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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 Tough Guy Challenge began a few years back on the eve of the International Women’s Day. As the story goes, my buddy Robert and his then-roommate were asked to leave the flat so that the girls could celebrate their day by having a girls night in. Unfortunately for these guys, they came home too…
It’s never too late to write about something sweet, right? After all, Thursday wasn’t that long ago anyway, and it being a Fat Thursday to boot, I think it deserves an honorable mention for this week. Not that getting my face stuffed with sugar deserves honorable mentions. But Ania made some pretty cool meringues for…
I started this blog entry by researching all sorts of laws of occurrence and repeatability and about thirty minutes into it I lost track of what I wanted to say while staring at a page for the Laws of the Mind… What I wanted to write about today was my new morning routine. For the…
The Big Owl mountain is only 1,015m above sea level (3,330feet) but it is fairly nearby and it has a cool lighthouse looking observation tower built in 1906 atop of it. Whenever we feel like getting out of the house to do some moderate snow hiking, the Big Owl is our go-to destination. The views…
Illusion is a Polish heavy metal band formed in 1992. Given that I was 10 at the time, and that I left Poland to live in the States just two years later, I never listened to Polish metal, nor have I ever heard of a band called Illusion. Until I met my wife. At the…
I’m turning 37 years old tomorrow. Yikes! And while I haven’t really thought about it too much before, for some reason this year I’m approaching that 37-year mark with a little more caution. Maybe it’s just me getting wiser, or so I hope anyway, but I did spend the last couple of evenings reminiscing of…
This week’s been relatively calm so when my phone reminded me of my self imposed blog-post-deadline late this Sunday afternoon…absolutely no post topic came to mind. I have set this post deadline to force myself into some kind of creative writing for at least a few minutes every week. Don’t get me wrong, as a…
Every now and again I get the urge to make me some pancakes. Ania will sometimes make the traditional Polish ones, but Polish pancakes, also known as ‘neleśniki’, are just not the same. They’re mostly very thin and you actually roll them or fold them into triangles with your choice of filling be that fruit…
Yesterday I ran my first half-marathon of the year, but it was a ‘first’ in a few other ways, too. It was my first half-marathon in the winter time. Snow, mud, ice and all. It was my first marathon in the mountains. An elevation difference of only about 600meters, but still 600meters more than the…
Yesterday was Wroclaw’s first real snow day of the season and the city freaked out. Perhaps it didn’t freak out as much as it simply shut itself down. And that shouldn’t happen in Poland in the winter time. It’s only natural that we associated winter with snow. I know, I know, but in Poland that…
