Success
It was during a beer-infused evening sometime in November of 2018 that a group of four guys decided to run a trail marathon. The idea wasn’t a total moon shot: one of the guys had already run a 240km trail run that very year, another was running half marathons on a regular basis, yet another…
My New 27-Year-Old Scooter
I got the scooter bug the day I joined GOVECS back in 2011. Within a week of working there, I somehow managed to get a company-issued scooter for research and development testing. Back then, GOVECS GO! line of scooters was just entering the market and the scooter itself was evolving almost every month. The best…
Peruvian Adventure
We knew that Peru was going to be our vacation destination this year since January of 2019. That is when we did an extensive plane ticket search and eventually bought our flights. And that was it for many weeks to come. Somehow we couldn’t get around to planning the rest of the trip beyond landing…
My Vacation Reading
For the past three years, I’ve had a vacation custom of reading one full book, cover to cover, during that particular trip. This probably doesn’t sound that significant to most of you, but I’m not a speed reader. I’m not really a fast reader, either. I do alright gluing my syllables together, and usually, speed…
The Books Movie
I absolutely love books and yet I’ve never been one to love to read. Does that make sense? Most of what I love about books has recently been summarised in a YouTube video by Max Joseph, a filmmaker who hits my view of books right on the head. The video in question is linked below,…
Becoming Faster
A week ago I ran my fastest half-marathon, and I did it at the exact same race I started my half-marathon running to begin with. The H2O half-marathon is a fairly new race in Wrocław, and this year’s edition was only a third race in the series. If you remember my last year’s post, I…
Vapor Lock
I sat in front of my work laptop for at least a couple of hours unable to focus on any single task. My heart was pounding, my mind was wandering in a thousand different directions, I didn’t have a headache but I felt as if I was to explode any second all while my Outlook…
Breaking One Hundred
Running in the late-fall, mid-winter, and then early-spring months in Poland is quite shitty, to say the least. And I’m not talking about the weather. Sure, it’s cold, rainy, snowy, even icy at times. But giving up running due to -5 degrees Celsius outside is not reason enough to quit running. Keeping your lungs healthy…
The Other Side of the Owl
We’ve been to the local Owl Mountains a few times in the past, but we’ve mostly hit the same trails since we simply didn’t know any better. So when the weather forecast called for a super sunny and warm day this past Saturday, we knew that we had to spend that day outdoors, but we…
Scrum is in the Air
On Monday I spent a few hours talkin’ Scrum with Agile On The Boat folk. AOTB is a pretty cool initiative that gathers around scrum masters, product owners, project managers, software developers, and anyone within Wroclaw’s software development scene to discuss the Agile Method. The topic of this weeks session was “Technically Aware Scrum Master”…
The Polish Magician 